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25 July – 31 August

For the first time, in 1931, a Salzburg Festival performance was broadcast overseas via long-distance cable. Listeners to no fewer than 83 stations of the American ­Columbia Broadcasting Company and 133 European radio stations could enjoy Rossini’s Il ­barbiere di Siviglia – a ‘guest performance’ of La Scala Milan – in a broadcast from the Festival Hall.

In the same year, the first audio record of a Festival concert was released, which, as the earliest Festival document, was remastered on CD in the mid-1990s. The Christschall company recorded Mozart’s Requiem on six shellac records in August 1931 in a cath­edral concert with the Salzburg Cathedral choir and the orchestra of the Cathedral Music Association conducted by Joseph Messner. The soloists are Hanna Seebach-Ziegler (­Soprano), Jella Braun von Fernwald (Alto), Hermann Gallos (Tenor) and Richard Mayr (Bass). Franz Sauer plays the cathedral organ.