Sponsors

Creativity and competitive edge are what drives both the Salzburg Festival and Audi. The collaboration began in 1994 with a guest appearance in Ingolstadt that caused an immediate sensation and remains an essential element of the partnership to this day. Since 1995 AUDI AG is a main sponsor of the Salzburg Festival to support the festival’s work in staging world-class artistic performances.

“Audi Night” was launched in 2006 – a social calendar highlight during the festival that attracts customers from around the world to Salzburg, where a unique flair and a superb cultural experience await them.

Our creative drive and innovative ideas are what enable us to master the complex challenges of the future. Customers and employees alike therefore prize the creative exchange of ideas that Audi offers throughout the year with its commitment to the arts as part of Audi ArtExperience. The partnership with the Salzburg Festival is one of the extraordinary and enduring projects that make up this commitment. It also demonstrates that Audi is a reliable and competent partner to the arts – at a global and regional level.

Siemens and the Salzburg Festival unite a long tradition: Since 1995, Siemens has been supporting the Salzburg Festival as a Project Sponsor, and since 1999 as a Main Sponsor. Starting in 2002 the “Siemens Festival>Nights” take place every year at the same time as the festival. Every year, the free open-air events attract up to 70,000 visitors to Salzburg’s historic city centre.

The Salzburg Festival, with its outstanding reputation and Siemens, one of the world’s leading high-tech companies, have much in common. Both place particular emphasis on the combination of tradition and innovation, continuity and creativity.

With this sponsoring engagement, Siemens consciously takes on cultural and social responsibility without ever interfering with artistic decisions. Wolfgang Hesoun, CEO Siemens Austria: “As part of our sponsoring activities, we try to develop our own cultural initiatives, thus aiming for real support for the arts, not just ‘giving away money.’ We wish to develop our own cultural projects, with a focus on technology as a transfer medium, and on supporting art that is to be made accessible to a broad public, especially to young people.”

This has motivated Siemens to present the “Siemens Festival>Nights” in Salzburg’s historic town since 2002 and the “Siemens Children’s>Festival” since 2008. Every summer, Festival productions are shown free of charge as open-air broadcasts on a large-scale LED wall. Diverse culinary offerings as well as the incomparable ambiance of the Kapitelplatz, with its view of the castle Hohensalzburg, make the Siemens Festival>Nights a wonderful overall experience – record attendance numbers of 70,000 visitors per year underline the quality of the events and make them a fixed part of the Salzburg Festival summer.

The non-profit Kühne Foundation based in Schindellegi (Switzerland) was founded by the Kühne family in 1976. As the main shareholder of the Kühne + Nagel Group, the foundation’s president, Prof. Dr. h.c. Klaus-Michael Kühne, takes social responsibility personally: “It is my firm belief that entrepreneurial success always brings with it a commitment to society.” The global focus of the foundation is reflected in its diverse fields of operation.

The main purpose of the support provided by the foundation is to promote training and further education in the areas of transport and logistics. Supporting a wide range of programmes reflect the conviction that logistics and logistics expertise significantly support the economic and social development of countries.

In addition, the Kühne Foundation supports projects and enterprises in the medical, cultural, and humanitarian spheres. Within the sphere of medicine, the declared goal of the Kühne Foundation is to reduce the health and social consequences of widespread allergy diseases. With this goal in mind, the Foundation founded the Christine Kühne – Center for Allergy Research and Education (CK-CARE).

The Kühne Foundation has increasingly focused on sponsoring cultural projects as well as literature. Through the Young Singers Project, the Salzburg Festival created a world-class platform for the promotion of young international singers in 2008. Since 2013, the Kühne Foundation has dedicated itself to this project, which is a model of its kind internationally, offering young singers the opportunity to work with Festival artists and gain international attention.

As of 2019, the Kühne Foundation has become a main sponsor of the Salzburg Festival and will continue to support the Young Singers Project.

The courage to take new paths and the responsibility for a sustainable approach to our planet drive both BWT and Salzburg Festival. As the latest main sponsor, BWT – Europe’s market leader in water treatment, headquartered in Mondsee and employing over 5,000 people worldwide – is transforming the Salzburg Festival into a so-called Plastic “Bottle Free Zone”. Because the company has a clear mission: change the world, sip by sip. Using globally patented BWT technologies, local water is filtered and enriched with valuable minerals such as magnesium, zinc, and silica. Guests, artists, and employees of the Salzburg Festival will thus be able to enjoy healthy, local, mineralized water and at the same time reduce plastic waste and CO2 emissions by avoiding bottled water. In this way, everyone makes an active contribution to the protection of our planet.

For 30 years now, BWT has been continuously setting new standards in the development of sustainable technologies and products for private households, hotels, restaurants, commerce, industry, and municipalities with the aim of ensuring safety, hygiene and health in daily contact with our elixir of life, water.

“The Salzburg Festival is the benchmark in the cultural sector. In our company, we also pursue an ambitious goal: We want to make the world a better place, sip by sip, with our technologies and our commitments. Being able to drive this vision forward together with a partner like the Salzburg Festival is a great honor for us and strengthens us in our mission “For You and Planet Blue,” says Andreas Weißenbacher, founder of BWT.

Since founder Hans Wilsdorf fulfilled his dream of creating an accurate and elegant wristwatch at the beginning of the 20th century – a period when the pocket watch was the norm − Rolex, the Swiss watch brand, has always encouraged individual excellence and the pursuit of perfection. In furthering this long-standing tradition, the company makes a significant contribution to the arts through its patronage of a large variety of programmes and activities.

Rolex’s commitment to the arts dates back to the 1970s when New Zealand soprano Dame Kiri Te Kanawa became the brand’s first cultural Testimonee. Over the years, this commitment has developed to embrace many other leading artists, prestigious institutions and festivals.

Included among the artists are Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli, French tenor Benjamin Bernheim, Spanish tenor Plácido Domingo, Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez, German tenor Jonas Kaufmann and Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva.

Rolex also supports foremost cultural institutions from around the world such as the legendary Teatro alla Scala in Milan, London’s historic Royal Opera House, the world-renowned Metropolitan Opera – dubbed “The Met” – in New York, the impressive Opéra National de Paris and the famed Vienna Philharmonic.

In 2012, the brand was delighted to incorporate the highly acclaimed Salzburg Festival into its cultural portfolio and became Exclusive Sponsor of the Whitsun Festival, directed by Cecilia Bartoli. The partnerships have flourished as they are based on common values and a shared appreciation for excellence.

Rolex remains increasingly active in the arts with the aim of helping to perpetuate an artistic heritage and make a unique and lasting contribution to culture around the world.

At Home on Stages

As the world’s leading producer of precision-cut crystal, Swarovski is at home on stage and screen around the globe, both as a sparkling addition to productions and through its close ties to art and culture. The company supports countless cultural initiatives and collaborations, including the 2019 Salzburg Festival production of Adriana Lecouvreur. With every project, Swarovski embraces its long heritage of cultural and social responsibility, while providing support for innovative contemporary creative talent. The collaboration between Swarovski and the Salzburg Festival represents shared values that are deeply rooted in the company’s history – crafting new identities, promoting culture and inspiring audiences.

Preserving Cultural Monuments, Awakening Enthusiasm for Art

UNIQA and art and culture have belonged together for many years. As the biggest art insurer in Central Europe, we are leading in preserving high-quality cultural monuments and experienced in supporting excellent cultural events. With great enthusiasm we accept the social responsibility of not only preserving our cultural heritage for future generations, but also providing cultural education. That is why we support the Salzburg Festival’s children’s and youth programme. As a partner, we encourage young artists to go their own way. With selected musical theatre productions, we wish to awaken a young audience’s enthusiasm for the arts, embedding the support for younger generations in the Festival’s long-range programming. Opera Camps, reduced-price youth tickets, student projects and age-appropriate introductory events inspire the enjoyment of music, keeping it alive for the future.

In 2017, Solway Group became the production sponsor for La clemenza di Tito at the Salzburg Festival. We thoroughly enjoyed our first year of cooperation. To continue our partnership, we chose to sponsor the Salzburg Festival’s Opera Camps for Children and Youth. During the three years of this successful partnership, Solway integrated cultural and educational cooperation into its sustainability policy by developing an opera camp scholarship program in support of talented young people living in the local areas of Solway’s operations. We are thrilled to expand our next four year partnership to support the festival’s significantly enlarged program for youth, jung&jede*r.

Those who invest in culture also invest in the community, because they are also investing in a force for economic growth – namely, the creative arts sector. Enabling and promoting culture is therefore not only a public and political task. This contribution to cultural mediation is also part of the Raiffeisen development mandate – all the more so since the Salzburg Festival, as one of the world’s most important cultural projects, embodies reputation and prestige as well as dynamism and innovation – to go out into the regions around Salzburg this year and get young people interested in great art.

However, great results require solid foundations. That’s why Raiffeisen supports the Salzburg Festival’s excellent “jung und jede*r” youth programme, which provides everyone in all Salzburg regions – particularly young people – with a diverse programme. This commitment to the promotion of high-quality culture in the region is our expression of attachment to our state and its people.

Bank of America believes the arts matter: they help economies thrive, help individuals connect with each other and across cultures, and educate and enrich societies. We support more than 2,000 visual and performing arts organizations worldwide that provide inspirational and educational sustenance, anchor communities, create jobs, complement school curricula, and generate substantial revenue for local businesses.

Our global sponsorship program provides exhibition support for 10-12 exhibitions a year. Currently, we are sponsoring Fantastic Women at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. Through our global Art Conservation Project, we have provided grants to museums in 33 countries supporting 170 conservation projects, including the recent restorations of a sculpture of Jean d’Aire by Auguste Rodin at the Kunsthaus in Zurich and Ecce Homo, by Titian at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. And through Art in Our Communities®, we have loaned more than 130 exhibitions from our corporate collection to museums worldwide. We are proud to be a sponsor of the 2020 edition of the Salzburg Festival and to share these world-class productions with the community.

Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft (BIG) looks back on a long tradition of special ties to the Salzburg Festival: as the owner of the venues Grosses Festspielhaus and Kollegienkirche, we are proud to offer our real estate to one of the world’s most important festivals every year.

Although BIG is primarily known for its buildings in the educational landscape, we are particularly interested in turning the spotlight on these cultural gems in our portfolio. The historic university buildings, ministries, schools and other properties in our care require special attention with regard to maintenance and restoration. The careful and consistent preservation of historic buildings is not only a cultural obligation but also relevant to the conservation of resources. For this reason, monument protection has also become an important element of climate protection.

In the extended anniversary year, BIG supports the Salzburg Festival by sponsoring the soloist concert by Igor Levit.

Kia Ora Foundation was founded in 1997, with a primary goal to enable post-graduate study in musical performance while its secondary purpose is to assist in education in applied sciences. In addition to the Scholarships, the Foundation funds special projects, which support activities involving New Zealand artists. Such projects range internationally regarding appearing in musical performance or in undertaking further study not specifically related to an academic institution.

V—A—C Foundation, established in 2009 produces new culture together with artists and audiences alike. It is a platform for open discussion aimed at redefining the contemporary landscape. Working also with local communities, V—A—C promotes its exhibitions, publishing, performative and learning programmes beyond all disciplinary boundaries and thus constantly resets the coordinates for dialogue within a new global geography. This methodology is applied in all V—A—C initiatives, taking place in its Venetian space, through international, cross-institutional partnerships and in its future home for arts and culture in Moscow, GES-2.