Sponsors

The Salzburg Festival is an excellent match for Audi as a premium car manufacturer. 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. AUDI AG has supported the Salzburg Festival for more than two decades now.
“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.

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.

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

Among the Testimonees are legendary Spanish tenor Placido Domingo; Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli, German tenor Jonas Kaufmann, Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez, French tenor Benjamin Bernheim, and Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva. Rolex also celebrates conductors at the realm of some of the world’s best orchestras: Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel and English-Italian conductor and pianist Sir Antonio Pappano. Leading institutions supported by Rolex include 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 Orchestra.

In 2012, Rolex was delighted to incorporate the highly acclaimed Salzburg Festival, as well as the Whitsun Festival directed by Cecilia Bartoli, into its cultural portfolio.

Rolex remains increasingly active in the arts, with aim of providing support that will help 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, with the transformation of our watchword, and overcoming challenges of various capacities, something we thrive at, we became the production sponsor for La clemenza di Tito at the Salzburg Festival. We thoroughly enjoyed our first year of cooperation. To further our partnership we chose to sponsor the Salzburg Festival Opera Camps for Children and Youths and to run the related fellowship program for young talents from economically unprivileged countries. As a company committed to youth educational programs designed to integrate indigenous communities into modern life through experiencing arts, we thought it would bring more value to both the Festival and the communities we serve. We are thrilled to enter into the third year of partnership with the festival, and are looking forward to supporting its creative concepts, that melt together tradition and innovation, whilst ensuring the new generations of talents get to experience the highest quality, known by the Salzburg Festival.

“Nestlé and the Salzburg Festival share an equal passion for quality,” points out Paul Bulcke, Chairman of the Board of Directors. “The constant striving for outstanding performance and a combination of tradition and innovation are the basis of our success. Every day, we offer people all over the world food of the highest quality. The Salzburg Festival, on the other hand, offers nourishment satisfying another need, as the Festival’s founder Max Reinhardt expressed: ‘Art and culture are always akin to food – they are the other bread.’

We are proud to support the opera production Simon Boccanegra by Giuseppe Verdi in 2019.”

Paul Bulcke Chairman of the Board of Directors, Nestlé S.A.

OMV produces and markets oil and gas, innovative energy and high-end petrochemical solutions – in a responsible way. With Group sales of EUR 23 bn and a workforce of more than 20,000 employees in 2018, OMV Aktiengesellschaft is one of Austria’s largest listed industrial companies. In Upstream, OMV has a strong base in Romania and Austria as part of the Central and Eastern Europe core region as well as a balanced international portfolio, with Russia, North Sea, Middle East and Africa as well as Asia-Pacific as further core regions. In Downstream, OMV more than 2,000 filling stations in ten countries. OMV runs gas storage facilities in Austria and Germany; its subsidiary Gas Connect Austria GmbH operates a gas pipeline network in Austria. In 2018, gas sales volumes amounted to around 114 TWh. Sustainability is an integral part of the corporate strategy. OMV is set to invest EUR 500 mn in innovative energy solutions by 2025.

PJSC Gazprom is pleased to support the Salzburg Festival in 2020, where the Russian Opera “Boris Godunov” composed by Modest Mussorgsky will be staged. We consider culture-sponsoring projects as an essential component of our social responsibility program. This applies equally to the performing and fine arts. With this commitment, we support the promotion of Russian cultural heritage and thus help to expand the cultural connections between Russia and Austria. Austria has been our key and reliable business partner for more than 50 years. It is a great honor for us to participate in such projects and make a sustainable contribution to the world culture.

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.

The V-A-C Foundation is honoured to join the Salzburg Festival in 2019 for the re-staging of Romeo Castellucci’s revolutionary Salomé.
V-A-C is committed to cultural production set to redefine our contemporaneity, through new partnerships, forms and methods, and revolutionary new operas like Salomé.