12-21 April 2025
The Salzburg Easter Festival was founded in 1967 by Herbert von Karajan. The main focus is on opera. The supporting programme is made up of numerous concerts.
The Salzburg Easter Festival was founded in 1967 by Herbert von Karajan as an addition to the Salzburg Festival in August and quickly established itself as an exclusive and artistically brilliant festival. Herbert von Karajan's basic idea in founding the Easter Festival was the desire to further develop the festival idea in Salzburg, whereby the Easter Festival never saw itself as an offshoot of the Salzburg Festival in the summer, but was able to develop a completely independent profile. This could only be achieved through first-class directors, top-class performers and sophisticated opera productions.
The Festival starts annually on the Saturday before Palm Sunday and lasts until Easter Monday. From 2023, the artistic director is Nikolaus Bachler, who will invite a different leading orchestra with its chief conductor to perform in Salzburg each year, to offer audiences a wide range of interpretative styles.
Under the title "Wounds and Miracles", the 2025 Salzburg Easter Festival offers a varied programme with three top-class orchestras: the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Mozarteum Orchestra. A new production of Modest Mussorgsky's "Khovanshchina" is at the heart of the festival. Three orchestral concerts and two choral concerts complete the programme. The Dance and Electro programme, created in 2023, will also be continued.
