Cultural Institution
Held: ten days around Easter (Saturday before Palm Sunday to Easter Monday). Venues: Grosses Festspielhaus, Haus fur Mozart, Felsenreitschule. Founded 1967 by Herbert von Karajan. Current director: Nikolaus Bachler. Tickets from approximately EUR 40 (recitals) to EUR 180 (opening opera).
Salzburg has three classical music festivals. The summer Salzburg Festival is the largest and most famous. The Easter Festival is the most exclusive. Herbert von Karajan created it in 1967, having quit the Vienna State Opera three years earlier over a dispute about artistic control. He wanted to conduct Wagner operas with the Berlin Philharmonic, he wanted to direct, produce, and program without compromise, and he wanted to do it in the city where he was born. The Osterfestspiele was the result: a ten-day festival built around a single major opera production, with orchestral concerts and recitals around it, using the full scale of Grosses Festspielhaus and the Felsenreitschule.
The first edition ran in March 1967, opening with Wagner’s Die Walkure. Karajan directed every edition until his death in July 1989. A two-year gap followed, then the festival resumed under different conductors, all working with the Berlin Philharmonic until 2012. Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden took over in 2013, shifting the resident orchestra for the first time in the festival’s history. The Berlin Philharmonic is scheduled to return as the resident orchestra in 2026.
The character is deliberately different from the summer festival: smaller, quieter, more concentrated, and with ticket prices that reflect the exclusivity. It draws classical music specialists more than general tourists, and the atmospheric contrast between Holy Week in Salzburg and the grandeur of the Grosses Festspielhaus is part of the point.
Locations
Built 1693
The Felsenreitschule is a theater carved directly into the Moenchsberg cliff face, which means the backstage wall is living rock and three tiers of 17th-century arcades form the auditorium. It was originally built in 1693 as a summer riding school for the Archbishop's horses.
Completed 1960
The Grosses Festspielhaus (Large Festival Hall) opened in 1960 as a major expansion of Salzburg's Festspielhaus complex, carved in large part from the Moenchsberg cliff face to achieve its 2,179-seat auditorium. Architect Clemens Holzmeister cut the main stage directly into the rock, creating one of the widest stages in the world at 100 meters.
