One of the five co-founders of the Salzburg Festival (1920), alongside Hofmannsthal, Reinhardt, Strauss, and Schalk. Alfred Roller was a founding member of the Vienna Secession and a close collaborator of Gustav Mahler at the Vienna Opera, bringing a revolutionary approach to stage design: light, space, and symbolic imagery replacing the painted backdrops and cluttered stages of the 19th century.
His visual language helped shape the aesthetic identity of the Salzburg Festival from its opening season. The way the Domplatz, the Felsenreitschule, and the Grosses Festspielhaus are used as performance spaces owes something to his understanding of how architecture and theatre intersect.
