Claudio Abbado

Snapshot

Claudio Abbado made his debut at the Salzburg Festival at 32, invited by Herbert von Karajan himself, and then returned almost every summer for nearly five decades. He conducted both orchestras at the heart of Salzburg’s musical life, and his later years produced some of the Festival’s most remembered Mozart and Mahler evenings.

The Story

Abbado arrived at the Salzburg Festival in 1965 because Karajan heard him in Berlin and issued a personal invitation. He conducted Mahler’s Second Symphony, the “Resurrection,” with the Vienna Philharmonic, and the debut was electrifying enough that the press called him “the new Mahler champion.” He was 32. The following summer he returned, and he kept returning almost every summer for the next four decades.

His tenure as Chief Conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic from 1986 to 1991, and then of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1989 to 2002, placed him at the centre of the two orchestras most essential to Salzburg’s identity. By 1997 he had accumulated an estimated 320 Salzburg performances and 27 opera productions. He programmed not just Beethoven and Mahler but pushed the Festival toward contemporary composers, including Berg, Ligeti, and Nono, drawing younger audiences and provoking traditionalists in equal measure.

Later in his career, after surviving stomach cancer in the early 2000s, his approach deepened. He brought the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra to the Festival for a celebrated 1998 performance of Mahler’s Fourth, with musicians drawn from across Europe. His final Salzburg seasons produced a 2012 Mozart Requiem at Salzburg Cathedral that critics praised for its transparency and emotional restraint. He conducted Mozart’s Mass K.139 and Schubert’s late Mass the same year with the Orchestra Mozart at the Grosses Festspielhaus. He died in Bologna in January 2014.