Markus Hinterhauser has been building his career in the Salzburg Festival longer than anyone in its modern history. He arrived as a pianist in the early 1990s, became Mortier's closest artistic collaborator, and returned as Artistic Director in 2017. He is now the living custodian of an institution he has known from the inside for over three decades.
The Story
Markus Hinterhauser was born in La Spezia, Italy, in 1958 and trained as a pianist before arriving in Salzburg in the early 1990s at the invitation of Gerard Mortier, who had just taken over as the Festival's Artistic Director. He became one of the central figures in Mortier's programming, both as a performer and as a conceptual collaborator, appearing in and helping to shape the concerts and chamber music series that were a key part of Mortier's reinvention of the Festival.
After Mortier's departure in 2001 Hinterhauser remained as concert director through subsequent artistic directorships, accumulating an institutional knowledge of the Festival's operations and identity that few people shared. He left to direct the Wiener Festwochen before being called back to take the artistic directorship in 2017.
His programming at the Grosses Festspielhaus, the Felsenreitschule, and the chamber venues has combined new commissions with the canonical repertoire, contemporary theatre with classical opera. He has maintained the intellectual ambition that Mortier established while negotiating with an institution that has its own gravitational pull toward tradition. Among the living figures associated with the Salzburg Festival, he is the one who knows it most thoroughly from the inside.
