Richard Wagner passed through Salzburg once, in August 1861, on a damp carriage journey to Vienna, hiding cigars under his laundry to avoid customs. He would not have guessed that a century later the city would stage his Ring cycle under Herbert von Karajan in a purpose-built hall, making Salzburg as much a Wagner city as a Mozart city. His music is central to what the Salzburg Festival is.
The Story
Wagner arrived in Salzburg on a rainy August night in 1861, a fugitive from the Saxon exile that had followed his participation in the 1849 Dresden uprising. He was on his way to Vienna, where an amnesty might let him resume a normal career. He recorded the Salzburg stop in his autobiography Mein Leben: a customs search, a bribe that failed, the rain, the inn. The city's baroque skyline and the thundering Salzach were there, but he was not staying. He was passing through.
His real Salzburg connection was forged not by his own presence but by the musicians who came after him. Richard Strauss, who co-founded the Salzburg Festival in 1920 with Max Reinhardt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, was the composer whose entire career grew from the soil Wagner had turned. Wagner's Tristan, his Ring, his Meistersinger had redefined what opera could be, and Strauss had absorbed all of it. The Festival's commitment to serious opera on the largest scale is a Wagnerian inheritance.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the poet who provided the Festival's literary foundation, engaged with Wagner's legacy throughout his career, both embracing it and arguing with it. The great Salzburg Festival operas that define the Festival's identity, whether Mozart or Strauss, exist in a world that Wagner made possible.
The direct staging of Wagner at the Festival came later. The first Wagner opera came in 1933, when Bruno Walter conducted Tristan und Isolde with the Vienna Philharmonic on the 50th anniversary of Wagner's death. The defining moment arrived with Karajan, who founded the Easter Festival in 1967 and opened it with Die Walkure. His Ring cycle productions made Salzburg a city where Wagner could be heard at the highest level of preparation and performance. The sets, the singers, the Berlin Philharmonic: the Easter Festival was built around the ambition to do Wagner properly. It succeeded. Salzburg became, for those productions, the equal of Bayreuth. The man who passed through on a rainy night in 1861 would not have recognised what his music had done to the place.
