Author: Nicole Restle
ca. 9 minutes
The 2026 Salzburg Easter Festival represents both a return and a new beginning for the Berliner Philharmoniker. After 13 years in Baden-Baden, the orchestra returns to the place where the festival was born in 1967.
When he founded the Salzburg Easter Festival in 1967, Herbert von Karajan realised a long-cherished dream. For some time, the Berliner Philharmoniker’s chief conductor had wanted to create a platform where he could realise his vision for presenting Wagner’s music dramas in a convincing manner – not just as a conductor but also as a stage director, events organizer and impresario. Although Karajan had a seat on the Salzburg Festival’s board of directors and was heavily involved in planning its programmes, Wagner’s works were not staged in the town, since the Festival was keen to avoid any conflict of interest with the Bayreuth Festival, which likewise takes place in late July and August. But it would be possible to perform Wagner in Salzburg at Easter.
Karajan began with a particularly ambitious project, Der Ring des Nibelungen. This meant turning the Berliner Philharmoniker into an opera orchestra and presenting the complete Ring cycle over four consecutive years, setting new standards with his interpretations. In addition to an opera, each Easter Festival also featured concerts under both Karajan and other internationally-celebrated guest conductors along with some of the world’s leading soloists.
In 1967 he greeted Festival-goers with the words: “I wanted to bring together an audience of connoisseurs and music-lovers eager to get to know the great works of music in a town that is also my own home town, and to present them with music and theatre of a festival standard.” Karajan also carried the financial risks involved in establishing a new festival. After all the costs had been covered, he was left with a profit of exactly 300 Austrian schillings – today approximately 24 euros. But his artistic concept had proved to be an outstanding success. From then on, Salzburg was a Mecca for music-lovers not only during the summer but also in spring.
“It was as if the whole town was suddenly placed on a pedestal,” recalls one of the orchestra’s violinists, Eva-Maria Tomasi, herself a native of Salzburg and a member of the orchestra’s board of directors. “The Festival exuded its own very special atmosphere.” She had grown used to this festive atmosphere during her childhood. “As a student, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend some of the dress rehearsals, and I felt particularly inspired by them. Back then I really couldn’t have imagined that I, too, would one day be a part of all this.” As a member of the Karajan Academy, Eva-Maria Tomasi first took part in the Salzburg Easter Festival in 1987, performing in Mozart’s Don Giovanni under Karajan. It was an experience that she has never forgotten. Although Wagner productions were central to the Easter Festival during the Karajan era, other composers were also represented over the years, from Puccini’s Tosca and La bohème with Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni to Verdi’s Il trovatore and Don Carlos and Bizet’s Carmen with Agnes Baltsa.
New points of emphasis
Karajan’s successors, Claudio Abbado and Sir Simon Rattle, continued to uphold the tradition of the Salzburg Easter Festival, while at the same time adding new emphases of their own. Under Abbado the focus moved away from Wagner, and artistic highlights of his period in office were Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Berg’s Wozzeck and Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. Rattle conducted not only Mozart’s Così fan tutte and Bizet’s Carmen, but also operas such as Britten’s Peter Grimes and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Between 2007 and 2010 he also worked on a new production of the Ring that was staged in association with the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. Rattle was keen to reshape the Easter Festival by bringing a new focus and structure to it, and by making it more modern and more open, without having to forgo its more traditional elements. The orchestra also wanted to give more than just two performances of each new production, so that the expensive and time-consuming rehearsals and the long periods spent working on each opera production felt justified. At the same time, musicians hoped for greater opportunities to perform chamber music and to pursue its educational projects. This prompted the orchestra to move the Easter Festival to Baden-Baden.
A musical home
But, as Eva-Maria Tomasi has noted, “Salzburg had become the Berliner Philharmoniker’s second home, and over the years, its members had put down roots there. We always felt that this was not a long-term separation.” Although a new generation has joined the orchestra in recent years, with the youngest third of members having joined after the Berliners’ departure from Salzburg, its older members continued to feel bound to the town. As a result it made logical sense to return to the roots of the Easter Festival. According to Andrea Zietzschmann, the orchestra’s General Manager, “Karajan founded this Festival for the Berliner Philharmoniker, so it is part of our DNA, which made the move to Baden-Baden thirteen years ago all the more radical a break. But our time there opened up many new perspectives, and the orchestra was able to reinvent itself with the Easter Festival on the banks of the River Oos. We now return to Salzburg enriched by the experiences of Baden-Baden.”
A new start with Wagner
To mark this return to Salzburg with a new production of Wagner’s Ring seems every bit as logical. After all, it recalls not only Karajan and Rattle but also Kirill Petrenko, who in the course of his early career conducted successful productions of the cycle at the Meiningen State Theatre, the Bayreuth Festival and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. At a press conference in September 2025, Petrenko admitted that with the exception of Der Rosenkavalier, there is no other piece of music that he has spent so long working on in such meticulous detail as the Ring. Wagner’s sombre parable about power and its abuse retains its startling relevance today. This is potentially especially true given that the Easter Festival’s new production is entrusted to Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov, who has suffered at the hands of Putin’s authoritarian regime.
“Kirill Serebrennikov has a hugely exciting approach to the Ring that is very much in tune with our times,” says Andrea Zietzschmann. “When Kirill Petrenko got to know him, he noticed at once that there was real chemistry between them. Their vision and their working method were perfectly matched.” What sets this new production of the Ring apart from the earlier ones in Salzburg is that in 2028 Kirill Petrenko and the Berliner Philharmoniker will be interpolating a new production of Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron, a work that has never previously been staged at the Easter Festival. Orchestra and conductor want to use this work to forge a link with the present day. The 2026 Easter Festival will be launched with Das Rheingold, with Christian Gerhaher making his role debut as Wotan. Eva-Maria Tomasi anticipates an exciting production. “Starting with Die Walküre, we also need to attune ourselves to the sheer length of these works, something that, as a concert orchestra, we’re not used to. But I’m already looking forward to having Kirill Petrenko as our guide on our journey through these tremendous works, something that he will undoubtedly do with tremendous enthusiasm and a sense of great excitement.”
A Concert at Its Finest
The concerts that will be accompanying this spring’s production of Das Rheingold will also be cast with only the finest artists. Kirill Petrenko conducts Mahler’s monumental Eighth Symphony, also known as the “Symphony of a Thousand”. Mahler himself said that as an expression of his metaphysical and humanist ideas it was “the greatest thing” he had ever written. There will also be two performances of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation under Daniel Harding. This is a work which, with its ebullient love of life, celebrates the world of God and His creatures. Tugan Sokhiev will conduct Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and spirit his listeners away to the dark world of a soul tormented by the pangs of unrequited love. He also leads Brahms’s Double Concerto, in which the two soloists are the Berliner Philharmoniker’s first concertmaster Noah Bendix-Balgley and its principal violoncellist Bruno Delepelaire.
The soloist in Bruch’s First Violin Concerto is Janine Jansen, the holder of the Salzburg Easter Festival’s Herbert von Karajan Award. As Andrea Zietzschmann points out, “We are naturally not only reviving a number of earlier traditions but are also continuing to allow the Easter Festival to evolve and at the same time profiting from the experiences that we gathered over many years in Baden-Baden. As a result there will be more chamber music and more education projects.” There will in fact be no fewer than seven chamber recitals featuring ensembles and members of the orchestra in small and intimate groups in various venues all over Salzburg. The orchestra’s Education Programme also includes a new element: in the Be Phil Orchestra, amateur musicians from Austria and surrounding countries will work alongside members of the Berliner Philharmoniker on a programme that will be conducted by Tugan Sokhiev. This is a project that exemplifies the new spirit of the Salzburg Easter Festival: music as a shared experience that binds us all together. In short, the orchestra’s return to Salzburg is also a new beginning.
