Major cultural events such as the Salzburg Easter Festival or Mozart Week invite you to immerse yourself in the world of art and artists. The Salzburg Whitsun Festival is also one of the cultural highlights – this year from 6 to 8 June.

Organised for the first time in 1973 by Herbert von Karajan as the ‘Salzburg Whitsun Concerts’, the Salzburg Whitsun Festival, as it is known today, is turning 52. The Whitsun Festival was added to the Summer Festival as an integral part of it in 1998. Since the Whitsun Festival has a smaller programme and takes place shortly before the Summer Festival, it has become a harbinger of the Summer Festival.

The idea of holding the festival at different times of the year goes back to one of its founding fathers, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. As early as 1919, he wrote that the festival should take place ‘every summer, but also at other times, such as around Christmas, or otherwise in winter, also at Easter and Pentecost’.

‘After Rome and Seville in previous years, we are continuing our imaginary city break as part of the Salzburg Whitsun Festival in 2025, this time letting ourselves be enchanted by the sounds of the lagoon city of Venice,’ writes artistic director and opera singer Cecilia Bartoli in her announcement of this year’s Whitsun Festival in Salzburg.

Vivaldi’s musical diversity

The opera ‘Hotel Metamorphosis’ is the centrepiece of this year’s Whitsun Festival. Antonio Vivaldi, the composer, was one of Venice’s most famous musicians, but for a long time he was only appreciated for his instrumental works. It was only with Cecilia Bartoli’s Vivaldi album in 1999 that his musical diversity was rediscovered. At the 2025 Whitsun Festival, Vivaldi’s music will be linked to Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’, a mythological work from the 1st century AD that deals with the constant transformation of all being. With texts by Ovid and music by Antonio Vivaldi, this work will be staged in two acts at the Haus für Mozart – on 6 and 8 June.

On 7 June, the Hamburg Ballet will be a guest in Salzburg. John Neumeier’s ballet ‘Death in Venice’, with music by Sebastian Bach and Richard Wagner, will enrich the Whitsun Festival at the Großes Festspielhaus. The ballet choreography is inspired by Thomas Mann’s novella and was developed by John Neumeier for the Hamburg Ballet. It balances between theatre and melodrama and portrays the mysterious desire of an aging artist who is destroyed by his last great love.

On 8 June, the Felsenreitschule will host the grand opera gala – arias and ensembles from Tancredi, Semiramide, Otello, Maometto II and L’Italiana in Algeri, conducted by Gianluca Capuano.

As conceived in 1998, the Whitsun Festival offers a foretaste of the programme of the Salzburg Summer Festival – this year from 18 July to 31 August. Then Salzburg is the stage of the world again. (pg/sb)

Salzburg Whitsun Festival, 6-8 June 2025. The programme and tickets can be found here.