Austrian Festival Missions after 1918: The Vienna Music Festival and the Long Shadow of Salzburg

Abstract

Rising from the ruins of a post-1918 Austria shed of its monarchical leadership and much of its former territory, the Salzburg Festival acquired a symbolic authority during the First Austrian Republic that continues to ensure its privileged place in Austrian politics and culture to this day. At the core of this privileged place are two signature legacies that, while grounded in the festival's prewar history, fortified a particular agenda of the Second Austrian Republic in defining Austrian history and national identity in the decades following World War II. The first, as expressed in 1919 by the festival's most articulate cofounder, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is that with its Salzburg setting, the festival should be understood as situated in the “heart of the heart of Europe,” a place where the antitheses of Central European geography (German and Slavic, German and Italian), social class (commoner and elite), and aesthetic genre (dramatic theater and opera) encounter one another only to be dissolved through transcendence in an “organic unity.”