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Helga Rabl-Stadler President of the Salzburg Festival

“Our Salzburg Festival House is meant to be a symbol. It is not the founding of a theater, not a project called to life by a few starry-eyed fantasists, and not the undertaking of a provincial town. It is a matter of European culture. And of eminent political, economic and social importance.” Those were the self-assured, urgent and unmistakable words used by poet and Salzburg Festival founder, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, as he described the task Salzburg faced 100 years ago.

And in his 1917 memorandum, composed in the midst of “the ravages of this war,” von Hofmannsthal’s congenial partner, director Max Reinhardt, wrote of the “terrible reality of our days,” of the “conflagration enveloping the world” that the Salzburg Festival could and should repudiate. Founding a festival was meant to be “one of the first works of peace.” The festival owes its existence to this firm belief in the power of art and in Salzburg as a seat of power.

It seems entirely logical to me that the Trilogue was founded at the beginning of the new millennium in the “heart of the heart of Europe” (as Hofmannsthal defined my hometown). Above all, I would like to thank Liz Mohn in particular for mobilizing all of the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s intellectual and organizational resources, and for continuing to make them available. I would like to thank Wolfgang Schüssel that the decision was made in favor of Salzburg. After all, this city is ideal for thinking about the world, for thinking anew and thinking ahead.

What Reinhardt postulated about the festival applies here, too, to some extent. He was convinced that the exceptional could only be achieved “at a remove from the everyday bustle of city life” and “far from the distractions of the metropolis.” The gatherings at the Trilogue, which usually give rise to inspiring exchanges after just a few hours, show that he was right. And the evening visits to the festival have always been more than mere entertainment – if I may say so.

“Art is a language that uncovers the hidden, tears open the sealed, makes tangible what is innermost, one that warns, excites, unsettles, gladdens.” That is what the great Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt passionately proclaimed to the audience during his remarks as the Salzburg Festival celebrated its 75th anniversary. “A work of art that wants to inspire, to move, needs qualified rejection as much as it needs approval” and “the great artworks are masterpieces because they always have something to say to people – even if every generation sees something different.” The title of his remarks was “What Is Truth? or Zeitgeist and Trends.”

Especially today, policy makers from all parties are tempted to follow the zeitgeist, allowing them to celebrate quick successes online. To me, that makes art’s contribution all the more important. No, artists are not smarter, they do not occupy the moral high ground. But in a time of hasty answers, they know how to ask questions that force – at best, inspire – the public to reflect.

Max Reinhardt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss were firmly convinced that antique mythology offered subtle possibilities for interpreting modern problems of both a personal and political nature. Von Hofmannsthal, Strauss’s favorite librettist, put it thus: “For if this age of ours is anything, it is mythical – I know of no other expression for an existence which unfolds in the face of such vast horizons – for this being surrounded by millennia, for this influx of Orient and Occident into our self, for this immense inner breadth, these mad inner tensions, this being here and elsewhere, which is the mark of our life. It is impossible to catch all this in middle-class dialogues. Let us write mythological operas! Believe me, they are the truest of all forms.”

Our operas Salome and, this year, Elektra, provide impressive, breathtaking proof of this thesis. The temporal distance enables us to clearly see, as with a magnifying glass, the eternally valid conflicts: war and peace, love and hatred, forgiveness and revenge.

And anyone looking for change architects could very well find them among our artists. Director Peter Sellars incorporated environmental issues into his productions long before Greta Thunberg took to the streets for the same cause – not bathetically, not using a sledgehammer, but with an artist’s sensibility for the looming catastrophe.

The Trilogue gave representatives of art and culture an equal place at the table with captains of industry and government ministers, so they could negotiate the future – a position we had to struggle for in the quotidian political arena during the pandemic. Everything else seemed more important – the hospitality industry, retail, the agricultural lobby. Yet the longer the lockdown went on, the more people quoted Reinhardt: art not as mere decoration, but as nourishment. And suddenly, the Salzburg Festival was again being praised for being what it was originally created to be: a beacon in dark times.

In April 2020, however, sympathies were not on our side. At a time when practically all other festivals were being cancelled, one feuilleton writer for a German-language publication stooped to the scurrilous assertion that “the Salzburg Festival undoubtedly wanted to become the cultural world’s Ischgl.”

Should we have allowed the coronavirus to wrest control completely and let the long-planned 100th anniversary of the world’s largest classical music festival simply go unobserved? Or was it more appropriate to carry out the event – while always giving the health of our artists, employees and audiences top priority, of course – so it could set an example of the power of art in a powerless time? No one could give us advice, there were no precedents to look to. The mood at the highest leadership levels was – and remains – marked by uncertainty, whether in business, politics or culture.

The lockdown imposed by governments was followed by an equally fatal lockdown in the brains, in the responses of those who should actually be leading, be thinking of alternatives. That the Metropolitan Opera closed its doors in March 2020 and announced it would reopen sometime in the autumn of 2021 after an incredible 18 months is not merely a loss for opera fans. It will be a blot on New York’s reputation as a cultural metropolis for a long time to come. It discredits the value of art. Art and culture are nourishment. They are essential services.

The Salzburg Festival provides both meaning and employment – we were always aware of this dual responsibility when we took the risk of performing during the pandemic. It was a calculated risk, not a gamble. We acted in keeping with an idea advanced by Peter F. Drucker, the first management guru: “There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.” Had we cancelled, our lack of courage would have been a cause for shame in light of our founding fathers, who believed in the need for festivals in much more difficult times.

Last year’s summer season was at times a veritable purgatory – even as the pandemic continues to cast its shadow over us this year as well. But by September we had near-heavenly results: a sold-out festival, a giant step forward in terms of digitalization, a thousand good ideas on how we can offer faster and even better service to our greatest asset, our loyal customers from 80 countries around the world.

I am certain that my appeal for courage in an age lacking courage will be well received, especially by Trilogue participants, and to that end I would like to cite Hugo von Hofmannsthal once more: “When the will alone bestirs itself, something has almost already been attained.”

I very much hope that, in the coming decade, the Trilogue will continue to infect decision makers from around the world with the will to engage in discourse and debate.