THE GREAT WORLD STAGE

90 Years of the Salzburg Festival

The hour struck for the birth of the Salzburg Festival on 22 August 1920, when Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Everyman was performed for the first time on the Domplatz, directed by Max Reinhardt. Since then, the Salzburg Festival has become established as the leading festival for opera, drama and concert.

The coming season will see the Salzburg Festival celebrating its 90^th anniversary. At the centre – indeed the heart – of the celebrations surrounding this anniversary there will be a multi-media show in the Salzburg Museum Kunsthalle, lasting from 17 July to 26 October. The exhibition aims to provide a view of the internal workings of the World Stage and a retrospective look at the history of the Salzburg Festival. A multi-media timeline guides visitors through the exhibition to the rhythm of music and speech. The visitor follows the timeline, which re-enacts the development of the Salzburg Festival over the decades. Yet the show features not only the individual personalities and their work; it also focuses on their motivation. Besides the timeline, the exhibition will include historic film footage, photos and sketches as well as animations to spotlight important events.

In the Säulenhalle of the Salzburg Museum, a total audio-visual experience will place visitors on a stylised stage and take them to where the stage is the world. Here, visitors can take their seats – original seating from festival performances – and enjoy legendary concerts and theatre performance footage of the Salzburg Festival, in perfect quality.

In addition, there will also be a “walkabout” encyclopaedia, an “A to Z of the Salzburg Festival”, the dramaturgical frame and guideline to research on the Salzburg Festival. Numerous Salzburg institutions will be involved (including the Residenzgalerie, the Mozarteum International Foundation, St Peter’s, etc.), creating a grand tour through the history of the festival. The topics will range from A for architecture to G for genius loci and E for Everyman, to V for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Z for Zooming into the future. Using stylised letters of the alphabet, stations will be set up throughout the city, associating specific locations with the various items from the encyclopaedia. In interaction with the exhibition “The Great World Stage”, the encyclopaedia will be a promenade through the history of the festival.

17 July - 26 October 2010

TRANSCENDING BORDERS

Bavaria and Salzburg 1810 to 2010

Major special exhibition project at the Neue Residenz and at the Altes Rathaus – the Old Town Hall – in Laufen

 
Salzburg belonged to Bavaria from 1810 until early 1816. Yet this relatively short period brought many permanent changes for Salzburg. The years are embedded in the period of the Napoleonic Wars, with momentous political upheavals in Europe. The Congress of Vienna redrew the map of the European continent, with direct effects on Salzburg: Austria received the present-day Federal Land of Salzburg, Bavaria the present-day Rupertiwinkel, which until 1972 corresponded to the administrative district of Laufen and has ever since been divided up between the adminstrative districts of Berchtesgadener Land (with Laufen and Teisendorf) and Traunstein (with Tittmoning and Waging). Their former shared heritage has remained in the awareness of many people on both sides of the border ever since.

This topic is now to be the subject of a bipartite major exhibition to take place in 2010, on the Salzburg side at the Salzburg Museum, and on the Bavarian side at the Old Town Hall – the Altes Rathaus – in the city of Laufen.

The Salzburg Museum will address the rulers’ personalities, from the last regnant Archbishop Colleredo to Emperor Francis I. In addition it will present a survey of the momentous changes in Salzburg under Bavarian rule, which even led to the recruiting of Salzburg soldiers for Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812, and will trace the living conditions of around 1810 in Salzburg, based on examples of various individuals.

In Laufen at the Altes Rathaus, the exhibition will focus on a presentation of the history of the Rupertiwinkel, i.e. the former Salzburg territories that finally fell to Bavaria in 1816, and on the topic of Border as a separating and connecting element right up to the present day.

The partners of the Salzburg Museum for this exhibition project are the Salzburg Landesarchiv, the General Administration of the National Archives of Bavaria in Munich, and the City of Laufen.

11 June - 31 October 2010

Cosmoramas by Johann Michael Sattler und Hubert Sattler | "Salzburg" and "The Orient"

22 January - 14 November 2010

The Circus is in Town!

The Greatest Show on Earth – in the Toy Collection

“Manege frei!” – “Under the Big Top” – is the motto of the special exhibition in the Toy Museum. Visitors will be amazed at the countless attractions in “mini” format: toys, games, books, posters, films – all about the circus. Three clowns from the early days of the famous Steiff toy manufactory greet visitors before they get caught up in the special atmosphere of an (almost) real circus ring. For the room showing the special exhibition is being made into a circus tent, a real big top, in which little visitors can step into the limelight themselves and get dressed up as ring master, animal trainer, juggler or clown.

Clowns and acrobats perform their acts in circus scenery made of wood, metal, tin and paper; wild animals and trainers show their daring tricks. A guest from America is presented in the world-famous “Humpty Dumpty circus", a graceful bareback rider. Animal trainers, strong men and tumblers, cast out of tin – from the Wollner workshop in Vienna – demonstrate their skills. A special visual trick: the zoetrope or magic drum makes the bottle balancing act come to life and has the clown jump through a hoop. There is a special section in the exhibition devoted to the history of the circus in Salzburg. The objects from the Toy Museum collection have been augmented by loans from Steiff and Playmobil and the Museum für Unterhaltungskunst (Museum of the Entertaining Arts) in Vienna.

6 March 2010 - 9 January 2011 

DEO GRATIAS!

Votive Pictures as a Mark of Popular Piety

Votive pictures reflect the anxieties and hardships that the devout had to struggle with, day in and day out. The birth of a child, work accidents, sickness of both human beings and animals are the constantly recurring themes of these pictures. They are offered at the most revered places of pilgrimage as thanks for rescue from a mishap through divine providence, betrothal plaques honouring a vow, or petition plaques begging redemption from distress.

This year’s special exhibition at the Folklore Museum in the Hellbrunn Monatsschlössl traces the most frequently occurring motifs, analyses the scourges of mankind associated with them, then as now, views them in the context of popular piety, environmental influences, nature and technical progress.

Votive pictures have to be “read”, otherwise one misses the point – to give in-depth support to this process, characteristic objects are placed next to them to make the everyday routine associated with them more immediate and palpable to the viewer, thus breathing new life into them.

1 May - 31 Oktober 2010