Two hours before the curtain rose for “Carmen” at the Salzburg Festival last week, the soprano Asmik Grigorian was in her dressing room at the Grosses Festspielhaus talking about how the show almost didn’t go on.
Grigorian’s debut as Carmen, in a new production by Gabriela Carrizo, was a high point of the six-week festival of music and theater — widely viewed as Europe’s premier classical music event — at the foot of the Austrian Alps.
But Grigorian said she had wanted to cancel after the festival board voted in March to terminate the contract of its artistic director, Markus Hinterhäuser, who has been the brilliant if temperamental face of the festival for more than a decade. She relented, she said, out of loyalty to Hinterhäuser, who, she noted, had helped make her career.
“This feels very strange and empty,” Grigorian said of this summer’s festival. “It was planned by Markus Hinterhäuser, and we are all here because of him. It feels a bit like a boat without a captain.”
“I hope with all my heart that this festival will continue to exist,” she added, “in the most beautiful way, as it did when he was here.”
At a time when major classical music organizations, particularly in the United States, are struggling with declining audiences, rising costs and a generational shift in musical tastes, the Salzburg Festival continues to thrive. The streets in this city where Mozart was born were bustling last week with women (and a few men) in shimmering gowns, as well as men (and a few women) in black tie and white tie. They negotiated cobblestones and endured suffocating heat that turned a performance of Messiaen’s “Saint François d’Assise” in the barely air-conditioned Felsenreitschule into a six-hour endurance test.
The festival, with its $89 million annual budget, sold 230,000 tickets this season, with visitors from 88 countries. “Last year we had about 98 percent of seats sold, and this year it will be over 99 percent,” Lukas Crepaz, the executive director of the festival, said. That’s a benchmark that would be the envy of most opera houses and concert halls. Salzburg draws a largely well-to-do crowd, paying $558 for best-in-the-house seats. (The least expensive seats go for $11.50.)
But for all that, the festival is unfolding in an atmosphere as tense and uncertain as any since World War II. It is shaken by the departure of Hinterhäuser, whose contract was originally set to last through 2031 but was terminated in spring, “effective immediately,” the board said, because of “irreconcilable differences of opinion.”
And the festival is girding for a $600 million rehabilitation project that will turn the festival complex into a construction site through 2033. The project, which begins in the fall, includes the closing of the festival’s largest hall, the 2,200-seat Festspielhaus, testing the loyalty of patrons who will be dispatched to a yet-to-be-chosen temporary theater.
A new director will mean a new direction for a festival that has long been identified with traditional classical repertoire but that over the past 20 years has presented more adventurous productions. “I think you will see a new handwriting,” said Kristina Hammer, the president of the festival. “Everybody has their own interpretation. But the DNA I’m sure will not be changed.”
Like many major classical organizations in Europe, Salzburg is entwined with the government. About 30 percent of its budget comes from government funding, and the supervisory board is made up in part of elected officials. That has added to the unease, particularly because this is an era of retrenchment and rising conservative power.
Barrie Kosky, the theater and opera director who drew a prolonged ovation here on opening night of his production of Rossini’s “Il Viaggio a Reims,” said that Hinterhäuser’s firing was “indicative of a larger problem that’s happening in Europe with cultural institutions and politics,” pointing to Paris, Rome, Berlin and Munich.
“I’m not interested in blame-gaming,” Kosky said. “However, I see a complete breakdown in the communication system between artists, artistic institutions and politics. Distrust. Lack of communication. A lack of understanding from the politician side that their job is to put people in positions of leadership and authority that come up with the ideas.”
Festival officials said they intended to announce the next artistic director this fall. During this interregnum, Hinterhäuser, who lives in Salzburg, remains very much a presence. He planned this summer’s festival, with its moody “Carmen” and its ascetic production of “Saint François.” He also turned up to play piano at two recitals and discreetly attended the season’s major productions, though he said he made a point of not going on opening nights to avoid uncomfortable encounters with the board.
“It’s been awkward,” Hinterhäuser said at a cafe a mile from his old office.
Discreet or not, Hinterhäuser is nearly as much a part of the conversation this year as Grigorian or the mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli, another festival staple. His departure was shrouded in mystery, with attendees trading tales of intrigue involving the man who was described by several former associates as an inspirational artist but an often-difficult supervisor.
Karoline Edtstadler, the governor of Salzburg State and head of the festival board, declined a request for an interview to discuss the Hinterhäuser’s departure. “Both parties agreed to confidentiality in the mutual separation agreement concluded between the Salzburg Festival Fund and Mr. Hinterhäuser,” said Christoph Reiser, a spokesman for Edtstadler.
Hinterhäuser blamed his departure on “politics” and said the main point of contention was the board’s challenging his authority to appoint Karin Bergmann as head of drama, which, he said, “is absolutely exclusively a decision for the artistic director.”
“It’s a pure power game,” he said. “This was four weeks of hell. A massacre. A public massacre.”
He added: “This was the greatest privilege of my life to be in this position and now it’s kind of ruined.”
Grigorian was not the only one distressed about Hinterhäuser’s departure. “Most artists were in a state of shock,” said the director Peter Sellars, a major contributor to the festival for nearly 20 years. “Markus had taken the place to such an extraordinary level. Every artist was completely supporting Markus.”
But Bergmann, who was appointed interim artistic director, said that Salzburg was “such a unique brand, such a strong brand, that a change in leadership is perhaps a little hiccup,” adding, “It’s not really something that changes anything.”
Bartoli, the artistic director of Salzburg’s Whitsun Festival, said the transition “is absolutely natural and has happened throughout the festival’s history.”
A changing of the guard, though, is not the only uncertainty clouding the horizon. The renovation project is ambitious. Plans call for tearing down workshops, where all aspects of productions are built (from sets to costumes), to make way for larger ones. The wings and backstage at the Festspielhaus, which have been considered too small for a stage of that size almost since it opened in 1960, are being dramatically expanded. Dated technology — workers still use ropes to lift and lower sets — is going to be replaced with top-of-the-line computerized systems. And yes, the climate-challenged air-conditioning system is on the upgrade list.
It would be daunting under the best of circumstances. But the festival venues are carved into the rock of the Mönchsberg, the hill that looms over old town, and are part of a UNESCO World Heritage district, which largely bans any kind of significant alterations to the historic halls. No building up or out: Any expansion has to burrowed into the rock.
This is going to be one of the first challenges for Hinterhäuser’s successor. “They have to find interim venues,” Bergmann said, “and they have to find a program that is adapted to those interim venues.”
Hinterhäuser’s imprint on the festival has been particularly clear this summer. Though he has been criticized for being too cerebral or dark, and there have been few commissions of new music during his reign, his festivals have offered a steady diet of at times radical interpretations of traditional works.
Productions this year featured dead birds dropping from the sky, live sheep and dogs onstage and abundant nudity. A staging of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos,” by the Berlin director Ersan Mondtag, shifted the story to Mars, with videos of spaceships, exploding planets and singers in space suits. The boos started the second the stage went dark.
“Markus did a great job to present this fantastic summer in a different way,” said Manfred Honeck, who conducted “Ariadne” and was not surprised by the boos. “He had a fantastic way of having the right proportion of that what we expect but also new elements and new things, which are I think so exciting. I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s nearly sold out.”
Bergmann praised Hinterhäuser’s programming, but suggested his limitations running an operation with a work force that swells to 4,000 people during the summer. “It is not so easy to do this job” she said. “If you’re an artist yourself, as Mr. Hinterhäuser is, it’s perhaps sometimes a problem for them to communicate the way that managers and organization leaders are expected to communicate.”
“Normally, everyone lived with, ‘this is a big artist, and he is full of temperament, and he has to let out his aggressions and his emotions, and that is the main thing,’” she said. “That doesn’t work today.”
Kosky said that while Hinterhäuser had been responsible “for an amazing chapter” at Salzburg, it was time to move on.
“We say in Yiddish, ‘genug iz genug’ — enough is enough: What happened has happened,” said Kosky, who is frequently mentioned as a possible successor to Hinterhäuser. “I see challenges, but I don’t see the end of the Salzburg Festival. Maybe a change of direction. Maybe it reinvents itself as something different.”
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