(Photo credit: Marco Borrelli)

The Salzburg Festival has released the final report for its 2023 edition.

In its 103rd year, the Salzburg Festival held 178 performances over 43 days at 15 venues. Directors of the Salzburg Festival, Kristina Hammer, Markus Hinterhäuser and Lukas Crepaz reported a “record quota” of 98.5% of seats filled at the 2023 festival. Over 241,000 visitors from 79 nations, 40 non-European nations attended this year’s program. In addition, 40,000 guests watched 49 screenings of the Siemens Festival>Nights on Salzburg’s Kapitelplatz. The Festival mentorship program continued successfully with 6,000 discounted tickets to performances in all the Festival’s three genres sold to young people under the age of 27 and for the two-day Festival Opening Party alone, more than 11,000 free tickets were distributed.

The opera program included 34 performances of five fully staged and three concert productions, in addition to 86 concerts. Staged operas included “Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Macbeth,” Falstaff,” “The Greek Passion,” and “Orfeo ed Euridice.” Concert versions presented were “The Indian Queen,” I Capuleti e I Monticchi,” and “Les Troyens.”

In addition to the concerts, the lion’s share of the Festival’s programming, Florian Wiegand, the head of concerts, was also responsible for a broad resonance worldwide: 14 television and streaming productions, 21 radio broadcasts, and 2 audio play versions of dramas ensured a comprehensive Festival echo in the media. Three new opera productions and nine concerts were recorded audiovisually for television and streaming. The partners of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) ensured that the radio broadcasts and the audiovisual broadcasts reached additional millions of listeners.

In total, the Salzburg Festival grossed 29 million Euro. Ticket sales amounted to 115,000 Euro which will go to charities. 25,000 Euro will be donated to the initiative “Austria helps Austria.” Another 25,000 Euro will be donated to support the establishment of a walk-in clinic for persons without health insurance in the grounds of the Archiepiscopal Private School Borromäum. 15,000 Euro will be donated to the Flachgauer Tafel, a food bank offering poverty-struck people aid. Cecilia Bartoli’s initiative raised 50,000 Euro from the “Orfeo ed Euridice” dress rehearsal. This money will benefit the Italian towns of Conselice and Sant’Agata sul Santerno in the Bassa Romagna region as well as various towns in the Romagna Faentina region. Both regions continue to suffer massively from the flooding catastrophe in Italy.