Cecilia Bartoli

Travel itself is the theme chosen by Cecilia Bartoli for the Salzburg Whitsun Festival from 22 to 25 May 2026. After the city-themed festivals of recent years, when select places of relevance for music history were the focus of attention, she now invites the audience to Salzburg under the motto “Bon Voyage!”.

Starting with Gioacchino Rossini’s Il Viaggio à Reims, in which a travelling party fails to arrive at its destination due to bizarre complications, the programme illuminates sea travel, expeditions of discovery, but also fateful journeys.

Musical rediscoveries and surprising new perspectives are assembled in this year’s programme by artistic director Cecilia Bartoli:

“For freelance artists, travel is a way of life: Today, travel is often a commodity, but travelling slowly is a luxury. Your body may move fast, but it recovers at its own pace, and your mind needs even longer to get to grips with fresh surroundings.

During Rossini’s lifetime, the speed at which people moved about increased tremendously due to modern achievements such as the railways. Being the astute man that he was, Rossini integrated some of these developments into his works from very early on. In Il viaggio a Reims, for instance, he plays with the craze of the upper classes for travelling across Europe.

As a creative artist I have always been driven by an unending curiosity about composers, musicians and what has surrounded them. And I feel very lucky that this urge has not diminished in recent decades: constantly fueling oneself with new input generates ideas, maintains creativity and drives one forward personally as well as artistically. Stagnation, conversely, leads to fossilization and death. In my mind, a sustainable artistic career – be it long or short – is an adventurous journey full of ups and downs, surprising turns, wonders and dangers. Don’t worry about being carried away to unknown shores, but do not hesitate to revisit familiar places either! New experiences make you reassess well-known things from a different, enriched perspective.

Gioacchino Rossini

I love Rossini’s music, but I also admire his personality, his humour, his joie de vivre. Rossini fills me with perpetual excitement and wonder, while his oeuvre still contains plenty of repertory for me to discover. And thus 2026 will see me make my debut as the famous Roman poetess and improviser Corinna in Il viaggio a Reims. For me, the farcical storyline of this merry piece contains novel twists, the work’s emergence is one of the curiosities of opera history, while its performance history resembles an initially fraught but ultimately successful voyage, culminating now in a frolicsome production at the Salzburg Whitsun Festival. (…)

Beyond Rossini, let us be your pilots on all kinds of other fascinating journeys. For example, we welcome back the magnificent dancers of the Hamburg Ballet and join them on an extended ocean cruise, where we discover in Die kleine Meerjungfrau (The Little Mermaid) a retelling of Andersen’s famous tale that is a combination of virtuosity, musicality, profundity and humour, something I deeply admire about John Neumeier’s work.

Claudio Monteverdi set the moving story of Ulysses’s arrival home to music in one of his late operas, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, first performed in 1640. We present it in a newly created staged production by Les Musiciens du Prince, under the baton of Gianluca Capuano, in collaboration with the historic Milanese string-puppet company Carlo Colla & Figli, and a group of expert live singers.

Guided by Davide Livermore and his crew, I will take you on a journey through my own life and career in a specially designed staged gala concert on Sunday evening, where we will illustrate the variety of wonderful music and musicians which I have been lucky to encounter on my journey.

Before we close our festival with the second performance of Il viaggio a Reims on the evening of Whitsun Monday, we welcome back Christina Pluhar and her ensemble L’Arpeggiata. I am excitedly looking forward to one of their famously original programmes, called Übers Meer (Across the Sea). The group will perform music from the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods alongside works from Germany, Spain and Latin America, and will portray further mythical journeys from Classical antiquity. The performance will culminate with Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, set in Jerusalem at the time of the great crusades. »