Outgoing Salzburg Festival leader Rabl-Stadler: I’m a big fan of the quota
As the co-owner of a Salzburg fashion house, journalist and VP politician Helga Rabl-Stadler as President of the Salzburg Festival in 1995. But with optimism and tenacity, she fought for her place as one of the most successful cultural managers in Europe. Now she is retiring. Talk to a conservative feminist.
AZ: First of all, compliments for the chic costume, Ms. Rabl-Stadler, that you wore at the last season press conference of the Festival!
HELGA RABL-STADLER: Oh, I’m glad you liked it, a beautiful color, isn’t it? From Akris. Albert Kriemler, a well-known Swiss fashion designer. He once said his goal was to create beautiful clothes for busy women.
At the end of the year YOU will no longer have a job, at least not as President of the Salzburg Festival? Why are you actually stopping?
You should stop if the people, whose judgment you value, regret it. During my tenure there were 27 seasons, 5626 performances, 396 of which were premieres, in front of 6,094,994 visitors under six directors and ten art ministers, plus eight Jedermann and 14 library groups. I don’t have to justify why I’m ending this. I started in 1995 for the 75th anniversary of the festival and will now be leaving this place of activity in the year of the 100th anniversary. This closes a circle, but of course my heart hurts.
Bumpy start – but take a long breath
After your bumpy start and some humiliations, did you feel like you showed it to the many men you survived in office?
I don’t go to the women who want to show men where to go, but will create something together with them. However, I am a big fan of the quota because everything is still going too slowly.
Would you consider yourself a feminist?
Of course I am a feminist. If there are people who are afraid of this expression, they should look at me, I really am not to be feared.
When you took office under Gerard Mortier, the great innovator of the Salzburg Festival after Herbert von Karajan’s long reign, you were a novice to culture. That Hutmann let you feel
At the time, even though I had worked in journalism and politics, I was not prepared for someone who did not have the stable smell to be treated so brutally. Even in politics I didn’t appreciate intrigues, which is why I have friends and allies in all political camps. But I couldn’t imagine that things would get any harder in art.
Truly a tough school
One of the reasons I had a hard time with me was the fact that the office of Festival President was not well defined. And I’ve fallen into many a trap. For example, a journalist once asked me if I could play the piano, which I had to deny out of a bad conscience. As if the festival president should have taken on a piano recital when Pollini fills out. That wouldn’t happen to me today, because the president shouldn’t compete with the artistic director. If I had wanted that, everyone from Mortier to Hinterhuser would have turned against me. I am nothing more and nothing less than the manager of a medium-sized company with a permanent workforce of 230 employees, which in summer grows to become a large company in the province of Salzburg with more than 4000 employees. And there I can use what I have learned as a businesswoman, journalist and politician.
“There is a sequence of events everywhere”
Did she still feel like it and wanted to help shape the artistic program at least a little?
Clear no. But of course I was asked again and again, for example from the tourist sector, to play operas that everyone wants to hear or to let performances end as early as possible so that one can have a nice meal afterwards. I’ve always said: If you’re only out for events, it can go well for a few years, but at some point it becomes a fad for people. Because there is a series of events everywhere. But a high-class program as broad as ours can only be found at the Salzburg Festival.
When did you find your role as Festival President yourself?
Under (the composer and Mortier’s successor as festival director) Peter Ruzicka, who, unlike Mortier, only cared about artistic matters. Because of the struggles that had been forced on me before, I had to make it clear to myself why I exist and what I can do for the festival. And I can say without any modesty that without me, for example, the house for Mozart would not exist. I fought through that, including financing with sixty percent private funds, which had not existed before.
How important was the fact that you were a woman, especially at the beginning?
At the time, people in Salzburg believed that the festival was too important to be entrusted to a woman. I am of course happy that I was allowed to do it for so long and with so much recognition and that my successor WILL be a woman again.
You have always held back in the MeeToo debate and, for example, defended Placido Domingo against allegations of sexual assault in the USA. Is MeToo a witch hunt or a liberation?
This movement has its place, not only in terms of the treatment of women, but also in terms of the abuse of power in the cultural sector in general. Unfortunately there were and are attacks here. As for Domingo, the Festival has had only the best experiences with him, including celebrities.
“After the end of the pandemic we will have to fight a lot”
During your term of office there were several changes of artistic director and two veritable crises: the corruption scandal at the Easter Festival, which also affected the summer festival and now Corona. Will the pandemic leave a lasting mark on cultural life?
When I just heard that Minister Lauterbach predicted that the Corona issue would not be settled in the current four-year legislative period, I was a little worried. None of this will pass without a trace. In the summer of 2020 we were able to prove that. With a strong hygiene concept, safe festivals are possible under full occupancy, but after the end of the pandemic we still have to fight hard to see that as an enrichment, not a threat.
The Austrian mezzo-soprano Elisabeth Kulman recently canceled the farewell concert of her career at the Wiener Musikverein because she perceived concerts under 2 G conditions, i.e. only for those who have been vaccinated and recovered, as discriminatory. Do you agree with her?
No, 2 G is a necessary safety rule for me. I appreciate Ms. Kulmann as an artist and for her diverse commitment, but she got lost in this matter and I’m sure her audience is seriously disappointed.
More and more operas and ballets are being discontinued because they are said to have discriminatory content. A production of Peter Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” at the Berlin State Opera recently hit the scene. Keyword: break off culture.
The cancel culture is a real threat to the freedom of art. For many years we were perhaps a little too careless as to whether one could end up in the wrong direction with this or that representation or cast. But now self-censorship seems to be getting out of hand. One must not damage the freedom of art, which our ancestors wrested from the authorities in the past centuries. And we must not bring the threat to this freedom back into it through the back door.
Angela Merkel: Frequent guest – not a close friend
You go almost at the same time as Angela Merkel, who was a frequent guest at the Festival and was often seen with you. Do you have something like a friendship?
Friendship would be saying too much. But Angela Merkel gave me the nice present when I left, a handwritten thank you letter. Ms. Merkel is also the best advertisement for the festival because she is knowledgeable and well known. I will never forget when she was sitting with Christian Thielemann in rehearsals for Richard Strauss’ “Frau ohne Schatten” and afterwards tried to explain why he knocked on this or that. And it makes me smile that in the breaks even those artists who are certainly not politically close to her die,
What do you wish for the new festival president, the manager Kristina Hammer from Germany?
That she is not thrown as many beatings in front of her as I do and that the festival directors can grow back together as quickly as possible into the trio that has been so successful in recent years with artistic director Markus Hinterhuser, commercial director Lukas Crepaz and now Kristina Hammer as President.