2022 is now a particularly intense year, says museum director Martin Hochleitner. With his team, he will put new museum locations into operation. These include a new offshoot of Vienna’s Belvedere Palace in Salzburg and the Sound of Music Museum in the Hellbrunn district.

“Belvedere Salzburg” with 31 million euros

The largest project is the extension of the rooms in the New Residence to create a branch of the Belvedere in Salzburg. For this, the Sattler Panorama, a huge circular painting by Hubert Sattler, WILL move to the other side of the Salzach in the former Baroque Museum at Mirabell Palace. The “Belvedere Salzburg” project is estimated at around 31 million euros, says Hochleitner. The architecture competition is currently in the second phase, and 16 teams have been invited. The museum director expects construction to start next year, with completion scheduled for 2026.

A spatial and functional program was developed for the new Panorama Museum and a World Heritage Center under the working title “Orangerie Salzburg”. Hochleitner put the cost of the project at EUR 5.5 million. It is scheduled for completion in the second half of 2024.

New place of worship for “Sound of Music”

In Hellbrunn, the long-discussed “Sound of Music” museum is taking shape. Here, too, an initial space and function program was made, said the museum director. He assumes costs of around 2.5 million euros. Another project is the cathedral excavation museum with the new Roman museum Iuvavum. The excavations are to be made accessible via the planned new visitor center for the cathedral district in the old residence.

The museum has chosen “Salzburg unique” as the annual theme. It is the title of a new three-year permanent exhibition that opens in February. It is intended to show the diversity of Salzburg’s art and cultural history and, based on 200 objects from all collection areas, tell what has shaped and shapes Salzburg. One institution that has always contributed a lot to the further development of the Salzburg Museum is the Museum Association, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary today. In a separate exhibition entitled “Collected with Passion”, objects are shown that could be purchased with the support of the Museum’s Circle of Friends, which now has 14,000 members.

Salzburg’s coffee houses in focus

Visiting coffee houses has been one of those things that many people have sorely missed in the past few months. The Salzburg Museum will satisfy this longing with an exhibition: “Cafe Salzburg – Places. People. Stories” is dedicated to private and public coffee consumption. Playing with History is another show being prepared for the fall. It is about the question of how the past WAS represented in games or toys from the post-war period. In keeping with this, there WILL be a five-station journey through time in the toy museum. As in the previous summer, the Folklore Museum allows objects from the collection to enter into a dialogue with contemporary art in “Herz aller liebst”.

Festival anniversary show was the driving force

The Salzburg Museum recorded around 340,000 visitors in 2021 at its locations in the city of Salzburg and Hallein (Tennengau), where the Celtic Museum is operated. The strongest workhorse was the state exhibition for the anniversary of the festival. Almost 50,000 visitors saw the special exhibition “Great World Theater – 100 Years of the Salzburg Festival”. The concept of a state exhibition has once again proven to be successful, says museum director Martin Hochleitner.

Instead of 900,000 visitors as in 2019, which was still untroubled at the time, there were two-thirds fewer visitors in the crisis year 2021. one is satisfied that the toy museum even stands out with a record, says Hochleitner: “In August 2021, for example, we had the best visitor month in the history of this museum with more than 11,000 guests in the toy museum.”