Salzburg Festival Fires Its Artistic Director

Markus Hinterhäuser’s tenure as the artistic leader of the Salzburg Festival — one of the world’s most important classical music events — came to an abrupt end on Thursday when the festival’s board terminated his contract, effectively barring him from even overseeing this summer’s festival, which he planned.

Hinterhäuser’s tenure was supposed to run through 2031, but the festival’s board cut it short. It gave him the option to continue until 2027 to ensure a smooth transition to new leadership, but Hinterhäuser, 67, did not respond to that offer by a deadline of March 13.

“Due to irreconcilable differences of opinion, the Salzburg Festival and Artistic Director Markus Hinterhäuser have decided to part ways, effective immediately,” the festival’s supervisory board said in a statement. It said Hinterhäuser would be placed on leave through the original termination date of his contract, Sept. 30. This was in addition to an earlier decision by the board to rescind a five-year contract extension.

The board said that details of the termination agreement, reached between attorneys for the board and for Hinterhäuser, would remain confidential.

The sudden termination means that the artistic leadership of the world’s largest classical music festival is, for the moment, unknown. The announcement came less than four months before the 2026 festival opens. The board said that as it looks for a permanent successor, discussions were already underway with candidates for provisional artistic director.

Hinterhäuser’s association with the festival, which was founded over a century ago in the city of Mozart’s birth, is a long one. From 2007 to 2011, he programmed its concerts; he became artistic director in 2017. In that role, he found success by encouraging artists to re-examine traditional crowd-pleasing operas, and the festival twice extended his contract, most recently for a third term beginning this fall.

But Hinterhäuser’s standing — at the festival and within the broader world of classical music — has degraded in recent years, especially as he gained a reputation for hiring festival artists from a small pool of regulars. One of the most contentious appointments was that of the iconoclastic conductor Teodor Currentzis, who, as a beneficiary of Russian state funding, was briefly shunned by many European theaters and concert halls after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Hinterhäuser stood by Currentzis — who is leading a new production of Bizet’s “Carmen” this summer — despite widespread criticism.

Hinterhäuser was born in Italy and educated as a pianist in Austria, including at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. He is best known as an interpreter of avant-garde music, championing the works of composers including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Galina Ustvolskaya.

For most of his Salzburg tenure, Hinterhäuser had the support of Helga Rabl-Stadler, the festival’s president from 1995-2021. But Austrian news media reported that he had clashed with her successor, Kristina Hammer.

His departure comes at what is potentially a precarious and unstable moment for the festival. Hammer’s contract is set to expire at the end of this year. And the contract of Lukas Crepaz, the festival’s executive director, who is overseeing a multiyear project to renovate its theaters, expires in 2027.