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Wikipedia / Vienna Festival

The Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen) is a culture festival that takes place in Vienna for five or six weeks in May and June every year. The Vienna Festival was established in 1951, when Vienna was still occupied by the four Allied powers.

With a radical socio-political impact, the Vienna Festival | Free Republic of Vienna is Europe's most significant cross-over festival.

The Vienna Festival features theatre, opera and dance from all parts of the globe, also acting as producers of international works.

Each year, the Vienna Festival is launched with a free, public open-air event held in the square outside of Vienna's City Hall.

The festival attracts about 100,000 visitors per year.

Directors

Directors of the festival include:

History

For five to six weeks during May and June every year, the Vienna Festival seeks to create or contribute to cultural events that combine highest artistic demands and relevant socio-political issues and goals. As an innovative and international urban festival, the Vienna Festival opens a window to the international world of theatre and features a wide range of contemporary art forms and languages.

The programme seeks to bridge tradition and current developments in productions from all genres: operas, concerts, drama, performances, installations, readings, films. Valued classics are shown in new productions next to premieres of contemporary works with international directors; artists as well as ensembles from across the globe present celebrated works, frequently in their original languages.

The programme usually comprises about forty productions as well as numerous additional events that are free of charge.

The very first Vienna Festival events took place as early as 1927. The Vienna Festival was then re-established after the Second World War, in 1951, while the city of Vienna was still occupied by the Allies. In 1952, the Vienna Festival was one of the founding organisations of the European Festivals Association. The Theater an der Wien has been one of the festival’s main stages since 1962, next to Halle E and Halle G at MuseumsQuartier. Productions are also staged at numerous further, varying sites across the city.

Luc Bondy was the Vienna Festival’s artistic director from 2002, having already been its director of performing arts from 1998. Between 2014 and 2016, Markus Hinterhäuser took on the festival’s artistic direction, followed by Tomas Zierhofer-Kin in the years 2017 and 2018.

Under the artistic directorship of Christophe Slagmuylder (2019 – 2023), the Vienna Festival became Festwochen 2020 reframed during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with digital events on offer during May and June followed by fifteen live productions staged between 26 August and 26 September 2020. Most of the world premieres that had originally been scheduled for that year were shifted to 2021. In 2024, artistic director Milo Rau proclaimed the Free Republic of Vienna as a total work of art – from the opening event via various productions and the topical focus to the Vienna Declaration (Constitution of the Free Republic of Vienna). The future form of festivals was debated in a range of participative formats, such as the Council of the Republic, and with an extended network of local and international partners. Real protagonists of current events appeared in three Vienna Trials – productions staged as judicial trials. The newly established Academy Second Modernism is the global women composers’ platform of the Vienna Festival | Free Republic of Vienna, which aims to significantly raise the share of works by women composers featured in the programmes of concerts, festivals and operas across the globe. Its patron is Nuria Nono-Schoenberg.

Highlights

See also

References