Photographer：© Matthias Horn

Review

Without the play Jedermann, the Salzburger Festival would be unthinkable. It still fascinates across all borders.

Gaby Reucher, Deutsche Welle

About Jedermann

After more than 700 performances in a century, Jedermann is a central component of the Salzburg Festival’s DNA and keeps on prolonging its own history, a unique occurrence in German-language theatre.

The drama was conceived as a renewal of the medieval morality play, modelled on the English Everyman and further enriched by Hans Sachs’s Hecastus and other sources. Its creator, Hofmannsthal, worked on his own rendering over a number of years in a Europe marked by escalating conflicts. The risk of treating the material freely and of resituating its theme to its quintessence with neither temporal nor doctrinal ties — as Hofmannsthal here explicitly describes his process — constitutes the ideological energy centre of Jedermann.

CAST

Performers: Peter Lohmeyer, Tobias Moretti, Edith Clever, Gregor Bloéb, Markus Kofler, Helmut Mooshammer, Michael Masula, Pauline Knof, Caroline Peters, Gustav Peter Wöhler, Tino Hillebrand, Christoph Franken, Mavie Hörbiger, Falk Rockstroh

About Michael Sturminger

Michael Sturminger was born in Vienna in 1963 and studied directing and script-writing at the city’s University of Music and Performing Arts. Since 1990 he has been active as a freelance director in the fields of spoken drama, music theatre and the cinema as well as writing theatre scripts, librettos and screenplays. Michael Sturminger made his Salzburg Festival debut in 2006, directing Mozart’s Il sogno di Scipione. In 2017 he directed Salvatore Sciarrino’s chamber opera Lohengrin at the Salzburg Easter Festival and directed a new production of Jedermann at that year’s summer Festival.

About the Salzburger Festspiele

Once when Salzburger could not afford a new theatre due to economic conditions, the Salzburger Festival staged theatrical performances in the central square of the old city. Today, the Salzburger Festival has become the world's most important classical arts event.

In 2020, the 44-day Salzburger Festival featured some 200 performances in 16 venues. The Festival attracted audiences from 80 countries (including 40 non-European countries). These figures give a good indication of how the Salzburger Festival has flourished over the past century.

The 2020 Salzburger anniversary celebrations kicked off with the most legendary play, Jedermann, which has been staged at the festival since 1920. For the first time, a contemporary version directed, by Michael Sturminger, can be seen on television. In this anniversary edition of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's famous play about the life and death of the rich, audiences enjoyed performances by Tobias Moretti, Edith Clever, Caroline Peters, Mavie Hörbiger, Gregor Bloéb and Peter Lohmeyer.

About UNITEL

True to its motto "Music to Watch," UNITEL produces operas, concerts, operettas and ballets with acclaimed artists and at the highest technical quality. Currently boasting a film stock of more than 1500 productions, UNITEL was one of the first companies to produce music films in color and stereo, and records today exclusively in UHD and in Surround sound quality. UNITEL cooperates with all major public-law and private broadcasters, including ORF, ZDF, 3sat, Arte, NHK and BBC. In conjunction with major and independent labels such as Universal Music (Deutsche Grammophon/Decca), Warner Music, Sony Classical, C Major Entertainment, EuroArts and Arthaus, UNITEL has released about 700 DVDs and Blu-Rays to date, which are distributed in Germany and around the world.