Selling salzburg

Operatic productions including The Knight of the Rose, Norma and Il Trovatore will be staged at the 2015 Salzburg Festival. To attract more Chinese tourists to the musical town in the heart of Europe, the festival has hosted promotional events in China since 2012. [Photo/China Daily]

At next year's festival, the tenor will perform in the opera concert of Verdi's Ernani under the baton of Riccardo Muti.

Actor and director Max Reinhardt and poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal came up with the idea for the festival in 1917, during World War I, "because they believed that only the arts could reconcile people's fighting against each other in World War I", says Rabl-Stadler.

"I think this peacekeeping mission is very important and touching," says Rabl-Stadler. "That's why we often invite Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. The aim of the orchestra is to promote understanding between Israelis and Palestinians, and it is composed of musicians from countries that fought against each other during the war ... ."

The Salzburg Festival, which presents everything from concerts to operas and dramas, has remained a popular event through the years because of the richness and quality of the program, says Rabl-Stadler.

Every year she and Sven-Eric Bechtolf, the festival's artist director, "audition" productions around the world and try to bring the best operas and concerts to Salzburg.

Rabl-Stadler was appointed president of the Salzburg Festival in January 1995. Before that, she was a journalist, politician and saleswoman. In the early 1970s, she became the first female journalist to write a column for the Vienna daily newspaper Kurier. From 1988 to 1995, she served as president and financial adviser of the Salzburg Chamber of Commerce.