Cooperation With the Salzburg Festival Continues in 2008

August 2007 saw the first cooperation between the Salzburg Global Seminar and the Salzburg Festival founded by Schloss Leopoldskron’s great restorer and former owner, Max Reinhardt. This year, Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk and Bulgarian writer Dimitré Dinev will be the Writers in Residence, staying in Schloss Leopoldskron. They will hold public readings and conversations in the Salzburger Landestheater, the University Auditorium, the Mozarteum, Das Kino, and the Felsenreitschule.

On August 5 and 6, Schloss Leopoldskron will hold two readings of a new play by Austria’s best known playwright, Peter Handke. The play is a response to Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.

On August 5, 8 and 10, there will also be three "City Science Talks" in Schloss Leopoldskron's Great Hall. Thomas Oberender, Director of Drama at the Salzburg Festival, has invited guests from outside the artistic world to speak about art, and, in discussion with artists and writers taking part in the Festival, to treat themes from the Festival productions as empirical material without judging them from an aesthetic perspective. The idea is – as in last year’s “Salon” - to recreate the atmosphere of Schloss Leopoldskron in Reinhardt’s time, when he used to invite actors and other artists home for drinks and conversation after Festspiele performances.

Admission to these events in the Schloss will be by invitation only, but the City Science Talks will be recorded by the ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) and used as the basis for three radio broadcasts.

An additional event, held in the University Auditorium on August 10, will feature a discussion on art and politics between Orhan Pamuk and the leading British playwright David Hare (Stuff Happens, The Vertical Hour etc.), who is attending this year’s Salzburg Festival to direct Vanessa Redgrave in Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking”. These two giants of contemporary literature have agreed to engage in a public discussion on the theme of “Art and Politics”, exploring themes developed by Hare in his book of lectures “Obedience, Struggle and Revolt”. The discussion, held in English, will be introduced by Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, and moderated by Edward Mortimer, Senior Vice President and Chief Program Officer of the Salzburg Global Seminar. Tickets (price €15) are obtainable from the Salzburg Festival Box Office (www.salzburgerfestspiele.at).

The event is sponsored jointly by the Salzburg Festival, the New York Review of Books, which hopes to publish excerpts from the exchange, and the Salzburg Global Seminar. All three institutions are excited by this unique opportunity to bring together two distinguished writers from different cultures in opposite corners of Europe, in a city which lies roughly midway between the two and cherishes the legacy of Max Reinhardt.