GRAND PALAIS DES FESTIVALS (SALZBURGER FESTSPIELE)

Salzburg is a magnet for music lovers. You can attend classical music concerts here almost every day, and festivals are scheduled throughout the year. In August, the Salzburg Festival (Slazburg Festspiele), the most famous of them all, offers concerts, operas and plays at numerous venues in the city center. Equally renowned is the Easter Festival created by Herbert von Karajan.

The Grand Palais des Festivals was built to plans by architect Clemens Holzmeister, who had already designed Salzburg's Petit Palais des Festivals in the 1920s. The Grand Palais, built between 1956 and 1960, is one of the city's most impressive performance venues. Its construction required the excavation of 55,000^{m3 of} rock from the Mönchsberg. It was once home to the stables built in 1606-1607 under the rule of Prince-Archbishop Wolf Dietrich.

The interior of the Grand Palais is home to numerous masterpieces, including sculptures in Carrara marble and ceramics, four large colorful crosses on the theme of "Dreams with the Wrong Solutions", ceramic sculptures, the "dodecaphonic frieze" and frescoes. At 100 m wide, the Grand Palais des Festivals is one of the largest concert halls in the world. For its inauguration on July 26, 1960, Herbert von Karajan conducted Richard Strauss's Le Chevalier à la rose. Some memories of The Sound of Music.