Thank you, dear friends and patrons
We should like to express our heartfelt gratitude to you. In mid-November members of the Friends Association were asked by the Salzburg Festival to help by donating to the “House for Mozart”.
President Heinrich Spängler
Of the € 29.2 million estimated costs € 8.2 million have to be funded by private sponsors. Donald Kahn has very generously promised to give 4.2 million and has already transferred well over half this sum.
As a first initiative we enclosed payment slips when the festival programme was dispatched. By the end of February we had already received € 242,168.57 from 1,082 donors; the donated sums ranged from € 3 to € 50,000.
When we say that every donation counts, that’s exactly what
we mean. For instance, if you donate
€ 1 a day or week, that is already a help. If you can donate more,
we are very grateful. You can of course also make a donation in instalments,
like for example a lady from Germany who has a monthly debit order from
her account until July 2006.
Many individual donations ultimately make up a great whole. As a token of our gratitude we are inviting donors of € 500 or more to the opening premiere of the Whitsuntide Festival, a performance of G. F. Handel’s Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno.
Over the past few months people have expressed doubts about the commissioning process and about the project in general. We respect your opinion and are especially grateful that you are supporting us nevertheless. Bernhard Paumgartner’s founding idea of binding friends as regular visitors so that they can help the Festival in times of economic austerity (in his day the new Grosses Festspielhaus had to be filled) has been realised in a wonderful way. You – our guests and members – form your own opinion and take on a commitment.
In the Grosses Festspielhaus, in the Ticket Office and in the Friends Office you’ll find donation boxes. There is also the “House for Mozart Euro” whereby many visitors give us one additional euro for each festival ticket they purchase; this will probably increase our donation account by ? 200,000 per year.
In 2003 the tickets for the final dress rehearsal of Jedermann were sold at half the price of a regular ticket and resulted in income of € 101,765. This initiative will again be continued on 22 July 2004 at 5.30 p.m. on the Domplatz. In addition to this, until 2006, tickets will also be sold at a third of the price for the final dress rehearsal of a Mozart opera, this summer for Così fan tutte on 28 July at midday. In previous years we have organised gala dinners and from the revenue so far we have saved € 356,040. This season a gala dinner will be held after the premiere of the opera Die tote Stadt on 15 August – incidentally this will be the last premiere in the existing Kleines Festspielhaus before it is finally converted.
We are not using a cent of donations for administrative expenditure; the donations are paid in directly to a separate Salzburg Festival account. All the necessary “auxiliary items” such as printing matter, payment slips, postage fees etc. are paid for by the Friends Association. The donation account numbers are given on page 23 after the list of donors. You can of course also make a donation by credit card by phoning the number 0043 662 8045 284.
Building work is going according to plan, at present the stage tower is being converted. In summer the Kleines Festspielhaus can be used and no one will notice anything of the work that has gone on during the previous months. Heinrich Pölsler, director of the House for Mozart Building Company, assures us that as things stand at present, expenditure will remain within the budgeted amount.
Let’s all do our best!
Heinrich Spängler
At present the stage tower is being converted