Committee
We are pleased that we have been able to win over personalities from the arts and culture who have a connection to our region and are known far beyond the Salzkammergut. They actively support us as ambassadors in spreading our Capital of Culture idea and philosophy. The honorary committee was invited by the artistic management.
Aleida Assmann
Aleida Assmann is a German literature and cultural studies scholar specializing in the history of memory. In her work on cultural memory, remembrance, and forgetting, she examines the role that remembering the Holocaust and admitting one’s guilt play for the German nation. Her scholarly works are known not only among academics, but reach a broader audience. She received the Max Planck Research Prize for her interdisciplinary research in the field of memory history. Together with her husband, the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, she received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2018.
Photo: Valerie Assmann
Klaus Maria Brandauer
Klaus Maria Brandauer comes from Altaussee in Styria and is one of the most important and well-known stage and film actors of our time. He has been a member of the ensemble of the Vienna Burgtheater for more than forty years. Klaus Maria Brandauer’s international film career began as early as 1970 with “Salzburg Connection”. With István Szabó he realized the trilogy “Mephisto”, “Oberst Redl” and “Hanussen”. He played in “James Bond 007 – Never say never”, as well as in “Beyond Africa” by Sydney Pollack. Recently, his participation in “Die Auslöschung” and “Der Fall Wilhelm Reich” attracted great attention. In addition to his acting activities, Klaus Maria Brandauer also directs. Klaus Maria Brandauer regularly performs in readings and musical-literary programs, and is also a professor at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna.
Photo: Nik Hunger
Hubert von Goisern
Hubert von Goisern was born in Bad Goisern in 1952. In 1987 he founded the Alpinkatzen and began deconstructing alpine folk music. He is considered the inventor of the so-called “alpine rock”. Numerous musical projects in the area of tension between world and folk music, between tradition and modernity. His tours and musical journeys have taken him across Europe, the USA, to the Arab area, to Tibet and Africa.
From 2007 to 2009 he toured with a concert ship from Linz along the Danube to the Black Sea and along the Rhine to the North Sea, with the participation of over 100 musicians from 12 countries. The Brenna tuats tour in 2011 became one of the most successful of his career, and in 2015 the Amadeus Austrian Music Awards winner himself was seen on the big screen with the biographical documentary Brenna tuat’s schon lang. In 2018, the Hubert von Goisern Culture Prize was founded, and in May 2020 his first novel, Flüchtig, was published. The new studio album Zeiten & Zeichen will be released on August 28, 2020, and Hubert von Goisern will be back on tour in 2022.
Photo: Konrad Fersterer
Xenia Hausner
Xenia Hausner was born in 1951 into a Viennese family of artists. She studied stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and designed sets for theaters and opera houses, including Covent Garden in London, the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Theâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, and the Salzburg Festival. From 1992 Xenia Hausner turned exclusively to painting.
Her works are shown internationally in galleries, museums and art fairs. Xenia Hausner lives and works in Berlin, Vienna and at the Traunsee.
Photo: Robert Rieger
Johanna Mitterbauer
Johanna Mitterbauer grew up in Vienna and has lived in Gmunden, Upper Austria since 2008. She studied International Business Administration in Vienna, Paris, Oxford and Berlin. She has been working at the Salzkammergut Festwochen Gmunden since 2012 and has been commercial director since 2019. It is particularly important to her to appeal to young audiences and, in addition to the genres of music, visual arts and architecture, to bring theater back into focus with former Burgtheater director Karin Bergmann. Her heart’s project for the Capital of Culture 2024 is Maestro Franz Welser-Möst’s “Hausmusik Roas”.
Photo: Rudi Gigler
Tom Neuwirth aka Conchita Wurst
In 2011, Austrian artist Thomas Neuwirth created the art figure Conchita Wurst. As a bearded diva, he won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2014 and overnight became a global figurehead of the LGBTQI community.
Since then followed the platinum award-winning debut album Conchita (2015), the second longplayer From Vienna With Love with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra (2018), and the third studio album T.O.M. – Truth Over Magnitude (2019) with electro-pop and the new stage name WURST. An orchestral tour took him to Australia, among other places, in early 2020. As a host, Conchita WURST acted at the Life Ball, the opening of Wiener Festwochen and major TV music shows such as Eurovision Song Contest, or the Amadeus Austrian Music Awards. The artist supports socio-political causes. Conchita was the 2019 Ambassador of EuroPride Vienna, has been a Stonewall Day Ambassador since 2018 and supports the Free & Equal campaign of the United Nations.
Photo: Kevin Schünemann
Helga Rabl-Stadler
Helga Rabl-Stadler, born in Salzburg in 1948, received her doctorate in law in 1970. In the same year, she began her career as a political journalist in Vienna. She succeeded as the first female columnist in the daily newspaper Kurier. In 1978 she returned to Salzburg and became an authorized signatory, later sole owner of the family-owned fashion house. In 1985 she became the first woman vice president and in 1988 president of the Chamber of Commerce for Salzburg. At the same time, she was a member of the National Council for the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) for seven years and served as its deputy federal chairman from 1991 to 1994.
From 1995 to 2021, she was president of Salzburger Festspiele. The period of her presidency saw the greatest successes in sponsorship, the construction of the new House for Mozart and a comprehensive renovation and modernization of the festival halls. She received numerous honors, including being named Commandeur de l’ordre des arts et des lettres and the Kennedy Center Gold Medal in the Arts. 2018
Photo: Bernhard Müller
Franz Welser-Möst
Franz Welser-Möst is one of the most influential conductors of our time in both opera and symphonic fields. For more than 20 years, he has shaped the orchestra’s distinctive sound culture as longtime music director of the Cleveland Orchestra.
Since Welser-Möst’s tenure, the orchestra’s program has increasingly included world premieres and – continuing the orchestra’s history – opera productions at Severance Hall. Through innovative education projects and collaborations, Cleveland has the youngest audience in the United States. He will lead the Cleveland Orchestra until 2027.
Franz Welser-Möst has a particularly close and productive artistic partnership with the Vienna Philharmonic. Since 2014, he has conducted the orchestra every summer at Salzburger Festspiele, setting groundbreaking new standards as an opera and concert conductor. Under his musical direction were the historic memorial concerts in Sarajevo and in Versailles. He took the podium for the Summer Night Concert in 2010 and for the New Year’s Concert in 2011 and 2013, which he will conduct again in 2023.
Photo: Julia Wesely
