Since 2014, the Austrian UNESCO Commission has maintained the National Austrian Documentary Heritage Registry, comprising a collection of highly important documents for Austrian history.

In-house recordings of the Salzburg Festival span 80 years of music and theater history and have been cataloged and digitized in collaboration with the Austrian Media Library of the Vienna Museum of Science and Technology since 2020.

These will now be entered into the “Memory of the World Program,” which supports the preservation and accessibility of information worldwide.

“This cooperation was a precious mutual gift between the Salzburg Festival and the Austrian Media Library for the centenary of the Festival and the 60-year anniversary of the Media Library in 2020: by digitizing the Festival’s in-house recordings, important productions were saved from oblivion. In this process, the Media Library plays an important role as the keeper of Austria’s cultural heritage. The fact that the Austrian UNESCO Commission has now included the extraordinary documentation of Festival history in the National Memory of the World’ Registry fills us with gratitude, and also spurs us on to discover further treasures in the Festival archives and make them more readily accessible,” said Director of Dramaturgy, Publications & Archives at the Salzburg Festival, Margarethe Lasinger in an official statement.