Heilige Zeiten - Traumzeiten. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Bedeutung des Salzburger Adventsingens

Abstract

This article shows why people attend the Salzburg Advent Singing and what they expect to hear and to see in the Festspielhaus. Furthermore, it describes why and when the Salzburg Advent Singing began and what changes and developments there have been in connection with this tradition at Advent. In the context of the Salzburg Advent singing the audience experiences very different emotions and dreams. An important characteristic of the Salzburg Advent Singing is that it reactivates dreams, dreams about lost childhood and a life of peace and wellbeing. Christmas as a period of holiness, again and again demonstrates anew the dream of an ideal life. The Advent singing is the vehicle for a utopia in which people can see into the past and into the future. The emotions aroused every year by the Salzburg Advent singing are not a consequence of the Advent singing but a result of a reawakening of past experiences mingled with that which they are observing. Social reality as a symbolic reality constitutes itself, in the final analysis, through the process of interpretation by the individual.