Great Festival House

This guide to the Great Festival House in Salzburg starts with a stable built in 1606 for a prince-archbishop's one hundred thirty horses, a working stable that lasted three centuries and kept Austrian cavalry well into the twentieth. It follows the architect Clemens Holzmeister and the conductor Herbert von Karajan, who looked at the old stalls in 1956 and saw an opera house instead, and the crews who blasted tens of thousands of cubic meters of rock out of the cliff behind it to make room. The lower foyer still carries a trace of that history, in the stone underfoot where festival-goers now gather between acts.