Salzburg marionette: An intangible cultural heritage

From creating the dolls to making them move, puppetry is more than just child’s play or entertainment for children, and the Marionettenmuseum or Salzburg Theater and museum in Austria is dedicated to preserving this art form’s grit and growth as among the oldest and most renowned continuously operating marionette theaters in the world.

Originally founded in 1913 by sculptor and professor Anton Aicher as Aicher Family Theater, the Salzburg Marionette Theater is a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Intangible Cultural Heritage known for its “Playing Cross” technique or human-like and precise movements using a specialized cross bar that Aicher invented and is still being taught and used in the theater today.

The theater has its own workshops that handcraft the marionettes, including the puppets’ costumes and backdrops, while puppeteers undergo intensive training to master using 1.5-meter strings. Hundreds of these historical puppets can be seen in the World of Puppets at the nearby Hohensalzburg Fortress, where there are also interactive exhibits for trying to operate a marionette.

Since the baroque-style theater is nearby Mozart’s former house that is now a museum, the theater debuted with Mozart’s Bastien und Bastienne and continues to show Mozart ballets and operas. Over the decades, their repertoire has expanded to include productions like The Sound of Music, where Salzburg’s marionette heritage has been immortalized by Julie Andrews via “The Lonely Goatherd” scene.