Moz­art 22 is an en­ter­prise of ut­terly unique di­men­sions, the mu­sic­al pro­ject of the cen­tury: the present­a­tion of Moz­art’s com­plete stage works with­in the six weeks of the 2006 Salzburg Fest­iv­al sea­son to com­mem­or­ate Moz­art’s 250^th birth­day. It unites the greatest Moz­art sing­ers, con­duct­ors, stage dir­ect­ors and en­sembles of the day, present­ing a pan­or­ama of con­tem­por­ary ap­proaches to the mu­sic­al and stage in­terepret­a­tion of Moz­art’s dra­mat­ic oeuvre. This un­ri­valled un­der­tak­ing made it pos­sible to show the artist­ic de­vel­op­ment of a mu­sic­al geni­us and his dis­tinct­ive mu­sic­al style.

To make this ex­traordin­ary artist­ic achieve-ment ac­cess­ible to a much broad­er pub­lic, Unitel/Clas­sica and BFMI, in con­junc­tion with the Salzburg Fest­iv­al, re­cor­ded and docu- men­ted the en­tire Moz­art 22 cycle with HD tech­no­logy and 5.1 sur­round sound.

The preper­a­tions for this gi­gant­ic pro­ject began in 2003. At its peak about 160 people were work­ing on it nearly around the clock. It took 53 days to shoot, with con­cur­rent re­cord­ings of server­al op­er­as re­quir­ing up to twelve cam­er­as for each re­cord­ing.

On Novem­ber 24^th, 2006 the en­tire Moz­art 22 re­cord­ings was re­leased by Uni­ver­sal Mu­sic. Each DVD in the col­lect­or’s box comes with a mak­ing-of film as bo­nus ma­ter­i­al, pay­ing trib­ute to Salzburg’s most im­port­ant son.

In ad­di­tion, the cycle does in­clude doc­u­ment­ary series for TV dis­tri­bu­tion con­tain­ing ex­tens­ive foot­age from the live per­form­ances, ex­cerpts from re­hears­als, in­ter­views with the artists, and back­ground re­ports that shed light on the in­ter­pret­at­ive con­cepts of the per­form­ances and stage pro­duc­tions.