SALZBURG.- The Salzburg Festival attracts an audience of music and theater lovers from around the world. Yet its oldest tradition is a surprisingly local one.

In 1920, director Max Reinhardt and writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal inaugurated the first Salzburg Festival with an outdoor production of “Jedermann,” an adaptation of a medieval morality play. The performance took place on the square in front of Salzburg’s imposing Baroque cathedral.

“Jedermann” quickly became a festival fixture. Since the end of World War II, it has been performed here every summer, often with German-speaking acting luminaries tackling the title role of a wealthy and impious bon vivant who, in the prime of life, gets an unexpected visit from death. Faced with his mortality, the title character, whose name translates as Everyman, learns how fleeting fortune and fame are and undergoes a soul-saving conversion.

This year, the play’s complete 14-performance run sold out well in advance — even though it is the only production at the festival that is performed without English supertitles.

With this gripping new “Jedermann,” directed by Robert Carsen and starring the sensational Philipp Hochmair, it looks like it’s time for the festival to reverse that policy. This gutsy and moving production stands head and shoulders above Salzburg’s other recent stagings of the work, and deserves to be seen — and understood — by more than just the “Jedermann” die-hards.

Every director who approaches “Jedermann” must contend with the play’s peculiarities, including the heightened dialogue, whose archaic touches and rhyming couplets make a naturalistic delivery all but impossible. Though a classic, “Jedermann” is not universally acknowledged as a masterpiece. The most successful “Jedermann” productions refrain from excavating subtle or hidden meanings and focus on bringing the play’s memorable episodes and characters to life.

To do this, Carsen, a Canadian director best known for his opera productions, has an excellent cast at his disposal. Hochmair is convincing as the brash nobleman and, later, while cycling through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Christoph Luser, his lanky frame clad in a red velvet suit, brings louche charm to the roles of Everyman’s Good Companion and the Devil.

The production’s distinctive al fresco setting also presents logistical challenges, with the cathedral providing a distinctive backdrop and serving as the backstage area. For much of the evening, the stage remains a vast expanse of unadorned fake marble, filling up with actors, including a sizable corps of extras. The exception is the lengthy banquet where Death shows up uninvited and spoils the party.

The scene is arguably the play’s centerpiece and Carsen covers the stage with a carpet of fake grass and a white dance floor. Everyman’s party vibrates with loud music and feverish dancing. The chaos is carefully choreographed and the musical selections, including disco, tango and a memorable (and winking) rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “I’m Gonna Live Till I Die,” effectively ratchet up the tension by drawing out a bacchanal that is hurtling toward doom.

When Death arrives, he is a curly-haired youth (a charismatic Dominik Dos-Reis) rather than the Grim Reaper. With a wave of his hand, he turns Everyman’s wine into water and sends the panicked party guests fleeing. Another of the production’s flashiest touches is Everyman’s gold car, which Mammon, the personification of wealth (a scene-chewing Kristof Van Boven), loads up with the billionaire’s treasures before driving away.

As entertaining as such flourishes are, however, the quieter moments are the ones that linger, like when Dörte Lyssewski, as the personification of Everyman’s earthly deeds, cries out for him from the corner in which she lies in beggar’s rags. Faith (Regine Zimmermann) emerges from the cathedral with a bucket and slowly mops the stage. Later, she bends down to wipe Everyman’s feet. With simple yet powerful gestures like these, Carsen finds a way to make the play’s unlikely spiritual apotheosis convincing.

This new “Jedermann,” the maiden production of Marina Davydova’s first year as Salzburg’s head of drama, sent a strong signal that the festival’s theatrical program is in good hands. In her inaugural summer, Davydova, who hails from Baku, Azerbaijan, also commissioned a production about Stefan Zweig, the celebrated Viennese Jewish writer who lived in Salzburg between 1919 and 1934.

The result is Thom Luz’s “Decisive Moments in History” (“Sternstunden der Menschheit”), inspired by Zweig’s bestselling collection, first published in 1927 and later expanded, of historical miniatures about individuals who changed the course of world events. The interpretation of human striving that Zweig offers is far from a triumphant one. He chronicles not only great men and their heroic deeds, but also argues for the role error, chaos and failure play in determining history’s outcome.

The descending nightmare of the Third Reich, which would eventually send Zweig into exile, almost certainly influenced the author’s thinking. Though a great humanist, Zweig was forced to confront the forces of irrationalism and anti-enlightenment thought that guided his own time.

Luz, an innovative Swiss director, brings fragments of Zweig’s miniatures to life in an associative and sonically rich staging. Duri Bischoff’s stage resembles a museum storeroom with sculptures and fragments of statuary lined up on tall metal shelves. We hear snippets of Zweig’s descriptions — Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to secure a lasting peace for Europe, Sultan Mehmed II breaching Byzantium’s fortifications, Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole — as well as excepts from the author’s correspondence from his time in exile.

Much of the dialogue is disembodied and broadcast through large wooden speakers onstage. When recited by the six committed actors (from the Munich Residenztheater, where the production transfers in October), Zweig’s language comes vividly to life, despite the production’s high degree of abstraction.

Accompanying us throughout this hallucinogenic journey is a brass band that winds its way around the theater playing Brazilian street music. In the show’s finale, Luz superimposes Zweig’s account of the assassination of the Roman statesman Cicero, who bowed his neck to his executioners, and the Viennese author’s own death by suicide, in Petrópolis, Brazil, in 1942. With this swirling evocation of art, memory and history among the ruins, the Salzburg Festival has unveiled a fitting theatrical monument to this great writer.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.