Salzburg's Season

Once the residence of Composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Salzburg in the Austrian Alps has held annual summer music festivals since the end of the War. Before recent years, this baroque little city attracted middle-sized international audiences who enjoyed its competent performances of plays and operas with German and Viennese casts, its remote picturesqueness, its calm. By last week, when it was in the midst of another summer season, noisy Salzburg had become definitely the place to go for thousands of U. S. and European tourists of high & low degree.

Before embarking on his yachting trip, England's Edward VIII had stopped in Salzburg, snapshot the land marks, heard no music. Elsa Maxwell, funster for the unimaginative rich, was there. So were Steelman Myron Taylor, Music Patron Harry Harkness Flagler, Mrs. Woolworth Donahue, Secretary of Labor Frances Perhins, Singers Ganna Walska and Feodor Chaliapin. Long before the season opened, 11,316 U. S. visitors had made hotel reservations, bought $200,000 worth of concert and opera tickets. Last week with the Salzburg season half over, hawkers were doing a thriving business in cushions for the hard Festspielhaus seats, trade at the Cafe Bazar was rivaled only by that at a tearoom just opened by Count Ludwig Salm, and thousands of Auslander from everywhere were strolling Salzburg streets in Dirndln (peasant waist, skirt & apron) or Lederhosen (leather shorts with gay suspenders) from Joseph Lanz's smart shop.

Prime musical cause of Salzburg's 1936 prosperity is Conductor Arturo Toscanini, who snubbed Nazi Bayreuth in Salzburg's favor three seasons ago. When the Italian maestro, still hotly anti-Nazi, learned of plans to broadcast Salzburg events to Germany, he seethed & stormed, vowed to depart and never return if any performance under his baton was sent across the border. Last week while Salzburgers were hearing a familiar, first-rate Toscanini performance of Beethoven's Fidelio and a familiar, even better Toscanini version of Die Meistersinger, cafe talk was all of how the grey little conductor had rehearsed the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra to a frazzle in an effort to bring it up to the standard of his New York Philharmonic Symphony. One story was that Toscanini, defying precedent, placed the song contest sequence in the last act of Die Meistersinger to the right of the stage, justified his decision by referring to Wagner's original score. Reminded that Widow Wagner had always done it the other way around at Bayreuth, Toscanini snarled: "Oh, mama was not so clever as papa!"

No. 2 musical hero of Salzburg last week was Conductor Bruno Walter. This able Jew had arrived ailing from the effects of a Vienna performance of Tristan wud Isolde at which Nazi bullyboys threw stink bombs, ending the opera with the plump Isolde (Soprano Anny Konetzni) lying mute and gasping on Tristan's body while the orchestra wabbled through the Liebestod. To Walter at Salzburg was allotted Tristan, Mozart's Don Giovanni, Gluck's Orptmis and Eurydice.

Disciplined and deeply musical as was Conductor Walter on the podium, he had working with him no single artist so gifted as Toscanini's Soprano Lotte Lehmann. In the much-rehearsed Meister singer, Lehmann was a vital Eva. In Fidelio she was a dramatic, moving Leonore, even in that opera's static, old-fashioned stretches. Salzburg autograph collectors agreed with critics, pursued Soprano Lehmann in her Dirndl in the streets as often as they did Conductors Walter and Toscanini.

Worst feature of the 1936 Salzburg season has been the rain which dampened Max Reinhardt's open-air performances of famed Jedermann ("Everyman") and Faust, in which appeared Paula Wessely, a charming German Gretchen.

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