Salzburg Tries Again

In baroque Salzburg, long Austria's wealthiest city, G.I.s had a complaint to make last week. Their favorite movie theater, the Army's "Roxy," had been taken from them. For one month it was once more Festspielhaus for the century-old music festival in honor of Native Son Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

It was Salzburg's first full-blown festival since 1937; last year's was a worthy try, but dismal. This year nostalgic Austrians hoped to recapture the pomp and glitter of pre-Anschluss Salzburg; what they got, judging by last week's opening performances, was a reasonable facsimile.

Salzburg Burgers, among the best fed in all of Austria, arrived at the opening in expensive clothes, though many had to walk to the Festspielhaus over cobblestone streets.

Americans Present. They shared the Festspielhaus' 1,600 seats with U.S. officers and their families, for whom nearly one-third of the tickets were reserved, and some of the queer fish who have doubled Salzburg's population since V-E day. Salzburg has become an ideal hideout for big-& small-fry Nazis, and has replaced Istanbul as a center for intrigue. (Favorite gag in the Vienna cafes: "If you are not a member of the Nazi Party, then what were you doing in Salzburg?'')

On the black market, season tickets to Salzburg's festival cost 900 schillings, about six months' pay for an average Austrian worker. In the center box, filled in the old days with European royalty and U.S. millionaires, the native citizenry could ogle General Mark Clark, his wife and daughter, the Archbishop of Salzburg, and Austria's Chancellor Leopold Figl.

Masters Missing. Stars of Salzburg's great days like Arturo Toscanini, Lotte Lehmann and Bruno Walter had refused invitations to perform. Instead the opening-night audience listened to 6 ft. 2 in. Hans Hotter, a Munich Opera baritone, sing a roughly hewn but virile hero in Mozart's Don Giovanni. The cast included a promising, pretty, 30-year-old Bulgarian soprano named Ljuba Welitsch, who was the hit of the Vienna opera season in Salome. Don Ottavio was sung by Yugoslav Tenor Anton Dermota, whose performance was uneven, but at its best better than any Don Ottavio that Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera has heard in years. Eight years of Hitlerism had not destroyed the old Austro-German tradition of stagecraft; Don Giovanni had been so painstakingly rehearsed that every part added to the whole. But the opening night's applause was more polite than enthusiastic. Said a U.S. security officer standing outside the opera house: "There are an awful lot of Americans suffering in there."

Biggest visiting celebrity of the season so far was tall, blonde Helene Thimig Reinhardt, who traveled from New York to play her old role of Faith in the English morality play Everyman, originally staged in Salzburg by her late, great husband, Max Reinhardt. Yet to appear: Conductor John Barbirolli, Yehudi Menuhin and Grace Moore. Conspicuously absent was Austria's No. 1 conductor, arrogant 37-year-old Herbert von Karajan, a Salzburg boy who made good in Germany under the sponsorship of Hermann Goering. The Allied Council in Vienna turned him down at the last minute.

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