Orpheus in a Riding Academy

Salzburg hadn't looked so healthy in years--not since 1937 when Toscanini made it glow with Die Meistersinger and Fidelia. Store windows were chuck-full of cameras, Meissen china, English woolens. Last week thousands of music lovers poured into Salzburg for its famed music festival, and for the first time since the war found it something like old times.

Max Reinhardt's old Faust scenery had been ripped off the open stage of the Archbishop's riding school behind Salzburg's Festspielhaus. In its place workers had put up a simple Ionic-columned portico for this year's big show: an ambitious production of Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice by ambitious Conductor Herbert von Karajan (TIME, Mar. 29).

Von Karajan had the help of two crack stage directors, Hans Caspar Nehar and Oskar Fritz Schuh, who had studied under Reinhardt in Berlin. They gave the production two notable Reinhardt touches. After Eurydice's funeral, the mountain wall which towers up behind the stage came alive with song; a chorus of 65 demons had been strung along its side. In the following scene, in which Orpheus arrives in Elysium, the theater's canvas roof was rolled back, revealing a starlit summer sky.

The audience had never seen Orpheus treated so splendidly. Veteran Salzburg critic Max Graf was not being intentionally sarcastic when he said that Bruno Walter's severe 1932 version "was only greater vocally."

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