What's a Festival For?

Edinburgh's International Festival of Music and Drama was three years old, and finally big enough to be spanked. Last week, with this season's final performances, the critics' hairbrushes were flying.

Rather timidly, the Observer's Drama Critic Ivor Brown complained that the festival "is finding problems in its own success." There was, he thought, too much cultural plum pudding crammed into three weeks, leaving some customers with a stomachache.

The New Statesman and Nation's Desmond Shawe-Taylor wore a this-hurts-me-more-than-you look: "The grumble that events are too many and the day too crowded is merely frivolous . . . More serious is the complaint that this festival has no natural focal point, as Salzburg has in Mozart, Bayreuth in Wagner, and Aldeburgh in Britten; this is true and perhaps a pity . . . but what sort of festival could be constructed out of purely Scottish material . . .?"

Negligible Bit. The hardest wallops came in the Sunday Times from a critic Britons have heard for 45 years. Gruff old (80) Ernest Newman first wanted to know "What is a festival's work?" Is its virtue, he asked, "a quality inherent in it" or does its virtue come "merely from the fact that on a particular day [a piece] is performed some hundreds of miles from where we live?"

What nettled the doyen of British critics most was a performance of Rossini's Semiramide Overture by the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir John Barbirolli. "No really musical person," groused Newman, "would leave his comfortable home . . . specifically to hear this . . . But bring, at great expense, a German orchestra all the way from Berlin to play this negligible bit of Italian music in the capital of Scotland, and an English conductor all the way from Manchester to conduct it, and apparently it becomes, by some magical transformation . . . a 'festival' work and we trudge all the way to Edinburgh to hear it." In short, wrote he, "the only justification possible for the rather too marked lowering of the festival standard . . . this year is that some of the performances have been far better than the music."

Important Point. Lean, tired-eyed Festival Manager Rudolf Bing could hardly deny the charges. But neither did he see any reason to plead guilty. Said he with a sigh: "You don't come to Edinburgh to hear Brahms's Second Symphony. If you're the type who goes to a festival, you've heard it. But you do come to hear the Royal Philharmonic under Beecham, or the Berlin, or the Vienna Philharmonic, or the Concertgebouw. It seems to me that what is played here is less important than who plays it. Whatever he thinks of it, the festival-goer certainly gets a good idea of the state of orchestra-playing in Europe and what's doing in the theater. Isn't that what a festival is for?"

The cash register, at least, seemed to prove Rudi right. Some 50,000 visitors had trudged all the way to Edinburgh this year. The Glyndebourne opera performances had been 100% sold out; the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra under Bruno Walter, 99.1%, the Berlin Philharmonic, 99%. The festival probably would come the nearest yet to breaking even. But even if it fell short, Edinburgh's merchants would feel no pain in making up the deficit. The 50,000 visitors had dropped better than -L-500,000 in their tills in the past three weeks.

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