Music: Carnival in Scotland

In two years, Edinburgh has taken the place of Austria’s Salzburg as the music capital of the world.

Last week, Edinburgh’s second annual festival ended. For three weeks thousands of music lovers had heard the greatest of music, from Bach to Bartok, played by such orchestras as Amsterdam’s superb, 65-year-old Concertgebouw and Rome’s famed Augusteo. They had heard the Mozart piano concertos, performed unforgettably by their finest living interpreter—Pianist Artur Schnabel. They had seen Mozart’s operatic masterpieces, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutti, given with polish by a company that is fast becoming the best in the business—Britain’s Glyndebourne. They had heard superlative choral works, including Bach’s B Minor Mass, sung by a chorus with few peers—the Huddersfield Choral Society.

Hamlet in French. And there was drama. The Scottish Repertory’s production of Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, a Scottish morality play written in 1540 and last performed in 1554, was a high point of the festival. There was a production of the André Gide Hamlet. (“A moving experience,” reported the New York Times’s Dyneley Hussey of the famous soliloquies, though Hamlet in French, played by Jean-Louis Barrault, kept his voice pitched at “a tart oboe rather than the rich clarinet of English.”) And for trimmings there was Highland music, bagpipe parades and dancing in West Princes Street Gardens, below Edinburgh Castle.

Austrian in Edinburgh. Last week the man who blueprinted the festival could relax. With justifiable pride, Rudolf Bing could say: “We have sold a quarter of a million tickets in three weeks, not for a sporting event, but for Mozart operas, a Greek tragedy [John Gielgud’s production of Robinson Jeffers’ Medea], Hamlet in French and high-class orchestral music.”

A tall, pale, olive-skinned man, Bing got his start 28 years ago managing concert artists in Vienna, his native city (he is now a British subject). He learned a bit more working with state and municipal opera houses in Germany, then went to England in 1934 as a director and general manager of John Christie’s fledgling Glyndebourne company. When war came, Glyndebourne folded up for the duration. Bing got a job managing a chain of department stores.

But music was still in his head. Two years ago he went up to Edinburgh with an idea for a festival. The Lord Provost, Sir Jon Falconer, liked it. Bing wrung pledges for £60,000 from Edinburgh merchants, the Art Council of Great Britain and the City of Edinburgh. Then he wrote to Bruno Walter: “If we can get the Vienna Philharmonic to come, will you come to conduct it?” Walter quickly said yes. “After that,” says Bing, “it was easy. When artists were diffident, it was only necessary to tell them Bruno Walter was coming.”

Edinburgh’s Festival Society now plans to continue its festivals for at least five more years, with Bing signed up to manage the next three. There are no specific plans yet for 1949. Says Bing: “We simply cannot afford American orchestras yet, but I am not giving up hope.” And he did have some other gratifying news. Conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, who six months ago said the Scots were “damned fools to throw away £60,000 on a festival,” last week cabled from South Africa that he would be “delighted” to take part next year.