Music: The Old Tasks

“It is not our intention to pose new tasks, but rather really to accomplish the old ones.”

So said Austrian Poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, when he founded the annual Salzburg music festival (with Director Max Reinhardt, Composer Richard Strauss and others) and dedicated it to the memory of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Last week at Salzburg the founders’ intention was well fulfilled.

The old tasks of The Magic Flute and Fidelio were really accomplished by the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. The Flute was given first, before a sellout audience in the 300-year-old riding arena, carved out of the Monchsberg by the archbishops of Salzburg. “It is Mozart’s turn,” explained old Baron Heinrich Puthon, the festival’s president. “Next year we will open with Fidelio so Beethoven will not be mad at us.” For the Flute, the State Opera had no single great voice to offer, but its ensemble singing was highly polished; the acting had lightness and pace.

For Fidelio, the company had an unquestionably great voice, that of Guest Soprano Kirsten Flagstad, and Conductor Furtwngler gave a masterly reading of the score that won him a ten-minute personal ovation.

In the three festival weeks to come, there would be performances of the Mozart and Verdi requiems, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, Haydn’s Creation, Schubert’s Mass in E-Flat Major in a rich surrounding of orchestra and string literature.

Since war’s end, Salzburg has had to watch the rise of another fine summer festival at Edinburgh. Said one Salzburg conductor last week: let Edinburgh go on being “an international, large-scale musical review”; Salzburg had its own “vernacular”—which was another way of saying that Salzburg would stick to the old tasks, and accomplish them.