Music: Musical Axes

The cinema industry of the world split into ideological hemispheres last month when Great Britain, France and the U. S. withdrew from the Venice International Film Festival (TIME, July 3). Last week the musical world showed signs of a similar division. The Rome-Berlin Axis was much in evidence at Bayreuth, Wagnerian shrine, where the stodgy, Nazi-favored conductors of recent years were joined by an Italian, Victor de Sabata. In Salzburg, which Anschluss knocked off the list of international smart-spots, four of seven scheduled operas were to be given in Italian, two of them with Italian casts, under Tullio Serafin, onetime conductor of the Metropolitan Opera. In contrast with Salzburg’s old days, there was only one non-Axis conductor, and he a Hollander—Willem Mengelberg.

Music’s “anti-aggression front” salvoed its reply last week. In Lucerne, Switzerland, for the second year, opened a month-long festival designed to cabbage some of the Salzburg trade. Biggest tourist bait, as he was last summer, was Arturo Toscanini, whose European pond has shrunk rapidly in recent years. He was down for five concerts, including two performances of a work from which he generates much heat, the Verdi Requiem, to be done in Lucerne’s old Jesuit Church. Four concerts were to be broadcast, and Toscanini’s son-in-law, Vladimir Horowitz, able pianist, was scheduled to make one of his rare concert appearances under the maestro. The other festival conductors were also extra-Axis: England’s bald-pated Sir Adrian Boult, Switzerland’s Ernest Ansermet, the late Weimar Republic’s Bruno Walter (a Jew) and Fritz Busch (an anti-Nazi). The Vatican was to send to Lucerne its nonpolitical Sistine Chapel Choir.

Maestro Toscanini apparently had become a Lucerne fixture: he rented a chalet on the lake, began building a permanent home there, was made an honorary citizen of the town. Last summer Toscanini saluted another musician who once lived on Lake Lucerne. In Richard Wagner’s garden, Toscanini “reconstructed” the first performance of the Siegfried Idyll, which was a serenade to Wagner’s mistress and wife-to-be, Cosima von Bülow.