Bayreuth's Blight

The telegram which the people of Bayreuth have feared all spring arrived there last week. The Bavarian telegrapher's face was solemnly long as he received the message over the wire, beckoned a boy to pedal down through the town and deliver it to Frau Winifred Wagner, the robust Englishwoman who guards the shrine of Composer Richard Wagner, her father-in-law whom she never knew. Frau Wagner had a feeling before she tore open the envelope that the worst had happened, that Arturo Toscanini had decided not to come to Bayreuth this summer to conduct at the Wagner Festival. Over and over she read the telegram which Toscanini had sent from Florence. "The lamentable events which have wounded my feelings both as man and as artist have not up to this moment changed, despite my hopes. It is my duty today to break the silence that I have imposed upon myself for the last two months and to inform you that for my, for yours, and for everybody else's tranquillity it is better not to think any more of my going to Bayreuth. With unchanged sentiments of affectionate friendship toward the entire Wagner family. . . ." The "lamentable events" Frau Wagner and all the world knew referred to the Nazi attacks which Chancellor Adolf Hitler has condoned, if not instigated, against Jewish musicians in Germany. Two months ago when Bruno Walter was forbidden to conduct in Leipzig and Berlin, when Conductor Otto Klemperer was pommeled by a band of Nazi youths and Soprano Frida Leider had her Bayreuth invitation recalled, Toscanini joined ten other eminent musicians in cabling a protest to Hitler (TIME, April 10). The protest was ignored but the musicians who signed it had their phonograph records and radio broadcasts banned from Germany. And able Otto Klemperer was ousted from the Berlin State Opera where he had a contract until 1937.*

But Bayreuth had prayed that Toscanini would stay immune to Hitleritis. Toscanini, like other Bayreuth performers, takes no pay for conducting at the festivals. His appearances there assure the festival's financial as well as its artistic success. Toscanini's friends knew that refusing to go to Bayreuth seemed to him almost like betraying Wagner, that in his distress over the whole situation he was past feeling such thrusts as the one last week published in the Berlin Vossische Zeitung: "The great musician, with incorruptible ears ever mistrustfully and pedantically intent on the last sixteenth note, has heard out of the mighty orchestra that is Germany only the discordant tone." The National Socialist Militant League for German Culture said: "As Germans we are convinced that artistically adequate interpreters of the works of Wagner will be found." Frau Wagner hastily announced that Composer Richard Strauss will conduct the opening Parsifal. Who else will be found is hard to guess.

Aged Karl Muck is too frail now to conduct. Wilhelm Furtwangler is in high favor with Hitler but at odds with Frau Wagner because he felt she favored Toscanini. Fritz Busch is no Jew but the Nazis took his Dresden job away from him because they felt he had Red sympathies. Leo Blech who is a Jew has been permitted to keep his Berlin State Opera post because Kaiser Wilhelm gave it to him. But it is doubtful if Chancellor Hitler will want to grant Blech any more favors. Consensus last week was that most of the Festival performances would be directed by Karl Elmendorff, Bayreuth's staff conductor, a man of mediocre talent who in past years has turned out stupid performances shoddily rehearsed.

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