Nazi Salzburg

In 1842, the little Austrian Tyrolean town of Salzburg started the summer music festivals in honor of its illustrious son, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. These festivals were attended by the good, pipe-smoking Buerger of Salzburg, by a few hardy music-lovers from nearby Vienna and Munich, by an occasional tourist or student from the great world beyond the Alps. Their programs were simple and unimportant. In 1918. however, a group of Viennese musicians, headed by Composer Richard Strauss, Conductor Franz Schalk, Stage Director Max Reinhardt and Playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal. decided to give Salzburg a bigger place on the musical map. Two years later the first big Salzburg Festival was given, with a gala outdoor performance of von Hofmannsthal's Jedermann (Everyman) as its principal drawing card.

In 1934, when famed Maestro Arturo Toscanini snubbed Germany's Bayreuth Festival and decided to conduct in Salzburg instead, Salzburg's annual festival became Europe's biggest single tourist attraction. To it flocked not only music-lovers from all the world, but a great horde of gawping sightseers, visiting royalty, swank socialites.

Last spring, Austria's Nazification left the future of the Salzburg Festival in doubt. Maestro Toscanini, implacable foe of Naziism, immediately announced his resignation. Nazi racial policies ruled out Salzburg's two remaining luminaries. Conductor Bruno Walter and Stage Director Reinhardt. Though Nazi authorities soon announced that the festival would be continued as usual, it was obvious that Salzburg, 1938 model, was going to be very different from the Salzburgs that had preceded it.

Last week, as the first Nazi-sponsored Salzburg Festival opened, the extent of this difference became apparent. Cancellation of bookings from outside Greater Germany (including nearly 50% of those from England and the U. S.) converted the festival from an international tourist event into a dominantly German celebration. Places of absent foreign visitors were taken by droves of enthusiastic Nazis, including hundreds of members of Propaganda Minister Goebbels' "Strength through Joy" movement who had been granted specially reduced rates. The elaborate permanent stages formerly used for the Reinhardt Faust and Jedermann productions had been torn down, and the street name plates marking "Reinhardt Platz" and "Toscanini Hof" had been removed.

The festival's general program had changed little, but the personnel had changed much. In the place of the absent Toscanini reigned Germany's No. 1 conductor, Wilhelm Furtwaengler. Notably absent from the roster were such famous operatic names as Lotte Lehmann, Kerstin Thorborg, Rosa Pauly. In place of the grandiose stage productions of Faust and Jedermann, two new dramatic productions were scheduled: Goethe's Egmont and Amphitryon, a play by Germany's 19th-Century, romantic Playwright Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist.

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