Salzburg's Trial

At the Salzburg Festival, famed mainly for its glittering performances of Mozart and Richard Strauss, the season's big news was the world premiere last week of a modern, gloomy opera, The Trial. The music was by Gottfried von Einem, who, at 35, is regarded as Austria's outstanding postwar composer. The libretto was taken from Franz Kafka's novel.

Everything pointed to success. Kafka's nightmarish book, first published in 1925, is enjoying a vogue among intellectuals; it tells about a kind of tragic Sad Sack--an ordinary man named Joseph K. who is arrested, tried by a mysterious court for an unspecified crime, chivied by a cold, incomprehensible bureaucracy until he is finally led away by two black-clad agents and stabbed to death. This macabre theme of man tortured by forces he does not understand was successfully used by Alban Berg in Wozzeck and by Gian-Carlo Menotti in his more popular Consul. Salzburg first-nighters, remembering Von Einem's earlier, impressive opera, Danton's Death (TIME, Aug. 18, 1947), came with high hopes. But by the final curtain, they found themselves less than spellbound, responded with lukewarm applause.

Critics lauded the first-rate production, including the staging, the orchestra (under the Vienna State Opera's Karl Boehm) and the highly imaginative sets (by German Designer Caspar Neher), which evoked a kind of Orwellian gloom amid Salzburg's sunny, baroque opulence. But critics reluctantly admitted that Von Einem's score itself was something of a disappointment.

Although its overall effect was suitably uncanny, at times it sounded like a good movie sound track rather than full-blooded, dramatic music. Episodic treatment (like the book, the opera is divided into nine separate scenes) broke the mood with each intermission. Moreover, critics noted, the Von Einem score was derivative -- now a dash of Puccini, now Tchaikovsky, now Stravinsky. The opera's best feature : three scenes in which Joseph K. (superbly characterized by German Tenor Max Lorenz) is involved with different women, all beautifully sung by Switzerland's Soprano Lisa Delia Casa (who will appear at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera this season). These scenes are effectively composed in a perfumed, formal style.

The Trial will have another day in the critics' court: performances are scheduled for Berlin's Staedtische Oper and Manhattan's City Center this fall.

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