Mozart, Moses and Money

By Michael Walsh

From the Festung Hohensalzburg, the fortified stone redoubt above the glorious Austrian city where Mozart was born, the old town presents a serene, unruffled vista. But look closer. Down on the Getreidegasse, a narrow medieval street near the Salzach River that is now a pedestrian mall, a motley multinational horde is snapping photos of the ancient house where young Wolfgang first quickened to the sound of his father's violin. Huge tour buses rumble down the streets and across the bridges, daily following the shade of Julie Andrews into the movie-set countryside. The garages are jammed, the restaurants are packed, and there is not a hotel room frei within 50 miles.

Welcome to Salzburg, in August the classical-music world's equivalent of Cannes. To be sure, there are no topless starlets, cigar-smoking producers or interminable socialist-realist films from Rumania. Still, the music business has a hype and rhythm all its own. Posters of such performers as Conductor Herbert von Karajan (a native son), Soprano Kathleen Battle, Conductor Riccardo Muti and Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter are plastered in shop windows. Managers from the U.S. and Europe gather to plot the careers of performers and ensembles. Diners at the swank Goldener Hirsch restaurant near the Festspielhaus burst into applause whenever an artist enters.

Indeed, the hills are alive with the sound of music -- and money. The five- week festival is one of the priciest in Europe, with tickets running upwards of $200 for the major opera productions. For those who can afford it, though, Salzburg affords in return an unparalleled opportunity to display wealth and finery. On the street in front of the Festspielhaus, Mercedes-Benz and BMW luxury sedans steadily disgorge one of the most elegantly dressed summer crowds in Europe, the men in tuxedoes or formal Austrian loden coats, the bejeweled women in couturier fantasies and silk dress dirndls. One favorite local pastime is estimating the retail value of the gems on parade between Hirsch and the Festspielhaus before curtain time.

For some 30 years, Salzburg's fortunes have been in the hands of the formidable Karajan, the dominant conductor of the postwar generation. Now 79, he is debilitated by a series of illnesses and must clutch a special railing as he makes his way to the podium. Those looking for clues to music's most hotly debated question -- Karajan's eventual successor at the Berlin Philharmonic -- find Salzburg an ideal place to begin speculation.

A couple of years ago, Karajan told an interviewer that he favored either the autumnal Italian conductor Carlo Maria Giulini, 73, former music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, or the vital young Soviet emigre Semyon Bychkov, 34, recently named conductor of the Orchestre de Paris beginning in 1989.

Few chalk players, however, think the post will go to either. Far more likely is someone like Muti (whose festival poster had him clad in a black leather jacket, a la Karajan in his race-car days), or James Levine, who is cutting back his administrative duties at the Metropolitan Opera to expand his repertory. Certainly Levine's reputation has flourished in Salzburg in recent years. This season he is supervising an elegant The Marriage of Figaro, in substantially the same staging as Director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's New York and Paris versions, and a daring new production of Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, also by Ponnelle.

The thorny Moses, an unfinished twelve-tone opera freely adapted from Exodus, turned out to be a sensation. It begins with a powerful interpolated silent prologue. A community of black-suited, ringleted and bearded Hasidim is peaceably gathered on a set that includes a large menorah and Torah scrolls and, on the sides, a Jewish cemetery. Suddenly, khaki-suited, helmeted storm troopers rush in and desecrate the scene. The swift brutality was a provocative coup de theatre -- especially in Austria, where memories of the 1938 Nazi invasion are still fresh and where former Wehrmacht Officer Kurt Waldheim now presides.

By the time the evening had ended, though, many were left wondering whether the production was anti-Nazi or anti-Semitic. Schoenberg's libretto makes an explicit extended centerpiece out of the episode of the Golden Calf: gold is collected and formed into an idol; a ritual slaughter of animals is followed by a sacrifice of Four Naked Virgins; there is an orgy of drunkenness, sexual license and suicide. By forsaking emotionally neutral biblical robes for specific ghetto mufti (only Moses, portrayed by Bass-Baritone Theo Adam, is outfitted in Old Testament garb), Ponnelle risked having the quarrelsome Jews appear like characters in one of Julius Streicher's Nazi racist fantasies, evoking the stereotype of avariciousness and the calumny of blood libel. Even the splendid performances of Adam, British Tenor Philip Langridge as a smooth Aron, and the brilliant chorus of the Vienna State Opera could not erase the disturbing, if unintentional, impression.

More conventional was Don Giovanni. Karajan's 1986 recording with largely the same cast seemed sluggish and unfocused, but in the more stimulating environment of live performance, the interpretation gleamed. His is not the rhythmically incisive, sharply chiseled Mozart currently in favor in the wake of the original-instruments revolution, but a mellower, more reflective interpretation that prizes sonority and melodic beauty. Bass Samuel Ramey was a swaggering antihero, cocky till the end, and Soprano Julia Varady brought a sweet pathos to the obsessive Donna Elvira. Director Michael Hampe's staging was conventional until the climax. When the Commendatore dragged the unrepentant Don to perdition, the Iberian setting vanished to reveal a cosmic firmament, quenching the earthly fires of lust in a metaphysical supernova of destruction. The normally bubbly postlude took place on a desolate, Pirandellian stage, on which six characters wandered in search of a composer. That composer, of course, was Mozart, and in Salzburg he is never very far away.