Salzburg Festival: Politics, Mozart and Nostalgia

“Festivals,” Kurt Waldheim proclaimed last month, “reflect the official culture of a democracy.”

The beleaguered Austrian president was presiding at the opening of the Salzburg Festival. As such, he was offering governmental endorsement to his nation’s most glamorous manifestation of cultural achievement, and cultural pretension.

This sprawling conglomeration of operas, concerts, recitals, readings, plays and art shows remains remarkably expensive (a top ticket fetches as much as $250 on the white market). Salzburg in the summertime is essentially a tourist attraction, and undeniably a snobbish one. Much of what goes on here is patently over-rated. Still, music in Mozart’s home town can be magical.

The setting for Waldheim’s speech was the Felsenreitschule, once the riding academy of the prince-archbishops. Max Reinhardt, patron saint of the Salzburg Festival until the advent of the Nazis, had converted the multitiered school at the foot of the fortress into a theater in 1926 when he staged Goldoni’s “Servant of Two Masters.”

Waldheim was to have shared the rostrum with the celebrated author Hilde Spiel. She cancelled her appearance, however, in protest to his political past.

Significantly, she did participate in another event. Later in the week, she opened an exhibit of sculptures by the late Anna Mahler, another Austrian who had become persona non grata after the upheaval of the Anschluss .

This year, officially, was the year in which Salzburg looked back at 1938. It turned out to be a guilty glance rather than a penetrating gaze.

Waldheim spoke about the 50th anniversary of the day when, he said, his country “disappeared from the map for seven dark and bitter years.”

He pointed out that he, like Austria itself, was now 70. Thus he “had experienced the destiny of the republic in all its phases, good and bad, since the cradle.”

He expressed gratitude that he had been able to work for the cause of peace and international understanding at the United Nations.

“This duty,” he elaborated, “meant all the more to me because of the tragic lessons of the war, which, as with so many others of my generation, had cast certain shadows on my life.”

He talked about the uneasy relationship between politics and art. At least that is what he claimed to be talking about. The possibility of a certain ambiguity lingered.

“If we are to live together,” he said, “there can be disagreement but no malice, opponents but no enemies, confrontations but no hate. . . .

“Let us judge efforts and successes, no matter who achieves them, fairly and without jealousy, without spiteful preconceptions and without ulterior motives.”

With these potentially self-serving sentiments, Waldheim raised the curtain on another festival devoted primarily to the conspicuous consumption, and marketing, of Mozart, the Vienna Philharmonic and Herbert von Karajan, not necessarily in that order. In 1988, as in the past, Salzburg concentrated on conservative repertory delivered to exquisite locales in very fancy packages.

The festival authorities made some dutiful gestures in the direction of some art and artists defiled by Hitler and his henchmen. A painfully revealing booklet documentating the 1937 and 1938 festivals was sold for only 10 schillings--about 70 cents--alongside the 200-schilling souvenir program. Music by Ernst Krenek, Egon Wellesz, Hanns Eisler, Webern and Berg was performed in minor concerts, many in out-of-the-way places. Noted actors--including the current Everyman, Klaus Maria Brandauer--read excerpts from the writings of Albert Einstein, Siegmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and Franz Werfel in relatively small halls.

James Levine presided over a revival of last year’s controversial staging of Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron.” Tickets for both performances remained plentiful to the end.

Meanwhile, the idolized Karajan--80 and infirm--packed the Grosses Festspielhaus for a hyper-polished and rather somnolent “Don Giovanni.” Riccardo Muti at least enjoyed a succes d’estime with a pompous new production of “La Clemenza di Tito.” Levine pleased audiences, if not critics, with the clockwork routine of his “Nozze di Figaro.” Despite the hectic conducting of Riccardo Chailly, Salzburg savored the elegance and refinement of a challenge regarded hereabouts as a novelty: Rossini’s “Cenerentola.”

The elite pilgrims at this socio-cultural mecca want, above all, big names and modest challenges. The conservative spirit haunts Salzburg’s concert halls--which play host to a predictable array of stellar conductors, soloists and orchestras in dull programs--just as it dictates the mood in the opera houses. A director may take certain modern liberties with operatic staging. There may be a surprise or two when it comes to casting. Still, no music lover comes to Salzburg looking for large-scale adventure.

Under the circumstances, one must be grateful for tasteful favors. The most memorable one this summer involved “Cenerentola.”

Michael Hampe, the director, could not duplicate the storybook whimsy of the same opera as staged by the late, much-lamented Jean-Pierre Ponnelle in San Francisco, Milan, Munich and Washington. On the other hand, Hampe did avoid the cutesy irrelevancies and grotesque exaggerations of the New York City Opera production or the Frank Corsaro perversion created last season for the Music Center Opera.

At the Kleines Festspielhaus, “Cinderella” was played straight, with the stress on period drama and bel-canto virtue. The characters were human. The humor--if any--sprang from their foibles and their dramatic situations, not from sight gags and gimmickry.

Abetted by genial designs--Mauro Pagano’s final, heroic achievement before succumbing to AIDS--Hampe staged the melodramma giocoso with the authentic trappings of 19th-Century theater. Everything and everyone exuded quiet charm. Canvas drops transformed a drab kitchen into a courtly ballroom within seconds, and there was one climactic coup de theatre : a traveling panorama for the interlude depicting the prince’s frantic search for his beloved, complete with galloping toy horse, bouncing carriage and the illusion of drenching rain.

The ensemble, a genuine ensemble, for this thinking-person’s “Cenerentola” was dominated by Ann Murray--more waif, perhaps, than fairy-tale princess but a lyric mezzo-soprano of consummate flexibility and gentle elan. Her refinement was complemented by the stylish singing of William Matteuzzi (Bolognese, the first name notwithstanding) as the prince, the knowing nonchalance of Gino Quilico as his valet, and the gutsy if unidiomatic bonhommie of Walter Berry as the buffo father.

Hampe focused the drama on the ultimate goodness of the forgiving heroine. The opera might have been titled “La Clemenza della Cenerentola.” By a similar token, Johannes Schaaf’s production of “Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail” in the same theater could have been “La Clemenza di Bassa Selim.”

In this very picturesque but very unorthodox staging, the pathetic, exotic savage is the obvious hero. Belmonte is just a class-conscious wimp. Blonde is just a conniving baggage. Pedrillo is a nasty schemer. Most important, Konstanze is a potential love-object who strips to her slip and spends most of her great aria, “Martern aller Arten,” in the throes of sado-masochistic hysteria. The patient Bassa and Osmin, his rough yet sympathetic harem overseer, are lucky to be rid of this bunch.

None of Schaaf’s oh-so-serious inspirations have much to do with the sometimes earthy, sometimes lofty, always adorable score. The sights may be stimulating in their originality, but they stubbornly contradict the sounds, even with Horst Stein trying hard to make Mozart abrasive in the pit.

The hard-working cast found itself mired in vocal mediocrity. Inga Nielsen was a lightweight Konstanze, Lillian Watson a tough-cookie Blonde, Deon van der Walt a decent but pallid Belmonte, Heinz Zednik a superannuated Pedrillo. Kurt Rydl as Osmin boomed with decreasing fervor as the line descended. Ulrich Wildgruber sputtered and glowered feebly as Selim.

One left the little theater (capacity 1,324) happy only with the clever insinuation of Andreas Reinhardt’s starkly stylized sets.

It would be convenient, in this vein, to regard “Le Nozze di Figaro” as “La Clemenza della Contessa.” Unfortunately, the current incarnation of Ponnelle’s 1972 production, rehearsed by Lesley Konig, revealed no such telling perspective. This merely was “Figaro” business as usual, and not very stimulating business at that.

Levine conducted as if his mind were still on “Parsifal” in Bayreuth. Forget about tenderness and tension. Forget about wit and warmth. Forget about the revelations of authentic performance practice.

The cast included a college-girl Countess (Lella Cuberli), an engagingly cheeky Susanna (Marie McLaughlin), a youthful Figaro from the provinces (Manfred Hemm), a Cherubino with great legs and a good voice (Diana Montague), a hoarse Bartolo (Paolo Montarsolo). Despite festival conditions, the excellent Marcellina (Jane Berbie) and Basilio (Michel Senechal) were cruelly deprived of their arias. The evening belonged, and not just by default, to the suavely dangerous, sensitively nuanced Almaviva of Thomas Hampson, making his Salzburg debut.

“La Clemenza di Tito,” the one legitimate forgiveness opus, was staged in the Felsenreitschule by Peter Brenner as if this great opera seria were nothing but a vapid, costly pageant. Enrico Job draped the vast stage with lush, evasive curtains and punctuated the open spaces with irrelevant obelisks. Within this awkward milieu, Brenner fused elements of Roman antiquity with symbols of Baroque splendor and Napoleonic grandeur.

More damaging, he encouraged his singers to merely put on a pleasant concert. The singing was indeed pleasant when Carol Vaness could suggest Vitellia’s difficult florid rages and when Delores Ziegler could sketch Sesto’s daunting coloratura frustrations. Unfortunately, Gosta Winbergh found the heroic bravura of Tito Vespasiano a severe strain.

The only overwhelming passion came from Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic in the pit. That, alas, was not enough to dispel the pervasive aura of noble boredom.

Similar problems beset Karajan’s “Don Giovanni” in the Grosses Festspielhaus, even though it was--after the ubiquitous Pavarotti songfest--the biggest attraction in town.

The old maestro made lovely, essentially romantic chamber-music in the pit while a decent cast enacted timid charades on Pagano’s beautifully, lavishly, decorated stage. Hampe directed traffic ably while manipulating the sliding panels that refocused the inaction by altering the size of the proscenium.

Everything proceeded calmly, smoothly and usually prettily, though one could object to the comic-book cosmos that decorated what used to be the anti-hero’s descent to hell. One waited, in vain, for the spark of excitement.

Samuel Ramey repeated his handsome, superficial, charmless portrait of Don Giovanni. Ferruccio Furlanetto provided nice counterpoint as a youthful, easy-going, Italianate Leporello. Paata Burchuladze droned in some strange Slavic tongue as the Commendatore. Alexander Malta contributed a casual Masetto, John Aler a blunt, short-breathed Ottavio.

Julia Varady brought such limpid tone and compelling urgency to Donna Elvira’s “Mi tradi” that one almost forgave the tentative elements in her performance. Kathleen Battle sang so sweetly that one almost overlooked her tendency to turn the peasant-girl Zerlina into a prima donna. Anna Tomowa-Sintow remained the strident, matronly Donna Anna we lamented last year on television.

The dressy audience, which had reacted to the other operas with discerning restraint, clapped, cheered and stomped as if this really were a golden-age performance. All that glitters, however, isn’t golden. Not even when it comes to Mozart and Karajan in Salzburg.