SALZBURG DIARY : Trouble for Mortier, Grandeur for Strauss

The controversy rages on. Salzburg has become a cultural battleground. Everyone seems to be having a fine time.

The old guard longs desperately for the good old days--the days when the festival tended to be glamorous, slick, smug, safe, costly and, in many ways, unchallenging. The conservatives, in short, want Herbert von Karajan to come back from the dead.

If any mortal could manage that delicate trick, Karajan would be the one. So far, alas, no miracle.

In the meantime, his artistic legacy has been passed to Gerard Mortier, an enlightened upstart from Belgium who--horror of horrors--is honoring his mandate to change things. He wants to play more modern music, wants to massage fewer star egos, wants to explore the possibilities of modern theatricality.

He has been attacked for his efforts by a large segment of the public, by the mayor of this Baroque paradise, even by the mighty restaurateurs, who complain with heart-rending pathos that Mortier’s events hurt business by beginning too early and ending too late.

After an excellent performance of Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito” on Sunday, the audience at the “little” (1,323-seat) Festspielhaus cheered the musicians but subjected the progressive director-designer team--a team imported from Mortier’s Brussels--with a chorus of fortississimo boos that raised the hackles as well as the rafters.

This, clearly, was a symbolic act of disapproval for the new regime. It helped a visitor understand the critical drubbing meted out to Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic after their debut here last week. Salonen, after all, is not Karajan, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is not the Vienna Philharmonic, and their introductory program was fraught with danger.

That danger was acknowledged by critic Joachim Kaiser Monday in the important Suddeutsche Zeiting of Munich.

“To open a concert at the Salzburg Festspielhaus with the ‘Emperor Waltz,’ ” he wrote, “is at least an unusual way to attempt artistic suicide.”

Kaiser alluded to Salonen’s “star quality,” mentioned that the young maestro had turned down an offer to become music director in Los Angeles before Andre Previn, dismissed his Johann Strauss as a distortion, and offered a discerning overview:

“Salonen as a conductor is lean, quietly determined, totally secure and well able to get along without star airs.” Despite some reservations about a “less than totally secure orchestra,” Kaiser admired much of the Berg Concerto and at least the “dreamy” portions of the Mahler Fourth.

His summation: “This was not a great concert, but it promised much for the future.”

Meanwhile, Salzburg enjoyed some grandiose operatic nostalgia at the “big” (2,170-seat) Festspielhaus, thanks to Georg Solti--once mistrusted here as an archrival of Karajan’s but now revered as a valiant savior of all that is noble.

Solti’s major vehicle this summer is Richard Strauss’ “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” a sprawling, convoluted demonstration of mystical mumbo-jumbo, bloated rhetoric, emotional bombast and--on occasion--sublime musical inspiration.

If this opera has always been more popular with connoisseurs than with the masses, much of the blame must rest with the librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Since it was Hofmannsthal who created the Salzburg Festival 72 years ago, his occasional literary indiscretions (miscalculations?) are viewed here with a useful mixture of tolerance, affection and myopia.

His symbolic tale of yearning for spiritual--and physical--fulfillment among fairy-tale royalty as well as innocent Earthlings is, to say the least, difficult to stage. It involves, among other oddities, a big bag of kitschy magic tricks, a chorus of unborn children, a stream of self-immolating fish and a pair of leather-lung sopranos who take turns losing their shadows.

Gotz Friedrich, an old-guard German director well known in Los Angeles, enlisted Rolf Glittenberg to design elaborate sets for the impossibly awkward Cinemascope stage of the house that Karajan built, and Marianne Glittenberg to create pervasively ungainly costumes. The result is a bizarre theatrical jumble that owes scenic debts to Bauhaus, Kabuki and Disneyland.

There are agreeably picturesque moments in this astonishingly literal show, amid some surprising bows to ancient operatic convention. Dramatic illumination, however, remains elusive.

Musical illumination does not. Solti conducts the luxuriant Vienna Philharmonic with pervasive sweep and grandeur. In the process, he never swamps the singers (well, hardly ever), and he savors any opportunity for poetic introspection en route to the thumping climaxes.

The cast at the second performance, Saturday, was as strong as one is likely to encounter anywhere today. Replacing Cheryl Studer (reportedly pregnant and a victim of the current heat wave) was Ellen Shade, who had been scheduled to make her Salzburg debut as the Emperor’s Wife in a later performance. She sang the arching lines with radiant tone that really opened at the top, with affecting simplicity and commanding authority. Her finesse found an effective foil in the all-out Wagnerian gutsiness of Eva Marton as Barak’s Wife.

Robert Hale was Barak. Remembered as a reliable utility basso at the New York City Opera in the golden days of Norman Treigle, he has become a marvelously lean and incisive Heldenbariton in what must be a rewarding second lease on operatic life. Thomas Moser, another New York City Opera alumnus, sang the forbidding music of the Emperor (Strauss really hated tenors) as heroically as his burnished lyric tenor would permit.

Most impressive, and most expressive, of all, perhaps, was Marjana Lipovsek, who made a complex, almost sympathetic figure of the evil Nurse. She approached the grotesque challenge as if this were a bel-canto exercise--never screaming, never forcing, never cackling.

The huge supporting cast was dominated by Bryn Terfel (surely an incipient Barak), who boomed the warnings of the Spirit Messenger while suspended midair: a misplaced Peter Pan masquerading as Uebermensch .

The long, long opera was performed uncut. In this instance, fidelity to the composer’s wishes may have been a dubious virtue. All the offstage voices, not incidentally, were electronically amplified and sounded as if they were piped in from Sebastopol.

Even in sacred Salzburg. . . .