The Salzburg Festival

A Visiting Englishman's Impressions of an International Fair of Contemporary Music

ALDOUS HUXLEY

IF it were not for its climate, which is proverbially beastly, and its cooking, which is sound but a little monotonous, the town of Salzburg would be as pleasant a place to spend a summer in as you could hope to find in Central Europe. At a first glimpse this city of domes and towers, set in a curving valley between high hills, and bestriding with its bridges a green erratic mountain-river, reminds one of Florence—a Florence in miniature and absurdly, delightfully Teutonic. The austere elegance of the Tuscan landscape has given place to prospects of meadowy plains and distant peaked mountains that are as wholeheartedly and unashamedly sentimental as a German song—as for example Roslein or Ringlein or Tannenbaum.

As you look at the picture-book view from the fortifications on the hill above the town, you seem to hear those lusciously plaintive notes oozing out of the landscape; and then you look down at the town. For the incomparable beauty and grandeur of Brunelleschi's dome we have the jolly baroque cupolas of the Collegienkirche and the cathedral, merrily parodying grandeur. We have the queer charm of the narrow streets, the oddity of tunneled passages that lead under archways through dark burrows into sudden unexpected courtyards open to the sky and surrounded by arcaded terraces, almost like Spanish patios, then on again through further mazes of molework out into the street again. And then there are the fountains that mimic the fountains of Rome, the rose path of truly Italian beauty in the Kapitel Platz, with others more or less ridiculously charming in the gardens which lend their loveliness to the palace.

But best and most Italian of all Salzburg's beauties—not Florentine this, but Roman in its baroque magniloquence—is the thing they call the New Gate, which is nothing less than a great tunnel bored through the perpendicular crag; a superlative tunnel such as only a Prince Bishop of the Seventeenth Century would have dreamed of boring; forty feet high and, at either end, stupendous arches of triumph carved out of the living rock. It is worth going to Salzburg for that tunnel alone.

A Feast of Modern Music

IT was not, however, for the sake of this baroque Simplon, not for the semi-Italian splendours of churches and fountains, not for the German beauties of the mountains as seen from the beer-terraces of the various Aussichtspunkten—it was for none of these things that so many of us made the Salzburg pilgrimage this autumn. It was the festival of modern chamber music that brought us thither from the distant corners of the earth.

Twice a day, at half past ten in the morning and at seven at night—for one must be an early worm in Salzburg if one would listen to the singing of the musical birds—we repaired to the great ball of the Mozarteum to have contemporary music administered to us in generous three-and-a-half hour doses. The end of the feast found most of us rather weary; listening to one's contemporaries is not undilutedly pleasurable or interesting

In the course of the last four hundred years there have been not more than a dozen composers indisputably of the first rank. This is a fact which forbids us to expect too much from a single generation of composers, even when the men of that generation happen to be our contemporaries. By no means are the musicians of our age men of genius. It follows, therefore, that the greater part of the music performed at Salzburg was not immensely interesting, that some of it was even downright boring. In passing judgement upon any work of art, the man of sense is neither a passeiste nor a futurist. He is consistently a talentist—an admirer of genius wherever and in whatsoever form he finds it.

The fact that the greater number of the composers represented at Salzburg were, like most of the rest of us, poor devils without enough talent to make themselves particularly interesting, is not to be wondered; neither has it anything to do with the goodness or badness of modern music in general. And the fact that the prevailing mediocrity of the concerts at the Mozarteum was relieved by conpensatory thrills, that there were bons quarts (Theme which made up for the bad hours, amply justified the existence of the festival and of the music performed at it.

A Bird's-Eye View

THE programmes at this first Salzburg festival of modern chamber music were not so thoroughly representative of contemporary talent as they might have been,—not so representative as, let us hope, they will be in future years. Strauss, for example, appeared only as the author of some very feeble sentimental songs; Elgar and Delius did not appear at all. There was no sign of Mahler, none of Ornstein, none of Boyle, whose cello concerto, even with the orchestral part arranged for piano, is an interesting work and a great deal better worth listening to than much that was played at Salzburg.

There was hardly enough Pizetti and rather too much of the Parisian Six. The English were too exclusively represented by songs, the French by pieces for combinations of wind instruments. Altogether, there was much which might with advantage have been altered. None the less, in spite of all its failings, the festival was very well worth attending. It gave one a bird's-eye view of contemporary music which was most instructive. The city of modem music lay outspread below one—a collection of dwellings of every size and style with here and there a noble monument outstanding. It was, so to speak, the view over Salzburg from the beer-terrace at the top of the funicular.

And which were the noble monuments? What corresponded in this view over the city of music to the dome of the Collegienkirche and the cupolas of the cathedral, to the Kapitelbrunnen and the Newthar as they appear in the beer-terrace prospect of Salzburg? For me, at any rate, there were three or four works that stood out like domes and towers from the low Salzburg valley: Schonberg's Steich quartett mit Gesang, Bela Bartok's violin sonata,—The Quartet of Paul Hindemith, and, less unequivocally monumental, Kodaly's Serenade for strings and the Violin Sonata of Ernest Bloch.

Some of these names are already sufficiently familiar; one expects something of interest when one sees them on a programme. From Schonberg, for example, one always expects profound musical learning and an intellectual subtlety that provokes and satisfies the mind. What one does not so much expect of him and what, in this Steich Quartett mit Gersang, one is delighted to find, is a quality of intense emotion. The third and fourth movements, in which the voice makes its appearance, are extraordinarily stirring. Across all the intricacy and subtlety of the writing, the emotions of the Litanei and Entriickung come through, clear and piercingly. Schonberg's Op. io, as played by the admirable AmarHindemith Quartet and sung by Fraulein Huni, was one of the things that justified this festival of contemporary music.

Paul Hindemith's Quartet

SO was Paul Hindemith's Quartet. This work, for me, was one of the surprises; the name did not make me expect anything in particular. I knew of Hindemith as the man whoc plays the violin in the string combinationr which goes under his name, but not as a composer. His quartet introduced what amounts -to a new musical personality.

Rooted firmly in the classical past, this work of Hindemith's is yet essentially contemporary and original; it blossoms and fruits, so to speak, in the present. His technical framework is a development, a logical extension of the old framework. He does not, like Bartok, make a violent break with the past; he prefers to carry the traditional argument a step further. Listening to Hindemith's Quartet one is made aware that it has been written by someone who knows all there is to be known about stringe quartets from the inside, the player's point of' view; it is full of an ingenuity that makes the best of all the given material. But what is more remarkable and much more important is the fact that it is full of the most beautiful invention. It abounds with new, surprising themes and melodies; and the writing of the parts, which move with a fine independence, is rich and subtle. Altogether, it is a highly admirable work.

The Bartok violin sonata is a very different piece of music. Bartok, as I have said before, does not attempt to carry the old argument a step further; he breaks violently with the past. His harmonic system is based on no known, accepted relations. At his weakest—in many of his piano pieces, for example—he uses his "unrelated sonorities" merely to make a disagreeable barbaric noise. But at his best, as in the violin sonata, he succeeds in producing new and beautiful effects of energy and passion.

Of Bloch, I find it rather hard to speak. He is obviously a good musician and a serious artist who aspires towards the grand and the noble—a laudable aspiration in these days when so many of us do our best to make of art a music-hall festival. And yet, somehow, his music does not give me complete satisfaction. The tragic emotions of his "Schelomo," which ought to be so fine, are somehow clothed and, as it were, rank. There is a sort of emotional impurity about it all, very difficult to describe but which nevertheless prevents the work from achieving the greatness at which it aims.

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One has the impression that Bloch derives his idea of greatness, not from Michelangelo or Beethoven in the original, but from M. Roman Rolland's portraits of these artists—portraits which all those who have stood among the Medici tombs at Florence or have listened to one Finale of Op. 131 will know to be singularly inadequate as representations of greatness. Bloch's violin sonata is altogether a finer work; it would be completely admirable if it were not for a trace of the clothed theatrical impurity of emotion which spoils "Schelomo."

And what of the other musicians represented at Salzburg? What of the common dwellings of the city from among which the monuments stood grandly out? There were the young Frenchmen with their fatiguing wit and their thin subject matter; and there was the later Stravinsky, removed from his native seriousness and force by too long a sojourn in Paris. There were the Spaniards; De Falla at his most brilliant, making one forget the dreary composer of the "The Gardens of Aranjuez;" Salazar sophisticating luxuriantly round the full-blooded vulgarity of a dance tune. There were the English; Bliss, empty and rather pretentious; Box, badly represented by romantic songs that didn't come off; Holst in some pure archaistic settings of old religious work,

There were the Austrians; Wellesz, as earnestly modern and boring as a secondrate exhibitor at the Salon des Independents; Webern who might be quite good, but whose quartet performed at Salzburg was written down to such an infinite pianissimo as to be completely inaudible; Reti, richly exotic; Marx, romantic; with others, none of them exceptionally interesting. There were the Germans; mathematically intellectual Busoni was almost the only good one, except Hindemith, represented. Hungary contributed, besides the sonata of Bartok, the beautifully limpid Serenade by Kodaly. There were various Czechs who contributed songs of an interesting wildness. There was Wittern Pijper from Amsterdam, whose violin sonata sounded as though it had been written for performance in a very high class cinema, so refined was it and so bottomlessly commonplace,

There were also several Scandinavian composers, whose works I was unable to hear as I had previously been driven from the concert hall by the portentiously illwritten and pretentious violin sonata of Mr. Leo Sowerby of New York. Two movements of it were enough for me. I left the building regardless of the Scandinavians who were to follow. Perhaps the Beethoven of the twentieth century lurked among that little band of Danes and Swedes—I missed hearing him! Who knows? But somehow, I feel pretty confident that I didn't miss very much.