In 1990, Michael P. Steinberg published an important book on the ideology of the Salzburg Festival (Steinberg, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890–1938, Ithaca, 1990). That interesting book had one major weakness: Steinberg's central analytical concept, “nationalist cosmopolitanism,” tended to submerge the ideology of the Salzburg Festival into the large stream of German nationalist ideology with cosmopolitan trappings, from its beginnings in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment up to and including Nazism. Steinberg's perspective draped the Salzburg Festival in a German nationalist garb and made it into the twin of the Bayreuth Festival. Now, Robert Kriechbaumer has published a book on a crucial period of the Salzburg Festival that has bearing on Steinberg's argument without actually taking issue with it. This period (1933–44) encompasses the most militant Austrianist period of the Festival, when it was made into an instrument to further the Ständestaat and to counter the Nazi German expropriation of Greater German history and culture, as well as the Nazi party.

First, it needs to be pointed out that Kriechbaumer is writing what he calls a “political history” of the Salzburg Festival in the given period. Where Steinberg delved into culture and ideology, taking a deep look into the content of programming and underlying ideas, Kriechbaumer's main perspective pertains to the position and use of the Festival in the conflicts between Germany and Austria, and the larger international setting of the 1930s, when it had a prominent public profile. The political perspective also includes conflicts between the central ministries in Vienna, and later in Berlin, and the local and regional authorities in Salzburg, as well as conflicts within the cultural sphere itself between high profile conductors and directors, and between these and the authorities. As in almost every book that deals with the Nazi period in Austrian history, there is also a lot of energy and space devoted to Vergangenheitsbewältigung (confronting the past). Kriechbaumer takes a close look at many composers, conductors, directors, singers, and actors and asks questions about their involvement with Nazi Germany. Sometimes these miniature biographies take over and break up the flow of the narrative, blurring the focus of the book. Nevertheless, I happen to appreciate these sections of the book—I do not think Austrian historiography can have enough of such self-questioning after the long period following 1945 when a blind eye was turned to these matters—even if the book as a whole would have benefited from trimming them. In any case, the sections on Richard Strauss, Clemens Krauss, and Wilhelm Furtwängler also seem highly relevant to the topic of the book, and the important role played by Arturo Toscanini in the Festival up to 1937 deserves every page it gets.

Toscanini's strong political positioning against Nazi Germany was an essential part of the Festival during its years of changing from a mainly German, Central European festival into the international and cosmopolitan festival known to subsequent history. Kriechbaumer describes this forced change of course (political measures from Nazi Germany reduced visitors from Germany drastically from one year to another) with numbers and statistics, and with an interesting look at the relationship between programming and the winning of large new groups of visitors foremost from Great Britain, the United States, and France, which soon compensated for the disappearance of the German audience. I found this to be, perhaps, the most interesting part of the book; it gave me a new understanding of the changes in profile of the Festival over time. The parts I found the least interesting are the extended sections on the international political history of the 1930s. To some degree, this context for the study is needed, but I doubt that it needs to take up quite so many pages. The study also implicitly begs for a follow up study examining the restarting of the Festival in 1945 and the following years; it would be interesting to learn more about its political role in the Austrianist hothouse of the late 1940's Second Republic.

What then is the bearing of Kriechbaumer's book on Steinberg's argument? Well, Kriechbaumer's close look at the period in question demonstrates that the Festival was indeed strongly colored by Austrian ideology; between 1933 and 1938, the Salzburg Festival was defined in opposition to Germany as it was during its founding phase in the last months of World War I (when it was linked to the “Austrian Idea” as propagated at this time by one of the founders of the Festival, Hugo von Hofmannsthal). The Festival was defined against the Bayreuth Festival, its German counterpart, and even set up against the geographically adjacent Obersalzberg of Hitler fame. Even more interesting is the persistence of a weak Austrianist strain during the Nazi period, when the head of the Festival, Clemens Krauss, with the aid of the Gauleiter in Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, worked to give the program an Austrian cultural profile. This work was finally halted in 1944 by Joseph Goebbels, who had been grinding his teeth over this development for some time and who cancelled the Festival in view of the declaration of total war. Nevertheless, the Austrianist position taken by the Festival organizers was nationally ambivalent. Although ambiguous and shifting over time, the Austrianist position was mainly that of “another and better Germany,” modeled on the Habsburg Empire and the multinational Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, an open and inclusive Great Germany that was defined against both the Prussian and the Nazi view of the Little German nation as closed and homogeneous. From this perspective, Steinberg's central concept of “nationalist cosmopolitanism” seems to gain new currency, even though his somewhat totalizing argument about the ideology of the Salzburg Festival would benefit from incorporating the type of sharp differences and shifts that appear in Kriechbaumer's close-up picture of the Festival.