The Legacies of the Salzburg Festival

Rising from the ruins of a post-1918 Austria shed of its monarchical leadership and much of its former territory, the Salzburg Festival acquired a symbolic authority during the First Austrian Republic that continues to ensure its privileged place in Austrian politics and culture to this day. At the core of this privileged place are two signature legacies that, while grounded in the festival's prewar history, fortified a particular agenda of the Second Austrian Republic in defining Austrian history and national identity in the decades following World War II. The first, as expressed in 1919 by the festival's most articulate cofounder, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is that with its Salzburg setting, the festival should be understood as situated in the “heart of the heart of Europe,” a place where the antitheses of Central European geography (German and Slavic, German and Italian), social class (commoner and elite), and aesthetic genre (dramatic theater and opera) encounter one another only to be dissolved through transcendence in an “organic unity.”Footnote ¹

The second is that, from 1933 to 1937, immediately prior to the annexation of Austria by the German Reich in 1938, Salzburg had become an international icon of resistance to National Socialism. With its defiance of German economic pressure via tourist restrictions (Tausend-Mark-Sperre), its rejection of Wilhelm Furtwängler in favor of the anti-Fascist conductor Arturo Toscanini, and its celebrity status as a destination for wealthy American, British, and European opponents of Hitler, the Salzburg Festival presented a picture of Austria different from the cheering post-Anschluss crowds of the Heldenplatz.Footnote ² Proclaimed shortly after the end of the war in April 1945, the Second Republic sought, internationally, to reconcile Cold War polarities through its neutrality and to bolster its case as the first victim of Nazism. Domestically, it sought to heal prewar political divisions and to reestablish the claim to high culture that many Austrians felt to be their country's greatest achievement. In this Second Republic, each legacy of the Salzburg Festival found its place.

As the founding narratives of the Second Republic slowly began to unravel in the 1970s, a process that culminated in the “Waldheim affair” of the mid 1980s, the Salzburg Festival also found itself confronted with challenges to its official history. Already in 1975, the Salzburg Germanist Walter Weiss noted in an influential essay that from conception to realization Hofmannsthal's Salzburg Festival “was not only a matter of a theatrical, aesthetic program.”Footnote ³ Not only had Hofmannsthal ascribed a political purpose to the festival centerpiece, the Jedermann play, when that drama had premiered in 1911, but as Weiss argued, the notion of a Salzburg Festival in which status oppositions and social disintegration were sublimated in a harmonious and unified whole was an import into the aesthetic sphere of ideas formulated by Othmar Spann, a pioneer political theorist of the Austrian Ständestaat.Footnote ⁴

So much for apolitical “organic unity.” In a more sustained polemic delivered in 1990, the American scholar Michael Steinberg directly challenged the claim of the Salzburg Festival as an anti-Bayreuth and a monument of Austrian resistance to Nazi Germany. The “meaning” of the Salzburg Festival, as he summarized it, was that “the drive to cultural totality and the resistance to fragmentation and ambiguity … emerges as the common denominator between the baroque and the fascist, between the Salzburg great world theater (the text and the historical process) and the political theater of the Nuremberg Rally of September 1934.”Footnote ⁵ The Salzburg Festival, Steinberg suggested, presented less a principled last stand against Nazism than a specifically Austrian incarnation of National Socialist aesthetics. Salzburg was Nuremberg, and to the extent that the Second Republic claimed the festival as a precursor to its own cultural policy and vision, it retraveled the road of Fascist aesthetics and politics.

It is a memorable conclusion, and in his preface to the paperback edition, Steinberg stood by it.Footnote ⁶ Given that he had situated a National Socialist Party event and the Salzburg Festival on a single trajectory, a career-defining claim that generated some spirited responses—and not only in Salzburg—there was no point in backing down. Yet, by telescoping the years between 1919 Salzburg and 1934 Nuremberg, Steinberg's formulation also raised some questions of historiography. As the late Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler observed, the book “does not distinguish clear stages of historical development.… The festivals of the Social Democrats would have provided a foil to Hofmannsthal's programme and at the same time supplied many surprising parallels.”Footnote ⁷ Or, to sharpen the point: 1919 is not 1934. And an approach to the Salzburg Festival as a festival event that emerges at an early postwar moment during what was, in Austria, “between 1918 and 1938 a pronounced festival culture” might yield a different picture of the Salzburg Festival and the First Republic than we are accustomed to seeing.Footnote ⁸

In what follows, I would like to develop this line of inquiry by examining the Salzburg Festival next to an Austrian festival that preceded it, one held in Vienna during May and June 1920. This festival, the Meisteraufführungen Wiener Musik (Virtuoso Performances of Viennese Music), was an event whose size and scope, as critics of the time noted, were unprecedented in the history of Viennese music.Footnote ⁹ Like its counterpart in Salzburg, this festival declared its purpose as a response to the cultural and political challenges facing Austria in the aftermath of World War I. Like the Salzburg Festival, it sought to present itself to domestic constituencies as a contemporary realization of a specifically “Austrian” heritage, while, internationally, it proposed to stake a coherent claim to the relevance of Austria within the global postwar order. But while both festivals shared a commitment to Austrian exceptionalism, each also expressed the distinct intellectual affinities and traditions of their respective founders. To be sure, neither festival lacked a “political” dimension. The case for the Salzburg Festival as an ideological construct has already been indicated. But the Virtuoso Performances itself proceeded according to a remarkably coherent intellectual agenda, based on the pedagogical principles of the music scholar Guido Adler, and represented the first large-scale cultural initiative of the postwar “red” Vienna government. Today, our view of the Austrian festival event as it emerged after 1918 is shaped not only by the post-1945 triumph of the Salzburg Festival, but by the fateful spectacle of staged mass political festivals during the 1930s. An examination of the Virtuoso Performances together with the Salzburg Festival suggests a different festival landscape in 1919: a contested festival landscape marked by private as well as public initiatives, by contrasting but equally respectful claims to honor the Austrian Catholic legacy, and by alternative visions of the relationship between Austrian culture and a potentially emerging Austrian national state.

Guido Adler and the 1919 Call for the “Vienna Music Festival”

The initial impetus, the design, and the rationale for the Virtuoso Performances came from Guido Adler. Successor to his former teacher Eduard Hanslick, whose chair in the Department of Art History and Musicology at the University of Vienna he assumed in 1898 and held until his retirement in 1927, Adler lived a life of extraordinary achievement in both musical scholarship and public advocacy for music. Measured against this achievement, Adler must be reckoned among the larger-than-life Austrian personalities whose influence and impact remain to be fully registered.Footnote ¹⁰ Born in 1855 in Eibenschütz/Ivančice, Moravia, a few years prior to his later friend Gustav Mahler, and Jewish, Adler cofounded the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft in 1884, publishing an essay in its inaugural issue that has recently been described as “signaling the establishment of musicology.”Footnote ¹¹ Less than a decade later, he founded the historical edition series Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich (Monuments of Fine Music in Austria), and in 1909, he organized the Third Congress of the Society of International Musicology held in Vienna. Indeed, Leon Botstein has fairly described Adler as “the key Viennese figure in music history during this period.”Footnote ¹² In a feuilleton beginning on page one of the Neue Freie Presse on 26 March 1919, an essay that preceded by several weeks the first published reflections of Hugo von Hofmannsthal on plans for a Salzburg Festival, Adler presented his call for a “Vienna Music Festival,” by remarking on the current crisis of the Austrian state. At present, he wrote, “Everything exists in uncertainty—politically, socially, economically, and culturally.”Footnote ¹³

To counter this uncertainty, Adler proposed a cultural initiative, a series of music festivals, and sought for it the endorsement of the Vienna Municipal Council. In what might have been a veiled reference to the activities of the Salzburger Festspielhaus-Gemeinde, of which he surely knew, Adler underscored the civic nature of the enterprise. “In such a situation to speak of festivals?” he asked, “Yes, spoken of openly and clearly, not secretly and hidden away, like many private discussions.”Footnote ¹⁴ Confronted by a crisis, and with the signing of the Treaty of St. Germain that would provide the international legal basis for the First Republic still five months away, Adler offered a response that recapitulated both his own biographical experience and that of so many other self-made men of his late-nineteenth-century Austrian generation. The Viennese public would find self-realization through devotion to cultural activity. “We cannot allow ourselves to languish,” he wrote, “we must keep working on ourselves—otherwise we will not get through the crisis.”Footnote ¹⁵ The Vienna Music Festival would be this self-conscious work undertaken by the public on itself, a music festival that would, pragmatically, serve as a source of income but, more important, raise local morale, as music had during the war, and use culture to strengthen international relations. Before the war, high Austrian music had linked all cultured nations, Adler argued, and its music had led the world to Vienna. Let it do so again.

In Wollen und Wirken, the brief memoir he published in 1935, Adler recalled that the Haydn Centennial Celebration he organized in 1909 had provided the model for the Vienna Music Festival he would propose a decade later.Footnote ¹⁶ That celebration, scheduled by Adler to coincide with the attendance of roughly five hundred registered conferencegoers in Vienna for the Third Congress of the International Society of Musicology, had been conceived as a program organized with Haydn at its focal point. Works by composers, regardless of their national origin, would be featured based on their stylistic affiliation with Viennese and Austrian music. The Vienna Music Festival would proceed similarly. Like the Haydn Celebration, the festival would derive its coherence from the unifying idea of Viennese and Austrian music. Again, Austrian composers would provide the primary reference point, much as did Haydn, for supplementary performances of international works with stylistic affiliations to Viennese and Austrian music. In planning for the Haydn Celebration, Adler had unsuccessfully argued that it should serve as the inaugural event in a new series of recurring festivals in Vienna. Both international and grounded in musical scholarship, the 1920 Vienna Music Festival would make good on that earlier proposal.Footnote ¹⁷ For the future Vienna festivals, as the Adler of 1919 noted by way of example, “a Beethoven–Schubert festival could incorporate a program of German Gesellschaftslieder (sixteenth century) … a Mahler–Wolf festival could integrate the lavish works of the polychoral schools of the seventeenth century … Mahler's Eighth Symphony possesses an internal connection here.…”Footnote ¹⁸ Thus, at the everyday level, the Vienna Music Festival would highlight specifically Austrian composers in order to connect visitors with, as Adler said, the “genius loci” of Vienna.Footnote ¹⁹ At the level of scholarship, the event would affirm the national framework of Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, via festival performances, and champion the centrality of Viennese and Austrian achievements in music.

The Austrian Festival Mission in Vienna and Salzburg

“The festival drama, if it earns its name, is propaganda literature,” writes Peter von Matt.Footnote ²⁰ Such a declaration seems tailor-made to fit the contribution of Hugo von Hofmannsthal to the Salzburg Festival. For in the essays he wrote in support of the festival, Hofmannsthal sketched an especially compelling definition of the festival place in which he intended his own dramas, among other apposite works, to be performed. From that standpoint, the range and intensity of the scholarly engagement with Hofmannsthal's festival conception pay tribute to the power of his original synthesis.Footnote ²¹ As Matt argues, however, definitions such as those provided by Hofmannsthal must by necessity be powerfully articulated because the purpose of festival activities is to confirm and consolidate the identity of a group by temporarily intensifying an experience of togetherness. Here, the size of the group plays a decisive role. Whereas the well-established small group (family, village, youth gang, association) swiftly achieves self-confirmation in a face-to-face encounter, and thus requires minimal self-reflection, the less uniform large group requires self-reflective testimonies to its “own qualities, own particularity specialness, and own necessity” to achieve the festival purpose. Through the festival activities, as Matt puts it, the group effectively issues a three-part declaration: “this we were / this we are / this we want to be.”Footnote ²²

For Hofmannsthal, the three-part declaration he envisioned for the Salzburg Festival was inseparable from his own experience of World War I. In response to the wartime crisis, Hofmannsthal had devoted increasing energy to his homeland, not only in a succession of projects, most notably the patriotic book series Österreichische Bibliothek (1915–17), but also in a sequence of essayistic reflections on Austria, its cultural forms, its personalities, and its purpose in history. The common intellectual denominator of these reflections was what Hofmannsthal had labeled the “Austrian idea.” According to this idea, Habsburg Austria embodied the possibility of various nationalities living together in a shared home, and had created a culture that expressed this idea.Footnote ²³ With the disintegration of Habsburg state and geography, the old Austrian idea was finished.Footnote ²⁴ In his plan for the Salzburg Festival, however, Hofmannsthal repurposed that idea by joining to it two key concepts he adopted from the Austrian literary scholar Josef Nadler. One, Salzburg would now occupy for contemporary Austria and Bavaria the mediating role formerly occupied by “Austria” within the Habsburg lands. Two, the aesthetic style most faithful to the festival occasion—because it most fully expressed the landscape, “primal ethnic drive,” and history of the southern German and Austrian region—emerged as the Catholic baroque.Footnote ²⁵ For Hofmannsthal, the Salzburg Festival would thus stay true to the ancient Austrian inheritance (“this we were”), furnish the basis for a new Austria (“this we are”), but also show the place of Austria in German culture (“this we will be”).

Like the Salzburg Festival, where for Hofmannsthal the concept of the baroque would fuse an aesthetic to a (Bavarian and Austrian) regional history, Guido Adler foresaw the Vienna Music Festival as an event in which an affinity between music and location would resonate. But for Adler, his own suggestion that the festival experience of visitors would be elevated by the Viennese genius loci, or “spirit of the place,” meant little more than that the location would be an added incentive to attend. It resembles the empty upbeat observation he made in 1890, while commenting for the Prague daily Bohemia on the proposal to build a Mozart-Festspielhaus on the Mönchsberg in Salzburg, when he pointed to its rustling stands of pine and beech and remarked that “art and music are united there.”Footnote ²⁶ In his feuilleton, Adler did characterize Vienna as a “place of music,” but such catchphrases were more often elaborated by others than by Adler. For example, in the 1921 essay “Wien als Musikstadt,” his former student Egon Wellesz ascribed the significance of Vienna as a music city to its location in terms that recall those Hofmannsthal had used for Salzburg. “The most diverse influences operate upon the city, the Slavic from the north, Hungarian and Polish from the east, Italian and Wendish from the south.… There arises no cheap cosmopolitanism, but a genuine culture with a certain pull toward the conservative.”Footnote ²⁷ Like rustling pine branches and beech trees, however, such details were evocative generalities. Most often, Adler himself seems to have avoided such speculative formulations.

Set against the rousing but conceptually empty “spirit of the place” invoked by Adler, the relationship of Salzburg to the festival program could scarcely have been more different. As described by Hofmannsthal and realized by Max Reinhardt, Salzburg represents a convergence of aesthetic, cultural, and political elements that elevates landscape to the level of a performative agent virtually on equal footing with the festival works. Indeed, the first Salzburg staging of Hofmannsthal's Jedermann by Max Reinhardt in 1920 already proclaimed a transformation of the festival space that made theater and city interchangeable. As the conservative Catholic critic Joseph Lux observed in his review of this performance, “Things play along here that no theater offers. Church bells play along, the mighty brass ensembles, the powerful brass choirs, the cool and clear cathedral facade, the square with its well-balanced spatial relationships.…”Footnote ²⁸ With such effects, we approach the “ideology of the baroque” that Michael Steinberg has argued figured so decisively in the festival's founding. This understanding of the festival work in relationship to the national space is surely not one Adler would have shared. True, the Vienna Music Festival would highlight the Austrian and Viennese musical traditions by underscoring their centrality. But this centrality derived its significance from the juxtaposition of one musical form to another. The polychoral schools of the seventeenth century would enrich the understanding of Mahler's Eighth Symphony—and vice versa. On the other hand, for all his differences with Hofmannsthal regarding the relationship between location and festival work, Adler, too, would likely have seen his festival proposal as the outcome of his own thinking about musicology and the history of music.

This thinking began in the late 1870s, in the wake of Adler's brief flirtation with a career in law. It was powerfully shaped, on the one hand, by his encounter with Eduard Hanslick at the University of Vienna, and on the other, by a growing “scientificity” of discourse in all fields of intellectual inquiry. In Hanslick, Adler found a mentor whose advocacy for scientific inquiry acknowledged the institutional power of this growing scientificity, even as Hanslick continued to warn of the “excesses” of science and preserved in his music criticism an aesthetic of the beautiful.Footnote ²⁹ Heeding none of these warnings, and with little affinity for traditional aesthetics, Adler looked directly to the natural sciences as a model on which to establish music as a distinct field of study. As he had described the future undertaking of musicology in his landmark 1885 essay “The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology,” “the essential fact to be remembered is the analogy between art-historical methods and the methods of the natural sciences.”Footnote ³⁰

Gustav Mahler called his friend by the nickname “Science,” at least privately.Footnote ³¹ Musicology, Adler argued, should become scientific by studying the process of music's becoming—that is, by treating music as a historical object.Footnote ³² For the historicist Adler, the critical analytic unit in this process—critical because it was accessible to the musicologist—was “style.” By defining and differentiating forms of “style” in music, the musicologist would not give priority to the fulfillment of certain formal criteria, as had Hanslick, but rather register the first appearance of these criteria in the development of music.Footnote ³³ The term “style,” which Adler defined as the “ideational aggregation of all the elements that constitute an artwork, an art school, an artist identity, a type of art, and an originality of art,” represented the coherent assembly of criteria the musicologist had identified.Footnote ³⁴ By charting the first appearance of each style, the musicologist could scientifically record the development of music and specify the interrelation of its meaningful criteria.

The Festival Program as Theory of History

The Vienna Music Festival Adler proposed in 1919 might be characterized as a performance of this historicist theory. Viewed from this standpoint, the potential festival program—the Beethoven–Schubert festival might incorporate sixteenth-century German Gesellschaftslieder, or a festival devoted to Christoph Willibald Gluck that included works from the Italian opera school as cultivated in seventeenth-century Vienna—would constitute a pedagogical demonstration of a “scientifically” grounded relationship between musical styles. From such historical-theoretical presuppositions, a critical relativism toward modern music would also follow, and Adler was known as a vigorous and well-connected advocate of the younger generation of composers in Vienna.Footnote ³⁵ After all, emerging features in modern music might eventually be recognized as constituting a “style.” Or, as he put it in his 1898 inaugural academic address, the historian of music has “the duty to meet the works of contemporary artists with affection and respect, and not to smother them through unbefitting comparisons with works of the past.”Footnote ³⁶ In addition to its provenance in the nineteenth-century discourse of science, Adler's historicist approach is also complexly grounded in Habsburg Austria.Footnote ³⁷ Himself a loyal Habsburg subject, Adler devoted a “test volume” of what would later become Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich to the musical compositions of the Habsburg rulers Ferdinand III, Leopold I, and Joseph I, the first scholarly documentation of the monarchical contribution to Austrian musical history.Footnote ³⁸ Of course, this historicism did not actually depend on a monarchial presence. Whereas, in 1904, Adler could endorse an initiative for new music in Vienna in a Neue Freie Presse feuilleton by referring to the reverence of the Viennese for the “hallowed tradition of classical art and the ancestral affection for the musical ruling house of Austria, to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven,” in 1919 he could recite the same list but omit the “musical ruling house.”Footnote ³⁹

For the Salzburg Festival, history and tradition would also furnish the context for the performance and reception of festival works. These, on the view of Hofmannsthal, would be conveyed by the successful realization of the baroque festival idea. With Jedermann, and particularly the “hyperbaroque” Das Salzburger große Welttheater (1922), which Hofmannsthal conceived with a specific cast in mind for the Kollegienkirche in Salzburg and discussed with Max Reinhart at every stage, Hofmannsthal delivered two works designed to resonate with his own vision for the Salzburg Festival.Footnote ⁴⁰ But whereas Adler understood the historicist aesthetic behind the Vienna Music Festival as a means to frame distinct moments in the evolution of musical style up to the present, for Hofmannsthal, the baroque aesthetic would be plucked from the past and resituated by the festival in the present. Far from a variable historical metric, the baroque represented a stable aesthetic norm whose surface changed through history, even as the norm remained intact. It is on the basis of such an understanding of the baroque, for example, that Hofmannsthal justified the decision to add Don Giovanni to the festival program. As he explained in his signed 1921 essay “Festspiele in Salzburg,” the pairing of the Mozart opera with a return of his Jedermann drama made sense because of their mutual affinity. “The two works are thoroughly related,” he argued, “because both are a true theater, not born from rhetoric, not from the psychological, but from ‘the primal drive that wants to see the superhuman made palpable und holds a deep abhorrence for formless abstraction.’”Footnote ⁴¹

With respect to the pervasiveness of this “baroque” idea following World War I, Roger Bauer once observed that at the time it was widely understood that “the way back to the baroque leads through Wagner.”Footnote ⁴² And surely, the Wagnerian project of reviving a traditional folk community through the total work of art is central to the original vision of the Salzburg Festival. But as has become clear, however, in the nearly forty years since Bauer's observation, where Vienna is concerned, so much of the local cultural energy and artistic modernism leads through Wagner.Footnote ⁴³ The Vienna Music Festival proposed by Guido Adler, no less than the Salzburg Festival, is grounded in a Wagnerian festival idea.Footnote ⁴⁴ Like the Wagnerian Festival, these festivals are to be distinguished from composer anniversaries. After all, there had been a long tradition of commemorating single, nationally oriented figures in Habsburg Austria, and the First Republic also marked a number of such anniversaries—from the 1922 Vienna Schubert Celebration, to the Beethoven and Schubert centenaries of 1927 and 1928, and the Liszt and Bruckner events in 1936. Unlike Bayreuth, Salzburg, and the proposed Vienna Music Festival, anniversary events are not organized to be consistent with a cultural-ideological agenda. In other words, anniversary celebrations of Schubert, Beethoven, or any other single figure are, in principle, limited to salient dates, and though they may serve political purposes of the moment, these celebrations are not designed to continue. Indeed, as Hofmannsthal always insisted, Salzburg is not a Mozart Festival. By contrast, the festival in the Wagnerian sense is expressly designed to recur. It should reinforce and sustain its original purpose, and thus affirm the festival's “this we are” and “this we want to be.” “To each festival,” Adler wrote in 1919, “we could give a unified character, a basic physiognomy, a stylistic coherence.” As he stressed, “we need not confine ourselves to repetition like, for example, the Bayreuth Festival,” a view that echoed Hofmannsthal's characterization of Salzburg, delivered anonymously in 1919: “Bayreuth would remain as it is, but it serves a great artist. Salzburg wants to serve the classical possession of a nation.”Footnote ⁴⁵

For the festival to perform its task of confirming and consolidating the identity of a group by temporarily intensifying an experience of togetherness, the festival work must stand in a coherent relationship to the purpose of the festival event. The festival drama, as Matt observes, is “propaganda literature.” Measured by this standard, it is not immediately clear how the works foreseen by Guido Adler for the Vienna Music Festival could be situated within a unified festival purpose. One potential unifying element, the city of Vienna, had been reduced to a charming if undifferentiated backdrop, while the historicist approach to musicology would actually seem at cross purposes with the cultural-ideological festival purpose. By 1919, however, Adler's historicist approach to musical style had changed. Broadly put, the historicism of musical styles that had once been advanced as a value-free principle of scientific investigation had yielded to an approach in which such styles still occupied a central place, but where the Vienna Classical School was now elevated as a fundamental reference point for these styles. This is apparent to anyone who opens the entry on “The Vienna Classical School,” written by Adler himself, in the Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, the standard reference text he edited in 1924. There, Adler introduces his subject with the sweeping premise that now framed his thinking. “The Viennese Classical School is recognized by all cultural nations in the entire musical world as the embodiment of musical achievement; English researchers have described it as the ‘classical school par excellence’ and the ‘most fertile School in the world.’”Footnote ⁴⁶

Adler elaborated this position programmatically throughout the 1920s, most fully, perhaps, in a series of writings that appeared in The Musical Quarterly.Footnote ⁴⁷ Thus, in his 1925 essay “Internationalism in Music,” a title that alludes to the essay's attempt to distinguish a core shared international musical inheritance from the less essential elements of various national musical traditions, Adler summarizes the long march of music history by concluding that “the strongest power of unification was manifested by the instrumental music of the Vienna Classical School, which reached the highest pitch of universality.”Footnote ⁴⁸ If, as Adler argued here, the Vienna Classical School aggregated the entire musical-cultural inheritance of the continent, then every other musical style could be placed in relationship to it. This is the organizing idea behind the Vienna Music Festival, and it also represents the late-career thinking of Guido Adler. In justifying Viennese universality, he wrote, “The international predominance of the Vienna School is based on its fundamental characteristics: symmetrical periodization, unification of homophonic and polyphonic style, melodic emotional appeal, rhythmic proportionality, clear harmonic modulation, stable tonality,” and the list continued.Footnote ⁴⁹ From one standpoint, Adler's “Vienna Classical School” and the “baroque” of Hofmannsthal could be said to serve a similar function. Each represented the conceptual premise that secured the irreplaceably “Austrian” character of the festival. Yet, the “Austria,” to which the adjective “Austrian” referred in the two festival conceptions, was not the same. For Hofmannsthal, “Austrian” marked a cultural legacy, a concept that extended across national boundaries to include Bavaria. For Adler, by contrast, what was “Austrian” fell within the national boundaries of Austria set following World War I.

The Vienna Music Festival—Presented by the Social Democratic Kunststelle

Considering the commitment of Guido Adler to a methodological historicism, it might be supposed that his Vienna Music Festival would not only resist ideological positioning but be impervious to politics. In fact, it is one of the ironies of the 1920 festival, the sole realization of Adler's proposed annual event, that it could hardly be situated more squarely in the party and cultural politics of the early First Austrian Republic. For though Adler had auditioned with the Vienna Municipal Council for the role of festival organizer in February 1919, the political composition and posture of that body changed soon thereafter. With the May 1919 elections, Vienna returned a majority Socialist slate of candidates to its Municipal Council—the beginning of the “Red Vienna” period. As part of its agenda for reform, in November 1919, the council established the Verein sozialdemokratische Kunststelle (Social Democratic Cultural Agency Association). The largest of five such Kunststellen, the Social Democratic Kunststelle supported participating local cultural institutions by increasing working-class access to these institutions through reduced-price theater and concert tickets.Footnote ⁵⁰ Shortly thereafter, in February 1920, the Council approved Adler's original festival proposal, appointing David Josef Bach, the director of the Social Democratic Kunststelle, as its artistic and administrative director.Footnote ⁵¹ With Bach holding the position Adler had once envisioned for himself, the first Vienna Music Festival, renamed Meisteraufführungen Wiener Musik, ran in a program of just under three weeks, from 26 May to 13 June 1920.

For the Virtuoso Performances, Bach assembled a program whose massive scope and scale recalled the Wagnerian festival purpose of creating an event that would experientially overwhelm its audience. Hofmannsthal, who shared with Bach the birth year of 1874 and studies at the Akademisches Gymnasium, once defended his rejection of Vienna as a festival location by arguing that the large city is the place of distraction, whereas the festival performance requires focus.Footnote ⁵² With performances of works by 130 composers under 36 different conductors in 19 days, the Virtuoso Performances generated a festival focus that commanded the attention of Vienna and staked a claim for its musical authority. For such a monumental undertaking, Bach's credentials were impeccable. In December 1905, he had inaugurated the Viennese Workers' Symphony Concerts (Arbeiter-Sinfoniekonzerte) in the Großer Musikvereinssaal, a concert series that persevered from monarchy to republic with 228 programs until 1934. These performances have acquired a mythical character in subsequent history, because they illustrate the remarkable position of early Viennese Socialism that, among other amenities, workers needed to acquire elite culture in order to become full human beings. Bach stood fully behind this position, and, in his role as feuilleton editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung after 1918 and via his leadership of the Kunststelle and other activities, he owns much of the responsibility for its implementation. Largely due to the efforts of Bach, moreover, music occupied a special place in Socialist culture in Vienna. As Bach proudly noted, worker education took place in Vienna initially through music, whereas in Germany the Social Democratic movement had embraced the naturalist theater, for example, in the Freie Volksbühne in Berlin, as the instrument of working-class education.Footnote ⁵³

To the question of which cultural products would best educate workers in Vienna, the Virtuoso Performances presented the answer that the Workers' Symphony Concerts increasingly delivered in the postwar years. During the prewar years, these concerts had been guided by a programming intent that sought to make available to working-class audiences a traditional classical musical repertory, such as symphonies by Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Mozart.Footnote ⁵⁴ That intent changed along with postwar Vienna, as the narrower focus on the traditional repertory gave way to an expanded effort to provide workers access to avant-garde composers,Footnote ⁵⁵ and vice versa. In 1922, for example, Bach invited Anton Webern to assume direction of the Workers' Symphony Concerts, and two years later he asked him to lead the Singverein der Sozialdemokratischen Kunststelle (Social Democratic Choral Society). Throughout the 1920s, the Workers' Symphony Concerts featured works by composers associated with musical modernism—from Zoltán Kodály to Ernst Křenek, Paul Amadeus Pisk to Max Reger. A program guide from the 1930–31 concert season underscored this achievement, noting that the Workers' Symphony Concerts had presented the Vienna or world premieres of compositions by “Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Frederic Delius, Hanns Eisler, Artur Honegger, Leoš Janáček, Hanns Jelinek … and Arnold Schönberg.”Footnote ⁵⁶

From this standpoint, it might be said that the Virtuoso Performances constitutes an early postwar experiment in combining Workers' Symphony Concerts, Kunststelle cultural politics, and conventional Viennese concertgoing. Indeed, the festival did strike a balance between a time-tested classical repertory and modernist compositions. Thus, the frequently performed Beethoven Ninth and Brahms Second Symphony might be seen as offset by Zemlinsky's Vier Gesänge, op. 13, whose premiere at the famous 1913 Skandalkonzert had ended so abruptly, and Schönberg's similarly controversial Gurrelieder, which was performed for the first time since its 1913 premiere. Like the Workers' Symphony Concerts as well, the Virtuoso Performances highlighted works of canonic composers that featured a men's chorus, particularly by Franz Schubert, and popular works by Fritz Kreisler, Johann Strauss Jr., and Franz von Suppé were included.Footnote ⁵⁷

At the same time, the Virtuoso Performances provide what may be the clearest glimpse we have into the cultural-educational philosophy of David Josef Bach as manifested in his music programming. This is because whereas the Social Democratic Kunststelle essentially served as a ticket broker between cultural institutions and Socialist audiences, Bach and his board determined the program for the Virtuoso Performances (and the Workers' Symphony Concerts). Indeed, a few years later, Karl Kraus placed the Kunststelle's ticket brokering at the center of his anti-Kunststelle polemic, charging that selling tickets simply “kept alive a sham culture ripe for ruin instead of destroying it.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Backed by a theater audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands, he argued, the Kunststelle had failed to seize the chance to become its own artistic director (Intendant), opting to reduce itself to the role of cashier.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Virtuoso Performances marked an occasion when the Kunststelle actually did serve as its own artistic director and, in its programming, realized its own pedagogical agenda.

That pedagogical agenda was guided by the historicist musicological presuppositions of Guido Adler. All the music scheduled for the festival, for example, bore a direct relationship to Austria or to the Vienna Classical School, while a striking number of concerts devoted to early music performed on historical instruments attested to the centrality of the historical approach.Footnote ⁶⁰ And while Adler had largely withdrawn from the festival enterprise, his former students now occupied those positions that, with David Josef Bach, most powerfully shaped Kunststelle music programming. Not only Anton Webern, but Arbeiter-Zeitung music critic and composer Paul Amadeus Pisk, whom Werner Jank has described as having the “most influence on the workers music movement in the First Republic,” had written their doctoral dissertations with Adler at the Institute for Music History at the University of Vienna.Footnote ⁶¹ Erwin Stein, another student of Adler, left after seven semesters without completing his degree but was recruited by Bach to direct Workers' Symphony Concerts.Footnote ⁶² In retrospect, scholars have explained Bach's efforts to present works of musical modernity to worker audiences by stressing his friendship with Arnold Schönberg.Footnote ⁶³ But the Social Democratic Kunststelle was a virtual fifth column of Adler students trained to see musical forms in historicist terms. The presence of these students partly explains why postwar Workers' Symphony Concerts featured a rich program of modern music, yet little music devoted to the topic of labor itself. Historically, modern music and a Wagnerian ideal of forging a community through the performance event, not compositions celebrating worker solidarity, constituted the progressive element. To the extent that Adler's students were also students of Schönberg, it generally happened that, as in the case of Stein, they were referred by Adler to Schönberg because Adler believed that the study of music history required technical skill in music composition. The road of young musical talent ran from Adler to Schönberg, not in the opposite direction.Footnote ⁶⁴

Though not every event scheduled for the Virtuoso Performances can be fairly, or entirely, ascribed to the intellectual authority of Guido Adler, the program expressed a remarkable convergence with his particular conception of musical history. Church music, for example, a tradition Adler valorized both in his own research and in his reckoning of music history, occupied a prominent place in the program offerings.Footnote ⁶⁵ Local churches, including St. Stephen's Cathedral, Maria am Gestade, the Minoritenkirche, and the Peterskirche, were also engaged as performance locations, even as the denunciation of the church and clerical power belonged to the talking points of Social Democratic speeches.Footnote ⁶⁶ For a daylong program of church music at the Klosterneuburg Abbey, a special excursion train was arranged. Once delivered, visitors listened to the “Missa ‘Lauda Sion,’” op. 22, by Max Springer, one of whose highlights was the abbey organ; received a tour accompanied by fanfares from the Thirty Years' War; and, during an afternoon concert performance at St. Martins Church, heard a selection of period sacred compositions, including works from the age of classic Renaissance polyphony.Footnote ⁶⁷ As the Catholic daily the Reichspost summarized the occasion on its front page, it was “truly a beautiful, solemn, and impressive day … may other such days of liturgical, artistic elevation follow elsewhere.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In its own review, the Arbeiter-Zeitung, likewise, unreservedly upheld the relevance of the concert, affirming that church music “is intimately linked to music's historical process.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Part of the Virtuoso Performances, such religious programming was indistinguishable from what the Christian Social Kunststelle of Hans Brečka might present. Indeed, one of the first events the Christian Social Kunststelle sponsored in early 1920 was a concert on the abbey organ at Klosterneuburg.Footnote ⁷⁰

The Virtuoso Performances presented a wide-ranging series of church music concerts—from Gregorian chorus to Johann Joseph Fux to Vinzenz Goller, and this program earned the respect of the Catholic cultural establishment. In the memorial volume dedicated to Virtuoso Performances, for example, the leader of the Catholic revival and cultural hardliner Richard Kralik celebrated the achievements of the festival. Kralik had expressed on more than one occasion the kind of warm feelings toward David Josef Bach he would never show toward Hugo von Hofmannsthal.Footnote ⁷¹ In his essay “Moderne Musik und alte Tradition,” however, Kralik specifically endorsed the programming approach of Bach and his colleagues. Modern music, Kralik argued, derived its validity from its place in the historical tradition. “The historian,” he wrote, “is not interested whether the music is better, but how it is related to the musical schools.”Footnote ⁷² Guido Adler would not have put it much differently. Kralik was not the only Catholic intellectual to be inspired in equal part by the Virtuoso Performances and the Salzburg Festival. In 1923, the director of the Christian Social Kunststelle, Hans Brečka, and Burgtheater director Franz Herterich cofounded the Mariazeller Festspiele, an event conceived as drawing upon a Catholic and alpine Austrian tradition of religious festivals, an initiative that would run until 1925.Footnote ⁷³

The place that the Virtuoso Performances accorded church music and notable sites in the European Catholic tradition, such as the pilgrimage site Klosterneuburg monastery, highlights a generally undervalued aspect of the postwar context in which the Salzburg Festival and the Virtuoso Performances acquired their shape. This local Austrian Catholic culture, as scholars have recently shown, entailed a far greater differentiation than had been previously recognized.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Salzburg Festival certainly represents a single—albeit historically and critically privileged—manifestation of this culture. At the same time, however, Socialist cultural policy in Vienna itself also sought to acknowledge Catholic social and religious practices. In view of the historicist principles that guided programming of the Virtuoso Performances, more can be said of this acknowledgment than that it derives from an “accommodation with ‘Catholic’ cultural forms … enshrined in the Socialist party principle that considers religion a wholly private affair,” or from an acceptance of such forms based on their popularity.Footnote ⁷⁵ Rather, the festival engagement with church music suggests that the Social Democratic Kunststelle granted its approval to such music based on an Adlerian recognition of its significance in the history of music development.

The Salzburg Festival Revisited

Today, the Salzburg Festival seems to have made peace with its symbolic authority and its legacies. With a schedule of annual performances in late July and August, it is the institutional inspiration for the recurring festival as transnational event, where the performance commodity is the attraction, and the Salzburg Festival can claim to have directly influenced the creation of dozens of “new Salzburgs,” from the Edinburgh International Festival to the Chamber Music Festival in Marlboro.Footnote ⁷⁶ Testifying to its privileged place in Austria, the festival is indemnified by the 1950 “Festival Fund Act” (Festspielfondsgesetz), which ensures that unlike other distinguished Austrian institutions, such as the Vienna Burgtheater, the public is obligated to finance any deficits it incurs. And while the critical reckonings of several decades ago were mocked as long overdue at the time, they look remarkably prescient when set next to the current defensive public posture of other Austrian cultural institutions, including the Vienna State Opera but most notably the Vienna Philharmonic.Footnote ⁷⁷

Of course, scandals are inseparable from the Salzburg Festival; yet the festival also tries to show that it can provoke itself, as expressed by the title of Peter von Matt's 2012 Festival Inaugural Address, “Art, Extravagance, and Justice.”Footnote ⁷⁸ However, with the exception of Austrian President Thomas Klestil's 1999 Inaugural Address, in which, following his invocation of the festival's legacy as an Austrian refuge from Nazi Germany, he pronounced the purpose of festivals to be a “sanatorium of the soul”—a reassertion of Hofmannsthal's disgraced “organic unity” thesis—few of these scandals have crossed the Austrian border.Footnote ⁷⁹ These days, the erstwhile bête noire Michael Steinberg is even affirmatively featured in the history section of the official festival Web site.Footnote ⁸⁰ Indeed, all appears settled, as the post-1945 project of Austria as a “culture nation” that would both help to consolidate an inchoate national identity and pay tribute to a yearning for lost grandeur has found its apotheosis in Salzburg.Footnote ⁸¹

Yet, the hard-won settlement surrounding the Salzburg Festival has come at a price. This price is paid not only in the (false) retrospective picture of a First Republic Austria, in which Salzburg matches the cultural leadership of Vienna while surpassing it in innovation, but also in an underestimation of the competing visions for post-1918 Austrian culture and in the historical consideration of postwar Austrian cultural policy within a broader European context. With respect to the latter historical consideration, for example, it might be asked: To what extent the highly Austrocentric focus on the Salzburg Festival has hindered an understanding of Austria's contribution to the emerging post-1918 European trend to mobilize culture as a vehicle for foreign policy?Footnote ⁸² With respect to the critical evaluation of the postwar Austrian cultural elite, of course, it has long been recognized that scholars have overstated the originality, innovation, and entrepreneurial spirit of Salzburg Festival cofounders Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt.Footnote ⁸³ At its most benign, this limited focus on Hofmannsthal, Reinhardt, and the Salzburg Festival has deepened our understanding of Hofmannsthal and Austria, and provided a robust context in which to frame postwar Austrian history and culture. Less benignly, this limited focus has obscured shared premises, local cultural patterns, and other historical continuities that extend from the prewar years into the First Republic. The essay title, “Die Salzburger Idee: Das erste international Musikfest nach dem ersten Weltkrieg,” may stand here for many such formulations.Footnote ⁸⁴

It is, in some sense, a tribute to Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his masterful promotion of the event that the impression persists that the Salzburg Festival is the only representation of cultural Austria. But surely other forces have contributed to this impression. Post-1918 literature set in Vienna, for example, did its part to suggest that the former Habsburg capital was populated by profiteers, petty criminals, fallen women, and desperate ex-officers, and wrecked by the speculations of foreign capital. Indeed, as Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler has shown, writers of all political conviction, in both serious and popular literature, shared this predominantly dark, virtually postapocalyptic picture of postwar Vienna.Footnote ⁸⁵ In the face of such desperate urban nightmares, the optimistic vision of Guido Adler is all the more difficult to register. But the classic enlightened Jewish liberalism of the Austrian Adler was both robust and resilient. It survived the breakdown of liberal Austrian society in the 1880s and the 1890s, and it also survived the end of Habsburg Austria.

For Adler, the Vienna Music Festival, and Vienna itself, would enable Austria to assert a new leadership role in the postwar international order. Adler himself cited the success of Vienna in presenting itself to an international public at two events, in 1892 and 1909, which drew visitors “not only from Europe, but from America.” Attendees at subsequent music conferences in London in 1911, and in 1914 in Paris, reported that these events were “but a shadow of what we experienced in Vienna.”Footnote ⁸⁶ An annual Vienna Music Festival would thus reconnect Vienna to a legacy that the war had not destroyed. That legacy of Vienna as the leading global site for international conventions and meetings, continues to the present.Footnote ⁸⁷ With the Salzburg Festival, Hofmannsthal also sought to connect to the national space of Austria and, via the Catholic baroque, to stake a claim for its relevance in the global postwar order. That this “Austria” was not isomorphic with the ethnic, political, and historical reality of the country, as it then existed, remains one of the most problematic aspects of the festival's origins. Still, in a context where the “Salzburg mythology” is sometimes accused of leading back to “medieval wholeness and the baroque unity of Catholicism,” it should also be noted that the vision of the Salzburg Festival, like that of the Vienna Music Festival, was to be both forward-looking and international.Footnote ⁸⁸

The cultural agenda of Red Vienna is, at least in the early postwar years, not nearly as confrontational as is sometimes presented in the Vienna–Salzburg schema. But as the 1920s advanced, that changed. One reason is that the affirmative attitude toward the classical bourgeois cultural inheritance, represented by David Josef Bach, fell under increasing attack within Social Democratic ranks, particularly around the issue of what cultural objects best addressed the political and human needs of workers.Footnote ⁸⁹ More important, Vienna itself changed, as everyday life became politicized and politics became more confrontational. Historians generally stress the circumstances surrounding the burning of the Palace of Justice in 1927 as a critical moment in this development.Footnote ⁹⁰ In response to the politically charged jury acquittal of three Heimwehr members, left-wing protesters assembled on the Vienna Ringstraße and, following a series of altercations with the police, directed their fury at the Palace of Justice. A security force of six hundred subsequently shot into the crowd of protesters, killing eighty-nine and injuring countless more. As a single, watershed event, the Palace of Justice tragedy symbolizes the political and ideological forces at work in Vienna that signaled an end to the brand of pragmatic cultural politics practiced by David Josef Bach. The final defeat of the Social Democratic Party at the hands of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß, who dissolved Parliament in March 1933 and succeeding in banning the party completely in 1934, is legendary. In this context, it might be recalled that failure paints with a broad brush. The Social Democratic Party failed to counter the rise of the Austrian Ständestaat in the 1930s. To what extent has this failure also fueled the energy of later scholars to brand Social Democratic cultural initiatives of the 1920s as failed? Is there more than failure to be found?

In March 1927, a brief poem entitled “Beethoven,” written by Ernst Fischer, appeared on the first page of the Kunststelle journal Kunst und Volk. The poem's publication coincided with the 1927 Vienna Beethoven Centennial Celebration led by Guido Adler, and the young Fischer could hardly have selected a more symbolic subject. For the Socialist movement, the name “Beethoven” stood for the triumph of bourgeois culture at its most revolutionary, a triumph the Social Democratic Party sought to emulate.Footnote ⁹¹ When a 1933 survey asked which men had made the greatest impact on them, more young Viennese leather workers said Beethoven than said Karl Marx.Footnote ⁹² In the first strophe of his poem, Fischer articulated an emerging view of Beethoven and music within Socialist culture, a view fundamentally at odds with that of David Josef Bach. “Musik auf dem Marsch! / Musik in den tönenden Massen! / Organisierte Leidenschaft! Dunkle Gewalt des Blutes, heilaufglänzendes Antlitz! / Musik auf dem Marsch.”Footnote ⁹³ With Beethoven, Fischer announced, the workers would march—and would march as an organized mass. The age of assertively proletarian culture, and the Socialist mass festival with Catholic culture as its “archenemy,” was coming of age in Vienna.Footnote ⁹⁴ The Kunststelle kept step. In the fall of 1928, Josef Luitpold Stern assumed leadership of the party section for what were now called Arbeiterfeste, and Paul Amadeus Pisk would soon oversee the repurposing of the Kunststelle's chamber orchestra to strengthen the role of music at party events.Footnote ⁹⁵ On 18 July 1931, the Wiener Stadion opened in the Prater. To celebrate the occasion, and to commemorate the Second Workers' Olympics scheduled to take place the following day, five thousand individuals participated in a staged drama before an audience of sixty thousand. The subject of the drama was human history from the feudal era to the collapse of capitalism and the (future) triumph of Socialism.Footnote ⁹⁶ The Virtuoso Performances had selected as its performance subject Schönberg's Gurrelieder, a work that required a large choral and orchestral force, and the size of this supporting cast was designed to impress the public. In the Wiener Stadion, the mass itself was the subject of the performance. The age of the orchestrated mass political festival had arrived.

With what is probably the minimum in flexible accounting for such ventures, the Virtuoso Performances announced a net financial surplus of 127,319 crowns.Footnote ⁹⁷ Though his vision of a recurring Vienna Music Festival did not materialize, Guido Adler repeated his call for such an event, and city-based arts festivals continued in Vienna throughout the 1920s. His efforts here serve as a reminder that although fin-de-siècle and First Republic scholarship tends to direct its attention toward artists, academic institutions and their leaders played a significant role in Viennese cultural life. Meanwhile, bolstered by the success of the Virtuoso Performances, David Josef Bach secured the appointment in 1924 to direct the Musik- und Theaterfest (Music and Theater Festival), which ran from 14 September to 19 October. In his ceremonial speech to the first proceedings of the International Music Congress, an event scheduled to overlap with the festival, Bach hinted at a return to the historicist principles that had guided 1920 festival programming when he declared the purpose of the upcoming festival to show “the line connecting the Viennese classical tradition with contemporary music.”Footnote ⁹⁸ But it was not to be. The 1924 festival featured both German and Austrian musical works, and programming for the theater also held a central position.Footnote ⁹⁹ Meanwhile, that same year, the organizers of the Salzburg Festival suspended event activities, succumbing to financial and organizational difficulties. Indeed, the future of that festival was in serious jeopardy. In 1924, it would have seemed natural to ask: Would the historicist and pluralist Austrian vision of Guido Adler's Vienna Music Festival flourish in the years ahead? And was there a future for Salzburg? Ultimately, the 1924 Vienna event posted a substantial deficit (almost one-third of total expenditures), and it was Salzburg that flourished.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ But to those questions, Franz Schalk, a founding figure of the Salzburg Festival and a frequent conductor of the postwar Workers' Symphony Concerts, delivered an indirect but self-evident answer. In a Neue Freie Presse article, where he heralded the opening of the Music and Theater Festival, and called for the establishment of a Vienna festival to be held according to a fixed schedule at regular intervals, he noted, “no other city brings to the presentation of such a festival the rich and inestimable preconditions” of Vienna.Footnote ¹⁰¹