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andante presents highlights of its up-and-coming Web pages devoted to the Salzburg Festival.

Introduction to the Salzburg Festival -Salzburg Festival on the Selenophone

Introduction to the Salzburg Festival

The first important predecessor of the present-day Salzburg Festival was the 1877 music festival held by the Mozart-Stiftung. Subsequent festivals under Richter (1879 and 1887, for the centenary of Don Giovanni), Jahn (1891, for Mozart's death centenary), Hofkapellmeister Joseph Hellmesberger (ii) (1901), Mottl (1904), Strauss and Mahler (1906, including a performance of Le nozze di Figaro by the Vienna Hofoper personally subsidized by Emperor Franz Joseph), Nikisch, Franz Schalk, and Weingartner (1910) led to the idea of a regular festival; one was planned for summer 1914 but was cancelled on the outbreak of war. In 1917 Friedrich Gehmacher and Heinrich Damisch founded the Salzburger Festspielhaus-Gemeinde in Vienna with a branch in Salzburg for the purpose of establishing an annual festival of drama and music with special emphasis on the works of Mozart; the first festival took place in 1920 with Max Reinhardt's production of Hofmannstahl's Jedermann in the Domplatz, since then a traditional event. Bernhard Paumgartner organized the first series of concerts at the 1921 festival; operas were first given at the 1922 festival in the small Stadttheater: Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte conducted by Strauss, and Le nozze di Figaro and Die Entführung aus dem Serail conducted by Schalk. There were no music performances at the 1923 festival, when the first official ISCM festival was held in Salzburg, and the entire 1924 festival was cancelled because of the general economic crisis.

1925 was an important year, with the opening of the Festspielhaus, the first lieder recital and the first radio broadcast of a festival event (Don Giovanni, 24 August). The Festspielhaus was rebuilt in 1926 by Clemens Holzmeister to seat 1200, first used for opera in 1927 (Fidelio) and altered in 1937 and 1939. Open-air performances have been given in the Felsenreitschule (Summer Riding School) since 1926; in the same year a contemporary opera, Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, was for the first time included among the festival events. During the 1930s Walter, Furtwängler, Knappertsbusch and Toscanini were the leading conductors; Herbert Graf produced many of the operas. After the Anschluss in 1938, however, many artists left or refused to perform in Salzburg, including Walter, Toscanini, Kleiber, Fritz Busch and Klemperer. Events were curtailed during World War II and the 1944 festival was cancelled.

The founding and early history of the Salzburg Festival has increasingly become a fashionable topic in cultural history; in one compelling view it is seen as a search for Austrian identity after the fall of the Habsburg monarchy, and as a conservative reaction against modernism (Steinberg, 1990). Since its resurrection in 1945 a number of premières have been given at the festival, notably Strauss's Die Liebe der Danae (1952) and Henze's The Bassarids (1966); productions of early operas have also been mounted, including Cavalieri's Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo (1968). The Vienna PO has long been the musical backbone of the festival; in addition to playing for orchestral concerts, it has also served as the opera orchestra, chamber orchestra for the serenade concerts, and for the sacred concerts. The first guest orchestra to perform was the Budapest PO under Ernst von Dohnányi in 1931; the next was the Berlin PO in 1957. Among conductors, the festival has been dominated in the postwar era by Furtwängler, Böhm and Karajan, who until his death in 1989 also served as musical director. Karajan was succeeded as director in 1991 by Gérard Mortier; under his direction the festival has reintroduced the performance of classic 20th-century operas, including Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, Berg's Lulu, Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle and Janácek's From the House of the Dead.

From the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Edition; used with permission

andante/Salzburg Festspiele CD Collection
The Sounds of Freedom

The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center constitutes a treasure trove for music lovers. These unique holdings include the original Selenophone film prints for five complete Arturo Toscanini and Bruno Walter opera performances recorded at the 1937 Salzburg Festival, and a machine on which to play them.

Nineteen-thirty-seven was, of course, the last Salzburg Festival before Hitler annexed Austria. In January of 1938, Toscanini, who had already been acclaimed as a great star and driving light of the festival two summers previously, went into self-imposed exile from Nazified countries and Walter, a Jew, was relieved of his post - he had been the main conductor of the Vienna State Opera and Salzburg Festival since 1933. His performances of "Le Nozze di Figaro" and "Don Giovanni", belong to the timeless highlights of the Festival’s history, as do Toscanini’s Die Zauberflöte, Falstaff and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Seth Winner, one of the world’s foremost transfer agents working with historic reissues, has painstakingly restored these recordings from the original material.

"The Selenophone," Winner explains, "was a forerunner of the tape recorder, which took 35mm 'negative' nitrate movie film with the video portion sliced off, retaining the sound portion only. The film was then spun onto 17-inch diameter flanges, which revolved at around thirty inches per second, and could hold about a half-hour of uninterrupted music. As the film went through the machine, a light beam would "burn" the sound modulation into the negative. The negative was processed into a positive 'print,' just like normal film."

Pirated recordings of these operas in terrible sound have been available from time to time. The Toscanini performances stemmed from poorly made tape copies from either the lacquer dubs NBC made from the films, or the tape dubs made for the conductor’s son Walter Toscanini in 1956 by engineer John Corbett. According to Corbett, the Salzburg performances were among the last items Toscanini auditioned before his death in January 1957. Winner thought that new transfers from the Selenophone prints would yield upgraded results. But the Selonophone had to be reassembled - no small task for an obsolete piece of machinery.

Enter John Taddei, a former operations engineer at CBS Television. Taddei restored the Selenophone, attaching a new power source and preamp, greatly improving its playback frequency response. Winner, in turn, laboriously cleaned and respliced the films before dubbing them onto archival tape. As a result, Toscanini’s newly restored performances together with Walter’s Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, boast a clarity, dynamic range, and wealth of sonic information that far outstrips anything previously available. More importantly, they allow us at last to hear how these two great conductors led opera in the theater prior to the second World War.