Music Richard Osborne

SALZBURG’S (COVID-FREE) CENTENARY FESTIVAL

‘A triumph over adversity or reckless folly?’ was the headline in the Guardian, as the Salzburg Festival got under way on 1st August. By late August, triumph had romped home by a country mile.

Back in April, when most late-summer and autumn festivals were busily throwing in the towel, Salzburg held its nerve. Guided by a well-resourced and well-organised Austria that had quarantined early (and would later boast one of Europe’s lowest per capita death rates), the festival could afford to bide its time. When it was announced in mid-may that gatherings of up to a thousand people might be possible from 1st August, it was game on.

This is not the place to chronicle the logistics – or the cost – of the astonishing, artistic, administrative, technical and medical programmes that now swung into action. Suffice it to say that when I forwarded the end-of-festival analysis to an old friend from Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, he emailed back, ‘Does the Festival Office also run countries?’

The planning was such that there was no need for physical distancing between players on stage or reductions in orchestral forces. For Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, the Vienna Philharmonic fielded the prescribed 108 players; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony went ahead with soloists and a full choir.

Audiences, strategically seated, were not required to wear face masks during performances, though the use of fans was strictly forbidden. Some 76,000 tickets were sold during the festival, yet by the end not a single case of COVID-19 had been reported to any authority, local or national. (Madrid’s Teatro Real had a similar nil return after public stagings of Verdi’s La traviata in July).

Though opera suffered, Salzburg rescued 108 of its planned 200 performances, quite a few of which can still be enjoyed over here on Europe’s free-to-view TV culture channel ARTE.

A new production of Richard Strauss’s Elektra (ARTE until 30th October) was one of the operas saved. It’s a work deep in Salzburg’s DNA, since it was after seeing Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s reworking of Sophocles’s tragedy, directed by Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1903, that Strauss resolved to create the opera. And it was this same triumvirate who founded the Salzburg Festival in 1920 in the aftermath of war, as a vehicle for hope and reconciliation rooted in shared European cultural values.

My first Elektra – Salzburg’s third, back in 1964 – was conducted by Karajan, and staged by him. Set in Agamemnon’s Mycenae, it was far more atmospherically charged than Krzysztof Warlikowski’s drably designed 2020 staging, though things such as the interaction of the death-obsessed Elektra (Aušrinė Stundytė) and her more life-affirming sister Chrysothemis (Asmik Grigorian,