Austerity Aside

What Salzburg was no longer able to do, Edinburgh had set out to do better. Edinburgh's ambition: to become, for three weeks each year, the musical capital of Europe.

Scotland's ancient granite capital had never played hostess to so many people. The first Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama caught the city up in a giddy Highland fling. Overnight, dignified George Street became a gay cosmopolitan avenue where silky Parisian accents rubbed cozily against the rough Northern burr. In the stately Princes Street gardens, the floral clock blossomed with the names of Haydn, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Elgar.

At night, the visitors watched parades of skirling pipers and stared up at the famed Castle, floating in floodlights like a castle in the air. (Fuel Minister Shinwell at first forbade it because it cost 2 1/2 tons of coal a night.) For the festival's three crowded weeks, the austere Scots laid aside their own austerity and winked at Britain's as well. The town's great Assembly Rooms became a festival club, which found food to serve 2,000 meals a day and enough Scotch to wash it down.

Import Balance. In every sense but one (a financial loss of -L-30,000, outweighed by -L-1,000,000 the tourists spent), the maiden festival was a smashing success. It could boast no native core, like Salzburg's opera, built around Mozart, the home-town boy. But Edinburgh made up for it with an imposing array of imports. There were half-a-dozen symphony orchestras, a history-making quartet, the Sadler's Wells Ballet. When Louis Jouvet's Paris company did Moliere's L'Ecole des Femmes, the Queen and Princess Margaret were on hand to join the applause.

London's Old Vic came up to offer Richard II and The Taming of the Shrew, and the Glyndebourne Opera staged marathon runs of Figaro and Macbeth.

Austrian-born Rudolf Bing, Glyndebourne's manager and the festival's creator, had worked two years to pull off the most ambitious musical extravaganza (97 performances) ever staged in Britain. In the opening week, Bing started with a bang. He presented a star quartet of virtuosos: Pianist Artur Schnabel, Violinist Joseph Szigeti, Violist William Primrose and 35-year-old French Cellist Pierre Fournier. It was the chamber-music event of the year. Sighed E. M. Forster in the London Times: ". . . The performance I enjoyed most. . . . What a mercy that such music and such interpreters exist! They are a light in the world's darkness, raised high above hatred and poverty."

'Hail Halle. In two opulent performances, the 90-year old Halle Orchestra showed that John Barbirolli had increased in stature since he left the New York Philharmonic in 1943 for Manchester.

But Impresario Bing had cannily saved his Sunday punch for the final week. It was the dramatic reunion of Bruno Walter and his old Vienna Philharmonic, parted since the Anschluss of 1938. One afternoon the 84 Viennese, in shabby lounge suits, trooped into Usher Hall for rehearsal. When Walter entered from the wings, they clapped happily and beat their bows on their instruments. Said the boss: "It is good that we meet again. It is high time, for I am getting a very old man [he was 71 last Monday]. . . . Now, gentlemen, we begin. Achtung!" It was like the old days: they went through God Save the King six times before he was satisfied.

Walter and the Viennese gave six rousing concerts last week and managed to dwarf what had gone before.

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