Giant at Home

Salzburg conservatives clucked over this year's changes. At the festival where Mozart and the 18th century had once reigned sovereign, this year a 19th century Italian opera (Verdi's Don Carlos) had opened the season--with a nearly all-Italian cast. There was even a 20th century opera by, um Gottes willen, an American (Samuel Barber's Vanessa, which was cheered by the audience, panned by the critics). Although no one in easygoing Salzburg cared to estimate how long it would take, work had even begun on the long-needed new Festspielhaus. Symbol of these innovations was a native Salzburg son, Conductor Herbert von Karajan, who is widely known as "Generalmusikdirektor of the continent of Europe." At 50, Karajan holds no fewer than six of Europe's top musical posts,* races from one engagement to another in his Mercedes-Benz 3005L or a fly-yourself plane. Last week, as he conducted festival productions of Don Carlos and Beethoven's Fidelia, associates reverently called him "the giant."

For graceful, greying Herbert von Karajan, such acclaim is routine. What stood out last week was Karajan's marked success in a hazardous venture--combining the jobs of conductor and stage director. In the case of the smashingly successful Don Carlos, Karajan left the staging to Germany's brilliant, aging (58) ActorDirector Gustaf Grimdgens. But Karajan himself mounted Fidelia in what Salzburg officially translates as "the Rocky Riding School"--a spacious hollow, walled by three tiers of colonnades, all cut out of a rock cliff, where the archbishop's horses used to exercise.* For Fidelia, Karajan put prison bars on the arcades during the first three scenes to create an atmosphere of oppressive confinement, opened the last scene with a blinding bath of light revealing the liberated prisoners. Festival visitors and critics generally agreed that not even the late Max Reinhardt, who staged Faust in the Riding School, had used the tricky space to better effect. To Karajan's Beethoven the musical reaction was reserved. Recalling Wilhelm Furtwangler's last Salzburg Fidelia (1950), critics complained that elegant, speed-loving Karajan did not have his idolized predecessor's warmth. Wrote one: "Karajan's brilliance has the shining translucency of a perfectly formed icicle." But Karajan's success with the festival public is unshakable (ticket orders this year hit a record high, despite prices which one visitor grumbled are "strictly New York"). And few critics could deny that, along with Si-year-old Bruno Waker, Herbert von Karajan belongs in the topmost level of the world's conductors.

* In addition to being the first man to run the Salzburg Festival singlehanded, Karajan heads the Vienna State Opera, Vienna's Gesellschajt der Musikjreunde, the German wing of La Scala, serves as permanent conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and chief conductor of London's Philharmonia. * On two occasions to specially written works (K. 187, K. 188) by a teen-age Salzburger: W. A. Mozart.

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