I used to attend the Salzburg Festival annually until, at unhappy last,
the prices there just got to be too, too, much.  So now I keep a nostalgic
eye on the place via news columns.  For instance, just yesterday here in
Munich, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung's very savvy critic, Wolfgang Schreiber
wrote up a performance by James Levine and theMet orchestra ministering
to Alfred Brendel playing of Mozart's KV 466.  What the critic noted was
tension between the energy of the orchestra with its anti-romantic, almost
neutral palette of sound and the very personal art of accentuation of this
pianist.

As for what followed, Mahler 6, it caused Schreiber to write:
the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera is no doubt a very good opera
orchestra, but it cannot quite match the best of the concert orchestras
here in Europe or in America, the sound that emerges from the pit is a bit
too raw.

Turning from critique to reportage Schreiber then noted that, due to the
flood of the Salzach river, the performance started so late it only ended
at about midnight.

Another item of Salzburgiana was provided by the New YorkTimes' Anne
Midgette who reported thusly:

   SALZBURG, Austria, Aug.  9 - Coming to Austria from New York to see;
   King Kandaules ; which ended its run at the Salzburg Festival on
   Thursday night, is closing a circle.  The opera itself traveled from
   Austria to New York when its composer, Alexander Zemlinsky, fled the
   Nazis in 1938.

   For this King ; the trip to the New World was nearly fatal.
   Zemlinsky hoped that the piece would be his ticket to American success,
   but Arthur Bodanzky, a conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, advised
   him to abandon it.  Bodanzky's objection wasn't about quality:  he
   thought that the nudity in Act II, which is crucial to the plot,
   would never play in the strait-laced United States.

   So the opera had to come back to Salzburg, where the nudity took
   center stage, or rather stage right, where Nina Stemme, a soprano,
   stripped down in the pivotal scene that ends Act II.  But it was
   far from the most climactic moment in this production ...

Kandaules, the king of ancient Lydia, needs adulation and loves power
(like another leader in the 1930's, the period when this production is
set).  When Gyges seems unimpressed by his vast wealth, the king insists
on showing the fisherman his most prized possession:  the beauty of his
naked wife.  The characters change fundamentally in the course of the
opera:  when Gyges ultimately stabs Kandaules (commanded by Nyssia,
outraged at the trick her husband has played on her) both men sing of
their friendship as if this were a Tristanesque betrayal.

And that's it from Salzburg, friends (the waters are receding
there but rising at the  opera house inDresden, even as I write).

Denis Fodor