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Back in Mozart's birthplace, the Salzburg Festival's main event last week was a different kind of opera. Listeners found few tunes to whistle when they came away from Danton's Death, the new opera by Gottfried von Einem. But few could for get the sheer violence of Einem's orchestral onslaught on dictatorship. What was left unsaid by the orchestra was sung by the chorus, which Einem employed as Mussorgsky did in Boris Godunov, as the real protagonist of the drama. There were few arias, and most of them were drowned in the dissonant...
This year, for Salzburg's third postwar festival, something new had been added. There was still Mozart nachtmusik by candlelight under the stars, and a performance of the Marriage of Figaro. But the big news was Danton's Death, composed by young (28) Gottfried von Einem, Austria's newest claim to musical fame. Einem had set to music Georg Büchner's 1834 drama of the French Revolution: he was inspired, he said, by the plot on Hitler's life, and the Nürnberg trials. Einem and his father, trying to escape...
Devotion to Dissonance. Composer Einem's six-act opera was full of clashing, dissonant stridencies, which reflected his devotion to Hindemith, Stravinsky and Mussorgsky, and perhaps his admiration of Duke Ellington. Temperamental, giant-sized (6 ft. 6 in.) Conductor Otto Klemperer found it troublesome to rehearse. He packed his bag, boarded a train for Switzerland. Klemperer's Hungarian assistant was rushed in to take his place...
Strenuous Rest. At the fashionable Waldhaus in Sils, Switzerland, Conductor Klemperer was not very communicative about his wrestlings with the Einem score. He showed up in the hotel lobby in bright green corduroy shorts, white sleeveless shirt, his thin white legs encased in striped silk socks. Yes, he felt he needed a rest, he said. It was a strenuous rest: he was playing tennis, going for long walks, working on two compositions of his own, sitting up late alone evenings over a benedictine with mineral water in the hotel bar. Did he like Einem's opera? Klemperer was guarded...
Last week she sang song cycles by two great French song writers, Francis Poulenc and Olivier Messiaen, and two songs by a 28-year-old Austrian, Gottfried von Einem, five by Paul Bowles and several by such unknown Americans as Everett B. Helm, Bela Wilda and Ned Rorem. Her voice was limited in range and occasionally harsh in the high notes, but as always, her interpretations were intelligent and distinguished by restraint...