Eine Triumphpforte österreichischer Kunst: Hugo von Hofmannsthals Gründung der Salzburger Festspiele by Norbert Christian Wolf (review)

Since its establishment in 1920, the Salzburg Festival has emerged as one of Europe’s premiere cultural events and today has come to solidify Austria’s reputation as center of artistic, musical, and dramatic innovation. As Michael Steinberg’s 1990 study demonstrated, the history of the festival’s founding ideology remains deeply intertwined with the dynamics of interwar politics. Drawing upon an “invented tradition” that linked Austria’s theatrical heritage to the Catholic Baroque, the Salzburg Festival came to play a defining role in the development of a distinct Austrian national identity in the volatile early years of the First Republic.

Norbert Christian Wolf’s most recent contribution to festival literature, Eine Triumphpforte österreichischer Kunst: Hugo von Hofmannsthals Gründung der Salzburger Festspiele, sets out with a familiar premise: to question the validity of the festival’s popular “European-pacificist-cosmopolitan” image. Whereas Steinberg’s study focused primarily on placing the festival in the larger context of Austrian cultural history, Wolf stays close to the source texts. In the first two sections of his work, Wolf at empts a comprehensive documentary history of the development of the festival’s founding ideology. In addition to the programmatic texts by Hofmannsthal, Wolf also focuses on the writings of other lesser-known architects of the festival vision, such as Viennese salonnière Berta Zuckerkandl. In the third and fourth chapters, Wolf reflects on the genesis and performance history of Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann and Das Salzburger große Welttheater, examining these works in the context of festival ideology as well as the poet’s broader political and artistic Weltanschauung. Through this rich and detailed examination of the festival’s founding documents, Wolf convincingly challenges contemporary myths of the festival’s ideology as a static and fixed concept, revealing a variety of conflicting visions and pragmatic choices that made the festival the cultural landmark that it is today.

Wolf’s close reading draws attention to the variety of discourses that came to shape Hofmannsthal’s program for the festival. For example, the elision of the historical influence of the Josephenian Enlightenment on Mozart’s operas in Hofmannsthal’s essay Deutsche Festspiele zu Salzburg, bills Don Juan and Die Zauberflöte, along with the plays of Raimund and Grillparzer, as part of an Austrian theatrical tradition directly descended from the world theater of Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Shakespeare. Yet at the same time, Hofmannsthal conjures up a vision of the festival as the artistic realization of an imagined Bavarian-Austrian folk community. Despite the fact that the poet employs a rhetorical style reminiscent of the writings of the literary historian Josef Nadler, Wolf appears determined to distance the poet from nationalist politics. Instead, he identifies Hofmannsthal’s appeal to a German spirit as a defensive tactic against the critical reactions of the anti-Semitic press to his Jewish heritage. By highlighting Hofmannsthal’s engagement with international aesthetic discourses, Wolf further calls into question connections between Hofmannsthal’s program for the festival and völkisch ideology. In the litle-known Wiener Brief, writ en in 1923 for a planned performance of Das Salzburger große Welt heater in the United States, Hofmannsthal eschews such nationalist language, describing the festival vision instead through references to the poetry of Walt Whitman, the trends of modern art, and the philosophy of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.

Wolf’s in-depth analyses of Jedermann and Das Salzburger große Welt heater sheds light on a variety of surprising contradictions between Hofmannsthal’s artistic vision for these works in their original contexts and in their defining roles in the development of Salzburg’s ideology. Wolf’s discussion of Jedermann is particularly insightful, illuminating the text as a reflection of the modern “crisis of conscience” under capitalism, drawn from Hofmannsthal’s study of the philosophy of Georg Simmel. The transformation of Jedermann into a defining work of the festival’s Catholic ideology appears...