Abstract

Kurt Waldheim personally opened the 1987 Salzburg Festival in July by attending the premiere of Herbert von Karajan's new Don Giovanni and dedicating an annual photographic tribute to Max Reinhardt, born Max Goldmann, a festival co-founder who died in New York exile in 1943. The last week of the festival was marked by the joint appearance of Pinchas Zukerman and Marc Neikrug, wearing yarmulkes a gesture by which they hoped to indicate that their fifth appearance at Austria's most glamorous festival, now in the Waldheim era, was not business as usual. (Reviews of the recital chose to overlook this extra-musical component.) The day after the Zukerman/Neikrug recital, the Israel Philharmonic played, after receiving assurances from the festival management that Waldheim would not seize the photo-opportunity and attend the concert. These events are not political intrusions or irrelevancies in the face of an apolitical celebration of high culture and great music. For the last fifty years, Germany and Austria have marketed culture with the ideological position that music and music festivals are apolitical. But in Austria, music is a political affair, and since its founding in 1920, the

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