Leonard Bernstein arrived at the Salzburg Festival in 1959 as a 40-year-old American who needed to prove himself to European audiences. He left as someone who helped those same audiences rediscover Mahler, the composer Salzburg had done most to suppress.
The Story
Bernstein's Salzburg debut on 22 August 1959 was a deliberate declaration. He programmed Hindemith alongside Mozart and Beethoven with the Vienna Philharmonic, and the standing ovations that followed put an end to any residual European skepticism about American conductors. He was already famous at home as the composer of West Side Story and as the first American-born conductor to lead a major orchestra, but Salzburg mattered differently. The Festival's audience measured conductors against Karajan, Furtwangler, and Toscanini. Bernstein made that measurement work in his favour.
His deepest Salzburg contribution was Mahler. He brought Mahler's music back to the Vienna Philharmonic at a time when the orchestra's relationship with the composer, a former Philharmonic director who had been marginalised by antisemitism and erased during the Nazi years, was still uncomfortable. Between 1967 and 1976 he recorded all nine completed Mahler symphonies with the Philharmonic, a cycle filmed for television by Humphrey Burton. The 1975 performance of Mahler's Eighth Symphony at the Grosses Festspielhaus, with the Vienna Philharmonic, the Vienna State Opera Chorus, the Wiener Singverein, and soloists including Margaret Price and Agnes Baltsa, was one of the defining concerts of the Festival's postwar decades. Deutsche Grammophon recorded it live.
He returned to Salzburg throughout his career, conducting at the Festival for decades, his presence defined by an intensity that sometimes unnerved orchestras and always held audiences. He died in New York in October 1990, five weeks before what would have been his 72nd birthday.
