A Good Deed - and Some Good Music,Too

By Jay Nordlinger [NY Sun, 19 August 2005]

SALZBURG, Austria - As you may remember from a review last week, the festival is honoring Franz Schreker this year. He was an Austrian composer (1878-1934) whose father was Jewish (and super-assimilated). When the Nazis came to power, they stripped Schreker of his position - director of the Berlin Conservatory - and banned his music. After the Nazi period, Schreker was largely forgotten, because the late Romanticism that he embodied was despised - not by audiences, but by a rigid musical establishment. The same fate befell Korngold and Zemlinsky. All of these composers have been honored by the Salzburg Festival, in a series that ends this year.