Austria, Germany, Italy

The annual music festival at Salzburg, Mozart's birthplace, promises to be as fine an affair this year as it was last. The elite of musical Europe and America journey in large numbers to the little old city to attend or participate in festive productions of the works of the finest and most beautiful of all composers.

That Austria, which has passed the last few years in probing the depths of disaster and despair, should work so bravely and well to keep up its musical culture has provoked endless wonderment. The Austrian may be short of all the necessaries, with starvation and revolution looming before him, but still, admitting no neglect, he goes to concert and to Mass.

The music publishing enterprises of both Austria and Germany have been ruined, and the most famous houses have been barely able to exist. A queer and ironical turn of luck enters here. The Teutonic publisher of cultural works in general has long been noted for his courage and self-abnegation. The story of the publisher and Einstein is characteristic. Einstein brought his manuscript, saying that there were a dozen men in the entire world who would be able to understand it. The publisher replied meditatively that he would print the work. The music houses constantly got out editions of composers who had only the smallest vogue, losing money cheerfully in the larger interest of music. They printed modernists, when "nobody" wanted a page of the modernists. In particular they published the .works of the new school of Italian modernist composers. These had been unable to get publication in Italy. Firms like Ricordi and Sozogno limit themselves chiefly to opera publications, where the profits are probable and large, and let these crazy modernist fellows severely alone. But today the Italian modernists are enjoying quite a vogue throughout the world. The head of the Universal Edition of Vienna, which with Breitkopf and Hertal has the highest rank among central European music publishing houses, told the writer that his firm had been able to continue business largely because of the fact that they held the copyrights on the Italian modernists, whose works now brought royalties from all over the world, royalties not fabulously large in the eyes of other peoples, but, with the insane rate of exchange, quite fabulously large in Vienna.