“American First Aid”: Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein at the Salzburg Festival, 1959

Abstract

This article examines the reception of two American artists during the Salzburg Festival of 1959 in the context of Cold War cultural diplomacy. While Austria had just become an independent republic again in 1955, the Salzburg Festival was experiencing a second American occupation, this time at Austrian invitation. The reasons for and the ways in which Austrian audiences and critics interpreted these performances and the idea of American music—through genre, personality, and politics—reveal the identity of the Festival, and by extension Austria, in a state of flux.