Music
Scotched Festival
By DAVID CAIRNS Money is a language which, one would have thought, the city fathers of Edinburgh needed no special tuition to understand. Persuade them that the Festival is gradually perishing for lack of it, and like shrewd men of business they will surely take out their cheque books and ensure its healthy and vigorous survival by reinvesting some of what they have made from it.
But it is not nearly so simple as that. In the first place, there is the obstinate British fallacy of the business approach : that music should be made a 'paying concern.' Secondly, the workings of the puritan mind are dark and tortuous. Music is sinful and those who do well out of it must pretend to others, or by a subtler hypocrisy con- vince themselves, that they are none the richer. So you hear hoteliers complain that the Festival is bad for trade, that it comes right at the height of the season and keeps away the sort of tourists Edinburgh wants, that those who come hardly buy anything in the big shops, that the only people who profit are the suburban amateurs who improvise bed and breakfast and do the hotels out of honest business. This is the very ecstasy of cant, by which the descendants of John Knox are able to go on disapproving of art even while they wax fat on it. It also provides them with a defence, however spurious, against the charge that they do not lift a finger to support the enterprise that has made their city widely known and loved as never before.
Consider the facts. The present 'season' is largely a creation of the Festival. If it now spreads from May till October and over the whole extent of Scotland, so that the Scottish tourist trade is a grandly booming business, it has the interest stimulated by the Festival chiefly to thank for that. So far from Edinburgh's being exploited by the Festival, the exact opposite is true. The puny sum which the corporation spend on pub- licising their city would not pay for one orchestral concert. But why bother, since they get their publicity done for them—by the Festival.
During the three weeks some quarter of a million people come to Edinburgh and spend be- tween £2 million and £3 million, about 5 per cent. of which goes on tickets. The rest pours into the pockets of the citizenry. In return they contribute slightly over a three-farthing rate. Local poli- ticians and understandably cagey about putting the rate up to a penny; they would have to justify the action to their constituents, most of whom can reasonably argue that, not happening to own large concerns in the neighbourhood of Princes Street, it is not they who should be asked to unbelt. But neither, apparently, should the owners of the large concerns. When, last March, the Lord Provost appealed to 2,000 businesses in the centre of Edinburgh for £25,000 to settle the perfectly respectable debts of the Festival (last year there was a net deficit of £22,000), the response they made would have shamed Volpone himself into reaching for the key of his strongbox. Six months after, the miserable fact is that some £7,000 has trickled in—that is, between £3 and £4 per business.
Where is the legendary canniness of the Scots? At the present rate of degeneration, with rela- tively less and less room for manoeuvre, the Festi- val won't last. In the past Scotland has proved itself able to bear artistic decline with perfect equanimity. But artistic considerations are, after all, commercially relevant. Theoretically there may be no reason why the Festival should not con- tinue year after year serving up the musical equivalent of stale station sandwiches. But, without exaggerating the influence of a more and more critical press, one must see that in the end such a policy would destroy itself. Increasingly unable to afford artists of the first excellence, penned up, for fear of poor takings, within a narrow round of box-office certainties, the Festival would wither to an inglorious provincial- ism and sink into world disrepute.
It is customary to blame the feebleness of the programme .planners and the sheep-like timidity of the public. But the planners must be finan- cially free to experiment and build up, over the course of several years, an audience prepared to pay to listen to the kind of music that a festival exists for. It is vital, for example, that Mr. Pon- sonby should be allowed to go on 'putting on concerts which, like this year's famous Stravinsky concert, may, on a short view and a purely com- mercial reckoning, fail, but which give a festival critical reclame and in the long run safeguard its future. Possibly the committee might have shown more guile in enticing the public. This year's experience seems to prove that what sells a programme more than anything else is the presence of a celebrated soloist; one suspects that the Usher Hall was packed for the Britten con- cert (it was indecently empty for Stravinsky on the previous evening) because people had come to hear Peter Pears sing and the composer con- duct. This superb concert, one of the most ex- citing I have been to, is said to have taken nearly three years of wary gestation by committee. An elephant is less circumspect. Mr. Ponsonby must be able to resist all craven appeals to caution and plan imaginatively. But he can only do this if he has enough cash to work with : to be precise, an extra £25,000 a year—a mere fraction of the £3 million and a small price to pay for the effective survival of the Festival.
This does not touch larger questions which Edinburgh will eventually have to .face: the building, for example, of a theatre adequate for grand opera. The project, mooted last year, lies buried deep in municipal indifference. Which brings us back to the city fathers. Edinburgh has seen some fine murders in its time. If the business- men have their way, there will be another—the murder of the Festival. Perhaps the sight of someone else's blood does not trouble them; they can look the other way. But it touches them more closely. They may find that in the act of waving aside the beggar's bowl. they have foolishly cut their own throats.
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