Take it as it Comes

“Edinburgh must ask what its festivals are for.”  Voiced irascibly by TheTimes this morning, it’s a good request, but to whom should it be addressed and what, if anything, will be the answer?

What Edinburgh’s festivals are - if not what they are for - seems clear enough. They are a gigantic muddle, increasingly based on the principle that too much is not enough. Too much of what? Too much of what does not matter seems to be the irritated answer.

Lost somewhere in the middle, and striving vainly to re-assert itself, is what  we now call the EIF, which was once its raison d’etre.  Do you remember - I do - how Sir Thomas Beecham was once for presbyterian reasons forbidden to conduct Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at the Usher Hall on the opening Sunday of the Festival and gave us the Ninth Symphony instead?

It caused a scandal at the time.Today the Missa Solemnis is just another work, conducted this year amid much else by a very young musician. The sense of occasion, thwarted though it was,  has gone. The Missa Solemnis, like Mahler and Bruckner symphonies, turns up anytime, hidden among stand-up comedians and similar enticements.

I accept that stand-up comedy is today something special to Edinburgh, and that there is little point in longing for the old days when the opening Sunday of the Festival was a sacrosanct night when nothing but the opening concert happened. The first night could be tremendous - think of the time when Sir Georg Solti conducted Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust and hissed to Arthur Oldham afterwards that his boy choristers had been out of tune.

But many of the Festival’s opening concerts were very dull indeed, and you could not even buy a consoling drink at the Usher Hall.

This year the opening concert is on a Friday, amid much else, which has been one way of shelving  the old tradition. The reviews were as slapdash as the concert itself appears to have been. But then the decline - some would say the international demise - of real music criticism is just another sign of the times.

So, as The Times asked today, what are the Edinburgh Festivals for, and what is to be done about them? The answer presumably is nothing. There are still high-minded festivals in Europe, such as Lucerne’s, which has just named Riccardo Chailly as its new musical director, an inspired choice in the wake of the great and glorious Claudio Abbadio. Such things continue to matter in cities whose cultural boundaries have not been eroded. Edinburgh is not the festival it was, that’s for sure. It is far bigger and more varied, but it is still a great event and, like it or not, we must take it as it comes.
21 August 2015