Children have the Proms. Grown-ups head to Salzburg. Snob summer

Salzburg Festival doesn’t mess about. The offerings this year include an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain in Lithuanian, a Soviet-era operatic treatment of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and Igor Levit tackling one of the Himalayan peaks of the piano rep. Kiddies, meanwhile, could enjoy the children’s opera Die Kluge (brilliantly done), a Nazi-era allegory on the rise of Hitler by Carl Orff, a composer they love here but whose politics are shall we say, um, complicated. (Pleasingly, I’m not sure the festival understands the concept of cancellation.) People always think Salzburg is pretty and fun. It’s not. It’s dark and primal, with a festival that is far more uncompromising and exhilarating than a global-elite bun-fight in provincial Austria has any right to be.

To play one of these works is to throw yourself off a cliff. To risk it all

The set-up is rather like at Mecca, with the daily worship taking place before a massive rock. The three main music halls – to which a quarter of a million visitors flock during the month-long summer Festspiele – are all carved out of the Mönchsberg, the looming clastic mound that dominates the city centre. In one of these, the Felsenreitschule – which once hosted blood sports and occasionally, when the Salzburgers decide to turn on a director, can summon up some of this spirit again – the back of the stage is the actual mountain face. To do pretty much anything in the old town, you have to navigate any number of caves. You park in caves, feast in caves, stroll through caves, listen in caves.

And inside the festival’s handsome lairs? Pure, mountain-fresh high art – remember that stuff? No disco nights. No gaming music. No ‘brat’ anything. Children have the Proms. Grown-ups head to Salzburg. Snob summer.