Swanky, stale and sullen, the summer music festival has had its day

‘Festival?’ said Nathan Milstein. ‘What is festival?’ I had naively asked the most immaculate of violinists where he used to play in the summer and he looked at me as if I had proposed an unnatural act.

‘Before the war,’ said Nathan, offering a glimpse of paradise lost, ‘Volodya and I would stay at Senar for six weeks with Rachmaninov.’ Volodya was Horowitz, his best friend.

‘In those days,’ he continued, ‘we liked to spend time with composers. A composer was someone you could talk to. He knew philosophy, literature, lepidoptery. Rachmaninov could name all the butterflies around Lake Lucerne. He liked me better than Volodya, maybe because I was not pianist.’

Milstein was a one-off, a cavalier who played 30 recitals a year at most. His contempt for festivals and routine concerts was uniquely refreshing. Now, ahead of a music-free summer, it feels acutely relevant. Do we really need festivals?

The model of the modern music festival was shaped 100 years ago this summer by Richard Strauss, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt with the notion that artists could play for fun and each other at Salzburg, far off the beaten career track.