A book linking the world-renowned Salzburg Music Festival with Austria's current political flirtation with the right wing has won a top prize in Austria.

Cornell University professor of history Michael Steinberg's book Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival, published in German earlier this year by Anto n Pustet Publishers, has been awarded the Victor Adler Staatspreis, the Austrian government's prize for the best historical work. An authority on the Salzburg Festival, Steinberg has published articles about its history and meaning in The New York Times and in scholarly journals. He will travel to Vienna in April 2001 to receive the award from Austria's minister of education.

The highly regarded book, which traces the cultural and political roots of the festival, also has been reissued in paperback this September by Cornell University Press with a timely new preface that is highly relevant to the current political situation in Austria. The book was first published in hardcover by the press in 1990 and is a prominent text in European studies.

Steinberg's new preface describes fin de siécle Austria as "the little world in which the big world holds its rehearsals," in a quote from playwright Freidrich Hebbel. The phrase is also an accurate description of the Salzburg Festival, writes Steinberg, which was "conceived by its founders as a stage for the reconfiguration of Austrian identity." He draws a trajectory from the festival's beginnings in 1918, after the fall of Austria's Habsburg empire, to the Nazis' rise to power in Austria in 1938, to the 1999 speech at Salzburg by Austrian President Thomas Klestil attacking the festival's contemporary direction under artistic leader Gérard Mortier and calling for a return to traditionalist ideals. Mortier countered that the speech was "a fatal reminder of the Nazi period" when a false interpretation of the festival's artistic values was used to arouse nationalism and legitimate Hitler's regime.

Steinberg notes that Klestil's speech foreshadowed the rise to power only months later of Jörg Haider's right-wing party, which threatened Austria's role in the European Union when it formed a coalition government with the country's conservative People's Party. "The dubiousness of Austria's current government reflects the continuing inadequacy of Austrian political discourse to work through the realities and cover-ups of the fascist and Nazi past," writes Steinberg. He also looks at Kurt Waldheim's festival, and Nazi, links.