“American tenor Neil Shicoff, who was overlooked for the position of director of Vienna’s State Opera, has pulled out of Austria’s renowned Salzburg Festival.” Shicoff had been tirelessly promoted for the Vienna job by Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer, but the heavy-handedness worked against Shicoff, and Dominique Meyer got the gig instead. In a letter to Salzburg’s festival director, Shicoff expressed a desire to distance himself from “intrigues and disappointments.”