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Concert 2001
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Concert 2001
Everything transitory is mere allegory
31 August 2001 is irrevocably the finale! With the solemn words of the Chorus mysticus from Goethe's Faust II an era comes to an end in the Grosses Festspielhaus - ten astonishing years with Gerard Mortier and Hans Landesmann. "Everything transitory is mere allegory..." Gustav Mahler reached for the stars when he set the last scene of the Faust tragedy and combined it with the Latin Whitsuntide hymn Veni, creator spiritus as his Eighth Symphony. He wanted the universe to resound in music. The end of an artistic management's term of office could hardly be sealed in a more ambitious, more monumental way or with greater symbolic power than with this work. It contains an avowal of western music history, of ceremony, of the ability of art to create an occasion, and an acknowledgement of lasting responsibility. After the world premiere of the Eighth Symphony in Munich Thomas Mann claimed that the composer Gustav Mahler embodied "the most serious and most holy artistic will of our time".
The choice of musicians who will perform the 'Symphony of a Thousand' at the end of the Festival summer is also full of symbolism. The Austrian Franz Welser-Möst will conduct the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, whose members come from all over Europe, the Choir of the Society of the Friends of Music from Vienna, where Mahler studied at the conservatory, the Philharmonic Choir from Prague, where Mahler had an appointment as conductor at the German Landestheater and St. Florian's Abbey Boys Choir. And for this notable concert could there be a more suitable location than Salzburg, in the heart of Europe? Sándor Végh loved the city because for him it represented a fortunate synthesis of Romanesque, German and Slavic influences. The great violinist and artistic director of the Camerata Academica was one of the last witnesses of the Habsburg monarchy, "The Austrians, Czechs, other Slav nationalities and the Italians became integrated as the most wonderful pan-European creation. During the historical development this disintegrated, not only politically but also culturally, and was destroyed. In our time we are beginning to piece together again what was shattered and are creating links between Vienna and Budapest and now again also with Prague." Gustav Mahler grew up in the border countries of Bohemia and Moravia and his music reflects much of the richness of the multinational state. His contemporary Hugo Wolf, whose family house stood in what is nowadays Slovenia, the teacher's son Franz Schubert from the Viennese suburbs, and of course above all Joseph Haydn from Rohrau in Lower Austria - in their creative works they all document the incomparable attraction of a music history blended together from various nationalities.
Many concerts at this year's Salzburg Festival are dedicated to the lost and yet everlasting Austrian and pan-European musical culture. A symphony by Joseph Haydn will be played in each of the Mozart Matinees, alternately combined with familiar and less familiar works, concertos, arias and masses by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Waltraud Meier, Anne Sofie von Otter and Matthias Goerne intend to explore the cosmos of Schubert songs in their recitals; soprano Christine Schäfer will be absorbed in the philosophical and emotional worlds of Hugo Wolf and Alban Berg. And of course Gustav Mahler: even before the hour of farewell arrives with a performance of his Eighth Symphony, Sir Simon Rattle will conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler's Fifth, and Claudio Abbado with the Berlin Philharmonic will perform his Seventh Symphony. Another apocalyptic, profound symphonist from Habsburg Austria is also impressively represented this year: Anton Bruckner. His unfinished Ninth Symphony is on the programme almost at the beginning of the season, in a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Pierre Boulez, a key figure as composer and conductor in the Mortier/Landesmann era. In mid August Riccardo Muti will conduct the same orchestra in a performance of Bruckner's Sixth Symphony. The Seventh Symphony will be played by one of this year's guest orchestras, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, under their principal conductor Lorin Maazel.
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| Gérard Uféras, Opéra National de Paris, Palais Garnier, 1990 |
Not long ago Alfred Brendel was asked whether he felt himself personally and musically to be a product of the Imperial and Royal Empire. The 70-year-old pianist, who was born in Wiesenberg in northern Moravia, spent his youth in Graz and Zagreb, lived for awhile in Vienna and finally settled in London, replied, "Yes, to a certain degree. Certainly from the background of my family. Perhaps also in connection with the literature of the 1920s in Vienna, with Musil and some of his contemporaries, Mauthner as a philosopher. Maybe that is a kind of home. But for the rest I am unashamedly homeless. I do not need any roots, I am in principle and enjoy being a paying guest." The Salzburg Festival is paying tribute to the pianist in his special birthday year with a series of concerts in which he himself does the honours: as accompanist for baritone Matthias Goerne, and as soloist in Beethoven's five Piano Concertos, which he will perform together with Sir Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic. In between, Alfred Brendel will give a reading in the Mozarteum. In the past few years he has published three volumes of poetry that reveal his sense of humour, his linguistic wit and his cryptic fantasies - qualities that undoubtedly distinguish him as a late product of the Austrian monarchy.
Almost thirty years ago Brendel wrote, "It took a long time before it was acknowledged that Schubert was a great composer for the piano and one of the outstanding masters of the sonata." He came up against prejudices that denied the "Prince of Song" the competence for the great instrumental form. In word and deed he fought against this false judgement - successfully: nowadays Schubert's Piano Sonatas belong indisputably to the core repertoire for the piano. The series of four concerts entitled Sturm and Drang in the Mozarteum that will explore piano music of the romantic period begins and ends with Schubert. Christian Zacharias will play one of the three Piano Pieces D 946 and the Sonata in G major, D. 894, also Schubert songs in transcriptions by Liszt; four weeks later Stefan Vladar will end the series with Schubert's final Piano Sonata in B major, D. 960. There is plenty of room between these two pillars for Chopin, Schumann, Brahms and even Skrjabin, for the pianists Yefim Bronfman and Grigory Sokolov - and for the decidedly anti-romantic Sonata No. 6 by Sergey Prokofiev.
Dvorsák's Ninth Symphony (played by the Berlin Philharmonic under Claudio Abbado) is not the only work at this year's Festival to come from the New World. There will also be an incredible variety of settings of American poetry, performed by baritone Thomas Hampson together with his fellow-countrymen Barbara Bonney, Susan Graham and Dennis Russell Davies in four concerts under the motto "I hear America singing..."
Conductor Sylvain Cambreling is also breaking out into "new
worlds" when he directs the first performance of two works commissioned
by Maurizio Pollini:
a new piece by the Italian Giacomo Manzoni and The Doctrine of Similarity
by the English composer Brian Ferneyhough. Two younger musicians, Hanspeter
Kyburz from Germany, who explores the mysterious Voynich Cipher Manuscript,
and the Austrian Bernhard Lang, who is equally at home with jazz
and improvisation as well as in electronic music and computer-assisted
compositions, this year represent the "Next Generation". Hans
Zender, aged 65, has almost become a "classical" composer
of the modern time and can look back on a richly productive life.
His composition of the High Song of Solomon fills an entire evening with
enchanting Biblical poetry. "Composers of the Turn of the Century",
the heading of concert programmes with new and extremely new music, could
also be the title of the concert series given by the Camerata Salzburg.
Together with their principal conductor Sir Roger Norrington the
Camerata will show their mettle with two giants of music history: the
"heroic" Beethoven and the strict "prophet" Schoenberg,
who died 50 years ago. In the opening concert the theme "Of Dictators
and Despots" links the 'Eroica' Symphony by Beethoven with the Ode
to Napoleon. The second evening explores the fascination of string sound
in Beethoven's Violin Concerto and Schoenberg's Transfigured Night. And
in the final concert Schoenberg's Second Chamber Symphony will be coupled
with Beethoven's Mass in C major. The man who commissioned this work,
Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy, commented at the first performance
of this liturgical masterpiece, "But my dear Beethoven, what have
you done again now?"
And then it really is time to take farewell. In the last Mozart Matinee conducted by Erwin Ortner, the exciting period of the directors Mortier and Landesmann will come to an end with Haydn's Symphony No. 45, in whose final movement the musicians of the Mozarteum Orchestra will finish their part one by one and leave the stage prematurely. However, the real finale after Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony is reserved for the Arnold Schoenberg Choir who will sing a work by their name patron, Peace on Earth, a serious message yet at the same time full of hope. This composition was created almost one hundred years ago - based on a text by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer - and will never grow old and never be in vain:
"Yet there is an insuperable belief
That the weak shall not fall prey
To the plundering of that
Shameless vision of death.
Justice, as it were,
Tempers and influences murder and horror,
And an empire will arise
To seek peace on earth."
Wolfgang Stähr
Vienna Philharmonic
26 July 2001 9 p.m.
29 July 2001 8.30 p.m.
Grosses Festspielhaus
Bartók Four Orchestral Pieces, op.12
Bruckner Symphony No. 9 in
D minor
Conductor Pierre Boulez
For 26 July tickets are available for ATS 1,000, 1,400, and 1,800; for
29 July for ATS 1,800 and 2,200.
Guest Orchestras
1 August 2001 9 p.m.
Grosses Festspielhaus
R. Strauss Burlesque in D minor for Piano and Orchestra
Bruckner Symphony No. 7 in
E major
Soloist Rudolf Buchbinder
Conductor Lorin Maazel
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
Tickets are available for ATS 800, 1,200, 1,500 and 1,800.
5 August 2001
Kleines Festspielhaus
Berlioz Overture Le carnaval romain, op. 9, Les nuits d'été, op. 7
Shostakovich Symphony No. 5 in D minor, op. 47
Soloists Susan Graham, Mark Padmore, Russell Braun
Conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner
Czech Philharmonic
Tickets are available for ATS 1,000, 1,200, 1,400, 1,600, 1,800.