Sunday, March 6, 2016

Obituary Nikolaus Harnoncourt – Because great ideas come up – Frankfurter Rundschau

06 March 2016

Nikolas Harnoncourt, here 2012 in samples in Salzburg, is dead. Photo: REUTERS

The music he retorted speaking, their decisiveness and sharpness, her charm and wit: the pioneer, cellist and conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt has died at the age of 86.

So enormously sad the occasion also. is that now performs on the website of Nikolaus Harnoncourt: a smile returns at the sight of the image that receives a great there. As you can see the almost young musicians are in concert dress on a sofa, covered by his cello. Resting, sleeping perhaps before a performance. Other musicians grab Studies, he is deeply relaxed

Under the photograph of the apparently 1950s are the lines with which had to be expected, but nonetheless formulate an incredible loss. “At 5.3. 2016 Nikolaus Harnoncourt peacefully asleep in his family. Grief and gratitude are great. It was a wonderful collaboration. Alice Harnoncourt and family “.

It’s been on the day exactly three months that Nikolaus Harnoncourt gave his farewell to the conductor’s stand known, it was the day before his 86th birthday. And like everything else in his professional and artistic life had this resignation size and stringency.

In an open letter, handwritten and settled a concert program booklet of his orchestra Concentus Musicus Wien in facsimile, he justified this step with his failing health. “My physical strength areas a rejection of my future plans,” it said. “As great thoughts come up: built between us on the podium and you has the hall an unusually deep relationship.”



He broke the crust of euphony, mass, karajanesk clenched fist on

An unusually deep relationship – how true. The musician, who since December 6, 1929 in Berlin (although he was thoroughly Austrian, his mother was even the great-great-great-granddaughter of Emperor Francis I) as Johannes Nicolaus Graf de la Fontaine and d’Harnoncourt was born -Unverzagt, seemed to have come into the world in order to realign the relationship between man and music. This may be big words, but the meaning Harnoncourt accordingly. After almost single-handedly broke Nikolaus Harnoncourt that crust of beautiful sound, sound mass and karajanesk clenched fist, which had settled on the classical music.

He was right in the middle in this philharmonic attitude, finally, he was in the 50s and 60s cellist with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan was his boss. This way of making music he endured until 1969, after all. His own ensemble, the Concentus Musicus, he had already founded in 1953 as a small Musizierkreis. Together with the Viennese violinist Alice Hoffelner, whom he married in the same year 1953, and a handful of like-minded, he played on old instruments baroque music – “the Harnoncourts sitting at home with their expensive violins on apple crates and feed on potatoes and salad”, was then spotted .

But more than that, he wanted to understand the sound as speech and music as communication. The books “Music as Speech” and “The musical dialogue”, written in the early ’80s, when the historically informed performance practice was still too happy abandoned by broad music bourgeoisie ridicule, contain the essence of this Harnoncourt’schen making music. You must now both back out are read out of the closet and new, this Old and New Testaments of musical thinking, the Good News of the Muse temple Bored.

It was the time of the public effective pioneering acts , The inclusion of the “Brandenburg Concertos” in 1964, with natural horns that made her name nor honor (but you do not want to hear so yet today – unbelievable how the game has developed technical skill there!). The performance of Monteverdi’s operas, first 1972 “Il ritorno d’Ulisse” at the Piccola Scala in Milan, Harnoncourt debuted as a conductor. His Concentus Musicus, he led the way out to 1987, the cello

. “In the beginning, the orchestra had a hard”

From 1975 he was increasingly in “traditional” orchestras on the podium, always without baton. Early this: the Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam. “In the beginning, the orchestra did difficult,” the longtime chief conductor Bernard Haitink Amsterdam remembered in FR-Interview. “The musicians have been reluctant, because they did not understand this approach. But Harnoncourt as charismatic and able to convey so much what he wanted, that he was finally respected. Because he has a real conviction, he does not only follow a fashion. And he always says that makes him so likeable: Ultimately I do not know it ‘ “

In the 80s, the cycle of Mozart operas – a milestone.. As rattled as in the overture to “kidnapping”, an ear cleaner. Following German Romanticism was questioned source criticism, Robert Schumann was particularly important to him. And until recently he surprised the man, who said of himself that he was “not engagierbar”, thus not commercially oriented and commercially. As he there together played with pianist Lang Lang and gushed in the skies, a pretty puzzle

His merit. Since Harnoncourt music speaks again. His ideas have become common, fortunately. Little more a conductor, an orchestra, not rhetorical, examined the breathing gesture of music. By Harnoncourt music has its sharpness get back their decision. Your charm, her wit. Harnoncourt deifying would seem, although his glorious fury and his eyes flashing stood him also devilishly good.

Can we be optimistic that Harnoncourt heritage remains alive? “I believe that there is little spiritually interested people who are optimists. Because optimism is always a degree of stupidity ahead “Said, unfortunately, Nikolaus Harnoncourt

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