On the death of the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt – The man, the music for … – Süddeutsche.de

He wanted the tones as the first time. Well except conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt has died at the age of 86 years.

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It is only two months ago that Nicholas Harnoncourt his departure from the conductor’s podium announced. Yet his last concerts and recordings sounded in no way alter the least, on the contrary: Sometimes his tempos seemed to have grown even more extreme, the tympanic nor powerful, the Forte stormy and majestic like a hurricane. Harnoncourt had remained the same revolutionary, as he had for more than half a century jolted the music scene.

The Berlin-born Austrians came from anything but revolutionary proportions. When Johann Nicolaus de la Fontaine and d’Harnoncourt-Unverzagt he belonged to the Austrian nobility, which both the local abolition of nobility predicate as soon clad bourgeois profession. For seventeen years he belonged from 1952 as a cellist with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, which was then the young Herbert von Karajan conducted. But the forced euphony postwar began Harnoncourt soon to question him too seemed mixing sound and duration vibrato to pack the old composers in cotton wool. And how many revolutions in history have been a return to the sources, Harnoncourt was the antidote to the tradition even older traditions.

conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt A world institution of music

He has, open spaces of the music, that was lost long since. The Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt lay down an international career, all the great music stars have worked in the past decades with him. Next week, he conducted at the Salzburg Festival.

(Video: Süddeutsche.de, Photo: Marco Borggreve , Photo: Marco Borggreve)

in ancient instrumental textbooks and scores that were gathering dust in libraries and long on instruments that could have long to play no more. With his wife Alice, a violinist, proven Harnoncourt play on tines and theorbo, the timpani struck again with wooden mallets, tensed gut strings on violin and cello. The result sounded initially pretty raw – and was one of the beginnings of a movement that is no longer an integral part of the current music business: the historical performance practice. There are now countless specialist ensembles, are also the major symphony influenced by the ancient game practices.

Harnoncourt Feuerkopf campaigned continuously for his discoveries

But Harnoncourt excited long stir when he with his own, occurred since 1958 known as Concentus Musicus Ensemble. What should be better on a clanking harpsichord than on smoother sound of the modern piano, why a viol a score to be more appropriate than a cello? In 1962, the Concentus a sensational new recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos out in the seventies and eighties played Harnoncourt in collaboration with Gustav Leonhardt the entire cantata of the same composers.

Harnoncourt Feuerkopf campaigned continuously for his discoveries, with his books. “Music as Speech” is the most famous and contains very title what Harnoncourt lifelong wanted: to bring music new to speak, to make it sound again like the first time. Given the rhetorical resources should be rediscovered that were once naturally understood by the audience.

That thus all, now almost forgotten operas could be brought back to life, proving the legendary cycle of works by Claudio Monteverdi with the director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle at Zurich Opera house in the seventies. And even if the resistors were numerous, Harnoncourt could not only convince his diehard fan base gradually. Had he initially the Concentus Musicus still led by the cello, soon felt some large institutions that could be pumped into the old wires classical with him fresh blood.

Music was never sure because, “to empty evenings to garnish by opera and concert visits, “he said once

Harnoncourt joined as conductor of the podium Amsterdam Concertgebouw orchestra, soon the Berliner Philharmoniker. Not later than his “Missa Solemnis” in 1992 meant when the once so strongly influenced by Herbert von Karajan Salzburg Festival, the final reconciliation with the Austrian music business. A checkered relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic, culminating in the joint New Year’s concerts in 2001 and 2003. For the first of the concerts themselves Harnoncourt had only stipulated that he did not have to constantly smile.

That he on historical instruments could do without and still pass on his impulses, came with some old companions to no good, but showing the inner width of this conductor. He systematically expanded since also your own repertoire, seemed to find his real focus even in the romance that was crucial in his highly expressive charged conducting style and his desire for furious delimitation. The historical performance practice he ran henceforth maximum undogmatic, he did not want to promote a real original sound. As he was convinced that music is for there never, “to empty evenings by opera and concert visits to garnish”, as he once said.

Harnoncourt tried the revolutionaries in the works to uncover, no matter what time it was the first time broken out. From the Viennese Classical Coming, his repertoire included thus Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bruckner, Wagner, Bizet, Smetana, Dvořák or Bartók. The older Harnoncourt became, the more actually seemed to interest him. “Specialization I reject on principle,” he said once the Wiener Zeitung Default . “Now at the age where I have to limit my current activities, I can finally do the things that I always wanted to do.”

That was enough opera to a performance of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” Styriarte in Graz in 2009. Since Harnoncourt had the festival marked for over thirty years, and together with his son, the opera director Philipp Harnoncourt. The life’s work can now understand in over four hundred recordings. “To be fair, the music has to move to the outermost edge of disaster”, Harnoncourt once said. This Sunday he died at the age of 86 years.