 
Heinrich Spängler
Helga Rabl-Stadler
G. Schwaighofer
Josef Hussek
Great success
The little match girl
DaPonte in Santa Fe
Masterclasses
Young Directors
Forging links
The Camerata
Compulsory
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FORGING LINKS
Classical works and contemporary music at the Salzburg Festival
“For the public, playing music is limited to the performance of classical and romantic works. Consequently the contemporary composer is a kind of gatecrasher, who at all costs wants to dine at a table to which he has not been invited”, remarked Arthur Honegger, half a century ago. And he added sarcastically, “To be sure, the best characteristic of a composer is to have died”.
Grief for submerged beauty?
And is it not true to say that at the end of the Festival season, when Soile Isokoski sings Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, some of us will be overcome by the melancholy feeling of listening to the farewell of an irrevocably submerged beauty? Did music not also die with its masters, when Europe lay in ruins?
From sound to music
“Music is dead” – Helmut Lachenmann, composer born in 1935, makes an unequivocal statement. Yet he shows no nostalgia or remorse: “‘Music is dead’ means that it must constantly be brought to life again. This is an adventure and a risk, for the listener too: we hear the first sound but do not yet have any kind of relationship to the context and the laws from which it emerges. In contrast to historical music, with whose language we are familiar, we discover these laws and the sound landscapes they determine at best through the work itself: laws that cannot primarily be based on a consensus between public and composer. We have lived with this experience since Schoenberg.”
The question of beauty in music
Since Schoenberg, no, we have always lived with the inescapable question as to the beauty of music. For what “truth” does art reflect – heaven, earth, hell? Which human self-esteem man can it intensify or plunge into doubt?
The usual ideal of beauty
Helmut Lachenmann tries to isolate the answer in an experiment: “When I discuss this question with students or course participants, I sometimes hold two pictures next to one another: one photo is of an elegant film star, a ‘dazzling beauty’ as it were, and beside it the portrait by Dürer of his old mother, a frail old women with sunken cheeks, pointed nose and a bitter gaze, and I ask which of the two is the more beautiful? The response is usually embarrassed laughter”.
Nobody will be unmoved
The contemporary composer, the intruder and the unwelcome guest will in future continue to startle and disturb his table companions with this question. Nobody, however, who knows what it is like to have a sense of longing and curiosity, to spend one’s life searching, will remain unmoved by the evenings with Helmut Lachenmann in Salzburg in late August. And the composer himself will be present, indeed he will also take part: as the narrator in his Musik mit Leonardo. On 30 August finally, in a historic location, the Felsenreitschule, Lachenmann’s opera Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern will be performed, one day after the Four Last Songs …
Contemporary music from austria
A separate concert series entitled “Austria Today” brings together almost exclusively composers who do not have the advantage of already being dead. Anyone who crosses the Staatsbrücke or the Makartsteg can on one evening in the Grosses Festspielhaus hear Schubert and Liszt played by Rudolf Buchbinder and on the next in the Mozarteum, recent and the very latest works by Johannes Maria Staud, Clemens Gadenstätter and Beat Furrer.
On the right and left banks of Salzach
Or one can begin with Olga Neuwirth and Georg Friedrich Haas and then on the next day hear Haydn, Strauss and Brahms played by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Mariss Jansons. Beauty and truth, celebration and play: on the right and left banks of the river Salzach.
Art is never at an end
Art is never at an end. “If there were beautiful beginnings, as for instance, in Greek civilisation and if they have again become submerged, one cannot say that art has been destroyed,” declares Baron von Risach in Adalbert Stifter’s novel Der Nachsommer. “Other beginnings will come and they will create something completely different, if they are and will all be based on the same essence, the divine; and nobody can say what will be in ten thousand, in a hundred thousand years, in millions of years or in hundreds of billions of years, because no one knows the plan of the creator with the human race on earth.”
Wolfgang Stähr
Monika Rittershaus, Papageno
VIENNA PHILHARMONIC
6 and 8 August 2002, 9 p.m.
Grosses Festspielhaus
Joseph Haydn
Symphony No. 97 in C major, H. I:97
Richard Strauss
Waltz Sequence No. 1 from Der Rosenkavalier
Johannes Brahms
Symphony No. 1 in C minor, op. 68
Conductor Mariss Jansons
Tickets are available in the
categories € 110, € 150 and € 190.
23 August 2002, 9 p.m.
24 August 2002, 11 a.m.
Grosses Festspielhaus
Franz Schreker
Prelude to a drama
W. A. Mozart
Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra in A major, K. 622
Richard Strauss
Ein Heldenleben, op. 40
Conductor Christian Thieleman
Soloist Sabine Meyer clarinet
Tickets are available in the categories
€ 110, € 150 and € 190 (only for the concert on 24. 8.)
GUEST ORCHESTRAS
23 August 2002, 8 p.m.
Felsenreitschule
Benjamin Britten
Sinfonia da Requiem, op. 20
Leonard Bernstein
Symphony No. 1 ‘Jeremiah’
Alexander Zemlinsky
Lyric Symphony, op. 18
Conductor Dennis Russell Davies
Soloists Solveig Kringelborn soprano
Hanna Schwarz contralto
Bo Skovhus baritone
Radio Symphony Orchestra of Vienna
Tickets are available for
€ 30, € 40, € 45, € 60, € 75 and € 90
25 August 2002, 9 p.m.
Grosses Festspielhaus
Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 10 in F sharp major in the reconstructed
version by Deryck Cooke
Conductor Riccardo Chailly
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam
Tickets are available for
€ 60, € 90, € 110 and € 135.
GUEST ORCHESTRAS
29 August 2002, 7.30 p.m.
Grosses Festspielhaus
Richard Strauss
Prelude to Guntram Four Last Songs An Alpine Symphony, op. 64
Conductor Bernard Haitink
Soloist Soile Isokoski soprano
Staatskapelle Dresden
Tickets are available for
€ 60, € 90, € 110 and € 135.
AUSTRIA TODAY
30 July 2002
Austrian Ensemble for New Music
Conductor Johannes Kalitzke
1 August 2002
ensemble recherché
Petra Hoffmann soprano
4 August 2002
Marino Formenti piano
Florian Müller piano
5 August 2002
Kairos Quartett
6 August 2002
Ensemble On Line Vienna
Conductor Simeon Pironkoff jun.
Soloist Anna Maria Pammer soprano
Mozarteum, 7.30 p.m.
Tickets are available for
€ 15, € 22, € 30 and € 45.
Telephone: 0043 662 8045-500
Telefax: 0043 662 8045-555
E-mail: info@salzburgfestival.at