Nikolaus Harnoncourt

15 CD - RCO 19007 - (c) & (p) 2022

Nikolaus Harnoncourt LIVE - The Radio Recordings 1981-2012

Johann Sebastian Bach	Johannes-Passion, BWV 245	15 aprile 1984	114' 15"	CD 1 & 2	1-28 & 1-12
Felix Mendelssohn	Psalm 42 "Wie der Hirsch schreit", Op. 42 (1837)	26 aprile 2009	26' 34"	CD 2	13-19
Franz Joseph Haydn	Die Schöpfung, Hob. XXI:2 (1797-98)	22 ottobre 2000	100' 54"	CD 3 & 4	1-16 7 1.18
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	Aria da Concerto "Ch'io mi scordi di te... Non temer, amato bene", KV 505 (1786)	9 gennaio 1992	10' 52"	CD 4	19
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	Symphony No. 39 in E flat major, KV 543 (1788) / Symphony No. 40 in G minor, KV 550 (1788)	27 gennaio 1991	64' 06"	CD 5	1-8
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	Symphony No. 41 in C major "Jupiter". KV 551 (1788)	27 gennaio 1991	38' 48"	CD 6	1-4
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	Piano Concerto No. 13 in C major, KV 415/387b (1782-83)	18 settembre 1981	28' 28"	CD 6	5-7
Ludwig van Beethoven	Missa Solemnis in D major, Op. 123 (1819-23)	25 aprile 2012	86' 07"	CD 7 & 8	1-4 & 1
Ludwig van Beethoven	Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21 (1799-1800)	19 marzo 1998	26' 18"	CD 8	2-5
Ludwig van Beethoven	Aria "Ah! Perfido", Op. 65 (1796)	19 marzo 1998	13' 52"	CD 8	6
Franz Schubert	Symphony No. 9 in C major, D 944 (1825-26)	11 novembre 1992	54' 51"	CD 9	1-4
Franz Schubert	Symphony No. 8 in B minor "Unfinisched", D 759 (1822)	7 novembre 1997	28' 34"	CD 10	1-2
Johannes Brahms	Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 (1862-76)	24 marzo 1996	46' 20"	CD 10	3-6
Robert Schumann	Ouverture "Manfred", Op. 115 (1848)	2 maggio 2004	12' 03"	CD 11	1
Robert Schumann	Symphony No. 1 in B flat major "Spring", Op. 38 (1841)	2 maggio 2004	31' 55"	CD 11	2-5
Robert Schumann	Symphony No. 3 in E flat major "Rhenisch", Op. 97 (1850)	28 novembre 2004	30' 38"	CD 11	6-10
Johannes Brahms	Tragic Overture, Op. 81 (1880)	12 maggio 1996	14' 14"	CD 12	1
Johannes Brahms	Symphony No. 3 in F major, Op. 90 (1883)	20 gennaio 1996	37' 41"	CD 12	2-5
Antonín Dvořák	Biblical Songs, Op. 99 (1894-95)	28 novembre 2004	27' 56"	CD 12	6-15
Antonín Dvořák	Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70 (1885) / Rehearsal fragments (16/17 marzo 1998)	20 marzo 1998	66' 32"	CD 13	1-4 / 5-8
Anton Bruckner	Symphony No. 4 in E flat major "Romantic" (1874-78/80)	3 aprile 1997	61' 56"	CD 14	1-4
Johann Strauss II	"An der schönen, blauen Donau", Op. 314 (1866)	7 giugno 1984	9' 35"	CD 14	5
Johann Strauss II	Die Fledermaus (1873): Trio "So muss allein ich bleiben" - Aria "Klänge der Heimat"	7 giugno 1984	8' 57"	CD 14	6-7
Felix Mendelssohn	Ein Sommernachtstraum, Op. 21 & 61 (1826/1842)	26 aprile 2009	81' 51"	CD 15	1-15


ROYAL CONCERTGEBOUW AMSTERDAM
Nikolaus Harnoncourt


Luogo e data di registrazione
Concertgebouw, Amsterdam (Holland)
Registrazione live / studio
live (Radio Recordings)
Recordings / Editing and mastering
RNW/Broadcast Facilities Netherlands, NOB/Dutchview / Lodewijk Collette, Rob Heerschop (db Mediagroep) and Everett Porter (Plyhymnia)
Edizione CD
RCO 19007 - (15 CD) - 1056' 00" - (p) & (c) 2022 - DDD
Prime Edizioni LP
-
Nota
For details, see the link of each composer.

Notes
When Nikolaus Harnoncourt made his Concertgebouw Orchestra debut on 21 March 1975 in a performance of Bach's St John Passion, he had been conducting (in inverted commas) for just three years. As a cellist in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, a job he had been doing with growing reluctance from 1952 to 1969, he sat at the very back of the section, although chief conductor Herbert von Karajan would have gladly promoted him to the position of principal, an offer he declined. The orchestra was a means for him to earn a living, not an ambition. This was particularly the case when it came to the early music ensemble the Concentus Musicus of Vienna, which he founded in 1953 and which, as a player, he led as primus inter pares. Starting from its ﬁrst performances in 1957, the group attracted attention ﬁrst in Vienna and subsequently to a growing extent outside it, with its incredibly diverse repertoire ranging from medieval music to Bach. The musicians of the Concentus Musicus were pioneers on every front. Here at the beginning of the early music movement, Harnoncourt would even have to track down his own instruments, searching for these rarities far and wide, given the general lack of good instrument builders. Period instruments quite literally devoured half the Harnoncourt household budget. All this time, Harnoncourt remained one with his fellow musicians and players . only later, when the Concentus Musicus also started to explore symphonic repertoire - occasionally conducting it in the traditional way, depending upon the size of the ensemble, but solely when necessary. With major reservations about the conducting profession, Harnoncourt even went so far as to call it an ‘anti-profession’ in 1969. Despite this, on 28 December 1972 - at La Piccola Scala in Milan, no less - he took to the podium for the ﬁrst time to conduct Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, and from that moment, there was no stopping him. Just a few months on, he led the Residentie Orchestra in Bach's St Matthew Passion in the small ensemble that was to be introduced to audiences in Amsterdam two years later, and he would perform Monteverdi's L'Orfeo with the Concentus Musicus in The Hague in December 1973. So far, Harnoncourt had come to the Netherlands with the sole purpose of giving specialist early music performances. It could be argued that in this initial phase, he would not have ﬁt the bill as an ordinary conductor to lead an ordinary orchestra in traditional concert programmes. As an orchestral musician, he was, of course, familiar with a wide-ranging repertoire, but he was primarily an early music specialist who additionally taught a course on the theory and practice of early music at the Salzburg Mozarteum two days a week, a position he would hold until retiring in 1993. Together with the Dutch harpsichordist and organist Gustav Leonhardt and the Concentus Musicus, Harnoncourt undertook a groundbreaking recording cycle of the complete Bach cantatas in 1971, a project they concluded only in 1990. So when, in 1969, Harnoncourt gave up his orchestra job in disgust at what he considered to be a grotesque performance of a Mozart symphony, it was most certainly not because his longing to become a great maestro had ﬁnally got the better of him. Iindeed, Harnoncourt pursued a career as a conductor because he had no other choice. It was in a liberal Amsterdam that he found the freedom to broaden his spectrum. And it was the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra which served as the real launch pad for Harnoncourt the conductors career. Here he never became an elegantly, mystically swaying maestro like Karajan. Without the aid of a baton, Harnoncourt would conduct with the sometimes brusque, scrawling movements reflecting the explosiveness and many contrasts characteristic of his interpretations of Bach and Mozart. He would confront Amsterdam's Concertgebouw audiences with a completely different conception of Bach from the Romantically monumental interpretations performed by large orchestra which they knew well from Eugen Jochum and perhaps even Willem Mengelberg's pre-war St Matthew Passion. Vibrato in the strings was strictly rationed, tempos tightened, the instrumentation thinned out, and dramatic conflicts intensiﬁed rather than smoothed over. In the opening chorus of the St John Passion, the chorus started off with that clipped ‘Herr!’ in tones which are almost barking and utterly devoid of illusion, with Harnoncourt having the basses wring their hands in despair at unexpected moments. All became spirit, pain, a struggle with life. Harnoncourt would have the chorus alternately whisper and explode; at times, the singing was almost speech-like - at others, the raging helplessness of a lost humanity. In short, the Passion of Christ was again made to be what it is - that drama. One could oversimplify by saying that Harnoncourt taught the Concertgebouw Orchestra to live rough and dangerous from the very ﬁrst moment; that he taught the musicians to put not only their instrumental techniques, but also their standard aesthetic approaches on the line; that he taught them to question the essence of beauty. Is that essence merely the act of beautiful music-making? Or is it sometimes also about potentially having to make music that sounds as harsh and at times as desolate as life itself? Harnoncourt's answer was that it is both. He introduced these ideas, and they resonated. Apparently, the time was ripe, particularly in the Netherlands, a country which had embraced the early music movement from its inception. Perhaps the anti-authoritarian zeitgeist which, in the spirit of the 1960s, either consciously or unconsciously sought to deﬁne a less deferential and passive relationship with cultural heritage, played a part. The winds of change were making themselves felt at the concertgebouw, too. Some of the musicians, as members of groups like the Netherlands Wind Ensemble, had already become part of that movement of emancipation outside the orchestra. At any rate, the new perspective struck a chord with many. The Dutch media responded in a spirit of constructive criticism and was moderately positive regarding the ‘experiment’, as the daily De Volkskrant literally called it. And indeed, audiences immediately rewarded Harnoncourt's efforts with applause. If truth be told, though, his vision was actually not as radical as all that. Reduced to twenty-eight players, the orchestra performed on modern instruments as it ordinarily did, lute and viola d'amore notwithstanding; vocal soloists like Elly Ameling were permitted to maintain their usual vibrato technique, although Harnoncourt did discuss text expression thoroughly with them. But the Palm Sunday ritual, in its musical form, truly became the Passion once again, and that was the religiously minded Harnoncourt's objective where life's struggle, death and loss played a role in symphonic repertoire no less, for that matter, than in the Passions themselves. Beauty, he felt, could become beauty only when juxtaposed with its mirror opposite. His belief in music as a realm of pain and friction, as a language in which the non-aesthetic could function as a contrast medium to the purely beautiful, found a ﬁtting choreography in his scrawling gesticulations. How that same conducting technique could serve the vulnerable intimacy of Schubert or the eye-winking schmaltz of Johann Strauss, with a precision and refinement which had often been lacking, was the marvel of his persuasiveness. One had to look at his eyes - curiously rolling, almost bulging with intensity - which could set orchestras on edge without him uttering a single word. In addition to all this, Harnoncourt was a gifted educator. On YouTube, surviving footage of him rehearsing shows how he could compellingly, yet without being overbearing in the slightest, champion sometimes very controversial views. Although few interpretations of Beethoven were as extreme as Harnoncourt's maniacal Fifth, he managed to win over one and all. In time, no one - not even institutions and venues which had long remained closed to this contrary dissident like the Vienna Philharmonic and the Salzburg Festival - could resist that appeal. But it was in Amsterdam that he found his very ﬁrst leading orchestra, and without the early recognition of his talents here, his career would have taken a rather different course. Harnoncourt's deepening ties with the Concertgebouw Orchestra represented the starting point of a career that would take him to the very highest echelons of the international musical landscape. When Johann Nikolaus Graf de la Fontaine und d'Harnoncourt-Unverzagt (his full name) died near Salzburg on 5 March 2016, he was rightly considered one of the greatest and most influential conductors of his time. And in all those years, the bond he shared with what was by then the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra constituted one of the golden threads running through his life, during which he would never permanently attach himself to any one ensemble. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra would, however, end up appointing Harnoncourt as its honorary guest conductor in 2000 to lend some institutional weight to the fruitfulness of their relationship, and he led the orchestra for the last time, in Bruckner's Fifth Symphony, in 2013. Rarely has a working relationship ever been so mutually beneﬁcial. Harnoncourt's annual Palm Sunday performances of Bach's St John and St Matthew Passions, programmed in alternation at his request, marked the beginning of a collective journey from the baroque and Viennese classicism through to the giants of the nineteenth century and extending into the twentieth. Initially, Harnoncourt stayed relatively close to what he knew, performing works by Rameau, Vivaldi, Handel, J.S. Bach and C.P.E. Bach. Indeed, it was not until his unexpected Mozart and Johann Strauss programme at the 1984 Holland Festival that Harnoncourt would conduct in Amsterdam a single note written after 1800. Then the boundaries gradually started to shift. Harnoncourt conducted for the ﬁrst time in Amsterdam a symphony by Schubert, the ‘Unﬁnished’, in November 1985 and - surprise, surprise! - a spectacular Fledermaus by Johann Strauss the Younger at the Muziektheater in June 1987. He considered this production of a master operetta neither as a betrayal of his high standards nor as a breach of his aesthetic morals. He saw Strauss as the direct and, as reflected by his magnum opus, brilliant heir to Schubert - end of story. In 1988, Beethoven's 'Eroica' was followed by Berio's Schubert adaptation Rendering, and starting from 1994, he programmed Schumann and Bruckner. In 1996, Harnoncourt, not exactly a natural-born modernist, evidently did not shrink from Alban Berg's concert aria Der Wein, daringly programming it between Johann Strauss the Younger's Kaiser-Walzer and Brahms's Third Symphony. Meanwhile, he presented his unforgettable cycle of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas at the Muziektheater: Don Giovanni in 1988, Così fan tutte in 1990 and Le nozze di Figaro in 1993. The Schubert symphonies were brought together in a magisterial CD cycle, while Mendelssohn and Schumann, Brahms and Dvořák formed the mainstays of his odyssey through the nineteenth century. Until the very end, Harnoncourt remained unpredictable. He suddenly decided to programme Smetana's complete Má vlast in 2010, and in 2012, one year before his last performance, he presented his credentials once more with Beethoven's Missa solemnis, whose intimacy and devotion equalled the often unbridled exuberance of his Beethoven symphonies. One of Harnoncourt's most singular qualities was his ability to conceive of any work, independently of its stylistic and historical context, as a unique universe incomparable with all else. Brahms's Second Symphony, for instance, made up an entirely different world from that of the Third, and thus sounded proportionately different. Never did Harnoncourt stereotype oeuvres or his favourite masterpieces, nor did he ever become a creature of habit. The distance whereby a performance of a great Mozart symphony under Harnoncourt's direction would differ from the last could vary from slight to dramatically vast. All that he knew and felt allowed him to choose any approach on the stylistic spectrum. And despite the steady expansion of his portfolio, he never became the kind of 'everyone's friend’ who, like a vain, undiscriminating jack-of-all-trades, would let himself be used on every occasion. Out of reasons of principle, there was also quite a lot he did not conduct. He had blind spots where the music of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler was concerned, and he considered that of Berlioz to be inferior. His exploration of the non-baroque French repertoire remained limited to Bizet's Carmen and two operettas by Offenbach. As for Verdi, he did go so far as to record Aida and the Requiem, the latter with the Concentus Musicus, no less. Harnoncourt came to Wagner late - too late perhaps - whose music remained a fraught, secret love. Indeed, he got no further than excerpts like the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde in concert version. Yet to the amazement and delight of many, he did conduct George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess at the Styriarte Festival in Graz in 2009. Oddly enough, the American Gershwin was also a kind of Austrian family tradition. Like Lehár, his music was an old love of his father's, the engineer and civil servant Eberhard Harnoncourt, who also happened to compose music. Father and son had more in common - they were both gifted woodworkers, and for Harnoncourt, the impact of this craftsmanship was not something to be made light of. His theatre career started out in his own puppet theatre, where he performed as an adolescent with marionettes he had carved and dressed himself, eventually culminating in an almost megalomaniac performance involving a troupe of twenty-three. The puppeteer's experience would perhaps continue to echo in the gestural mobility of his orchestral sound, which moved as people walk, speak and gesticulate. Incidentally, in Vienna, his children slept in a wooden bunk bed made by Harnoncourt himself. The love between the Concertgebouw Orchestra and the conductor was mutual and enduring. The two clicked right away back in 1975. When Harnoncourt informed the principals of the orchestra of his intentions ahead of his ﬁrst St John Passion, the orchestra's leader Herman Krebbers concluded the discussion with a declaration of full support: ‘We'll do what you want.’ After completing the Schubert project in 1992, Harnoncourt said to the orchestra, ‘Many thanks for seven weeks of pure harmony.’ And upon conclusion of the Amsterdam Mozart-Da Ponte cycle, the orchestra in turn thanked him for ‘opening new windows on to the history of music' and for the positive influence he had had on the musicians’ thinking. No word of that praise could be insincere. For many orchestral players who worked with him, there was a life before and a life after Harnoncourt. When the celebrated conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch came to Amsterdam to record a Beethoven cycle for EMI, musicians had misgivings about returning to the full, Romantic orchestral sound from before the early music movement. Although a world-class ensemble is in principle boundlessly ﬂexible and any conductor of calibre can transmit his or her own sound and ideas to an orchestra, this example shows how bold ﬁgures like Harnoncourt can nonetheless leave a lasting mark. Looking back, it is striking how remarkably paradoxical the Harnoncourt on paper, as reflected in performance statistics and lists of works, is when compared with the real Harnoncourt. Aside from a few frivolous Straussian lapses, his repertoire conjures up the image of a conservative maestro in the classical and Romantic tradition, whereas his views on that repertoire were frequently perceived as unusual and courting controversy. This antithesis between conservatism and radicalism was false. What drove Harnoncourt was the literally sacred belief, one inspired by respect, that masterpieces could and sometimes should sound fundamentally different from how they had always sounded. Could because he believed that essential aspects of their musical message had been ignored or remained underemphasised within the existing performance traditions, such as the drama of Mozart with its violent and demonic sides. Should because Harnoncourt thought that the scores of these works had demonstrably been poorly or even wrongly interpreted and that instruments were not being played correctly. Next, it was a question of all the details that give oeuvres their unique signature, details that he studied with scholarly tenacity: bowings, accents, phrasing marks and slurs, vibrato, sound duration, the tempos Mozart calls for, which are extremely precise and detailed, and all that this could potentially mean for the proportional relationships of tempos to one another. If andante was still a relatively fast tempo in Mozart's time, unlike in the nineteenth century, which Harnoncourt became convinced of after studying the sources, piu andante would mean faster, not slower. It goes without saying how far-reaching the consequences of such insight could be for an opera finale like that of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, in which tragicomic intrigues build to a climax through precisely planned delays and accelerations. With his vast knowledge of the repertoire, Harnoncourt also knew as few others did with what precision the eighteenth century expressed itself. He believed it was the century of articulation - and not just in the medium of opera. To quote the title of Harnoncourt's classic collection of reflections on the subject, music until around 1800 had been music as speech, or Musik als Klangrede. Unconventionality was never a game for Harnoncourt; indeed, he was unconventional solely when he felt the need for it. He was a 'troublemaker' who could also be wonderfully mild, as can clearly be heard in the present collection in Brahms's elegiac, restrained Tragic Overture or in the thoughtfully lingering Third Symphony, shrouded in the mists of melancholy. The cogs of rhythm and melodic ﬁgures are more audible than usual in Harnoncourt's performances, as if the craftsman in him had laid bare the inner workings of the machine out of mechanical interest, yet we do not hear a forced attempt to bend arbitrarily to his will the spheres embedded in the nature of the music; he follows Brahms the singer with all the ripeness and attention he possesses. In Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, one can hear the Romantic in Harnoncourt lustily singing that Austrian melodiousness with unemotional directness. Sometimes, however, without audibly turning the music inside out, he would discover a totally new and unanticipated perspective on the supposedly familiar. Schubert's Fourth Symphony, not exactly heart-rending music to a more superﬁcial ear than his, could become a wrenching experience under his direction, a late Mozart symphony a blazing mineﬁeld. Sometimes deﬁantly on - or just over - the edge, sometimes imperceptibly, Harnoncourt would undermine everything one thought one knew about masterpieces. This compulsion contained a system which was more about ethics than provocation. Harnoncourt made music truly from an inner conviction that challenged all that was self-evident. How would you judge Nikolaus Harnoncourt if you heard him for the ﬁrst time in 2022? Where would you place him? First of all, in the Central European tradition which, despite Monteverdi and Rameau, Bach and Handel, Mendelssohn and Schumann, was always the ﬁrst language of the Austrian Harnoncourt, who was born in Berlin but grew up in Graz, and who was also shaped by such leading cultural immigrants as Beethoven from Bonn and Brahms from Hamburg. In a narrower sense, ‘Viennese’ thus formed the line running from Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven via Brahms, Johann Strauss and Bruckner to Alban Berg, with classical and Romantic branches leading to the North German symphonists Mendelssohn and Schumann. In addition, one can, with retrospective effect, hear perhaps even more clearly just how deeply his conducting was rooted in the diction of the eighteenth century, in the music of speech, underpinned by a singular sense off lowing tempos tuned to fluent delivery - tempos, and not just those of Mozart, which he studied right down to their minutest nuances. Above all, though, one would think, what a masterfully minded conductor. What respect he had for singers when accompanying them in obscure yet magniﬁcent Schubert arias, and what a dauntless dramatist of the presumably familiar. The minuet in Mozart's Symphony No. 39 is played at such a furiously fast tempo that it is virtually a scherzo. Who would possibly have dared to do such a thing - at a time when the angelic aesthetic balance of Bruno Walter, Karl Böhm or Josef Krips still set the standard for a successful Mozart interpretation? In those days, the listener would be stunned by such an act. But, as we know now, it works - it was so musical that it was simply believable. The ﬁnale of the Symphony No.39 is brusque, yet miraculously detailed. The Allegro molto and the Allegro assai of the Fortieth, the ﬁrst movement taken slightly faster than the last on the basis of research, have the effect of a landslide. Dozens of imitators have since appropriated this proud, outspoken approach; indeed, no self-respecting authentic Mozart interpretation would not let it rip and roar today. Yet it was Harnoncourt who was the ﬁrst conductor to seek out and ﬁnd the drama in the symphonies using a precept founded on speculative impulse, instinct and solid argument. One will probably never hear it like that again, connected as it was with the inextinguishable in his personality. Listening to the recordings on this release, it is clear how the world has changed since Harnoncourt took his ﬁrst radical steps in the mid 1970s. He was an unorthodox and controversial ﬁgure at the time, and would long remain so in his native country. Booking such a conductor was a statement. Now, decades later, we experience as natural what at the time occasionally sounded a bit forced and coarse or theatrically artiﬁcial to listeners. All this means that Harnoncourt drastically changed the general perception of Mozart. Few musicians can say the same. And that process took place to a considerable extent in Amsterdam. But how did he do it? Of course, he possessed boundless energy. And, as previously mentioned, he was an outstanding teacher. His credentials probably helped, too. Orchestras respected Harnoncourt as a confrére who, as a dissident, at least had one foot ﬁrmly in the real world. He was a blend of the qualities of the old-school kapellmeister and those of an academically trained specialist. Above all, he never did things by halves. For his ﬁrst Mozart programme with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, for instance, he scheduled no fewer than seven rehearsals - an unprecedented number. There was some explaining to do, and from an historical perspective, the explanation was not an easy one. Harnoncourt's relationship with historical music was not devoid of paradox. According to his world view, the magnet effect of early music in the twentieth century had become the main symptom of a cultural crisis whose origins could be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century with the rise of Schoenberg and his disciples, who weakened the bond between contemporary music and audiences. Harnoncourt believed that this had resulted in the irrevocable loss of one of the most important prerequisites for a vibrant musical culture. After all, up until the advent of new music, music of the current day had always predominated in healthy musical life. This had been so in the time of Bach and Mozart, and continued \|.o be the rule well into the nineteenth century. Harnoncourt believed that after audiences broke the social contract with living music, the standard repertoire was assigned the task in the concert hall which new music could no longer fulﬁl: being pleasing to the ear. But this beauty, Harnoncourt felt, was based on an historical misunderstanding, because we perceived only the sanitised exterior of early music, not its contrary, lively core, owing to what he called the ‘apathetic and aestheticizing approach to music’ of an encroaching mainstream culture. The question for him was also whether we could even recover it at all, since he believed that the essence of music was fully comprehended solely by those living at the time. It was therefore up to the performers to do something about that. The task of musicians was to correct the historical distortion of an aestheticised conception of music in the spirit of that time. And this is precisely where the difﬁculty lies - because how could they if the music of speciﬁc eras and style periods had become unknowable to posterity, if early music was, as Harnoncourt wrote, so ‘inextricably linked to a particular time’, if it is ‘the living expression of its own period and can be completely understood only by its contemporaries‘? Easy: by making the best of a bad job, through study - by examining manuscripts, treatises and other historical sources to penetrate, if only partially, the wordless secrets of that other world. Making the process even more ambiguous was, for his part, the fact that behind that disinterested motive lay the individual ambition of the future interpreter, which Harnoncourt neither could nor wanted to cast off. Objective knowledge and self-awareness thus became the touchstones of personal freedom of action and scope. As he put it, ‘We have to know what music intends to express in order to understand what we want to say with it.’ That ‘we’ should, of course, always be understood as the aristocratically strict royal ‘we’ in Harnoncourt's case. For him, knowledge was a source of imagination. Although the last word on music was never to be found in historical sources and the theoretical writings on performance practice contradicted one another so starkly, they did stimulate the imagination, which was what really mattered after the study phase. Harnoncourt knew that without an alert musical instinct, the quest would never pay off. He often repeated that dead knowledge could never produce art. Harnoncourt believed that ‘an interpretation that was historically uninformed but musically alive would be preferable. Musicology should never become an end in itself.’ He once said that his favourite performance of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No.5 was that which featured a piano instead of a harpsichord - the pianist being Rudolf Serkin, admittedly. Not the notes, the right instruments or the most profound knowledge had the last word when it came to musical substance. ‘Notation as such cannot convey a piece of music, but only serves as a point of reference,’ he wrote. Here Harnoncourt almost sounds like the out-and-out Romantic Mahler, whom he loathed, when he concluded that the essence of music was not in the notes. Strange bedfellows? Perhaps not. Harnoncourt, a Romantic in his own words, was and remained remarkably undogmatic. His views were not, in fact, diametrically opposed to Romantic performance practice, which was supposed to stand in opposition to authentic performance practice; for Harnoncourt, who had had a former career as an orchestral musician, they were not even categorically distinct worlds. On the contrary, they were closer than outsiders thought. As an orchestral musician, Harnoncourt had played under the greatest old-school maestros of the 1950s and 60s, some of whom, as he fondly recalled, did, in fact, meet his musical standards. He played Bruckner under Karajan and Berg's Wozzeck under Karl Böhm, the mellifluous Mozart interpreter who would later brand Harnoncourt's Mozart as ‘mistreatment’. And so he discovered that older generations of conductors were perhaps actually historically closer to a performance tradition that, in a broader perspective, could have been called ‘authentic’ as well. An old maestro like Bruno Walter, Harnoncourt once wrote admiringly, at least knew how to play dotted rhythms in the spirit of Mozart. With satisfaction, he cited the Viennese culture of dance music as an unbroken tradition in which players had handed down from father to son how a waltz was supposed to sound right down to the present day. Across the generations, there had thus been direct contact with the source culture, and an interpreter need not go in search of the style. The conductor Mahler, with his theoretically praiseworthy yet fatally blind trust in the score, had had a degenerative effect on this uninhibited intuitive relationship with music, Harnoncourt believed, resulting in many things having been forgotten ‘which used to be living knowledge'. One could argue that Harnoncourt was promoting an aspect of the Romantic tradition which seems to be in direct conflict with his views on stylistic purity. Not so - Mahler and Harnoncourt were presumably on the same wavelength in this respect because the essence was not in the notes. ‘However,’ wrote Harnoncourt, ‘when we make music, then we must forget everything we have read.’ This actually points to how nonconformist Harnoncourt could be. It says something that his writings in both collections Musik als Klangrede and Der musikalische Dialog are still fresh decades later. Indeed, they have not been superseded by new truths, for they do not proclaim old ones. In them, Harnoncourt speculates with all the means at his disposal upon the highest goal - the shaping of the work in the composer's mind and the imagination of the performer, who is also permitted magically to err, as long as he sincerely and unreservedly believes in what he is doing. ‘We must always be willing to recognize something new and to acknowledge our mistakes,’ wrote Harnoncourt, but ‘a "mistake" which comes from conviction, from educated taste and feeling, is more convincing than any musical cogitation'. Amen. Bas van Putten translation: Josh Dillon

Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1929-2016)