three months ago almost exact, 5 December last year, the musical world was shocked when the director Nikolaus Harnoncourt circulated a handwritten note began: “my physical forces demand the cancellation of my future plans.” It was sad then learn the retirement from the stage of the great master, but no one expected that the protagonist of one of the most exciting adventures of musical performance in the twentieth century was extinguished so soon. Yesterday, however, his wife, Alice, announced the news. “On Saturday Harnoncourt expired, surrounded by their loved ones. We have the greatest sadness and deepest gratitude. It was a wonderful relationship.”
“With it ends an era,” he said also Thomas Ángyán, Intendant of the Musikverein , the Viennese room was also a little the director’s house. What is the time it ends? Of a pioneer, along with Gustav Leonhardt, currents of historicist interpretation, which were taught to play and to listen to music otherwise baroque and classicism first. Although you probably upset that defined it as such, Harnoncourt was a kind of lucid musical archaeologist, someone dedicated to critically clean the patina of interpretive misunderstandings that accumulated for centuries in the old repertoire. With the foundation in 1953 and in collaboration with his wife, grouping Concentus Musicus Wien, the practice of early music first came to light and, so to speak, professionalized.
the problem with that Harnoncourt ran at the time was how to be faithful to music (the old) who left touching for centuries and became a foreign language.
the answer was that fidelity to text should not suffocate fidelity to the work: an interpretation is faithful to the play “when it approaches the idea that the composer had when he created them.” This is where the archaeological utopia, whose first step is to change the distorted view the romantic perspective of the nineteenth century and institutionalized in conservatories, whose emergence, after the French Revolution, erased the relationship between teacher and pupil actually begins.
in this line, Harnoncourt, plus a director unbelievable, was the most honest of all. But lets not only an example of artistic integrity, but also recordings that are already reference and a thought that rushed into the writings and interviews gathered in the musical dialogue, music and sound speech and music is louder than words, books so you have to come back again and again.
he was born in 1929 in Berlin, but was an Austrian to the core (liked to say that when he led the symphonies of Anton Bruckner felt “the smell of the earth “) and the heart of his repertoire, he met first as a cellist, was the Central European and specifically Viennese music, Schubert to Strauss. He used to say that there was no right or simply historically authentic version: “It is impossible, illusory, a debate charlatans”. After all, the work was not for him the letter, but what lies behind the notes: the sense. Perhaps that was the obsession of the director, who put into action their ideas versions renouncing the usual smoothness with which Mozart, Haydn or Beethoven heard in concert halls and offered steep readings (just think of your idea Eroica symphony as criticism of heroism), full of chiaroscuro. Able to bring the old lessons to a not necessarily old repertoire
The Harnoncourt own condensed wisdom in a kind of currency that any interpreter, whether or not historicist, may be recorded to fire. “We need to know what is what music means to know what we mean by it. “
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