Conductor
6 December 1929, Berlin - 5 March 2016, St. Georgen im Attergau, Upper Austria
Nikolaus Harnoncourt is the conductor who changed how the world hears Mozart and Bach. He built his ideas for twenty years while Herbert von Karajan kept him off the Salzburg Festival stage. When Karajan died, the Festival finally heard what it had been missing.
Harnoncourt grew up in Graz in a noble household that traced its lineage to Archduke Johann of Austria. He studied cello at the Vienna Academy and joined the Vienna Symphony as a cellist in 1952. The following year, with his wife Alice Hoffelner, he founded the Concentus Musicus Wien in a cramped Viennese basement, a small ensemble dedicated to performing Baroque and Renaissance music on original instruments with Baroque tuning, gut strings, and phrasing drawn from historical treatises rather than modern convention. Their 1957 debut with a Bach cantata produced a bright, uneven timbre that startled listeners used to the smoothed-out sound of modern orchestras. It was the beginning of a revolution in how classical music is performed.
For two decades, Karajan’s dominance over the Salzburg Festival effectively excluded Harnoncourt from its stages. The Mozarteum gave him an alternative: he taught Performance Practice there from 1972 to 1993, shaping a generation of early-music specialists who now populate orchestras and ensembles across Europe. After Karajan’s death in 1989, artistic director Gerard Mortier began the transformation of the Festival, and Harnoncourt made his debut there in 1992. The 1990s became his decade at Salzburg. He conducted Le nozze di Figaro in 1995 with Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Bryn Terfel, Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea in 1993, and continued conducting at the Festival and at the Mozartwoche until old age slowed him.
He died on 5 March 2016 in St. Georgen im Attergau, a small town at the edge of the Salzkammergut, a few kilometres from the Attersee. His archive is held by the Nikolaus Harnoncourt Zentrum in Linz, while in Salzburg he is remembered for the decades he taught at the Mozarteum.
Locations
Completed 1960
The Grosses Festspielhaus (Large Festival Hall) opened in 1960 as a major expansion of Salzburg's Festspielhaus complex, carved in large part from the Moenchsberg cliff face to achieve its 2,179-seat auditorium. Architect Clemens Holzmeister cut the main stage directly into the rock, creating one of the widest stages in the world at 100 meters.
Organizations
One of the world's most prestigious performing arts festivals. Held annually late July to end of August. Founded 1920 by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Reinhardt, Richard Strauss, Franz Schalk, and Alfred Roller. Inaugural event: Jedermann on Domplatz. Herbert von Karajan defined the postwar era. Opera, drama, concerts.
