A tryst with Mozart
October 5, 2021
In today's episode, we visit Würzburg's opulent Baroque palace to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the city's Mozart festival. The program features Jörg Widmann conducting the Camerata Salzburg in various works by Mozart, including the composer's last symphony, Jupiter.
A Mozart festival in Würzburg?
Salzburg is Mozart's birthplace, so the connection is clear. But why is there a Mozart festival in Würzburg? A city in northern Bavaria where Mozart neither lived nor worked?
Our concert takes place in the palace's Imperial Hall. Light shines through the rows of tall arched windows, making numerous chandeliers twinkle and showing off the exquisitely detailed frescoed ceiling.
Mozart would have loved to perform here. But the only time he ever stopped here was to take a coffee break during a carriage journey. The coffee was apparently good enough to write home about – literally.
Mozart wrote to his wife, Constanza: "In Würzburg we strengthened our expensive stomachs with coffee; it's a beautiful, grand city."
The Weimar Republic
Good as it was, that cup of coffee is also not the reason Würzburg has an annual Mozart festival. It's really due to another man, Hermann Zilcher, a composer and conductor who founded the festival.
Artistic director Evelyn Meining explains what he felt at the first performance in 1921. "The legend behind the origin of the festival goes back to Mozart's music. According to founder Hermann Zilcher, no other music was able to bring together all the arts so well. In 1921, he conducted Mozart's Exsultate, Jubilate motet in the Imperial Hall.
Afterward, he said it was as if he had only needed to trace the color and shape of Mozart's musical ornamentation with his baton."
It was during this time, the era of the democratic Weimar Republic, that the palace was made into a cultural space and the public was allowed to visit for the first time.
Zilcher continued to lead the yearly festival up through 1943. He wasn't just a fan of Mozart, though. Zilcher joined the Nazi party early in its rise to power and even wrote cantatas to honor Adolf Hitler. After World War II, the American occupying forces barred him from working in the cultural sector, but he never received any official sentence.
After breaking off during World War II, the Mozart festival started up again in 1951. The artistic director of the festival, Evelyn Meining, believes that at this time, people would have needed such orientation and perspective.
Much of the country lay in ruins and Würzburg had been almost totally destroyed by bombing, and the palace that was home to the Mozart Festival was in shambles. Photos of the time show people dancing and making music in front of the burned-out building.
The palace was eventually restored to its former glory, becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1981.
The cabinet of curiosities
Today's concert starts with Mozart's Fantasia for a Mechanical Organ in F-minor.
The piece was written for the Viennese Count von Deym, who ran a cabinet of curiosities, filled with automated musical instruments. The piece went on to be so successful that it was arranged multiple times. Würzburg Mozart festival founder Hermann Zilcher arranged it too, for a large orchestra.
To conductor Jörg Widmann's ears, however, Zilcher's work is too big, too fussy, just too over-the-top, so the conductor decided to reduce some parts and even rewrite them.
The musical traveler
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart crisscrossed some ten European countries, starting as a child. He spent nearly a third of his life on the road – not a comfortable thing at the time, since travel was by horse-drawn carriage.
His Sinfonia Concertante was likely composed in 1779, after returning from a tour with stops in Paris and Mannheim.
The Sinfonia Concertante is scored for violin, viola and orchestra. Violinist Renaud Capucon and violist Gerard Causse will be performing on instruments that originally belonged to Mozart.
Solo performers know their own instruments intimately, and they nearly always perform with them, so suddenly playing a strange instrument – even if it was once Mozart's – is no easy task.
It took some time for violist Gerard Causse to get used to the Mozart viola, which has been rebuilt over the years. But violinist Renaud Capucon was pleased with his instrument from the get-go.
"It's quite a challenge to play another violin. I used to play my violin, and now I was playing the violin of Mozart... And it was a wonderful instrument; it's very rich, a very 'juicy' violin, very natural and from the first note. I was happy with it. "
It took the festival's artistic director Evelyn Meining three years to convince the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg to lend out the instruments. They rarely ever travel. The soloists were only allowed to rehearse with them the day before the concert. Normally, they would have multiple days, or even weeks, to get used to a new instrument.
A chat between friends
In the first movement of the Sinfonia Concertante, the violin and viola trade the melody back and forth.
Violinist Capucon prefers to see it as a chat between friends. "I love to play this piece with Gerard Causse. We have played together for 20 years. It's a piece that is half chamber music, half orchestra. It's a dialog between violin and viola but also a dialogue with the orchestra, so it's a double role."
The friendly dialogue of the first movement, an allegro maestoso, turns into a mournful second movement. To conductor Jörg Widmann, this movement is heavy with death. "You know, it's one of the darkest and saddest pieces which Mozart wrote... you cannot imagine any darker, more death like this music."
This melancholic "andante" is followed by a lively presto that ends the piece.
From Mozart to Widmann
The next piece is one of Widmann's, a work called Con Brio, which means "with vigor." It's full of loud and soft, familiar sounds and less familiar noises, traditional elements and radically new ones.
Hearing this in an otherwise all Mozart concert leads to new listening discoveries: "It simply changes your whole perception of everything, if you have heard my piece, which consists of noises, white noise... It also gives a fresh approach to classical music in general, but also the other way round. You will listen to my music in a different way than if it would be in an exclusively modern music context," Widmann says.
Widmann is versatile, you could even call him a triple threat: He conducts, he performs as a clarinetist, and he composes. "All started with the clarinet. I started playing the clarinet at the age of seven, and when I practiced at home, or rather I improvised a lot, then on the next day I was quite furious with myself, because I could not remember the beautiful moments of my improvisation the day before."
The solution was simple: Widmann decided to take composition lessons, and the conductor in him was born.
More fiery music
Back to Mozart now. His last symphony, Symphony 41, is another fiery piece of music. It's called the Jupiter Symphony after the god of all gods in Roman mythology.
Though it was written in 1788, conductor Jörg Widmann finds the piece very modern even today.
"… It is so modern. You know, he has some harmonic shifts, which is beyond Wagner. It goes to modern music. Sometimes if you would only play one of these chords to an audience and you would ask, well, in which century this was written, they would say, well, it is really modern music, harsh dissonance, not really nice sound, 20th-century music... But the beauty is there because there are also the elements of abyss and dissonance," Widmann says.
The symphony is in C-major. Mozart composed it for two violins, one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two clarinets, timpani, viola and bass. That's not a lot of instruments, but they make a lot of sound.
A physical experience
Widmann is a very physically expressive conductor. Sometimes he's majestically upright, exuding a calm dignity; other times his gestures are stormy, his eyes wide open. He can't just merely keep the beat, he says.
The music he conducts manifests itself in his body: "I would say, it's something physical. Why? Because for me a note in music is not anything abstract. For me, it's a body. In German it's this wonderful thing, 'sound body,' 'Klangkörper,' which I like a lot, because, you know, if you hear again, Jupiter Symphony, the beginning, it does something with you physically..."
This edition of DWFC also has arias from two later concerts. One is from Mozart's opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio and the other is from his oratorio, The Liberation of Bethulia.
Tenor Julian Pregardien and the Baroque music ensemble, Concentus Musicus Wien will first perform the opera aria "Konstanze! Dich wieder zu sehen! O wie ängstlich, O wie feurig," meaning, "Constanza, to see you again! O how nervously, o how ardently." The concert was recorded on June 24, 2021, in the Imperial Hall of the Würzburg palace, with Stefan Gottfried conducting.
Wrapping up
In the final performance for today, Soprano Christiane Karg sings "Quel nocchier che in gran procella," or "the helmsman who in a great tempest," from the oratorio The Liberation of Bethulia. She is accompanied by the Italian period-instrument ensemble Il Giardino Armonico. The concert took place on June 23 as part of the 100th-anniversary celebration of Würzburg's Mozart festival.
Mozart wrote "The Liberation of Bethulia" in 1771, when he was just fifteen. He had been traveling with his father in Italy when, upon stopping to rest in Padua, he received an in-person commission for the oratorio from Don Giuseppe Ximena of Padua, the Prince of Aragon.
With that, we end our musical celebration of the 100th anniversary of Würzburg's Mozart festival. Join Cristina Burack, for the next Deutsche Welle Festival Concert.
Performances featured in this DW Festival Concert:
1. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Fantasia for a Mechanical Organ in F-minor, KV 608 (Arrangement by Hermann Zilcher), Allegro – Andante - Tempo Primo
Performed by: Camerata Salzburg
Conductor: Jörg Widmann
2. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra in E-flat major, KV 364 (320d), Allegro maestoso, Andante, Presto
Performed by: Camerata Salzburg
Viola: Gerard Causse
Violin: Renaud Capucon
Conductor: Jörg Widmann
3. Jörg Widmann, Con Brio – concert overture for orchestra, Allegro
Performed by: Camerata Salzburg
Conductor: Jörg Widmann
4. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Symphony 41 in C-major, "Jupiter" KV 551
Performed by: Camerata Salzburg
Conductor: Jörg Widmann
5. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, "Konstanze! Dich wieder zu sehen! O wie ängstlich, O wie feurig" (aria) from The Abduction from the Seraglio, KV 384
Performed by: Julian Pregardien (tenor) and Concentus Musicus Wien
Conductor: Stefan Gottfried
Produced at Deutsche Welle with sound engineer Thomas Schmidt, producer and Russian show host Anastassia Boutsko, and host Cristina Burack. Text and production by Gaby Reucher.