Interview with Franz Welser-Möst on the Vienna New Year's Concert: Kassensturz in three-four time

Created: 12/26/2022 3:26 p.m

By: Markus Thiel

After 2011 and 2013, Franz Welser-Möst conducts the New Year's Concert for the third time.

© JULIA WESELY

Can you just have fun these days?

Or perform the Radetzky March?

Especially the New Year's Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic has to put up with such questions.

Next Sunday it will again be conducted by Franz Welser-Möst.

14 of the 15 pieces you are conducting this time have never been played at the New Year's Concert.

Is this now a Viennese revolution?

(Laughs.)

no

It happened like this: Some time ago, on a whim, I bought everything that was in print by the Strauss family and Joseph Lanner.

Just out of interest, just like I have all the Haydn symphonies in my library.

Then came the pandemic, like everyone else I had a lot of time and browsed again and again.

I kept noting down: "This is a great piece, you should play it..." When the invitation for my third New Year's concert came, I had a printout from the Philharmonic archives of what had been played so far.

That's when I realized that many of the pieces I had written down had never been performed at the New Year's Concert.

Take a look at our music business as a whole: all the baroque operas that have been discovered in the past 30 years!

So why not show

And the Philharmoniker appreciated that immediately?

There was a little discussion, but they settled into it.

I said: "You'll see, one piece is more beautiful than the other."

So the New Year's concert has been revolving around itself for far too long?

The program is always selected by the conductor and the board of the Philharmoniker.

Many of my colleagues have never dealt with the music in an extreme way.

And then it's like: “Okay, let's do the Emperor's Waltz, Spring Voices' Waltz and so on.” I was also interested in where the pieces were performed and under what circumstances.

And I've also done a lot of folk music.

I just don't want to be in repeat gear all the time.

Has the New Year's concert perhaps changed after all, through no fault of your own?

Because people look at things very differently in these times of crisis?

Naturally.

Every art is perceived and illuminated in the time in which it takes place.

Check out the history of the New Year's Concert, starting with Clemens Krauss.

He had an amazing feeling for this music and felt that it had to get out of the pure entertainment corner.

In general, the concert was always dependent on the respective conductor: When Herbert von Karajan stood at the podium once in 1987 at an advanced age, it was like a big farewell.

Carlos Kleiber shot everything into another dimension with his electrifying way.

And a cow was always milked: 800,000 CDs from the concert with Seiji Ozawa in 2002 were sold in Japan alone!

Of course, social issues also play a role.

I am asked: "How can you conduct the Radetzky March

Is it a criterion for you?

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We have to ask ourselves the question in culture: What are we canceling and for what reason?

Then we wouldn't be allowed to play Beethoven's Ninth anymore either.

There is no play that has been so abused - by Adolf Hitler, by Josef Stalin and others.

And just think what the orchestras played in the concentration camps.

This is a very difficult discussion.

And it should also be guided.

But I am of the opinion that precisely because we live in times that are not as cheerful as they were three or four years ago, it is one of the tasks of art to spread hope.

They will also conduct the waltz "Heldengedicht" by Josef Strauss.

It was composed for the unveiling of a warlord's equestrian statue.

It would be wrong to have doubts here.

Back then, people took an opportunity and gave such waltzes a title.

But these titles have nothing or very little to do with the content of the music.

If you take the history of the Strauss family: Both Johann Strauss father and son were for the revolution in 1848.

But typically Viennese: if things turn out differently, you make arrangements.

It is said that art does not exist in a vacuum.

And the music of the New Year's concert?

Is it really just enough for itself?

In general, it always has to do with the interpretation.

Back then, where I grew up, Mahler's music was considered cheap and vulgar.

I heard that even when I was in college.

Something like that changes with social processes.

I never found Mahler ordinary.

His music says an awful lot about the Austrian soul.

As soon as art says something important, it also endures.

So what do Strauss waltzes say about the Viennese soul?

When things go a little bad, is escapism the only thing that helps?

Of course, that's part of it too.

Let's take typical Viennese like Helmut Qualtinger.

Whining is a national sport in Austria.

On the other hand, if you go back to dear Augustin, that banquet singer during the plague, those dire conditions were alleviated by his art.

All very Catholic: jubilant in heaven and saddened to death.

We drink a quarter, then it's over.

Then what is the function of the New Year's concert?

The soundtrack to the day when everything still seems fine?

Roughly.

We look back, tick off things that went badly and look to the future with confidence.

I can't see anything bad in that.

It's like a bank where the fiscal year ends on December 31st.

We're cashing out and staying optimistic.

This music simply expresses an attitude towards life.

Could a spectacle like the New Year's Concert only take place in Vienna?

I firmly believe that.

We talked to my orchestra in Cleveland about doing something like that there.

After many discussions, it was clear to us: This makes no sense.

Waltz, polkas, golden Musikvereinssaal, Vienna, Philharmonic Orchestra - everything is just right.

This is perfect for this day.

What does an Austrian conductor do better than colleagues from other countries?

Maybe that I can rely on my roots, my musical growth and less on what the orchestra offers.

You can learn a musical dialect.

But it's not enough to listen to two or three YouTube excerpts, it takes an intensive examination.

A Zubin Mehta could do that too, as could a Mariss Jansons, both of whom studied in Vienna and dealt with it a lot.

A rubato for example, that little delay, is hard to explain.

It's also about moods within a melody.

How that ends, how a new phrase begins... If you overdo it, it becomes tasteless.

If you don't do enough, it becomes bland and mechanical.

The problem is that there are traditions, but very little of them have been written down.

Within the Vienna Philharmonic, for example, there are two factions.

They differ on how short or long the second beat of the waltz should be.

How does the conductor of the New Year's concert actually celebrate New Year's Eve?

I'm not celebrating at all.

The preview is at 7:30 p.m. and lasts two and a half hours.

It's long and tiring.

You have to be extremely fit in the brain because in the waltzes, especially in the quadrilles, you have the possibility of doing something wrong every ten to twenty seconds.

So I go to bed on New Year's Eve as soon as the adrenaline is down and try to get a good night's sleep.

Then the next day a light breakfast.

I have to be at the Musikverein an hour before the concert starts.

There's still an awful lot going on.

The ORF unit manager wants something, the CD company, the tie has to fit perfectly... It's like a wasp's nest.

One is glad that one can enter the stage at 11.15 a.m. where nobody can tug at one anymore.

And when you think back to 2011?

It was really terrible at the first New Year's concert.

It makes you so nervous... Barbara Rett from ORF once said to me: "We still had to push every debutant onto the stage." This year I'm overwhelmed by the great joy of performing this fantastic music with this orchestra.

The interview was conducted by Markus Thiel.

Live broadcast

on January 1, 2023, 11:15 a.m., on ZDF;

Recording on January 7, 8:15 p.m., on 3sat;

the double CD will be released on January 13th.