The magnificent Imperial Hall of the Residenz is the central concert venue of the Mozart Festival. The Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra from Finland played there for the opening. © Dita Full Moon
"Speculire - study - consider", Mozart himself once wrote about his everyday life as a composer. The Würzburg Mozart Festival has made this its motto in 2023. A four-and-a-half-week festival between anti-cliché action, unusual formats and culinary delights in the Kaisersaal.
In the last sentence, the store almost flies apart. As if the music is tired of structure, fixed rhythm and all the other conventions. Only peppered chords before it goes into the middle part of the finale. You can play it even more radically than the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra. But the most revolutionary moment of the 40th Symphony is also shared here in the reverberant Kaisersaal. Who comes up with such a thing? Above all, how long does it take to come up with such an idea?
A few seconds, so the common tale says. As if everything had flown to Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, like a divine lightning bolt or, for atheists, like a quick grab on the shelf of his ideas supermarket. No, all this was work, hard even, according to the Würzburg Mozart Festival. Although this year's motto "Fascination Mozart" is enticing, it is followed by three words of the master about his day's work: "speculire - study - consider". Which suggests sometimes tricky compositional work.
Ragna Schirmer is this year's "Artiste etoile"
A typical motto for Germany's oldest Mozart festival in a place that Wolfgang only briefly saw once. For many years, no pleasing Mozart balls have been spun there, here you penetrate under the surface of the chocolate coating. Until 2 July, Mozart's cosmos will be measured again. With celebrities such as the Camerata Salzburg including Renato Capuçon, the Ensemble Resonanz under Riccardo Minasi, soprano Christiane Karg or pianist Ragna Schirmer, "Artiste etoile" this year. But also with witty formats such as a disco in the Bürgerbräu, a "Figaro" for children, pop-up concerts in the old town or the "Mozart Laboratory" with its panel discussions and open rehearsals.
At the start in the Kaisersaal of the Residenz, the central concert venue, the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra proves that Finns can also play with southern inflame. Mozart's 40th Symphony is a single storm-pushing trouble spot. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's string symphony is staged almost as surprising, with a raid-like dramaturgy of contrasts. As a souvenir, "Into the Heart of Light" by Einojuhani Rautavaara, a briskly pulsating elegy, can be heard. Mozart's last piano concerto becomes an anti-cliché action. Some see this as a melancholic retrospective, Ragna Schirmer and the Finnish Chamber Orchestra pull down the gauze curtain. A lot of it comes very directly, as an always natural, never demonstrative sound conversation. Other things become finely nuanced soliloquy. And here, too, in the execution of the first movement, the action pauses. A change of scenery, as if suddenly there is talk of something bad. A radical moment, only much more inwardly than the showstopper in the 40th Symphony.
Almost all city and regional celebrities attended the opening concert, including members of the state parliament. Prime Minister Markus Söder did not send his Minister of the Arts, but Digital Minister Judith Gerlach. After all, she is from Würzburg, which she addresses in her speech, only to drift into those clichés that the Mozart Festival is currently fighting.
Evelyn Meining, artistic director since 2014. © Dita Vollmond
The company has fully recovered from the difficult pandemic years. Two weeks after the start of advance sales, 80 percent of the tickets were gone, as artistic director Evelyn Meining reports in an interview. "That's a great vote of confidence." It is the tenth Mozart Festival under Meining's aegis. The fact that their programme also wants and needs to be an offer for newcomers to classical music is reflected in often unusual formats. And yet the boss doesn't want to curry favor. "I don't think the exaggerated focus on non-listeners is justified. Who and where the so-called non-listeners are is difficult to fathom, as is the question of their musical interests." It is important to have "creative offers for beginners", i.e. no indiscriminately sprayed attractants.
The baroque splendour of the Residenz, the location in the Main valley between the vineyards, plus one of the most popular composers of all: the Würzburgers certainly have it easier than other festivals. Nevertheless, it does not see itself as a place to escape the world in times of crisis. In 2016, for example, everything revolved around "Mozart's Europe", and two years later the focus was on the Age of Enlightenment. The darling of the gods (even if people in Würzburg hate the cliché) and the present are constantly touching. "That's highly political," says the artistic director. "We don't use Mozart as a shield to go to a lonely, protected island." What is perhaps missing is a concert hall for larger ensembles. But in terms of content, one feels well prepared: "Mozart is an infinite human cosmos, so that our themes will easily last for another 100 years."
Information
on the program and advance booking can be found at mozartfest.de.