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Of course, these old instruments that sound here at the opening concert of the Würzburg Mozart Festival in the Kaisersaal of the Residenz are relics of touch. But they are not just because they let themselves be touched, but also because they touch us through Mozart’s music and the art of the soloists, who are carried here by the Camerata Salzburg and the extremely careful conduct of Jörg Widmann. It is sound icons that pay attention to how we live. We have to answer to them, not them.
The Mozart Festival in Würzburg has been around for a hundred years, almost as long as the Salzburg Festival. Hermann Zilcher founded it. From the conductor Karl Böhm and the singer Maria Cebotari to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin and the pianist Alfred Brendel, Würzburg has been a place of excellent engagement with Mozart for a century. This long evocation of the present must not hide the fact that it is a “fragile good”, noted Würzburg’s mayor Christian Schuchardt in his opening speech, which contained a sentence that weighs heavily from the mouth of an active politician: “A commitment remains worthless as long as the political will does not lead to action. “
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was also speaking and, irritatingly, Gerhard Schröder was among his entourage, had it more convenient because he could leave it to his confession and hand over the political deeds to others: “Without Mozart and his music, our self-image, our understanding of the world and our ability to find an expression for it, something essential is missing. ”But Evelyn Meining, the festival director, feels the shocks that go through our country: the increasing political pressure to justify“ high culture ”through exclusivity campaigns, the harassed climate in the public -Legal broadcasting, the resetting of culture in the pandemic, which always has to be behind the retail trade and the hairdressers in all opening scenarios.
And because Evelyn Meining just doesn’t want to rest at concerts under Tiepolo frescoes, in other words when playing on an attractive tourist property, she has barbed hooks in the four weeks of concert program that are now to follow. In the series “How Much Mozart Do People Need?” Scientists, politicians, artists and business experts comment on the question of the meaning and future of “high culture”. The poet Ulla Hahn and the pianist Kit Armstrong pursue the “longing for the other world” in the age of artificial intelligence with the claim to artistic authorship.
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