Karajan’s heirs – Music in Dresden
“Inside a vessel of wondrous blessings is guarded there as the highest sanctuary”. Which text? That’s right, that’s the start of the press release for the 45th ART&ANTIQUE, Salzburg’s most traditional and most important fair for art, antiques and design. For die-hard Salzburg fans, a visit to the trade fair is a must. According to the fact sheet, its core target group is primarily in the “Investment and prof. Private collectors, artists, banks + insurance companies, architects, doctors + lawyers” is a must. The last event in 2019, i.e. “in peacetime” – I often heard the expression interspersed bitterly and ironically during this year’s Easter Festival, with both the Corona crisis and the Russian invasion of Ukraine resonating – counted 14,000 visitors. In the past few days, there must have been at least as many who flooded the state rooms of the Salzburg Residenz, after the long, “cultureless” corona crisis Grateful the works by Gustav Klimt exhibited for sale (the estimates for pencil sketches alone supported in the five to six-digit range) , Picasso, Warhol, Miró, Marc Chagall or Alfons Walde and took a bargain or two with them, for example “for our second home here in Salzburg”.
It is above all this audience that the Dresdner Staatskapelle found in 2013 when it took up its new Easter residency on the Salzach under its new chief conductor Christian Thielemann: an international jet-set audience that travels to Salzburg every Easter and enjoys culture in the broadest sense enjoy would like to. Salzburg’s restaurants, shops, galleries and museums know how to adapt to this tourist target group; At Easter, the city ticks to the beat of the prestigious festival and offers a harmonious overall cultural experience that still revolves around the aura of Herbert von Karajan. It was Karajan’s widow Eliette who publicly welcomed the Dresdeners to Salzburg in 2013. The Staatskapelle has had an artistic partnership with their daughter Isabel Karajan, an actress, for several years. Her sister Arabel, who is four years younger, presented the Staatskapelle with the Herbert von Karajan Prize at the Easter Festival last week. And Thielemann, formerly Karajan’s assistant and present at the Easter Festival for the first time in 1981, fulfilled the role of musical heir and administrator. Oh what – let’s just say Grail Keepers!
It is also understandable that the Dresden orchestra has often and willingly referred to its relationship with Herbert von Karajan over the past ten years. It was a long time ago that the great-great-grandfather Georg Karajan was raised to the nobility by the first King of Saxony, Friedrich August I. But Karajan’s attribution that the Dresden orchestral sound had the “splendour of old gold” also fits in wonderfully with the Salzburg era, and was accordingly often quoted in program booklets and media reports. The Staatskapelle brand and the Thielemann brand increased in value as a result of the Salzburg liaison.
With all the cinnabar, the champagne flutes passed before the »Te Deum«, the banter of the fur-lined ladies and the ridiculous performances by some C-celebrities the Staatskapelle has always taken its artistic residency seriously. No matter how the scenic part of the opera performances was received by the audience: musically, the international critics agreed that the Easter Festival was in top form during the Dresden decade. It must not be forgotten that the pleasure-seeking public, especially during Peter Ruzicka’s artistic directorship, had a lot to offer easter egg Was foisted on and contemporary music was naturally included in the series of concerts. A clear focus was placed on the younger audience; the »Kapelle for Kids« took care of Salzburg school children, and between the two performances of opera classics that attracted the public, the chapel was also allowed to shine with an offbeat repertoire.
In the final year, however, you had to look with a magnifying glass between a dense and unexpectedly fast-paced “Alpine Symphony” op. 64 (under Thielemann), Bruckner’s “Nine” (also under Thielemann) and Beethoven’s Triple Concerto (Wollong/Anger/Chung); program that had already been heard during the Dresden concert season. Unfortunately, due to illness, Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 1 in A minor was not included in the “Chamber Concert I”, which I had been looking forward to for various reasons. With its deadly sad farewell imagery in the Wagnerian style, it would have been the clever chamber music counterpoint to the 2022 program (and became mischievously and enigmatically through Mozart’s “Dissonance Quartet”).
Which brings us to the all-dominant theme of the 2022 Salzburg Easter Festival: the farewell of the Dresdeners, which was felt to be painful throughout, and the suspected reasons for it. The significant dissonances between Christian Thielemann and Nikolaus Bachler are the most obvious reason, of course. The tablecloth between the two artistic heavyweights was cut in 2019, and the farewell was inevitable even then. In the end, Christian Thielemann only said: The most important thing is “that you leave at a moment when everyone regrets it.”
Christine Lemke-Matwey once described the image of Karajan that now prevails; he is “a kind of Gunter Sachs of classical music” been. The traditional audience of the Salzburg Easter Festival can apparently live well with this attribution (actually a joke that on Easter Saturday not far from the Great Festival Hall a Gunter Sachs exhibition opened – the exhibited works seemed embarrassingly out of date and had in Berlin or even in Hamburg, where Sachs exhibited Warhol fifty years ago, caused indignation) and would probably have liked to continue celebrating the successor Christian Thielemann and thus also his own musical preferences. Demanding directing work, new interpretations of classic material, enigmatic programs that go against the grain, on the other hand, are viewed with incomprehension or even disapproval – the exclusivity of the conservative festivalsthe amount of the ticket prices has to serve as an explanation for this in the reviews of the last few days with a shrug of the shoulders (“If you pay almost 500 euros per card, you will not be snubbed, but will speak well“).
Nikolaus Bachler will assume that this art of defiantly conservative cultural enjoyment has hardly any perspective in today’s world. “There is no longer a Karajan figure,” the new director dictated to his colleague Michael Ernst in the block (see interview “Mr. Thielemann and I are professionals”, today in the Dresdner Latest News). A realignment of the Easter Festival is necessary because “the world has changed”. Bachler is, so to speak, doing without the mandatory part of the artistic heritage of the Karajan Easter Festival, he is now radically realigning the festival, adding dance and electronic music and inviting pugnacious directors. In Salzburg, a tradition has thus come to an end after fifty-five years, irretrievably. One can regret that – but also see it as a sign of departure in a new era of internationally oriented, curiously open, truly contemporary and enlightened reception of culture without Chi-Chi, kitsch and sentimentalities. “Children, create something new!”