The Mozart Festival blends into the Würzburg cityscape like a background noise that you only notice when it suddenly disappears. It shows the flag along the inner city streets: deep garnet red, deep and warm. The director Evelyn Meining, whose contract has just been extended ahead of schedule to 2029, and her small team have apparently never had the idea of ​​cutting back on the outdoor advertising budget in these difficult weeks, when hope and disillusionment are so close together. Even if in the centenary of the festival there are not nearly as many listeners as one would otherwise have hoped: it is about showing vitality, being there and setting standards with what is possible.

For example, the “Room for Mozart” in a shop, where you can meet not only Wolfgang Amadé in loosely arranged pictures and tables, but also the jazz drummer Tobias Schirmer, who uses civilization waste such as bicycle spokes, brake disks or pot lids to assemble and assemble new instruments demonstrates: Scrap becomes sound. And there are the graffiti sprayers on a street wall twenty meters further, cheerfully placing a couple of larger-than-life Mozart heads in the urban space - similar to each other, but with clever and funny details, as you can experience in your own music.

Such entering into everyday life is a principle of the four-week festival anyway. In this year of the pandemic, however, it may also have features of a resilient defiance to all restrictions. Sometimes you think you can hear him well into the evening programs: when the piano duo Tal & Groethuysen, active again in front of listeners for the first time in seven months, presents their familiar four-hand pieces, already performed hundreds of times together, with such a pressing energy that the turning points in Franz Schubert's F minor fantasy like tearing black holes wide open to fright or driving out all suppleness from the pieces by the festival patron and peeling out the hard core of strict thought work.Or when Andris Nelsons interprets Anton Bruckner's sixth symphony with the Bamberg Symphony (in their home concert hall instead of in the planned Würzburg Cathedral, the use of which also fell victim to the Corona restrictions) this time in a completely different way than in his rather fresh recording the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra - much less velvety, full-bodied and eloquent in sound, but with splintery, violently blinding brass sections, deep sadness in the Adagio and a deliberately challenging Scherzo: music that tries to drown out unprocessed trauma.the performance of which also fell victim to the Corona restrictions) this time it is very different than in its still quite fresh recording with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra - much less velvety, full-bodied and eloquent, but with sharp, splintered, violently blinding brass movements, deep sadness in the Adagio and a wantonly challenging Scherzo: music that tries to drown out unprocessed trauma.the performance of which also fell victim to the Corona restrictions) this time it is very different than in its still quite fresh recording with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra - much less velvety, full-bodied and eloquent, but with sharp, splintered, violently blinding brass movements, deep sadness in the Adagio and a wantonly challenging Scherzo: music that tries to drown out unprocessed trauma.

The Estonian composer Jüri Reinvere countered this struggle, which is directed towards God and the world, with a ten-minute piece of exposure and immersion in the sounds, often so quiet and fragile that turning the sheet of music almost becomes a disruptive factor. “Maria Anna, awake, in the next room”, one of the two commissioned works for this year's festival, is a night picture of Mozart's older sister, the “Nannerl” - close and open to him, yet in a different world. The chirping of crickets, the flickering of stars, the blowing of the wind in the curtains or your own deep breaths, perhaps also dreamily sunken fragments of memory: Much is opened in the oscillating sound bands of this premiere, nothing is forced into place; Music of the utmost discretion,flow together in the outside and inside world and which was brought to life by the Nelsons and the Bambergers with an astonishing delicacy.