First comes the music, then the word.
No, it is not about another skirmish in the music theater war, which has been undecided for centuries, about the meaning of what the lyricist wrote and the composer wrote down.
It is neither about the affirmation nor the rejection of “Prima la musica, poi le parole”, as the title of an opera by Salieri says.
No, it's just about the Rheingau Literature Festival, which has been following its older and bigger musical sister as reliably as the seasons since 1993. As soon as summer has come and autumn is approaching, the wine is being read and readers can expect an autumn program from the publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair, things start in the west of the region. It has moved a little further due to bridge problems near Wiesbaden, but is still easy to reach. For visitors from all over the Rhine-Main area, writers of contemporary German-speaking follow Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.
This year, authors as diverse as Joachim Gauck, Jenny Erpenbeck and the meteorologist Sven Plöger will be guests at the festival, which will open this Thursday at 8 p.m. at Johannisberg Castle with a performance by Jan Seghers. There are two hikes through the vineyards, which have long since been sold out, and Judith Hermann receives the Rheingau Literature Prize, endowed with 11,111 euros and 111 bottles of Riesling, on September 18 at 6 p.m. at Schloss Johannisberg.
There are even tickets for some performances. For Ulrike Almut Sandig and Dmitrij Kapitelman, for example. One reads on September 23 from 8 p.m. at Schloss Johannisberg, the other on September 24 from 8 p.m. in the Ingelheim wine cellar. And all of this as hygienically safe and distance-tested as last year, when nothing came of the music in the first summer of the pandemic, but the word held its ground in autumn. Like every year.