"Lust has its own horror and everything has death" can be read in Joseph von Eichendorff, and this intertwining of lust and horror, of beauty and death can be heard countless times in the music of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart.

Let's take the second theme in the first movement of the Piano Concerto in A major K. 488, with which the Würzburg Mozart Festival started its 101st year: Mozart derives it from the melodic qualities of a major triad with an added sixth.

The magic of this sound lies in the dissonant friction between fifth and sixth and in the tonal ambivalence.

It can function as a major triad with a sixth, but also as an inverted minor triad with an added seventh.

It is precisely this chromatic oscillation between major and minor and the erogenous dissonance that Mozart savors when formulating the theme.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Pleasure and melancholy, desire and the consciousness of death, longing and melancholy - everything comes together here.

It was the composer Pascal Auriat who, in 1973, further developed the potential of this theme in one of the most famous chansons for Dalida, whose text relentlessly and directly tells of lust and horror, of a woman in her mid-thirties desire for a younger man, of mating and being abandoned: " He was just eighteen.” And it is part of this secret French relationship magic about Mozart that Ulrich Konrad, Würzburg professor for musicology and at the same time one of the leading Mozart researchers in the world, in his essay “Mozart.

free spirit?

Freier Geist" at this year's Mozart Festival with Julien Offray de la Mettrie, the French theorist of libertinism and author of the treatise "The Art of Sensing Lust" from 1750,

According to Konrad, "Mozart's free spirit in music" occurs "without exception in recognition of a system of rules".

Don Giovanni, who seeks life and love without any order, ultimately sends Mozart to hell.

And yet, Konrad's reflections could be taken further, there is something manipulative in Mozart's music, which often uses the system of rules to lure us into danger zones.

With Mozart, order often only offers resistance to increase the appeal of crossing borders.

Konrad writes that it would be a misunderstanding to see Mozart only as an entertainer, but isn't the adventurous quality of his genius that he, the gambling addict, combines danger and pleasure, safety illusion and the courage to die?

Here, in the interplay of the concert program with the essay, you can see what makes the Mozart Festival Würzburg so special under Evelyn Meining's directorship: intelligence and sensual experience intertwine with one's own evidence.

The festival motto "All in one: Freigeist Mozart" is immediately brought to a reflective level that leaves everything that is merely idiomatic, zeitgeisty or purely mercantile behind.

After the magnificent centenary celebrations last year, which once again meant bringing tradition to life and securing one's own mission, the future is now to be symbolically dealt with.

For the first time in the history of the Mozart Festival, it was not an interpreter who was made the main artist, the “artiste étoile”, but a composer: Isabel Mundry.

She herself curated eight concert programs for the Mozart Festival.

Her “Signatures” for two pianos, percussion and strings will be premiered on June 11 as a commissioned work in the Kaisersaal of the Residenz.

And already in the opening concert, her "Traces des moments" for clarinet, accordion and string trio fit just as clearly with Mozart's piano concerto as with the festival motto of "Freigeist", although this intention may not have played a role when writing twenty-two years ago.

The three-movement work tells, so one can hear it at least, the story of a gaining of freedom.

It all begins in the first movement with a trembling receptivity of the ego to the world, with the composed experience of being exposed to suddenly changing impulses.

Here, action is an event, a constant being carried away by the force of the moment.

The second movement answers this with swelling, breathing sustained notes by Karl Rauer on the clarinet and Teodoro Anzellotti on the accordion,