On the death of Alice Harnoncourt: A woman who made an epoch

Furious, in the most charming Viennese dialect, interspersed with constant laughter, which of course was no joke at all, Alice Harnoncourt was still over ninety on the phone and could still be outraged at the musical stupidity of the professional world: "Tell me, how stupid someone must be , who studies singing at a music college and even after four semesters hasn’t heard anything about musical rhetoric or figure theory?!” Forgetting of tonal coding of linguistic and gestural meanings, which ultimately leads to a mindless pleasure rooted in comfort, drove her up the wall to the end.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Alice Harnoncourt, born Alice Hoffelner on September 26, 1930, was a passionate pioneer of what is commonly known as "historical performance practice" and by which one means playing on original instruments according to traditional playing techniques, but behind which there was an urgent desire to bring older music to life Regaining language ability that touches, shakes, even shocks us in a productive way in our present.

Her husband, the cellist and conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, to whom she had been married for 63 years until his death, possessed the enormous research energy, charismatic charisma and plastic verbal gift to conceive, embody and codify this program in writing.

Alice Harnoncourt, as an excellent violinist who played chamber music with the pianist Friedrich Gulda in her youth and studied with Jacques Thibaut in Paris, among others, was able to implement this program in a playful way, convey it to other colleagues and transform it into orchestral practice.

When women still had to ask their husbands for permission to work and were not wanted in orchestras, Alice Harnoncourt became Austria's first concertmaster at the Concentus Musicus Vienna, which her husband had founded with like-minded people.

Later she took part in interpretation courses and with other orchestras with which her husband worked, such as the Zurich Philharmonia, to teach the strings all the finer points of “music as sound speech”, as Harnoncourt’s most famous book is titled.

Basically agreeing with him on the matter, she was also able to advise and correct him in the details of practice.

“My husband sought and needed opposition.

Approval irritated him,” she said, shortly before her ninetieth birthday, outlining the basis of their unusual life together.

Probably her most famous recording were the twelve concertos op. 8 by Antonio Vivaldi with the Concentus Musicus Wien under the direction of her husband and with her as soloist.

In the "Four Seasons" she plays the entire pictorial character of the music to the extreme in painting and gestures: birds chirping, cooing love, carnivalesque presentations of the body that are reminiscent of almost obscene harlequinades, sadness, drunkenness, storm and cold - all in a firework of line changes and color contrasts.

When the violinist Gidon Kremer, who had just emigrated from the Soviet Union, heard her with it, he was disturbed to the bone because it contradicted everything he had learned, but at the same time he felt that Alice Harnoncourt was right.

Coming from a modern, education-hungry family - her father was a graphologist, her mother a translator and journalist - Alice Harnoncourt became independent early on and remained so throughout her marriage, although she had to look after four children - without a washing machine, as she emphasized. In the era before the copier, she had to copy sheet music herself and not only assisted her husband in rehearsals, courses and concerts, but also in setting up the parts at home.

After her husband's death, she published his texts from the estate about the origin of the Concentus Musicus and about his own family.

She discovers new interesting manuscripts every day, she said last summer.

And when previously unsent recordings of her husband's lectures from the 1970s appeared in German radio archives, she finally became very modern and recently produced a podcast series for ORF from them.

On the morning of July 20, Alice Harnoncourt passed away peacefully surrounded by her family.

She was 91 years old.

Her performance as a violinist, orchestra teacher and role model for working women was epoch-making.