He was a loyal person, the great master Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Zurich was at the centre of his great operatic triumphs. For many decades, following a strictly regulated schedule, he used to return to his artists in Zurich. In November 2011, there was to be a farewell performance, for once a great concert at the Tonhalle. Harnoncourt asked for Beethovens Fifth combined with Mozart. The serenade Gran Partita for 13 solo instruments was chosen. The wet and cold late autumn season prompted Nikolaus Harnoncourt to ask for an unusual rehearsal setting. The 13 musicians and myselfwere supposed to travel to St. Georgen in Upper Austria to prepare the Gran Partita at his archaic-looking home (a former vicarage). A feast lor our musicians. So we went to the charming little village, were accommodated in a small hotel and enjoyed our extensive work in the private rooms of the Harnoncourt family. An unforgettable highlight for all the musicians involved, an experience, which has its deeply rooted place in their biographies.
For me, too, an unforgettable moment amidst the numerous encounters with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, first in my life as a musician, then as the orchestra director of the Philharmonia Zürich.
WHAT HE REALLY MEANT TO SAY
Beethoven's Fifth with Harnoncourt
When the piece came to an end - and of course it ends spectacularly -, there was ai startled silence. First, people had to catch breath before breaking into applause and quickly getting onto their feet for a standing ovation. This was not surprising since nobody in the hall had probably ever heard Beetlhven's Fifth like this: with as much fury in its tone and as extraordinarily poignant in its interpretive design. Nor was it ever perceived as drastic in terrns of conveying a very definite meaning. An earthquake had shaken listeners through marrow and bones, But not only that. On this night a life dedicated to art was reaching its fulfilment.
Many years before, Nikolaus Harnoiicourt, a cellist working with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and Herbert von Karajan, had embarked on his journey as someone who rediscovered period instruments and an appropriate way of playing them. Together with his wife, violinist Alice Harnoneouri, and the Concentus Musicus Wien, founded in 1958, he began to write a new chapter in the field of historically informed performance and eventually brought about a decisive change in attitude towards early music. He did, however, point out relentlessly that he was noi interested in reconstruction. His aim was to retrieve a particular repertoire from the fossilization it had undergone through busily and monotonously repetitive performances. Bach's St Matthew Passion and the Brandenburg Concertos were presented in a breathtaking new light. At the same time, he did not have to wait long for resistence from the music business.
Harnoncourt was never deterred. Having become a full-time conductor and invited by the leading orchestras of our time, he extended the scope of his repertoire, embraced the Viennese classics and eventually some late romantic masters. His performances of Mozart, Beethoven and Bruckner showed unfamiliar and inspiring features. Here too, he followed the principles of ancient music and its origins, departing from the fundamental belief that music is a language, that it also contains stressed and unstressed syllables punctuation and breath marks, variations in tempo, and no less importantly that it is imbued with categories and figures of speech from the art of rhetoric. And that by logical consequance music imparts messages, at times implicity, at other times in a concrete way. By following this creed Nikolaus Harnoncourt challenged current stipulations established before and particularly after the Second World War concerning the continuous underlying pulse and the even suond, which is sustained by a permanent legato and vibrato. Moreover, he rejected the idea that music consisted exclusively of form without content, or, as Eduard Hanslick had put it, that "the essence of music is sound and motion".
When in 1990/91 Nikolaus Harnoncourt presented Beethoven's complete symphonies with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in Graz this approach was vividly palpable. At the same time, one could not deny that his performance still contained traces of a conventional approach. In his typical way, Harnoncourt of course took the musical notation at its word. In the third movement of the Fifth Symphony - the scherzo with its twirling fugue in the corresponding trio -, he restored the repeat, which Beethoven had originally written but half-heartedly cut after the symphony’s failure at its world premiere in Vienna in 1808. Beethoven’s metronome marks, however, were seen pragmatically and therefore taken into account in an approximative way. And the notion of a continuous underlying pulse remained imperative throughout.
During the next two decades of his work on Beethoven, Harnoncourt managed to free himself from the constraints of convention. How radically he achieved this can be heard in the live recording of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 with the Orchestra of Zurich Opera (today Philharmonia Zurich) in the Large Hall of Zurich’s Tonhalle on 26th November 2011. The sound is generally eruptive, even edgy but it is also clear and highly differentiated. It is an approach which uncovers structures while putting them into an interpretive context by assigning them content and meaning. When in the closing movement of the Fifth three trombones join in with the piccolo and contrabassoon for the first time in the history of symphonic music, Harnoncourt brings them out far more clearly than the trumpets, who usually overpower the rest of the orchestra in this section. This effect is clearly intended. Trombones are firmly associated with French revolutionary music and as Beethoven's sketchbooks show, his Fifth Symphony in C minor is closely related to the Third in E flat major, which was originally dedicated to Napoleon before being renamed the Eroica.
Next to the strikingly keen sound quality the 2011 performance of Beethoven’s Fifth from Zurich is most notable for its hard-driven tempi. However, the conductor needs to be held less accountable for this than the composer and his metronome markings, which were published from 1817 onwards and for a long time considered impossible to execute. In contrast to the earlier recording, Harnoncourt takes them at face value this time. Notwithstanding that, the basic tempi turn out to be of little relevance since he unvariably modifies and adapts them with great suppleness to match the expressive momentum of each situation. This is most apparent in the quavers opening the fugue in the middle section of the third movement: unusually drawn out at first, they break into an  enormously tearing pace within a single bar.
Such effects are not the liberties musicians might have taken at the close of the 19th century. In those days performers considered themselves next-level composers whose rendition was determined by a deeply subjective response to what they found in a score. Harnoncourt’s extreme handling of tempo changes, on the contrary, is based on recent insights of the period practice movement, which brought to light that the idea of a continuous tempo derives from the aestheticism of New Objectivity, a German movement established in the early 20th century. Moreover, like all elements in Harnoncourt’s approach the choice of tempo is founded on the conductor’s conviction that Beethoven’s Fifth contains a kind of programme. According to his belief, this symphony is not about Fate knocking three times at our door and our eventually overcoming it during the course of the four movements. He sees the symphony as a tale of oppression (in the opening movement), of suffering and hope (in the Andante con moto), of defiance (in the scherzo) and triumphant liberation (in the finale). One might agree or disagree with such an explicit interpretation but it is very hard to resist the intoxicating sweep of Harnoncourt's musical rendition of these ideas.
In the Zurich performance of Beethoven’s Fifth, he seemed to be in complete harmony with himself, sharing without restraint what he meant to say as a musician who had undergone a transformation from an early music pioneer into an expressionist artist par excellence. All this came to light during a highly symbolic concert: it was dedicated to the memory of Claus Helmut Drese, the recently deceased former general manager of Zurich Opera, who had from 1975 onwards invited Harnoncourt to produce the legendary Monteverdi-cycle at this theatre. At the same time, it marked the conductor’s farewell after a thirty-six year-long, exceptionally fruitful presence in this city. The special atmosphere of the occasion had already been evident in the "Gran Partita", played in the first half of this concert. Mozart's work too was governed by the conductor’s highly individual expressivity. Nevertheless, his interpretation contained moments of wonderfully relaxed beauty, above all in the sublime Adagio. Because Nikolaus Harnoncourt was like this too.