‘Why wouldn't it work?’

The camera zooms in on the mischievous child’s face. Thirteen-year-old Anne-Sophie, daughter of newspaper publisher Karl-Wilhelm Mutter from Wehr in Baden-Württemberg, has made herself comfortable on the sofa. The reporter asks politely, ‘Is it true that you want to be a violinist one day?’ She says yes. The interviewer presses on: ‘But what if it doesn’t work out? Do you have a plan B?’ The child smiles mischievously and adds thoughtfully, ‘Why shouldn’t it work out?’ Yes, why shouldn’t it, when you’re so talented? When the child from the Black Forest plays for Herbert von Karajan, the maestro is thrilled and describes his discovery as follows: ‘You can’t call her talented, she’s simply a genius on the violin’ – and opens the door to the world of classical music for her. The ‘child prodigy’ becomes the centre of attention. When asked about this years later in an interview for a German radio station, the violinist, now herself the mother of two grown children, replied without the slightest hint of vanity that every child is a miracle. The rest is music history.

In 2026, she will have been performing on stage for 50 years. The child prodigy has long since become a phenomenon. Volumes could be written about Mutter’s commitment to young talent. One chapter of this story is ‘Mutter’s Virtuosi’, young musicians with whom she goes on tour. Two of them, cellist Kian Soltani and double bassist Roman Patkoló, are part of the first of three concerts at the Musikverein, where she combines works by Clara Schumann and Mendelssohn with contemporary pieces by Sebastian Currier and André Previn.

Programmes such as these reveal that Mutter does not play music solely to demonstrate her virtuosity. A beautiful sound is never enough for her. Her playing remains utterly fascinating. When you listen to her, you get the impression that she is constantly searching for what lies behind a work. This is how she inspires composers from a wide variety of fields. One of the first to compose for her was the master of the Polish avant-garde, Krzysztof Penderecki. When he heard Mutter, then still a teenager, in concert with Karajan, he was fascinated by her playing. He followed the career of this young musician. In the early 1990s, he composed Metamorphoses, his Second Violin Concerto, for her. For Mutter, the premiere in Leipzig in 1995 with the MDR Symphony Orchestra under Mariss Jansons went far beyond music-making. She later explained that this work had helped her cope with the loss of her husband Detlev Wunderlich, who had succumbed to cancer. She will perform this concerto at the Musikverein in April with the Wiener Philharmoniker and Lorenzo Viotti conducting.

When Anne-Sophie Mutter advocates for diversity in concert performances, you can be sure that she is not doing so because it is trendy or to increase the proportion of women. One example of this is her collaboration with Iranian-born Aftab Darvishi. Mutter wanted to support women in Iran. Then she came across the music of this composer, who knows how to combine the sounds of her homeland with jazzy elements, making it perfect for jazz lover Mutter. She commissioned Darvishi to write the lament for solo violin ‘Likoo’. Nestled between violin concertos by Previn and Mozart, Mutter will perform it with the Kammerorchester Wien–Berlin in May.
An example of her approach to music can be found in what Mutter said in a conversation with cellist Jan Vogler about Mozart interpretations: there is not just one way to approach a work. Fixed, dogmatic ways of thinking are not productive – what is crucial is liveliness.

‘Why wouldn't it work?’

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