29 March 1827. Vienna in turmoil, Vienna in mourning. The schools had closed. What had happened? Beethoven, the titan, had died, and his funeral was to be an event. No fewer than 20,000 people paid their last respects. And it was not to be his only funeral. His remains were later exhumed and reburied twice. The cult knew almost no bounds, not even when it came to bizarre behaviour: at the second funeral, his bones and skull were measured; at the third, according to legend, Bruckner was determined to touch Beethoven’s skull. It was almost worship. When Beethoven was buried for the third time, he found himself in a metal coffin at the Central Cemetery. The Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde keeps proof of the cult surrounding the master in its archives: the key to that very coffin.
Long since removed from the cemetery, the object does not stand for a dark festival programme, but rather for the cult of composers, composers who value the music of the past beyond measure, who quote shining examples of music history in their works, and who write homages to other composers and their works to express their admiration. Right from the first concert, a captivating ‘ballet noir’, Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s ‘Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu’, shows that ‘Kult! Beethovens Sargschlüssel’ is not dominated by the blackness of death, but that there is room for bright joy. Where do creative minds stand in history? Who do they follow? It can be a burden, as we have known since Schubert – ‘who can still compose anything after Beethoven?’ – but also a pleasure, as Zimmermann felt when he let the quotations dance in this ‘Ballet noir’ (ORF RSO Wien, Maxime Pascal) in 1966. “Ride of the Valkyries” and “March to the Scaffold”, set to music by Stockhausen: wonderfully turbulent relationship magic! Luciano Berio found similar boldness in his courage to create a collage, masterfully executed in his “Sinfonia” (Wiener Symphoniker, Eva Ollikainen – 07.04.2027 & 08.04.2027). Delving into the vocabulary of the ancients does not necessarily imply disrespect – quite the contrary. Adaptation can be an expression of reverence, as can also be seen in Berio’s work. In Rendering, he sensitively breathes new life into a symphonic fragment by Schubert (Orchester Wiener Akademie, Martin Haselböck).
