Austrian star conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt

He was one of the few real world stars among conductors. He reached an audience of millions and always remained true to himself - and that means one thing above all: he was a true servant of art.

Following the death of Nikolaus Harnoncourt in March 2016, the "International Nikolaus Harnoncourt Days" were launched in St. Georgen im Attergau by Mechthild Bartolomey, the artistic director of Attergau Kultur. St. Georgen is the place that was home and retreat for its honorary citizen Nikolaus Harnoncourt for more than 40 years, the place that provided him with the atmosphere he needed for his work as a source of inspiration.

The place where his final resting place is located in the cemetery next to the parish church.

Biography Nikolaus Harnoncourt

Born in Berlin, the Austrian conductor spent his childhood and youth in Graz. Artistically ambitious from an early age, he eventually preferred studying the cello to the marionette theatre, which had occupied him intensively for years. After training at the Vienna Academy of Music, he became a cellist with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in 1952. A year later, together with his wife Alice, he founded the Concentus Musicus Wien in order to provide a forum for his increasingly intensive work with original instruments and the musical performance practice of Renaissance and Baroque music.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt collects historical instruments - albeit exclusively to use them for making music - and in parallel to making music andconducting , he also develops his analyses of "music as sound speech" in music-philosophical writings, which were written during his lessons in Salzburg and are still the standard works of historical performance practice today, opening up an entire cosmos of forgotten works and buried sound experiences.

From 1972 onwards, Nikolaus Harnoncourt taught performance practice and historical instrumentology as a professor at the Salzburg Mozarteum. At the same time, his success as an opera conductor grew. His debut at the Theater an der Wien with Monteverdi's "Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria" in 1971 was followed by the now legendary cycle of Monteverdi's music theatre works, created together with director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle at the Zurich Opera House, a breakthrough that was regarded as sensational worldwide. This was followed by an equally exemplary and pioneering cycle of Mozart operas at the same theatre and with Ponnelle as his partner. Both in the symphonic repertoire and in music theatre, Nikolaus Harnoncourt's path as a conductor led him from the Viennese Classical period to the Romantic repertoire and into the 20th century.

Some of the stops along the way: the Vienna State Opera with a Mozart cycle, the Salzburg Festival with Monteverdi's "L'incoronazione di Poppea" and Mozart's "Le nozze di Figaro", "Don Giovanni" and "La clemenza di Tito". In between, there is always Zurich: Weber's "Freischütz", Schubert's "Des Teufels Lustschloss" and "Alfonso und Estrella", Offenbach's "La belle Hélène", "La Périchole" and "La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein" or Verdi's "Aida". In his orchestral work, Nikolaus Harnoncourt has worked with the Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to develop and rediscover the great repertoire in cycles: the concertos and symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Dvorák and Bruckner, as well as Béla Bartók and Alban Berg.

A central venue for many of these projects was the Styriarte , the Styrian festival founded in Graz in 1985 , which Harnoncourt helped to shape artistically until his death. Today, Nikolaus Harnoncourt is one of the few real world stars among conductors. With performances such as the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert, he reaches an audience of millions - with the same passion and flaming seriousness with which he is consistently one thing above all else all over the world: a true servant of art.

On 5 December 2015, Nikolaus Harnoncourt informed his audience in an open letter that he would be retiring from the stage with immediate effect. On 5 March 2016, Nikolaus Harnoncourt passed away peacefully in his hometown of St. Georgen am Attersee surrounded by his family.