“When my mother played in an orchestra, you recognized her immediately by her violin tone – her playing style was special, unique, but modest – that distinguished her,” says Franz Harnoncourt, son of violinist and concertmaster Alice Harnoncourt, who died on Wednesday in the passed away at the age of 92 after a long and fulfilling life surrounded by her loved ones.
Born in Vienna in 1930, she discovered her great talent and passion for music at the age of five. Firmly determined to devote herself fully to music, the then young Alice Hoffelner began to practice consistently and set herself big goals. “My grandparents always supported them, but they weren’t musical. My mother worked it all out herself,” her son recalls. No wonder then that she was considered the most talented violinist at a young age and even received a scholarship to study the violin in Paris with Jacques Thibaud.
Emancipated concertmaster
“One shouldn’t forget the period in which my mother grew up. She lived through the Second World War, at that time a woman belonged at home, with her family, at the stove. But she never let her great passion be distracted and she was for it very emancipated at the time. After all, she became one of the first concertmasters of her time,” says Franz Harnoncourt.
Alice also studied violin and piano in Vienna with her future husband Nikolaus Harnoncourt. “The two met during their studies and my father knew immediately: This is the woman he would like to marry,” says son Franz. When Alice was only 22 years old, the two married in Graz. The couple had four children together: Elisabeth, Philipp, Eberhard and Franz.
Music as a language in the family
The life of the Harnoncourt family has always been shaped by music. They sang and played music together – “music was our mother tongue,” says son Franz. Alice and Nikolaus Harnoncourt were married for almost 64 years. “Hardly a day went by that the two didn’t spend together. Only once was my father alone on a concert tour, otherwise my mother was always at his side. The two complemented each other perfectly in their shared passion for music until my Father passed away in 2016.”
The couple was particularly fascinated by early music, renaissance and baroque music and making music on historical musical instruments. Whether Bach or Mozart: the great composers of music history have always accompanied the creations of the Harnoncourts. Together they were co-founders of the Concentus Musicus in Vienna and were awarded the “Golden Medal of Honor for Services to the State of Vienna” in 2011. “The unique violin playing, the tireless commitment to music and their great understanding for us musicians will be fondly remembered,” said the ensemble of the Concentus Musicus Wien on Wednesday.
If you listen to the pieces of music that Alice recorded with her husband, you can feel how much feeling the violinist put into every single note, into every single verse, into every single passage of the piece. A violin tone that will probably never fade away even after her death.
Source: Nachrichten
