Nikolaus Harnoncourt

Few musicians have matched the sheer range and depth of accomplishment that defined Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s path through the repertoire. He began his professional life as a cellist in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, yet soon turned his focus toward early music performed on period instruments, becoming one of the first established players to pursue that direction. Over an exceptionally influential span of years he steadily extended his work into later periods, earning repeated recording honors from at least six European nations together with a Gramophone Award for Special Achievement in 1990. Recordings issued across decades on the Teldec label ultimately surveyed seven centuries of musical history.

Harnoncourt often traced the shape of his artistic outlook to an upbringing overshadowed by Nazism. Born Nikolaus de la Fontaine und d’Harnoncourt in Berlin, he belonged to an aristocratic family that relocated to its historic residence in Graz, Austria. After enduring years of hardship under the regime, the family escaped to Salzburg in 1945. There he discovered his vocation, studying cello with Paul Grummer. In 1952 Herbert von Karajan admitted him to the Vienna Symphony, yet his interests already pointed elsewhere. While still a student he grew captivated by original Baroque instruments gathering dust in antique shops and questioned why working musicians ignored these resources when performing the music of their own era.

With his wife Alice he established the Concentus Musicus Wien in 1953, the first professional ensemble devoted to Baroque repertory. Drawing colleagues from the symphony, they spent four years mastering period instruments before making a striking entrance on the European stage in 1957. Their initial recording presented Purcell’s Viol Fantasias, after which came a succession of widely praised accounts of Bach’s major works. During the 1970s Harnoncourt joined Gustav Leonhardt in recording the complete cycle of Bach cantatas. Meanwhile Concentus Musicus explored large portions of the Baroque canon, including Monteverdi’s operas as well as music by Telemann, Rameau, and Fux. In time the conductor broadened his activities to encompass Haydn and Mozart with Concentus Musicus and, with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra, major nineteenth-century symphonic and operatic scores, among them a million-selling traversal of the Beethoven symphonies. From 1972 to 1993 he served as professor of performance practice at the Salzburg Mozarteum and published three substantial volumes on the topic. He continued to appear regularly as a guest with the Vienna Philharmonic until health concerns prompted his retirement in late 2015. He died shortly afterward, remembered for his extensive knowledge, collaborative spirit, and the esteem in which colleagues held him.