Warszawska Opera Kameralna | THE 19TH MOZART FESTIVAL IN WARSAW

THE 19TH MOZART FESTIVAL IN WARSAW

15 June - 26 July 2009

Ladies and gentlemen,

We are now beginning the Nineteenth Mozart Festival in Warsaw. A year from now, we will be celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of our only composer and pianist of genius – Fryderyk Chopin.

The question arises as to what links these two great composers and performers? Well, both Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Fryderyk Chopin were brilliant artists – from their childhood to the end of their lives. Both were excellent pianists. Both earned their living, to a considerable extent, from giving piano lessons. Both were also splendid improvisers on the piano, in a context appropriate to the times in which they lived: Mozart improvised in public concerts, Chopin at the conclusion of private musical gatherings in music lovers’ salons.

From the beginning of his musical education, Chopin was a great admirer of Mozart’s music and gave wonderful testimony to this admiration by writing his Variations on ‘Là ci darem la mano’, from the opera Don Giovanni. It was this work that first thrust great celebrity upon our Fryderyk, from the moment when Robert Schumann, after studying the published score, wrote: ‘Hats off, gentlemen! We have a genius!’ This outstanding composer and music critic was not mistaken; successive compositions which Chopin showed to the world in Austria, Germany and Paris confirmed this electrifying opinion.

Whereas Chopin was a composer of piano music, Mozart wrote freely in essentially all musical forms, availing himself of a wide range of instruments. He composed works for or with piano, which meant that he must have been the performer of chamber works with piano, as for a long time the piano part existed in the composer’s head alone. Mozart also wrote concertos for various instruments with orchestra and quintets for different sets of instruments. He wrote serenades, cassations, over forty symphonies and more than twenty works for the stage. And he also composed works of religious music, such as litanies and masses, including the Requiem, his last work, completed from his sketches by his pupil and collaborator F. X. Sűssmayr – one of his most well-known and admired works.

It was Mozart’s Requiem that Fryderyk Chopin wished to be played at his funeral in the Madeleine; and so it was.

Stefan Sutkowski