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KASSELER MUSIKTAGE 2010       |       Geschichte

Deutsche Version  

2008: 75 years of the "KASSELER MUSIKTAGE"
The history of one of the oldest European music festivals

The beginning

"This music festival is not an event for its own sake, but is intended above all as a stimulus. The choice of works, the combination of the living past with contemporary work, the striving for a true-to-style and exemplary performance, the involvement of the participants through active listening and singing themselves, the introduction to new music – all these are intended to serve as a model for audiences for their own singing and playing, to enthuse them to come back to music also for pure pleasure, to form their own opinions and to participate."

With this "declaration", the "Arbeitskreis für Hausmusik" [Study group for domestic music-making], AfH for short, invited Kassel’s citizens to the first KASSELER MUSIKTAGE in autumn 1933. This wasn’t just about a new music festival; even its organising committee had only been set up in the same year. Its aim was to further the work of the "Finkensteiner Bund", a singing movement which had been inaugurated by the Sudeten German folk-song scholar and music teacher Walther Hensel in 1924 and which had recently been ‘brought into line’ with Nazi policies. Its aim was the preservation and further research into German folk song and at the same time, to achieve the widest possible dissemination of songs and choruses in all sectors of society through song schools and singing weeks. The founding members included a young, enterprising music publisher from Augsburg, with a keen personal interest in this wide musical education for the general public. He became official publisher to the association, and of its newsletters and song collections.

His name: Karl Vötterle, founder and director for many years of Bärenreiter-Verlag. He moved the company from Augsburg to Kassel in 1927 and developed it into one of the leading international music publishers in the years following the Second World War. This ideal of a great German "singing movement", that music wasn’t just to be passively enjoyed, but should be something which everyone created, was the raison d’être of the AfH and is the fundamental aim of the KASSELER MUSIKTAGE (KMT); but not its only one.

Vötterle, a Protestant, was an equally energetic promoter of a living church music. The compositions of Heinrich Schütz which were then being rediscovered and his work in Kassel had led to the founding of the Heinrich Schütz-Gesellschaft (Heinrich Schütz Society) in 1929; these events gave a decisive impetus to the movement for the renewal of Protestant church music which was then getting underway. This movement came at just the right moment for Vötterle and his fellow founders of the KMT, and works by Hugo Distler, Ernst Pepping, Helmut Bornefeld and many others were regularly performed in the sacred concerts at the MUSIKTAGE. In contrast, Schütz, Bach, Handel, English Renaissance and Baroque music formed the "old" pillars of the programme. This also included music suitable for playing at home and chamber music to Mozart and Beethoven, "open singing" and "open dancing" sessions and Protestant and Catholic church services, social evenings for joining in singing and playing games, lectures on musicology and naturally – mostly as an afterthought – the further pedagogical work of the "study group".

And finally the new interest in authentic instruments, their reconstruction and how to play them, and the rediscovery of old, original sounds formed the third part of the concept of the KASSELER MUSIKTAGE in the early days. The festival was directed from 1933 for over forty years by the musicologist and Vötterle’s close colleague, Richard Baum.

In the ensuing "thousand years" the KASSELER MUSIKTAGE was unable to escape the Nazis’ appropriation of the festival for their own ends, but it managed the delicate balancing act between subjugation and self-determination, particularly under the patronage of Prince Philipp of Hesse. Chief Administrator of the Province of Hessen-Nassau, he was little appreciated by the regime grandees, but was unassailable.
The beginning of the war put paid to the whole enterprise. In 1943 the AfH wanted to resume the MUSIKTAGE for the first time since 1939. However, the devastating Allied air raid on Kassel on 22 October literally reduced the plans to ashes.

A new beginning and a new sense of purpose

In 1950 the "Arbeitskreis für Hausmusik" [Study group for domestic music-making], from 1952 the "Arbeitskreis für Haus- und Jugendmusik" [Study group for domestic and youth music], was able to permit the KASSELER MUSIKTAGE to resume, "with support from the Hesse Ministry for Education and Training and Kassel City Council". In the beginning it had a modest programme and was unspectacular: gamba music was heard at the opening concert, played by the unforgettable August Wenzinger. Of the original venues, only the City Hall was still available for a "social evening". The Ständehaus, Amerikahaus (buildings which now belong to the Murhardsche Library), Bärenreiter offices and others offered temporary space, as did the Friedenskirche, where the "Sacred Concerts" and "Evening Music" took place instead of in the destroyed Martinskirche, until this was rebuilt in 1958.

The programme concept remained the same in principle for several years. Church music and services were reinstated in their old place, domestic music continued as a major focus, but the scope of the festival broadened. Hessische Rundfunk (Hesse Broadcasting Service) and its symphony orchestra became major participants from 1955. Hessische Rundfunk broadcast regular recordings from the KASSELER MUSIKTAGE from 1977 onwards, and since 1994 has been an official co-promoter. Concerts by the Orchestra of the State Theatre became a mainstay of the festival, and from 1954, the State Theatre itself brought into play a further dimension with public appeal, beginning in the small concert hall. Later, Hans Hartleb staged Handel’s "Deidamia" in the Blue Room of City Hall. A high-point of this collaboration was Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s "Soldaten" at the 25th KASSELER MUSIKTAGE 1968.

The KASSELER MUSIKTAGE has enjoyed an increasing reputation amongst European music festivals for its thoughtful choice of interpreters – Wenzinger was followed by Helmuth Rilling, Marinus Voorberg, Hans Martin Linde, Alfred Deller, Wolfgang Gönnenwein, ensemble modern and "die reihe" and many others. Consideration has always been given to the balance between foreign and regional interpreters. As well as the State Orchestra, Klaus Martin Ziegler (d. 1993), the church music director and Kantor at St. Martin, played a major part with his choir and the Vocalensemble Kassel which he founded in 1965. The tireless contribution, both intellectual and practical, made by the harpsichordist and pianist Franzpeter Goebels in both early and contemporary music should also not be forgotten.

Ziegler, however, was not only a performing artist, he was also one of those most closely involved in programme planning at the KASSELER MUSIKTAGE in its engagement with contemporary music. The "Woche für geistliche Musik" [Sacred Music Week] biennale which he founded was amalgamated as "neue musik in der kirche" with the KMT in 1977. From then onwards, Ziegler was jointly responsible for the entire programme until his death in 1993.
Every year this reveals more clearly the other side of the MUSIKTAGE’s successful recipe: the festival’s constant urge to constantly rediscover itself. For example, the 19th century, so out of fashion at the beginning, came into its own; contemporary music and classic modern music outside the church sphere became consistently exciting focuses of attention; and the number of first performances and commissioned works increased. In contrast, during the 1960s the original philosophy moved away from one of joining in to one of explaining concepts. Introductions to works and accompanying symposia became a new hallmark of the event. Leading scholars regularly discussed themes such as "Early Music Today", "Contemporary Music Today" or "Forerunners of the Modern Age" in symposia. The idea of the accompanying conference finally became a decisive factor in the overall programme: from 1970, the KASSELER MUSIKTAGE had a general theme each year. The first was entitled "Forerunners of Contemporary Music in Three Eras". The last programme planned by Richard Baum was dedicated to "Bach 1975. Reception and Interpretation in the 20th century".

In 1976 Wolfgang Rehm took over the directorship of the KASSELER MUSIKTAGE, working with Ziegler from 1977 onwards. In that year, the two directors organised one of the most sensational years of the KASSELER MUSIKTAGE in collaboration with Manfred Schneckenburger’s documenta VI, which has gone down in legend. In 1991 Hesse Broadcasting’s Head of Music Leo Karl Gerhartz succeeded Rehm, creating once more new "dramaturgical" emphases with Mendelssohn and Satie in two successive years. A greater contrast couldn’t be achieved.

In his later programme planning, Baum had already discreetly developed this constructive art of surprise – on the one hand never quite doing what was expected and on the other hand, reacting seismographically to the major musical questions of the present. This was definitively raised to an actual maxim of the KASSELER MUSIKTAGE by Rehm, Ziegler and Gerhartz. In order to maintain the high standards now achieved, the MUSIKTAGE set up a programme committee in 1979 which took over entirely the work of the AfH (now "iam": Internationaler Arbeitskreis für Musik) as a team under the artistic director in the following years. In a short interregnum as director in 2004/05, Freimut Richter-Hansen, former Intendant of the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra, brought his skills to bear. Since 2006 Dieter Rexroth has been artistic director of the Kasseler Musikfestival, which can be reckoned to be one of the longest established in Europe. In Rexroth, the festival has undoubtedly attracted one of the most innovative, well-informed and important figures in German musical life. His two programmes to date, "The Divine in the Commonplace" and "Realms of Life and Realms of Art", perfectly perpetuate the tradition of the non-traditional, particularly with a noticeable increase in the number of commissioned works.

The KASSELER MUSIKTAGE has come a long way in the past 75 years, and has a rich and varied history. The fact that it continues successfully today may seem surprising on account of the demands it consistently places on a positive and insatiably curious public. But the festival has shown that such an audience exists and that it wants to take part in the endlessly intellectual and emotional adventures which music can offer.

In 1982 the KASSELER MUSIKTAGE restructured to form an incorporated society whose members now include the Hesse Ministry of Art and Sciences, Hesse Broadcasting Service, the City of Kassel, the Kassel Trustee Savings Bank, the Protestant Church Circuit Kassel, the Protestant Academy Hofgeismar, the University of Kassel, the Internationale Arbeitskreis für Musik, Kassel State Theatre, together with the music publishers Bärenreiter-Verlag, Merseburger, Furore and Alkor-Edition.

Martin Griesemer