Austria’s Nikolaus Harnoncourt Center Opens

Located at the Anton Bruckner Private University, the center includes an archive of Harnoncourt’s teaching and performance materials

After the announcement of its founding in 2023, the Nikolaus Harnoncourt Center (NHZ) at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz has been officially inaugurated. 

Created in honor of the GRAMMY Award-winning Austrian conductor and music researcher Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who passed away in 2016, the NHZ comprises the estate of the conductor — made available to the university by the Harnoncourt family.

NHZ’s mission is to digitize the seven-decade archive of the conductor and make it accessible to the public. In 2023, the state announced it would provide the NHZ with €460,000 per year to secure the artistic legacy; Harnoncourt’s estate includes audiovisual media, around 50 meters of sheet music, and almost two cubic meters of correspondence, essays, notes on works and performance practice, lecture manuscripts and material on his university teaching. 

Harnoncourt’s annotated scores include works by Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Bruckner, Strauss, Offenbach, Verdi, Dvořák, Brahms, Schumann, Bartók, as well as some Baroque composers he helped rescue from oblivion, including Biber, Schmelzer, and Muffat.

(Image courtesy: NHZ)

NHZ’s inauguration included the discussions with philosopher Wolfram Eilenberger and Florian Boesch, plus the opening of the “Nikolaus and Alice Harnoncourt: ‘Music is a language,” exhibition and think tank curated by Marie-Theres Arnbom, portraying the married couple’s life together and in music. 

Open at the St. Georgen State Music School from May 3 to September 15, 2024, the free exhibit will move to the foyer of Bruckner University from October 21 to December 6, 2024.

Though the NHZ is primarily a musicological research center, it also sees itself as a forum for education; Arnbom’s exhibit also offers opportunities for young musicians to explore the meaning and inspiration behind their own music-making. Additionally, the NHZ is organizing the Nikolaus Harnoncourt Summer School for emerging artists, which will be at his former residence from July 15–20, 2024, in St. Georgen im Attergau in Upper Austria.

“If one takes the score of a work arranged by Harnoncourt in order to be able to read and grasp his thoughts and emphases,” reads NHZ’s page on Bruckner University’s website, “the work is supplemented with a multitude of material about it: sketches, scoring ideas, concepts, secondary literature about the work or its composer, manuscripts, letters, primary sources, all of which contributed to Harnoncourt's engagement with the work. 

“The large number of recordings, programs, reviews, awards, and prizes not only testifies to the high esteem in which the artist was held, which [Harnoncourt]  had to work hard to achieve over decades, it also provides a vivid picture of the radical renewal of early music interpretation in the second half of the 20th century.”