By Igor Strawinski and Charles Ferdinand Ramuz. Collaboration with Musikkollegium Winterthur.
Musical Director: Jascha von der Goltz
Violin: Rahel Cunz Bassoon: Valeria Curti Trumpet: Guillaume Thoraval Trombone: Frédéric Bonvin
Percussion: Norbert Uhl Double Bass: Kristof Zambo Clarinet: Sérgio Pires
Sunday 29. January 2023, Konzertsaal Stadthaus Winterthur
How does someone become a patron? Material goods, family traditions and personal inclination prepare the ground. Werner Reinhart devoted himself to music even as a young businessman, when he seriously practised the clarinet and went to hear Richard Strauss's most recent tone poem four times in a row on a business trip (for example, in London in the autumn of 1905). However, the experience of having participated in the creation of the "Histoire du soldat" in 1918 transformed him into a patron. Stravinsky worked with the writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, the conductor Ernest Ansermet and other comrades-in-arms on Lake Geneva on a piece that told a Russian fairy tale with deliberately sparse means. A soldier on leave sells his violin to the devil, wins a fortune and loses his fiancée, marries the princess, but falls into the hands of the devil again. The plot and music are alien and distanced, making the play groundbreaking for 20th century music theatre. Werner Reinhart visited the artists' collective in Ramuz's villa; his literarily sensitive brother Hans wrote the German version, which Stravinsky liked very much. Looking back, Reinhart counted the "Memories of the Soldier's Days" among "those that count in my life". He may have pursued this feeling of happiness throughout his subsequent life as a patron of the arts.
Concert as part of the "Werner Reinhart Days", January 26. - 29. 2023, symposium of the Musicology Seminar of the University of Zurich.