Bard Music Festival Explores Life and Times of Peerless Classical Composer in “Mozart and His World” (August 7–16), Part of Bard SummerScape 2026
This August, the Bard Music Festival returns with an intensive two-week exploration of “Mozart and His World.” In eleven themed concerts, the festival’s 36th season examines the life and times of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, the Classical composer with arguably the most celebrated and recognized name in classical music. Weekend One considers Mozart and The Perils of Genius (August 7–9), and Weekend Two investigates his standing as The Universal Musician (August 13–16). Aside from Program Six, held in nearby Rhinebeck, all concerts take place in the stunning Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College’s idyllic Hudson River campus. Six programs will also stream live to home audiences worldwide on the Fisher Center’s virtual stage, and chartered coach transportation from New York City will be available for the final performance (see details below). Presented as a centerpiece of the 23rd Bard SummerScape festival, the Bard Music Festival once again offers “part boot camp for the brain, part spa for the spirit” (The New York Times).
Since its inception in 1990, the Bard Music Festival has enriched the standard concert repertory with a wealth of important rediscoveries. This is owed in no small part to its founder and co-artistic director, Leon Botstein, who serves as music director of both the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and The Orchestra Now (TŌN), Bard’s unique graduate training orchestra. At this year’s festival, TŌN performs under his leadership in Weekend One, and the ASO in Weekend Two. As in previous seasons, the Bard Festival Chorale takes part in all choral works under the direction of James Bagwell, including the final program, a semi-staged concert performance of The Abduction from the Seraglio (“Die Entführung aus dem Serail”), the opera with which Mozart made his breakthrough in Vienna. Like Bard’s orchestral, chamber, and vocal programs, the opera will boast a stellar lineup of guest artists.
Despite this enduring impact, however, much of Mozart’s rich output remains unfamiliar to today’s audiences, who have a limited understanding of the context in which he worked. To explore his life and world in all their complexity, the festival presents a broad sampling of his oeuvre, including his Symphonies Nos. 31 (“Paris”), 36 (“Linz”), and 38 (“Prague”); his operas The Impresario and The Abduction from the Seraglio; audience favorites like the C-minor Piano Concerto and Exsultate, jubilate; and such seldom-heard rarities as the Davide penitente and excerpts from the collaboratively created opera The Philosopher’s Stone.
These will be heard alongside music by composers including Mozart’s Renaissance and Baroque predecessors Gregorio Allegri, Johann Sebastian Bach, and George Frideric Handel; his teachers and mentors Leopold Mozart and Giovanni Battista Martini; his revered older contemporaries, like Josef Mysliveček, the brothers Joseph and Michael Haydn, and half-brothers Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian Bach; Mozart’s colleague Emanuel Schikaneder; his friends Maria Theresia von Paradis and Marianna Martines; his Italian rivals Muzio Clementi, Giovanni Paisiello, and Antonio Salieri; his students Thomas Attwood, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and Franz Xaver Süssmayr; his youngest son, Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart; and the many successors he influenced, Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Strauss among them.
Two thought-provoking panel discussions and a series of informative pre-concert talks will illuminate each concert’s themes. There will also be two social events: an Opening Night Social at Bard’s picturesque 1916 Ward Manor House (August 7) and a Summer Picnic on its bucolic college campus (August 15).
Program Two, “Fathers and Sons,” helps contextualize Mozart among his older contemporaries. His first significant violin sonata (K296), the first of his Viennese Quartets, and several of his earliest arias and songs will be heard alongside violin duets by his father and primary teacher, Leopold Mozart, a composer-violinist who authored a seminal treatise on his instrument; the “Sonata d’intavolatura” for keyboard by prominent Italian composer Giovanni Battista Martini, who mentored Mozart as a child; the Sextet in C by Johann Christian Bach, a student of Martini’s known as the “London” Bach, who greatly influenced Mozart; and the sixth “Prussian Sonata” by J. C. Bach’s half-brother Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, a leading proponent of Empfindsamkeit (“sensitive style”), whom Mozart held in especially high regard, saying: “He is the father, we are the children.”
Mozart enjoyed immense popularity and personal happiness in Prague, famously declaring, “My Praguers understand me.” Marking the festival’s first all-orchestral concert, Program Three, “Mozart and Prague,” celebrates his special bond with the city. Works by his older Bohemian contemporaries Christoph Willibald Gluck and Josef Mysliveček, a one-time Mozart family friend who served as something of a model for the younger composer, will be heard alongside Mozart’s own “Prague” Symphony and the overture to his opera seria The Clemency of Titus (“La clemenza di Tito”), a work commissioned for Emperor Leopold II’s coronation in the city. Other featured works include Mozart’s first wholly original piano concerto, the Fifth, which he wrote at 17 and continued performing and revising throughout his career, and his beloved motet Exsultate, jubilate. (This concert will be livestreamed.)
In a thoughtfully curated concert with commentary, Program Four, “Theatrical Life in Vienna: Hanswurst, Leporello, and Papageno,” scholar Lisa de Alwis investigates the popular Viennese theater traditions that inspired two of Mozart’s best-loved comic characters: Don Giovanni’s Leporello and The Magic Flute’s Papageno. The prototype for both roles was Hanswurst (“Jack Sausage”), a crafty but simple stock character, used for comic relief. Selections will be heard from The Philosopher’s Stone (“Der Stein der Weisen”), a Singspiel based on the same fairy tales as The Magic Flute, and collaboratively created by the same team, with music by Mozart in tandem with Emanuel Schikaneder (The Magic Flute’s commissioner, librettist, and first Papageno), Benedikt Schack (its first Tamino), Franz Xaver Gerl (its first Sarastro), and Johann Baptist Henneberg (its first conductor). Other excerpted works include The Nymph of the Danube (“Das Donauweibchen”), one of the most popular operas of the day, by the prolific Austrian composer Ferdinand Kauer.
The Habsburg Emperor Joseph II pitted Mozart against his Italian peers in two historic contests, both brought back to life in Program Five, “Rivalries and Conspiracies.” On the first such occasion, the emperor invited Mozart and pianist-composer Muzio Clementi, then newly arrived from Italy, to compete at the piano. Clementi played his own virtuosic B-flat-major Sonata, and Mozart responded by improvising a set of variations on a theme from André Grétry’s Les mariages samnites. Both pianists were then challenged to sightread music by Giovanni Paisiello, another Italian rival, after which — despite privately collecting on a bet in Mozart’s favor — Joseph II officially declared the duel a draw. Five years later, he commissioned Mozart and the Imperial Court Composer Antonio Salieri to write one-act operas on the same subject for a contest at Vienna’s vast Schönbrunn Palace, where Salieri’s Prima la musica, poi le parole (“First the Music, then the Words”) and Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor (“The Impresario”) premiered back-to-back before a court audience, tasked to choose between them. Keen to promote a German-language Singspiel tradition, Joseph II hoped that Mozart’s offering would prevail, but it was Salieri’s fashionable Italian opera buffa that won the day. (This concert will be livestreamed.)
Following the past three seasons’ sold-out concerts in nearby Rhinebeck, the Bard Music Festival returns off-campus for Program Six, “I live with God ever before me: Mozart’s Religion.” Featuring James Bagwell, the Bard Festival Chorale, and the renovated organ of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah, this program presents a sampling of Mozart’s own sacred music, dating from God is Our Refuge, a motet composed at just nine years old, to a late work commissioned for the musical clock at a wax museum, by way of two Church Sonatas and the dramatic liturgical psalm settings of his Vesperae solennes de Confessore. These will be heard alongside the original, less familiar version of Gregorio Allegri’s haunting Miserere, a work strictly guarded by the Vatican until Mozart transcribed it from memory as a child; J. S. Bach’s funeral motet Fürchte dich nicht; the fourth Chandos Anthem by George Frideric Handel, whom Mozart held in particularly high esteem; an Epiphany anthem by his student Thomas Attwood, the organist of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral; and the Missa brevis in F, a major liturgical choral work by Joseph Haydn, with whom Mozart shared a close friendship and deep-seated mutual reverence.
Mozart was similarly close to Haydn’s less well-remembered younger brother Michael Haydn, then a successful composer whose Requiem, partly inspired by the death of his infant daughter, would influence Mozart’s own. After opening with Mozart’s somber Masonic Funeral Music in C minor, Program Seven, “Beauty, Charity, and Reason,” complements Michael Haydn’s Mass with two of Mozart’s own religious choral works, both of which draw on his devotion to Freemasonry. Scored for male voices and orchestra, the cantata Laut verkünde unsre Freude was written for the dedication of a Masonic temple and represents Mozart’s last completed work. The program concludes with an all-too-rare live account of his Davide penitente, a cantata combining a specially created cadenza and two new arias with original text settings of his personally selected highlights from the unfinished Great Mass in C minor. (This concert will be livestreamed.)
Bard’s next chamber concert, Program Eight, “The Pinnacle of Achievement,” celebrates the music of Mozart and Joseph Haydn, when both were in their prime. Featured works include Mozart’s String Quintet in G minor, a profound, dark-hued masterpiece, written during his father’s final illness; several of Mozart’s finest lieder; and his Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, perhaps the greatest of his concertos, in the chamber arrangement to which he gave his blessing, by his student Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Known for good reason as the “Father of the String Quartet,” the elder Haydn brother is represented by the third of his “Russian” quartets, a mature work nicknamed “The Joke,” and perhaps one of those that inspired the six that Mozart dedicated to him.
Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos and his sophisticated “Linz” Symphony, composed in just four days, are two of the composer’s mature orchestral works. Program Nine, “Friends, Family, and Students,” presents them alongside examples by those within his inner circle: the Overture to Der Schulkandidat by his close friend Maria Theresia von Paradis, a musician who lost her sight at an early age; the festive Symphony in C by Marianna Martines, at whose musical soirées he was a frequent guest; the Overture in D by Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, his youngest child, born just four months before his death, who went on to study with Salieri and Hummel; and the “Turkish” Symphony by Franz Xaver Süssmayr, the friend, student, and assistant of Mozart’s, who is best-remembered for his posthumous completion of the latter’s Requiem. (This concert will be livestreamed.)
A master of all genres who revolutionized the opera and concerto forms, Mozart was instrumental in shaping the trajectory of Western concert music. Rather than attempting to capture the full scope of this singular impact, Program Ten, “A Lasting Influence: Mozart’s Legacy,” pairs Mozart’s unfinished, posthumously discovered D-minor Fantasia — a dark but well-loved masterpiece — with some of those of his peers’ and successors’ works that he inspired most directly. These include variations on a Papageno aria by Beethoven, on whose early career Mozart exerted a powerful influence; variations on a theme from Le nozze di Figaro by Beethoven’s friend, the Bohemian-born composer-theorist Anton Reicha; the formidably demanding piano fantasy on themes from Don Giovanni by Franz Liszt, who considered Mozart “the greatest of all masters”; selections from the piano arrangement of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Mozartiana, composed to mark the centennial of Don Giovanni; and the virtuosic concert fantasy on themes from The Magic Flute by Spanish violinist-composer Pablo de Sarasate. Finally, the String Sextet from Capriccio by Richard Strauss — the composer of this season’s SummerScape opera, The Egyptian Helen, and one in whom Mozart’s influence ran especially deep — offers a modern reflection on the Classical, Mozartean ideals of beauty and structural balance in a nostalgic 18th-century setting.
Mozart was commissioned to write The Abduction from the Seraglio (“Die Entführung aus dem Serail”) by Joseph II, who hoped to promote a German-language National Singspiel to rival Italian opera. An immediate success at its premiere, the work established Mozart’s reputation and remained one of the greatest successes of his career. The Abduction is the story of a Spanish nobleman and his fiancée. She and their two servants have been kidnapped by pirates and sold into the harem of a Turkish Pasha. Using intrigue and disguises to outwit their overseer, the lovers plot an escape. However, it is only when the pasha reveals unexpected nobility, choosing mercy over revenge, that the four regain their freedom. This story reflects the fascination that Turkey held for Mozart and his Viennese contemporaries, for whom the Ottoman Empire was not only a key cultural influence but also — in the long shadow of the Ottoman–Habsburg wars — a remembered military threat. Imagining the Ottoman world through Western eyes, the work is imbued with Orientalism, from Mozart’s approximation of Turkish music, loosely based on that of the famous Janissary marching bands, to exoticized characters like the buffoonishly brutal overseer. Yet the opera also complicates such stereotypes: the pasha’s final act of clemency gave Viennese audiences an Enlightenment lesson, presenting virtue as a universal trait and using the imagined East to critique Western cruelty. With its emphasis on historical scholarship and ability to provide a “rich web of context” (The New York Times), Bard is uniquely well-placed to explore these contradictions, when Botstein, the ASO, and the Bard Festival Chorale take part in a semi-staged concert performance of the opera. This forms Program Eleven, “Too beautiful”: Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, which draws the Bard Music Festival — and all seven weeks of Bard SummerScape — to a gripping close. (This concert will be livestreamed.)
Since its founding, each Bard Music Festival has been accompanied by the publication of a companion volume of new scholarship and interpretation, with essays and translated documents relating to the featured composer and their world. Published by the University of Chicago Press, Mozart and His World is edited by Bard’s 2026 Scholar-in-Residence: Simon P. Keefe, James Rossiter Hoyle Chair of Music at the University of Sheffield, whose publications for the Cambridge University Press include Mozart’s Requiem: Reception, Work, Completion, winner of the Mozart Society of America’s 2013 Marjorie Weston Emerson award, and Mozart in Context, named among the “Best Classical Music Book Releases of 2019” by BBC Music Magazine.
The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, Rebecca Gold Milikowsky, Daniel Shapiro, Stephen E. Simcock, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Advisory Board of the Fisher Center, Fisher Center members and general fund donors, The Shubert Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. The Bard Music Festival is generously supported by Helen and Roger Alcaly, the Bettina Baruch Foundation, Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the H&L Family Foundation, Gary and Edna Lachmund, the Marstrand Foundation, Denise Simon and Paulo Vieira da Cunha, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Wise Music Family Foundation, the Bard Music Festival Board, and Bard Music Festival members.
Post Date: 05-07-2026
Since its inception in 1990, the Bard Music Festival has enriched the standard concert repertory with a wealth of important rediscoveries. This is owed in no small part to its founder and co-artistic director, Leon Botstein, who serves as music director of both the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and The Orchestra Now (TŌN), Bard’s unique graduate training orchestra. At this year’s festival, TŌN performs under his leadership in Weekend One, and the ASO in Weekend Two. As in previous seasons, the Bard Festival Chorale takes part in all choral works under the direction of James Bagwell, including the final program, a semi-staged concert performance of The Abduction from the Seraglio (“Die Entführung aus dem Serail”), the opera with which Mozart made his breakthrough in Vienna. Like Bard’s orchestral, chamber, and vocal programs, the opera will boast a stellar lineup of guest artists.
Mozart and His World
Born 270 years ago this year, Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756–91) remains one of the most celebrated and recognized names in classical music. Probably the most gifted musical child prodigy ever, over the course of his brief life he completed more than 800 compositions, demonstrating extraordinary mastery of every Classical genre, including keyboard, chamber, religious, symphonic, concertante, and dramatic music. Against the political and cultural backdrop of Enlightenment-era Vienna, in the aftermath of the American Revolution and during that in France, he revolutionized both instrumental and operatic forms. In subsequent centuries, Mozart’s innovations fundamentally shaped the trajectory of Western classical music, just as his own compositions continued to dominate the concert hall.Despite this enduring impact, however, much of Mozart’s rich output remains unfamiliar to today’s audiences, who have a limited understanding of the context in which he worked. To explore his life and world in all their complexity, the festival presents a broad sampling of his oeuvre, including his Symphonies Nos. 31 (“Paris”), 36 (“Linz”), and 38 (“Prague”); his operas The Impresario and The Abduction from the Seraglio; audience favorites like the C-minor Piano Concerto and Exsultate, jubilate; and such seldom-heard rarities as the Davide penitente and excerpts from the collaboratively created opera The Philosopher’s Stone.
These will be heard alongside music by composers including Mozart’s Renaissance and Baroque predecessors Gregorio Allegri, Johann Sebastian Bach, and George Frideric Handel; his teachers and mentors Leopold Mozart and Giovanni Battista Martini; his revered older contemporaries, like Josef Mysliveček, the brothers Joseph and Michael Haydn, and half-brothers Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian Bach; Mozart’s colleague Emanuel Schikaneder; his friends Maria Theresia von Paradis and Marianna Martines; his Italian rivals Muzio Clementi, Giovanni Paisiello, and Antonio Salieri; his students Thomas Attwood, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and Franz Xaver Süssmayr; his youngest son, Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart; and the many successors he influenced, Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Strauss among them.
Two thought-provoking panel discussions and a series of informative pre-concert talks will illuminate each concert’s themes. There will also be two social events: an Opening Night Social at Bard’s picturesque 1916 Ward Manor House (August 7) and a Summer Picnic on its bucolic college campus (August 15).
Weekend One: The Perils of Genius (August 7–9)
The festival launches with Program One, “The Many Facets of Mozart.” Harnessing Bard’s unusual ability to integrate orchestral, vocal, and chamber works within a single event, this program will be presented with commentary by Leon Botstein. Devoted entirely to Mozart’s own music, it spans the breadth of the composer’s short career, from the pioneering four-hands duet he wrote as a teenager to Eine kleine deutsche Kantate, a work reflecting his commitment to Freemasonry, written shortly before his death. Other featured works include the masterly Quintet in E-flat for Piano and Winds, which he famously considered his best composition; Ch’io mi scordi di te?, the virtuosic opera aria-cum-piano concerto that he performed with The Marriage of Figaro’s first Susanna; the popular Sinfonia concertante in E-flat, which showcases his solo string writing; and his delightful “Paris” Symphony, composed in the French capital during the final years of the Ancien Regime. (This concert will be livestreamed.)Program Two, “Fathers and Sons,” helps contextualize Mozart among his older contemporaries. His first significant violin sonata (K296), the first of his Viennese Quartets, and several of his earliest arias and songs will be heard alongside violin duets by his father and primary teacher, Leopold Mozart, a composer-violinist who authored a seminal treatise on his instrument; the “Sonata d’intavolatura” for keyboard by prominent Italian composer Giovanni Battista Martini, who mentored Mozart as a child; the Sextet in C by Johann Christian Bach, a student of Martini’s known as the “London” Bach, who greatly influenced Mozart; and the sixth “Prussian Sonata” by J. C. Bach’s half-brother Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, a leading proponent of Empfindsamkeit (“sensitive style”), whom Mozart held in especially high regard, saying: “He is the father, we are the children.”
Mozart enjoyed immense popularity and personal happiness in Prague, famously declaring, “My Praguers understand me.” Marking the festival’s first all-orchestral concert, Program Three, “Mozart and Prague,” celebrates his special bond with the city. Works by his older Bohemian contemporaries Christoph Willibald Gluck and Josef Mysliveček, a one-time Mozart family friend who served as something of a model for the younger composer, will be heard alongside Mozart’s own “Prague” Symphony and the overture to his opera seria The Clemency of Titus (“La clemenza di Tito”), a work commissioned for Emperor Leopold II’s coronation in the city. Other featured works include Mozart’s first wholly original piano concerto, the Fifth, which he wrote at 17 and continued performing and revising throughout his career, and his beloved motet Exsultate, jubilate. (This concert will be livestreamed.)
In a thoughtfully curated concert with commentary, Program Four, “Theatrical Life in Vienna: Hanswurst, Leporello, and Papageno,” scholar Lisa de Alwis investigates the popular Viennese theater traditions that inspired two of Mozart’s best-loved comic characters: Don Giovanni’s Leporello and The Magic Flute’s Papageno. The prototype for both roles was Hanswurst (“Jack Sausage”), a crafty but simple stock character, used for comic relief. Selections will be heard from The Philosopher’s Stone (“Der Stein der Weisen”), a Singspiel based on the same fairy tales as The Magic Flute, and collaboratively created by the same team, with music by Mozart in tandem with Emanuel Schikaneder (The Magic Flute’s commissioner, librettist, and first Papageno), Benedikt Schack (its first Tamino), Franz Xaver Gerl (its first Sarastro), and Johann Baptist Henneberg (its first conductor). Other excerpted works include The Nymph of the Danube (“Das Donauweibchen”), one of the most popular operas of the day, by the prolific Austrian composer Ferdinand Kauer.
The Habsburg Emperor Joseph II pitted Mozart against his Italian peers in two historic contests, both brought back to life in Program Five, “Rivalries and Conspiracies.” On the first such occasion, the emperor invited Mozart and pianist-composer Muzio Clementi, then newly arrived from Italy, to compete at the piano. Clementi played his own virtuosic B-flat-major Sonata, and Mozart responded by improvising a set of variations on a theme from André Grétry’s Les mariages samnites. Both pianists were then challenged to sightread music by Giovanni Paisiello, another Italian rival, after which — despite privately collecting on a bet in Mozart’s favor — Joseph II officially declared the duel a draw. Five years later, he commissioned Mozart and the Imperial Court Composer Antonio Salieri to write one-act operas on the same subject for a contest at Vienna’s vast Schönbrunn Palace, where Salieri’s Prima la musica, poi le parole (“First the Music, then the Words”) and Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor (“The Impresario”) premiered back-to-back before a court audience, tasked to choose between them. Keen to promote a German-language Singspiel tradition, Joseph II hoped that Mozart’s offering would prevail, but it was Salieri’s fashionable Italian opera buffa that won the day. (This concert will be livestreamed.)
Weekend Two: The Universal Musician (August 13–16)
Following the past three seasons’ sold-out concerts in nearby Rhinebeck, the Bard Music Festival returns off-campus for Program Six, “I live with God ever before me: Mozart’s Religion.” Featuring James Bagwell, the Bard Festival Chorale, and the renovated organ of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah, this program presents a sampling of Mozart’s own sacred music, dating from God is Our Refuge, a motet composed at just nine years old, to a late work commissioned for the musical clock at a wax museum, by way of two Church Sonatas and the dramatic liturgical psalm settings of his Vesperae solennes de Confessore. These will be heard alongside the original, less familiar version of Gregorio Allegri’s haunting Miserere, a work strictly guarded by the Vatican until Mozart transcribed it from memory as a child; J. S. Bach’s funeral motet Fürchte dich nicht; the fourth Chandos Anthem by George Frideric Handel, whom Mozart held in particularly high esteem; an Epiphany anthem by his student Thomas Attwood, the organist of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral; and the Missa brevis in F, a major liturgical choral work by Joseph Haydn, with whom Mozart shared a close friendship and deep-seated mutual reverence.
Mozart was similarly close to Haydn’s less well-remembered younger brother Michael Haydn, then a successful composer whose Requiem, partly inspired by the death of his infant daughter, would influence Mozart’s own. After opening with Mozart’s somber Masonic Funeral Music in C minor, Program Seven, “Beauty, Charity, and Reason,” complements Michael Haydn’s Mass with two of Mozart’s own religious choral works, both of which draw on his devotion to Freemasonry. Scored for male voices and orchestra, the cantata Laut verkünde unsre Freude was written for the dedication of a Masonic temple and represents Mozart’s last completed work. The program concludes with an all-too-rare live account of his Davide penitente, a cantata combining a specially created cadenza and two new arias with original text settings of his personally selected highlights from the unfinished Great Mass in C minor. (This concert will be livestreamed.)
Bard’s next chamber concert, Program Eight, “The Pinnacle of Achievement,” celebrates the music of Mozart and Joseph Haydn, when both were in their prime. Featured works include Mozart’s String Quintet in G minor, a profound, dark-hued masterpiece, written during his father’s final illness; several of Mozart’s finest lieder; and his Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, perhaps the greatest of his concertos, in the chamber arrangement to which he gave his blessing, by his student Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Known for good reason as the “Father of the String Quartet,” the elder Haydn brother is represented by the third of his “Russian” quartets, a mature work nicknamed “The Joke,” and perhaps one of those that inspired the six that Mozart dedicated to him.
Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos and his sophisticated “Linz” Symphony, composed in just four days, are two of the composer’s mature orchestral works. Program Nine, “Friends, Family, and Students,” presents them alongside examples by those within his inner circle: the Overture to Der Schulkandidat by his close friend Maria Theresia von Paradis, a musician who lost her sight at an early age; the festive Symphony in C by Marianna Martines, at whose musical soirées he was a frequent guest; the Overture in D by Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, his youngest child, born just four months before his death, who went on to study with Salieri and Hummel; and the “Turkish” Symphony by Franz Xaver Süssmayr, the friend, student, and assistant of Mozart’s, who is best-remembered for his posthumous completion of the latter’s Requiem. (This concert will be livestreamed.)
A master of all genres who revolutionized the opera and concerto forms, Mozart was instrumental in shaping the trajectory of Western concert music. Rather than attempting to capture the full scope of this singular impact, Program Ten, “A Lasting Influence: Mozart’s Legacy,” pairs Mozart’s unfinished, posthumously discovered D-minor Fantasia — a dark but well-loved masterpiece — with some of those of his peers’ and successors’ works that he inspired most directly. These include variations on a Papageno aria by Beethoven, on whose early career Mozart exerted a powerful influence; variations on a theme from Le nozze di Figaro by Beethoven’s friend, the Bohemian-born composer-theorist Anton Reicha; the formidably demanding piano fantasy on themes from Don Giovanni by Franz Liszt, who considered Mozart “the greatest of all masters”; selections from the piano arrangement of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Mozartiana, composed to mark the centennial of Don Giovanni; and the virtuosic concert fantasy on themes from The Magic Flute by Spanish violinist-composer Pablo de Sarasate. Finally, the String Sextet from Capriccio by Richard Strauss — the composer of this season’s SummerScape opera, The Egyptian Helen, and one in whom Mozart’s influence ran especially deep — offers a modern reflection on the Classical, Mozartean ideals of beauty and structural balance in a nostalgic 18th-century setting.
Mozart was commissioned to write The Abduction from the Seraglio (“Die Entführung aus dem Serail”) by Joseph II, who hoped to promote a German-language National Singspiel to rival Italian opera. An immediate success at its premiere, the work established Mozart’s reputation and remained one of the greatest successes of his career. The Abduction is the story of a Spanish nobleman and his fiancée. She and their two servants have been kidnapped by pirates and sold into the harem of a Turkish Pasha. Using intrigue and disguises to outwit their overseer, the lovers plot an escape. However, it is only when the pasha reveals unexpected nobility, choosing mercy over revenge, that the four regain their freedom. This story reflects the fascination that Turkey held for Mozart and his Viennese contemporaries, for whom the Ottoman Empire was not only a key cultural influence but also — in the long shadow of the Ottoman–Habsburg wars — a remembered military threat. Imagining the Ottoman world through Western eyes, the work is imbued with Orientalism, from Mozart’s approximation of Turkish music, loosely based on that of the famous Janissary marching bands, to exoticized characters like the buffoonishly brutal overseer. Yet the opera also complicates such stereotypes: the pasha’s final act of clemency gave Viennese audiences an Enlightenment lesson, presenting virtue as a universal trait and using the imagined East to critique Western cruelty. With its emphasis on historical scholarship and ability to provide a “rich web of context” (The New York Times), Bard is uniquely well-placed to explore these contradictions, when Botstein, the ASO, and the Bard Festival Chorale take part in a semi-staged concert performance of the opera. This forms Program Eleven, “Too beautiful”: Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, which draws the Bard Music Festival — and all seven weeks of Bard SummerScape — to a gripping close. (This concert will be livestreamed.)
Supplementary events and companion book
Besides the eleven concert programs, there will be two free panel discussions: “Gottlieb or Amadé? Who Was Mozart?,” moderated by co-artistic director Christopher H. Gibbs (August 8), and “The Age of What?: Absolutism and Enlightenment or Revolution and Romanticism” (August 15). These will be supplemented by informative pre-concert talks — all free to ticket-holders — to illuminate some of the individual programs’ themes. Bard SummerScape also presents a rare new production of The Egyptian Helen (“Die ägyptische Helena”) by Richard Strauss, heir to the German-language opera tradition that originated with Mozart (July 24–August 2).Since its founding, each Bard Music Festival has been accompanied by the publication of a companion volume of new scholarship and interpretation, with essays and translated documents relating to the featured composer and their world. Published by the University of Chicago Press, Mozart and His World is edited by Bard’s 2026 Scholar-in-Residence: Simon P. Keefe, James Rossiter Hoyle Chair of Music at the University of Sheffield, whose publications for the Cambridge University Press include Mozart’s Requiem: Reception, Work, Completion, winner of the Mozart Society of America’s 2013 Marjorie Weston Emerson award, and Mozart in Context, named among the “Best Classical Music Book Releases of 2019” by BBC Music Magazine.
Round-trip bus transportation from New York City
Chartered bus transportation from New York City is available for the festival finale, Program Eleven (August 16). This may be ordered online or by calling the box office at 845-758-7900, and the meeting point for pick-up and drop-off is at Lincoln Center on Amsterdam Avenue, between 64th and 65th Streets. More information is available here.SummerScape tickets
Tickets for mainstage events start at $25 and livestreams are $20. Panel discussions are free of charge and open to the public. For complete information regarding tickets, series discounts, and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call Bard’s box office at (845) 758-7900.The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, Rebecca Gold Milikowsky, Daniel Shapiro, Stephen E. Simcock, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Advisory Board of the Fisher Center, Fisher Center members and general fund donors, The Shubert Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. The Bard Music Festival is generously supported by Helen and Roger Alcaly, the Bettina Baruch Foundation, Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the H&L Family Foundation, Gary and Edna Lachmund, the Marstrand Foundation, Denise Simon and Paulo Vieira da Cunha, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Wise Music Family Foundation, the Bard Music Festival Board, and Bard Music Festival members.
Post Date: 05-07-2026