Just in time for the turn of the year, our Special in this issue of mdw Magazine takes on the weighty theme of love. Various kinds of couples are in focus, here: Melanie Unseld takes on the 19th century with a look back at musician-marriages and the inherent tension between that era’s bourgeois selfunderstanding and artistic fulfilment. Two former mdw students tell us about their life together as an artist-couple, and two siblings meet up unrecognised and unawares in Handel’s Oreste, the Department of Voice and Music Theatre’s current opera production. Finally, a photo series curated by Fotomuseum WestLicht features a camera’s-eye look at couples who became famous during the cultural world’s more recent past.
This issue also features an interview with Andrés Orozco-Estrada to mark his 40th birthday, as well as reminiscences by audio engineer Jürg Jecklin, a retired member of the mdw’s teaching staff, about his time in Vienna. We discussed the significance of bodywork in acting and directing with Max Reinhardt Seminar staff members, who also gave us an impression of their teaching practice. The two festival heads of Diagonale – Festival of Austrian Film spoke with us about the responsibilities of such a festival, and in connection with this, we had some students report on their own very personal festival experiences.
This past July saw Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology head Ursula Hemetek became General Secretary of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), which means that the field of ethnomusicology’s most important worldwide organisation and place of international exchange is now located at the mdw. In addition to outlining the mission of the ICTM for us, Hemetek writes about the future and her plans for this organisation.
This issue also reports on the first European Music School Symposium, which was held at the mdw in early October with over 150 experts from 25 countries in attendance.
And from 14 December, the mdw will be showing an exhibition—to be opened with a special concert—to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of its former teacher Richard Stöhr, who in 1938 suffered termination of his employment here on “racial” grounds at age 63 and was subsequently forced to emigrate to the USA in 1939.
I wish you relaxing holidays and all the very best in 2018!
