Hans Landesmann

Hans Landesmann (born March 1, 1932 in Vienna ; † September 18, 2013 in Salzburg ) was an Austrian entrepreneur , festival director and music manager .

Life

Hans Landesmann grew up as the son of a wealthy family in Vienna and Budapest , where his Jewish family had to flee after the annexation of Austria in 1938. He completed piano studies in both cities. He then studied chemistry at the Sorbonne in Paris and at Columbia University New York , where he obtained a doctorate (PhD). In 1957, after the death of his father, Landesmann joined the Viennese family business, a meat wholesaler. Already a member of the Konzerthaus directorate, he became general secretary of the Wiener Konzerthaus in 1977 , where he played a key role in opening up concerts in Vienna to the music of the 20th century. Among other things, he founded the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra together with Claudio Abbado in 1986 , organized two Webern festivals and introduced his audience to the musical present in new concert series. He repeatedly advised international program makers and cultural politicians.

He played a key role in founding the Wien Modern festival . In 1989 he moved to the Salzburg Festival as commercial director and concert director , where he helped facilitate the structural reform after Karajan and the Mortier era in Salzburg. With concert projects around Pierre Boulez , Maurizio Pollini , György Ligeti and György Kurtág , he set modern accents and made possible the “Zeitfluss” festival organized by Markus Hinterhäuser and Tomas Zierhofer-Kin . In 2001 he left the festival with Mortier and was music director at the Wiener Festwochen from 2001 to 2004 . Here, too, he was particularly committed to the new music.

From 2007 to 2009 Hans Landesmann was the artistic director of the Salzburg Biennale.

His memoirs, published in early 2011, deal, among other things, with the narrow survival of the Jewish Landesmann family in Hungary in 1944/45 and the traditional rivalry between the music association and the concert hall company.

Awards

In 2007, Landesmann received the Grand Decoration of Honor in Gold for services to the State of Vienna .

Fonts

Together with other authors he was involved in the following books:

• Salzburg Festival 1992 to 2001 (two volumes). Zsolnay, Vienna 2001, ISBN 3-552-05170-8 .
• Herbert von Karajan and the Salzburg Festival . Residence, Salzburg / Vienna 1994, ISBN 3-701708444 .
• Hans Landesmann, Karl Harb: Without music, life would be a mistake. Memories , Zsolnay-Verlag, Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-552-05529-2

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans Landesmann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Hans Landesmann in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Music manager Hans Landesmann has died
2. ↑ Homepage of the Salzburg Biennale ( Memento of the original from October 12, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed January 9, 2010 
3. ^ Salzburg Biennale: Heike Hoffmann succeeds Hans Landesmann in derStandard.at, accessed on January 9, 2010
4. ↑ Large Gold Medal for Hans Landesmann City Hall Correspondence of May 9, 2007; larger image (accessed June 15, 2010)