Opening speach Eva-Maria Sens

What are we celebrating?

At first glance, that sounds like a surprisingly simple question. After all, we are here to celebrate an anniversary: fifty years of the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music. It is a beautiful, round, respectable number. A number that practically demands to be honoured, welcomed with fanfare, and wrapped in gold.

But what exactly are we honouring? What are we truly celebrating?

Anniversaries and birthdays are peculiar things. Personally, I have always had a somewhat complicated relationship with birthdays, especially my own. I was about eight years old when I first wondered why, on my birthday, I was the one being celebrated. Because if we are honest, I contributed comparatively little to my existence. Being born was not my idea. The day of my birth was not my achievement.

As I grew older, further doubts emerged. It seemed, and still seems, rather strange to say: Please come over. Please celebrate me. And if possible, bring me something nice as well.

As you can see, I am therefore exactly the right person to host the 50th birthday celebration of the Festwochen!

The advantage of this birthday is that it is not my own. And yet, I am not entirely uninvolved in the thing we are celebrating here. A tricky situation indeed. With one foot, I stand right in the middle of this birthday celebration; with the other, I stand outside the door, observing the birthday child from afar.

This ambivalence brings me back to our opening question: What are we celebrating? Who, in fact, is celebrating whom?

Are we celebrating the institution, the name, the brand? And what constitutes this institution, this brand? Does it simply exist independently, born out of thin air? Or is it not, beyond the simple definition of “a festival for early music performed in historically informed practice,” the people who fill it with life and thereby give it its identity?

Even the question of whether we are celebrating the present moment or looking back in retrospect receives very different answers, depending on whom you ask. For some, an anniversary exists to celebrate the origins. Celebration as remembrance. For others, it is about the here and now, a celebration that looks toward the future. And once again, we find ourselves balancing between two different ideas.

So here I stand, not exactly a natural birthday celebrant, faced with a grand anniversary and ideally expected to view the object of celebration both from the outside and the inside, from proximity and from distance, all at the same time.

In such situations, I like to turn to an image, a metaphor, to make things tangible.

Otto Ulf planted a tree so that we might dance in its shade today and harvest its golden apples. Over the decades, many people have cared for this tree, fertilized it, pruned it, and harvested its fruit. It has weathered many different conditions, not all of them beneficial. Its differently patterned annual rings bear witness to times of abundance as well as times of drought. Here and there, a woodpecker has pecked at its trunk. A foehn storm has broken off a few branches. The tree survived it all. It grew and flourished. At a certain point, its magnificent crown stretched high into the summer-blue sky, rising above the ridges of the Tyrolean Alps and becoming visible far and wide. Indeed, one might even go so far as to say: visible worldwide. Otto Ulf planted a tree whose equal can be found in the forests of Arcadia, animated and surrounded by people inclined to dance just slightly out of step with the ordinary.

No single ring tells the whole story. Not the first, not the largest, not the most beautiful, and not even this year’s. It is their sum that makes the tree, just as the sum of all years, all people, all who have marvelled, all creatives, all works and sounds make up the Festwochen.

Nor is any single perspective on this Festwochen Tree complete. Only when we assemble, as in a kaleidoscope, all the resonant, critical, harmonious, indifferent, accidental, jubilant, and wistful memories can we begin to understand what it is we are celebrating this summer.

I would like to leave you with my own answer to that question.

My answer is a love letter to this unique festival.

• I celebrate the idea and its mothers and fathers.
• I celebrate the curiosity that has been a constant companion since the earliest years.
• I celebrate the honesty and groundedness with which early music is approached in this place. The continuous effort to place present and past in dialogue with one another.
• I celebrate the joy with which people dedicate themselves to early music in such diverse and expansive ways.
• I celebrate the fact that there is no other place in the world where these two qualities are combined in quite the same way.
• I celebrate the courage that runs through all these decades.
• I celebrate the fact that we are just a little mad enough to harvest golden apples.
• I celebrate 7,392 names. That is how many artists have graced the Festwochen since 1976.
• I celebrate the fact that these extraordinarily gifted people offer the Festival Weeks not only their skill, their presence, and their emotions as part of a professional engagement, but that they grow into a family: an ever-expanding, meandering family.
• I celebrate the fact that the Festwochen are a kind of Arcadia, a place where fellowship and goodwill take centre stage.
• I celebrate the more than 640 people who have worked for the Festwochen beyond the stages. And I am immensely delighted that some of them are celebrating with us today.
• I celebrate the best team in the world. And this year, especially Anja Falch and Andreas Aigner, who are celebrating their tenth Festwochen in the year of the festival’s fiftieth anniversary.
• I celebrate the fact that I am allowed to be part of all this.

And now, to contradict a statement I made only moments ago, namely that I find it uncomfortable when birthdays implicitly involve requesting gifts, I would like to ask something of you.
To all of you who sit close to the sources of support and decision-making: please ensure that the Festwochen can remain a part of Arcadia in the decades to come.
And to all of you, I ask for a gift of words for the Festwochen. We have placed something in your program for this purpose. Give the Festwochen your own answer to this question and your wishes for the future.

So that the tree beneath which we dance this year, celebrating the 50th Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, may be interwoven with red leaves and good wishes.