Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester

250 years ago, an important music publishing house was founded just outside Frankfurt: in 1774, the Offenbach cloth merchant and composer Johann André opened the publishing house named after him, which was to achieve world fame with numerous Mozart first editions. We are taking the publishing house's anniversary in 2024 as an opportunity to include Mozart's Piano Concerto K. 537 in the programme, a work that owes its nickname ‘Coronation Concerto’ to a performance at the coronation of Leopold II as Emperor of Frankfurt and which André co-composed to a certain extent: When he published the work posthumously from the composer's estate in 1794, he independently added the bass part of the solo part, which was often only hinted at or missing entirely in Mozart's manuscript.
At a young age, Erich Wolfgang Korngold was regarded as a child prodigy of Mozart's calibre. Gustav Mahler is said to have exclaimed ‘A genius!’ when the twelve-year-old Wolfgang played his first compositions for him. Word of Korngold's talent of the century quickly spread, and in just a few years the young musician became the most sought-after opera composer of his time.
Banned from his homeland as a Jew, he became Hollywood's most important film composer in exile in America and created immortal soundtracks for cloak and dagger films that are still popular today. After the war, he returned to classical composition and created great works for the concert hall, including the Symphony in F sharp.
(Frankfurter Museums-Gesellschaft e.V.)