Nikolaus Harnoncourt: Pioneering conductor celebrated for using period instruments and the revival of Baroque music

Nikolaus Harnoncourt stepped down from the podium last December in the manner that had characterised his work as one of the world's leading conductors – with style but without fanfare. “Dear public,” he wrote, “my physical strength orders me to cancel my future plans.” Describing the synergy between himself and the audience as leading to an “unusually deep relationship”, he said farewell in an open letter, simply, elegantly and without pathos.

Born into a lineage that included some of Europe's most aristocratic families, Harnoncourt was also part of Austria's musical nobility, with a mastery that put him on the level of those other great post-war Austrian conductors Herbert von Karajan, Karl Böhm and Carlos Kleiber.

His concern for historical detail was legendary. He often distributed his own material to orchestras, adding expression marks on how to create more authentic or refined interpretations, aiming to erase what he called “traditionally traded” mistakes. Adding period instruments as well as tempi and dynamics discarded by modern performances, he broke through in the 1970s with a series of celebrated concerts, particularly of Monteverdi and Mozart.

He thought of his conducting as alive and romantic, not a relic of history. “I have always hated the word 'authenticity' because it is so dangerous,” he said. “'Museum music' does not interest me. I have no intention of organising guided tours to visit Louis XIV or Johann Sebastian Bach.”

He later expanded his repertoire to include 19th century opera favourites such as Aida, but didn't stop there. His individually accented interpretations, including composers as diverse as Beethoven and Richard Strauss, had already led Switzerland's Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper in 1999 to call him “the protagonist of the new expressionism.”

Harnoncourt believed art was the foil to modern society's materialism, which he saw as a threat to Europe's cultural values. As a boy, he acquired his knowledge of sacral music at the cathedral in his home city of Graz. “We as musicians – indeed all artists – have to administer a powerful, a holy language,” he said in a speech for Mozart's bicentenary in 1991. “We have to do everything in our power to keep it from getting lost in the maelstrom of materialism.”

He was born in Berlin in 1929. His father Eberhard belonged to the house of the Count de la Fontaine und d'Harnoncourt-Unverzagt of Luxembourg-Lorraine, while his mother, Duchess Meran and Baroness of Brandhofen, was a great-grandchild of Archduke Johann of Styria. The family moved to Graz, where Harnoncourt became an accomplished cello player. He chose music as his profession after hearing a radio recording of Beethoven's 7th Symphony under Wilhelm Furtwängler and went to Vienna in 1948 to study. Four years later he started as a cellist with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under Karajan, a job he would keep until 1969.

He was already experimenting with older sounds, having forged a group in 1949 with his future wife, Alice Hoffelner, for performances on period instruments. In 1953 he founded the Concentus Musicus Wien as a platform for his Renaissance and baroque work, using period instruments – many of which he had to buy at his own expense – to counteract what he called “stultifying, aesthetically sanitised music-making.” He wrote of his life in the 1950s, when money was scarce: “For musical instruments, we were willing to do almost anything.”

Early performances were mostly private and critics were initially hostile, commenting on the lack of brilliance in the sound and on the shortcomings of the older wind instruments. But the troupe's reputation grew, especially after a recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos in 1962. They first toured the US and Britain came in 1966, Germany two years later.

Harnoncourt made his conducting debut in 1972 with Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria at the Piccola Scala in Milan. A few years later, his breakthrough was complete after he joined the French director Jean-Pierre Ponelle on a celebrated cycle of Monteverdi operas performed at the Zurich Opera House on period instruments, starting with L'Orfeo in 1976.

In the 1980s he performed a series of Mozart operas, from Don Giovanni to the less regularly performed Lucio Silla and Mitridate re di Ponto, that were equally popular and critically acclaimed. In 1989 he completed an 18-year project to record the complete cycle of Bach cantatas with the Concentus Musicus Wien and conducted orchestras in Berlin, London, Vienna and other places around the world. He also recorded all nine Beethoven symphonies with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.

Though he was a regular in the 1990s at the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival, Harnoncourt remained selective, rejecting a position with a “renowned orchestra so as not to be constrained in his artistic development and freedom,” according to a biography on the Styriarte Festival website. He also taught at the Salzburg Mozarteum from 1972 to 1993.

Johann Nikolaus Graf de la Fontaine und d'Harnoncourt-Unverzagt (Nikolaus Harnoncourt), cellist and conductor: born Berlin 6 December 1929; married Alice Hoffelner (one daughter, two sons, and one son deceased); died Sankt Georgen im Attergau, Austria 5 March 2016.