We look back with almost nostalgia to the blissful times of the 1960s when the “sexual revolution” still aroused widespread indignation. The liberties the young generation took when they broke every possible taboo seemed totally new and unthinkable. But was their revolutionary insubordination in fact new? Were the young Viennese of the Biedermeier era doing anything different when they danced close together, face to face to the sounds of a waltz by Lanner or Schubert? Nikolaus Harnoncourt has only recently immortalised this dance revolution and the accompanying fall of morality on CD and will turn it into pure listening pleasure at this year’s styriarte Festival – thrillingly sensual, but full of subversive overtones.

That is what the programme of the 2013 styriarte Festival is all about: times in which more libertine trends blazed the way in the world of music, much to the joy or the fierce objection of the general public. The overall topic of this year’s festival will be love – without any taboos, yet with unforeseeable consequences. And “dangerous liaisons”...

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