The organiser of this meeting asked me to give the keynote address. I would like to talk about some very essential things for arts management in our time. Then, afterwards, I hope that you will have the courage to ask me difficult questions. Then we can discuss more practical things. But first I think that we should concentrate on some essential things for our time and consider how we, as arts managers, can cope with them.

I think that we are all together today in this room in Vienna because we really love our jobs. I believe that we belong to a very privileged group of people. There are few people in our time who can say that they love their jobs and we are among them. Therefore our responsibility is very great. My good friends, who know me very well, know that I am frequently in doubt about my job. We are, at the end of the 20th century, confronted by so many questions, I should say unanswered questions, that there are many days when I think that we should leave the arts and go into politics to try to work on a new century. In discussions with my friends I feel that they share my sentiments. I will tell you about some of my bad moments. They are also your bad moments.

Such a bad moment occurs when I think about what was the greatest artistic event of last year, at any rate in the concert programme of the Salzburg Festival. It was a concert with the Vienna Philharmonic and Pierre Boulez - a fantastic meeting, a wonderfully creative meeting, between Boulez and a very great traditional orchestra with all its beautiful sounds. It was wonderful to hear them play, for the first time, Livres pour cordes, by Pierre Boulez. But you know, at the same time, although this concert was sold out, it made a loss of 200,000 dollars. And I know - this is my bad moment - that if we had put on Brahms' Symphonies No. 2 and 4, which would have required only two or three rehearsals, we could have made 100,000 dollars. So there is a difference of 300,000 dollars!

Another bad moment happens when I receive a letter from Placido Domingo - people think I do not like him, but I think he is one of the finest artists singing at the moment - telling me that he cannot accept an offer to sing Oedipus Rex in Salzburg. He would perhaps be, at the moment, the best interpreter of the role, not only from the vocal point of view, but as a real star. After all, Oedipus was a star of his time (who had a great fall). And it would be marvellous for a great artist to project him - as Orson Welles, for example, did with Citizen Kane - to the public. He tells me that he does not have time to sing the role, but I know that at the same time he finds time to sing on the same evening Cavalleria at the Volksoper and another role at the Staatsoper. That is something very interesting! But I do not know that it is very amusing for us.

Another occasion arises when I have to decide, at Salzburg, whether I will play Le Nozze di Figaro in the big house or the small house. The difference is 1.8 million dollars for nine performances. It is a very difficult decision. You know that my decision will be to play it in the small house. And you know also what it will mean to defend that decision to my board of directors!

So those are my bad moments. And I am sure that you all have such moments every day. Karsten Witt, who is a very good friend of mine and whom I admire very much, has been working in Vienna and with his modern ideas he has had difficulty, in this very room, with the meeting of tradition and modernity.

Now, the things that I have been telling you about are all symptoms of what we call the cultural industry. Please note that this phrase is completely new. It did not exist before the Second World War. It is new and it is typical of our time. I don't say that it is something bad, but it is something very dangerous. The cultural industry, I should say, pollutes the life of the arts much more than a gap in the ozone layer. And we must learn to cope with it. Everything new we must learn to live with. It was the same with the telephone. It was the same with the fax machine. It is a fantastic machine. But we know that in earlier days, when we received a letter, we could take our time to consider how to answer it, whereas now, if you do not answer after five minutes, you get a second fax asking you why you did not answer! And it is the same with the cultural industry. We need this industry. But we must learn to cope with it. And the end of the 20th century presents, in some of its cultural aspects, very great problems for us.

The first is that we live in a world in which consumption is more important than creation. Eighty per cent of what we do in the arts world at the moment is dedicated to, and concentrated on, consumption, not creation. I hope that I do not sound like Savonarola - for they often say in the Italian newspapers that I am the new Savonarola. I hate Savonarola. I think that art should entertain. I do not say that art is not entertainment. But art should not be reduced to entertainment alone. Art is something really very important in communication between human beings. And we know that the most beautiful communication - love - is a very beautiful entertainment. Communication is just as important as entertainment, but I have the feeling that at the moment a lot of art simply entertains and communicates nothing. Stravinsky said that art was not a question of confirmation, but a question of desire. That is a fantastic thing to have said. To hear words of such sensitivity from a man like Stravinsky, who always defended thought, who defended the intellect, is beautiful. So I should say, concerning the first characteristic of our time - that consumption has become more important than creation - that we need to remember that art should provoke the intellect, free the feelings and stimulate our actions. How many arts performances are still worthy of this description?

The creative artist (as opposed to the interpreter) is always a visionary, which is to say that he has a feeling for his time. Normal people, as we are, do not have this feeling. The creative artist sees his own time in a special way. Think of Goethe, of Beethoven, of Mozart, of Shakespeare! The creative artist has a vision of his own time and of how things will be in the future. That means that most of the time the creative artist is a rebel. He is provocative, a prophet. He tells the public things that the public does not want to hear. And my question is this: if consumption is becoming more and more important than creation, where is the place for the creative artist? Many creators no longer have the material with which to communicate something great. And if they do not have the material, it is because they do not have the open air to breathe, because we do not create enough space for them.

The second characteristic of the end of the 20th century is that we are living in a world in which quantity is much more important than quality. I always have a bad feeling about the question, what percentage of a concert hall or an opera house has been sold. It is always the quantity - the numbers of people at a performance - not the quality of their looking and listening. It is always important to think about this, for what happens now, in a time of economic recession, is that quantity becomes ever more important. Mauricio Kagel said to me one day that if he had only 0.1 per cent of the audience for the German Rundfunk, that was still 70,000 people who had listened to his music. And those 70,000 people were very important for his creative work. So quantity is now for politicians and for business people very important. And we must always, as arts managers, try to place emphasis on the importance of the quality of the listening. I believe that the 70,000 people who listen to Mauricio Kagel or to a piece by Pierre Boulez are more important than the million who listen without knowing what they are looking for and what they are listening to.

I should say that the reason why quantity is so important at the end of the 20th century is the development of our democracy. Democracy has been a great development in human civilisation. But democracy is based on number: every person has one vote and the number of votes is what matters, not the quality of the votes. One of the great challenges for the next century is to make quality important again in a democracy, so that we will have a democracy, not only on the material level, but on the spiritual level. We have produced 'bread and plays' for large numbers of people, but we have not given them the keys to understand our traditions. To do so will be the next step in the real development of democracy. People from eastern European countries will know very well what I am talking about. It is for them at the moment the great problem. They have bread, often not so luxurious as our bread, but they have, generally, not been given the keys to understand our civilisation. The third point that I wish to consider is that we are living in an age of journalism. I mean that the most important reporting of our world is at the moment the daily news. It is the CNN every day: every day something new, rather than analysis. For the artist this means that every day he must wear a new hat. Can you believe that a real artist puts on a new hat every day? I understand why Lady Di is so popular. Every day she has a new hat! At any rate, journalism is killing the life of the arts, because journalism is the very opposite of the sources in our life that create art. Art wishes to concentrate on essential thoughts, essential feelings. That is the reason why Shakespeare wrote Macbeth. And the problem that confronts us is that the public more and more wants new events, new hats, every day, and we cannot give them to it, because art is not journalism.

So I come to my first conclusion, that in our time, when consumption is more important than creation, quantity than quality, journalism than analysis, the consequence is that the interpreter is more important than the creator. There was a time when the creator was more important. I have a feeling that fifty years from now people will know of Luciano Pavarotti - I am happy for him! - and of Placido Domingo and of Horowitz, but I am not sure that they will have heard of Mauricio Kagel, Wolfgang Rihm, Philip Glass and John Adams. I very much doubt it. Can you tell me the names of the contemporary interpreters of Mozart? Only specialists know them. We talk, when we are talking of the past, about creators. In the 20th century we are always talking about interpreters.

A second problem is that we always have to remake the same works. I no longer go to first nights at the opera, because I always see the same faces. There is nothing so incestuous as opera premieres at the moment. You hear the same people discussing the same Rigoletto, the same Verdi, with the only difference being that someone enters from the left, or from the right. You hear some dramaturgical remarks, but, you know, though I like dramaturgy very much, dramaturgy is not enough to justify forty performances of Rigoletto in one year. The piece is too important, just as Tristan und Isolde is too important, to make twenty different productions of it. I believe that Wagner would never have written his work if he had known that we would use it as a mass product for consumption.

The third point concerns the value of records. There is a misunderstanding in Vienna, where it is believed that I hate records. I adore records. They are very important. Without records I would not know Maria Callas, who was one of the very greatest interpreters of the 20th century. But at the end of the 20th century the record is becoming important as a reference, not as a document. It has become as if someone had a book of paintings from the Sistine Chapel at home and said that he did not need to go to Rome because he had these more beautiful pictures, or did not need to go to Egypt to see the pyramids because he had pictures of them. And we know, of course, that to be in the presence of the pyramids or to lie on one's back and look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel gives a quite different impression from that which pictures can give. But with records the matter is different. Nobody would say that he did not want to see the real paintings. But people ask why they should go to a concert when, with a record, they can sit in the middle of the orchestra. To hear Beethoven's 5th Symphony you are not supposed to sit in the middle of the orchestra! There are a lot of modern pieces composed for that, but Beethoven's 5th was composed for the concert hall of his time. So the record as a reference, not as a document, is dangerous for our time.

My last point is that we now have the great principle of 'a star is born'. We frequently decide who will be a star, not who could be a star. We have to do this, as arts managers, because television and the newspapers need stars, but it makes our job more difficult. We have to cope with real values and with commercial values.

My analysis may appear to be a little dark, but I am always happy to look clearly into the darkness in order to find the light afterwards. One of the poems that I most admire is the one about Leonardo da Vinci, sitting on the corner of a volcano and talking about the darkness of the soul and the world, and afterwards looking to heaven to find the possibility of light.

By analysing how we have come to our present condition we can find ways to guide us in the future. I am convinced that the end of the 20th century is the end of an epoch, a very great epoch. It is the end of the epoch of rationalism. And this is very important for the arts. The great principle of individualism which was formulated by Descartes - Je pense, donc je suis - comes to its end at the end of our century. Rationalist thought was of enormous significance for Western civilisation (friends from other parts of the world will look at things from another perspective). By this manner of thought we developed the great industrial and economic revolutions. What we have today, with our beautiful concert halls and opera houses, the music of Mozart, polyphonic music, is all the fruit of individualism and rationalist thought. But we have seen a great deal of criticism of that tradition since the end of the Second World War and at the end of the century the facts that confront us make it impossible to solve problems by means of that traditional thought.

After the end of the First World War the rebellion against tradition began with surrealism in painting and Dadaism in literature. We know about Marcel Duchamp and the reasons why he remained silent. Very interesting also is Alban Berg in the world of opera. To me it is very strange that Berg took precisely the same themes for his operas as Mozart did. I would compare Wozzeck with Le Nozze di Figaro (during the French Revolution) and Lulu with Don Giovanni. The themes are those of social opposition and erotic relationships, of the possibility of destroying things. And it is very interesting that Alban Berg, in the 20th century, when we started to question rationalism, took that same stories that had been used in another time and told them as stories of the 20th century. In doing so he went back to Mozart's essential questions.

We know that since the Second World War a great gap has opened up between arts managers and artists, on the one side, and the public, on the other. This is a consequence of the evolution of democracy. In 1968, when the heyday of existentialism was coming to its end, this first became very clear to me. And then came post-modernism, which to me seems very similar to the restoration in France after 1815. I believe that, if we want to find new ideas for the future, they must come out of the death of post-modernism. There should be an end to the restoration of old buildings. It is beautiful that this hall that we are in today has been restored (and I myself restored the Brussels opera and the Ghent opera). But critical editions should no longer be our top priority. It is fantastic that we have the new edition of Mozart - although it is already a bit out of date, so that we will probably need another edition! - but what we need is new works. We have had enough of post-modernism. We should create new ways for the future.

To create these new ways, I should like to refer to the principles which Joseph Beuys has talked about, principles which he derived from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Goethe, who was one of the great spirits of modern Western civilisation, enunciated two principles which should help us in developing our programmes for the future. On the one hand, he said that every human being had an enormous power of creativity, but that this power declined in adulthood. This may be even more true of our time, because we give our young people so vast an amount of scientific and technological knowledge that the weight of it destroys their creativity.

We can revive that creativity through our programming. Our programming should not now be an hour's lecture about painters or composers - when they were born, when they died - or about all the symphonies of Beethoven. It would be marvellous if young people discovered only one symphony and through that one symphony discovered how fantastic Beethoven was. That is my trouble with editions on record. You have the complete Mozart on record, or the complete Beethoven. It is much more important to listen to one sonata by Chopin, and then one piano work by Luigi Nono. That would stimulate creativity. I do not say that many of you are not doing this. Karsten Witt is a marvellous example. But we, as arts managers, must remember that knowledge is killing creativity: we should not put everything on our programmes, but should focus our efforts to make a meeting between tradition and modernity.

The second point is that our programmes should stimulate the original creativity that we have within us. What is that creativity? It is dancing (we dance only a little now) and singing (we don't sing anymore). It is, therefore, important to have choruses of people, as they do in England, so that people become involved in concert programmes. One of the most important creations of human beings is the myth of the search for treasure. In all great fairy tales it is important to look for the treasure. This is very important for creativity and we do not stimulate it enough. We must once more stimulate people to listen rather than to hear, to look rather than to see, to read cultures and not only languages. We learn to read languages, but we do not learn to understand cultures any more. We no longer learn the cultural content of a work.

I should like to finish on your theme: tradition meets modernity. It is a wonderful title, but titles are always dangerous. Modernity should have nothing to do with fashion. At the moment we try to be modern, but I do not feel very avant garde. I feel myself to be a very conservative man. That means that when I have an idea it is difficult to convince me of another one. But I listen. If you have good arguments I will adopt new ideas. That is conservatism and it has nothing to do with being a reactionary. I hope that we are all a little bit conservative. If we are not, we cannot be arts managers. We would always put everything from the past behind us. Now, modernity has nothing to do with fashion. It has to do with a knowledge of the facts, on the one hand, and a feeling for the spirit of the time, on the other. Tradition is the whole of human activity in the past, the creation of works that still have meaning for our time. Tradition meets modernity in the present, but it is the past and the future that alone are important, since the present never exists. Tradition can only be understood by the modern public if we give audiences the key to understanding. And the key to tradition is modernity, the feeling of our time. It is wrong to say that we make an actualisation of Mozart. Mozart is so modern that every actualisation is at once already old-fashioned. I think that a hundred years from now Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte will still be lectures in human relationships and the essential loves of human existence. Mozart is always more modern than any interpretation of him. And the same goes for Shakespeare.

Tradition, therefore, can give meaning only if it is recreated by modernity; and modernity should be nourished by tradition. If Mahler thought that tradition was schlamperei - and we must say it in this house where his spirit continually resides! - he meant that it was so when tradition closed our eyes to the future. His works are fantastic because he looked back to tradition, not with his eyes closed, but in order to project into the future. Originality of ideas is born of confrontation with tradition. To use a figure of speech, tradition is the wind that blows up the sails of modern ideas to make the ship of human adventure move.

We have many problems to discuss with politicians, including deficits, but the cultural system is as important as political and economic systems. Democracy will disappear if culture is not felt to be as important as the other systems. We know how difficult it is for politicians at this time. But real solutions to our democratic problems will only be found if politicians take time to consider the general culture of their societies.

Let me end with a few practical ideas. The first is that living artists should once more be present in our concert halls, so that the public can meet, not only performers, but creative artists. The second point is to attempt to bring creative artists out of their specialisations. It is so difficult today to have meetings between writers, painters and composers. It is rare in our time to find great artists who are able, like Pierre Boulez, to talk about Paul Klee or the novels of Marcel Proust. We miss this confrontation between artists. I try to bring painters and architects to Salzburg for new opera productions. In that city it is often a joke to try, but the attempt matters. Even if Marc Chagall's Magic Flute was not the best set for an opera, it was enormously interesting to have the confrontation of Chagall with Mozart.

We need again to create a community of artists and public. So I believe in subscriptions. At Salzburg, where I introduced them, the public is upset to be obliged to go to certain productions that would not sell well without subscriptions. But it is the same as drinking wine. I like red wine, but when I was eleven years old I hated it. If my father had not told me to try it - not at eleven, but at about fifteen! - I should never have come to like it. So we are guides. We do not oblige people. We are guides, not dictators. If we do not behave as guides, we do not give people the key. The misery of the end of the 20th century arises because the great art treasure of Western civilisation remains untapped. That great treasure could solve all our problems. It would be enough to study Goethe's Faust, to listen to one Mozart symphony, to listen to a new piece of Pierre Boulez to solve our problems. But the public no longer has the key to open the door to this treasure. As George Steiner wrote in his Bluebeard's Castle, we have the keys to open the doors to science and technology, but perhaps we should not open those doors because we have lost the conscience to understand and to accept what lies behind them. The only way to understand is through the treasure of art. We must be the guides.'

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