Program Notes: December 10, 2000
When Richard Wagner decided in the mid-1850s to write an opera based on two star-crossed lovers, it was partly because he knew his gargantuan, only partly complete four-opera Ring cycle did not then stand a chance of being staged, not least because he was still in exile for his participation in the 1848 Dresden uprising. But the modest story of Tristan und Isolde grew into an intense, five-hour Musikdrama, and Wagner was faced again with the prospect of not being able to bring his work to the stage-which is why he devised the concert version that we are performing tonight (1860), which collapses the action into the anguished Prélude and (skipping five hours) the ecstatic Isolde's Transfiguration, which is now better known as the Liebestod (Love-Death), after Liszt. The two titles mean much the same thing, but with a different emphasis; thus, Isolde's concluding aria portrays her as dying, yet not exactly dying, for she has been transfigured through the purity of her love of the dying Tristan. From the first big deflected arrival in the Prélude through the surging, endlessly swelling waves of the Transfiguration, this is some of the sexiest music ever written, but it is sexy in that peculiarly German, nineteenth-century, unconsummated, "infinite-longing" sort of way, so that we can only be grateful for that first bittersweet taste of death, late in the piece, that will carry Isolde to her heavenly union with her beloved.
The French prodigy Jean Francaix studied with Nadia Boulanger and absorbed something of Ravel's elegant style and careful craftsmanship. He composed The Flower Clock in 1959 on a commission from the great American oboist John de Lancie, revealing a remarkable ability, quintessentially French, to fashion something that is at once modest in aspiration and perfectly realized. Its seven short movements, which are played without pause, follow the series of flowers classified according to the hour of the day (or night) at which they bloom, a system devised by the Swedish botanist Carl von Linné (1707-1778), better known as Linneus. Francaix sets both the character of the flower and the atmosphere of the hour in a delicate, elegant manner, understated but with great charm.
"Im Tale blüht der Frühling auf!" ("In the valley, Spring bursts forth"). This final line in a poem by the obscure poet Adolf Böttger seems to have been the literary inspiration for the opening of the "Spring" Symphony by Robert Schumann, composed according to his diary in four days in late January 1841. But his inspiration was in fact more wide-ranging. Spring would have seemed a natural subject, even in wintry Leipzig, so soon after his marriage to Clara Wieck, and nothing could-or did-please his new bride more than Robert's turning his attention to the more prestigious genre of the symphony after years of writing mainly piano music and (in 1840) song. The symphony draws inspiration as well from Beethoven, especially the Fourth Symphony (also in B-flat), which Schumann especially loved (and which we performed last concert). Even more obviously, the opening is based on Schubert's "Great" C-Major Symphony, discovered and reviewed by Schumann in the mid-1830s and premiered by Mendelssohn in 1839. Although Schumann did not publicly reveal his poetic inspiration, he privately devised the a program for the symphony, labeling the movements, in order, "Spring's beginning," "Evening," "Joyful Playmates," and "Full Spring." Despite some trial-and-error miscalculations in the orchestration, the symphony was premiered by Mendelssohn in Spring 1841, and was well-received.
--- Raymond Knapp
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