London Symphony Orchestra

1 Overture
2 Minuet
3 The Fencing Master
4 Entrance and Dance of the Tailors
5 The Minuet of Lully
6 Courante
7 Entrance of Cléonte
8 Prelude to Act II
9 The Dinner

Richard Strauss’ most successful partnership was with Hugo von Hofmannsthal – the man who wrote the words to Strauss’ best operas. That partnership was tested when Hofmannsthal insisted Strauss collaborate with him on an opera based on Molière’s play Le bourgeois gentilhomme, written for the court of Louis XIV in 1670. Hofmannsthal was fired up by the comic potential of the play, which lampooned Monsieur Jourdain – a middle-class man with aristocratic aspirations. But the opera never came. What emerged, in 1912, was a stilted play with incidental music by Strauss. It proved a failure.

All was not lost however. The project led to one of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s best operas,  Ariadne auf Naxos, which was written as support to the play but later revised to stand on its own. In 1920, Strauss revisited all the music he’d written for various incarnations of the play, and plucked-out the best bits to form a suite. The music is filled with the spirit of the 17th-century, and some of its actual music: 'Minuet' and 'Entrance of Cléonte' reupholster music for Molière’s original production written by Louis XIV’s pet composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully.

Strauss reinvents 17th-century dance forms with very 20th-century harmonic and dramatic alterations. He makes the 'Courante' far more complicated than it needs to be – a reflection of Jourdain’s aspirations – and sends-up a ‘gavotte’ in 'Entrance and Dance of the Taylors'. We hear Jourdain in the Overture – all pretentious and uptight on the trumpet – and in 'The Fencing Master' – prone to bombast on the trombone.

To finish, Strauss delivers a critique of the entire aristocratic class. 'The Dinner' originally accompanied a feast. It tosses quotes from musical history around like a dinner party bore. Among them is a morsel from Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s biggest hit: the opera  Der Rosenkavalier.

^{Note by Andrew Mellor}

Richard Strauss
^{1864–1948 (Germany)}

Richard Strauss was born in Munich in 1864, the son of Franz Strauss, a brilliant horn player in the Munich court orchestra; it is therefore perhaps not surprising that some of the composer’s most striking writing is for the French horn. Strauss had his first piano lessons when he was four, and he produced his first composition two years later, but surprisingly he did not attend a music academy; his formal education ending rather at Munich University where he studied philosophy and aesthetics, continuing with his musical training at the same time.

Following the first public performances of his work, he received a commission from Hans von Bülow in 1882 and two years later was appointed Bülow’s Assistant Musical Director at the Meiningen Court Orchestra, the beginning of a career in which Strauss was to conduct many of the world’s great orchestras, in addition to holding positions at opera houses in Munich, Weimar, Berlin and Vienna. While at Munich, he married the singer Pauline de Ahna, for whom he wrote many of his greatest songs.

Strauss’s legacy is to be found in his operas and his magnificent symphonic poems. Scores such as Till Eulenspiegel, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Don Juan and Ein Heldenleben demonstrate his supreme mastery of orchestration; the thoroughly modern operas Salome and Elektra, with their Freudian themes and atonal scoring, are landmarks in the development of 20th-century music, and the neo-Classical Der Rosenkavalier has become one of the most popular operas of the century. Strauss spent his last years in self-imposed exile in Switzerland, waiting to be officially cleared of complicity in the Nazi regime. He died at Garmisch Partenkirchen in 1949, shortly after his widely celebrated 85th birthday.

^{Composer profile by Andrew Stewart}

1 Vorspiel (Prelude)
2 Love Music
3 Liebestod (Love Death)

In 1859, Richard Wagner finished writing Tristan and Isolde, his most revolutionary opera of all. It tells of the accidental, all-encompassing love between the nobleman Tristan and the princess Isolde.

So strong is this forbidden love that it leads Isolde to the metaphysical conclusion that it can only be realised through death. For the philosopher Michael Tanner, when witnessing this, we are ‘challenged to believe something, to examine some presuppositions of living at a level which I feel compelled to call religious.’

Wagner’s music does the mind-altering legwork. Much of it is founded on the broad implications of a single four-note chord. The so-called ‘Tristan chord’ is a ‘suspended’ chord – a discord that wants to resolve onto a consonant one, but in this case, can’t. Unable to resolve musically – and by implication, sexually – the chord sets in motion a giant crescendo of passion, longing and angst.

The conductor Leopold Stokowski fashioned an orchestral tone poem from Wagner’s five-hour opera, comprising the work’s orchestral Prelude and Isolde’s Act III Verklärung (her transfiguration, often referred to as her Liebestod – ‘Love Death’) unchanged, and the conductor’s own synthesis of the love music, mainly from Act II.

For Stokowski, the combination of despair and ecstasy in Tristan found its ‘supreme expression’ in the latter two passages. In them, Stokowski wrote,

In tonight’s account we hear the opera’s Prelude: three notes on low strings and then the ‘Tristan chord’, which initiates its own broad arch of longing.

Next, the Love Music describes the night of love that follows the protagonists’ drinking of a love potion. Stokowski’s synthesis of the music removes human voices, occasionally replacing them with instruments (in the first instance, cellos ‘sing’ Tristan’s lines, responded to by Isolde’s violins).

The opera’s tipping point comes in Act III when Isolde, having held the wounded and dying Tristan in her arms, sees their love continuing in death. Isolde’s Liebestod (Love Death) also resolves the riddle of the Tristan chord. Eventually, the orchestra runs aground on the key of C-sharp major, which in turn forces a standard resolution into G-sharp. Through the portal of the Tristan chord, the music then floats onto B major. This heavenly shift speaks of the bliss of true love, an emotion Wagner claimed never to have experienced.

^{Note by Andrew Mellor}

Richard Wagner
^{1813 (Germany) – 1883 (Italy)}

Richard Wagner was born on 22 May 1813 in Leipzig. His musical talent was encouraged at Leipzig’s Nicolaischule and through lessons with Christian Gottlieb Müller. In 1829 he completed his first instrumental compositions, enrolling briefly as a music student at Leipzig University two years later. Wagner married the actress Minna Planer in November 1836, the couple moving from Riga to Paris in 1839 to escape Wagner’s creditors and living there in extreme poverty. Here he completed his opera Rienzi and created another, Der fliegende Holländer. Rienzi proved a big success at its Dresden premiere in October 1842, establishing Wagner’s reputation.

In the 1850s, he began composing his monumental cycle of four Nibelung operas, also completing his ground-breaking opera Tristan and Isolde. His financial difficulties were removed in 1864 by the teenage King Ludwig II, a dedicated Wagnerite who commissioned Der Ring des Nibelungen. Wagner’s comic masterpiece, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was premiered on Ludwig’s command; the king later funded the building of a new theatre at Bayreuth for the sole performance of Wagner’s works.

For the remaining years of his life, Wagner worked on establishing the festival and composing Parsifal, written specifically for Bayreuth. He died in Venice on 13 February 1883, suffering a heart attack after an impassioned row with his second wife, Cosima.

According to Wagnerian legend, there has been more written about the composer than anybody other than Napoleon and Jesus Christ. Although the claim is inaccurate, it is typical of the myths that have become attached to Wagner’s life and works. The vast scale of his creative output, its revolutionary influence on the development of Western Classical music and the controversial nature of many of his views ensured the development of strong, even fanatical, support both for and against Wagner.

^{Composer profile by Andrew Stewart}

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Programme Contributors

Andrew Mellor is a journalist, critic and Nordic music specialist based in Copenhagen. He is a regular contributor to Gramophone, Opera and BBC Radio 3's Record Review.

Andrew Stewart is a freelance music journalist and writer. He is the author of The LSO at 90, and contributes to a wide variety of specialist classical music publications.