Subscription Concerts 2024-2025Program A
No. 2025 Subscription (Program A)

A pivotal figure in the history of opera, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) founded Musikdrama (music drama) as represented by his Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Isolde) (1859). In this operatic genre for which he wrote both libretto and music, the drama and the music are indissolubly united on an unprecedented level, especially by the scrupulous use of the leitmotifs (recurrent melodic or/and harmonic elements representing certain situations, feelings or so). Tristan und Isolde is about the forbidden love between the knight Tristan and his uncle’s wife Isolde. The Prelude to Act 1 foretells the tragic and sensual nature of the story with chromatic, ever-lasting melodies and opulent orchestral sound. The first chord heard at the outset is dissonant and unresolved: so-called “Tristan Chord,” this is considered in music history a principal which lead the traditional tonal harmony to ruin. Liebestod (Love-death) is sung by dying Isolde at the last scene, after Tristan was killed by Isolde’s jealous husband. The final B-major chord suggests that their love comes to fulfillment upon their death.

[Kumiko Nishi]

Richard Strauss (1864–1949) was a precocious musical genius. The son of the principal French horn player at the prestigious Munich Court Orchestra, he began to take piano lessons at age 4 and to compose at age 6 before starting to learn violin at age 8.
Guided by his father’s conservative musical taste, Strauss’s earliest compositions were modeled after Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. However, from 1880 when the mid-teenage composer studied the score of the above-mentioned opera Tristan und Isolde, he gradually deepened his adoration for Wagner. Voluptuous chromatic harmony, large-scale orchestra and the feeling of endlessness are some of the trademarks of Wagner’ music: almost all topflight composers of his and coming generations couldn’t skirt the problem of how to absorb and/or break away from his style. As for Strauss, his enthusiasm for Wagnerian late-Romanticism came to the climax with the opera Salome (1903–1905).
Besides fifteen operas, Strauss completed over two hundred songs during his exceptionally long productive career. One of his sources of inspiration was the soprano Pauline, whom he married in 1894. The couple also gave duet concerts together promoting his songs in various places. The fact that Pauline retired from singing in 1906 more or less influenced Strauss’s career as a song composer from that time forth. The five songs selected for today’s concert were penned for voice and piano before 1901, and Strauss himself prepared the orchestral accompaniment versions of the all five.
Das Rosenband (The Rose Chain) Op. 36-1 (1897/orch.1897, text by F. G. Klopstock) and Schubert’s famous song D. 280 share the same eighteenth-century poem about “the rose chains which are rustled” so that “she awakes from slumber” and “her life and mine become entwined.”
Freundliche Vision (A Welcome Vision) Op. 48-1 (1900/orch.1918, text by O. J. Bierbaum), filled with delicate sensibilities, pictures a daydream: in “a meadow full of daisies,” “I, together with one who loves me, go to a white house and into the peace full of beauty.”
Waldseligkeit (Bliss in the Woods) Op. 49-1 (1901/orch.1918, text by R. Dehmel) depicts a forest “beginning to rustle as the night approaches the trees.” “Under the branches, I am utterly alone.”
Befreit (Released) Op. 39-4 (1898/orch.1933, text by R. Dehmel) is famously quoted in Strauss’s autobiographical tone poem Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life) as one of the Hero’s representative works. The song with the call “o Glück (o happiness)!” closing each of the three verses, is about a man who addresses his dying wife/sweetheart.
Morgen (Tomorrow) Op. 27-4 (1894/orch.1897, text by J. H. Mackay) is the last of the four-song set with which Strauss presented Pauline to celebrate their marriage. Predicting their ever-lasting conjugal bond, the romantic song in bright G major confirms “the Sun will shine again tomorrow” and “we will gaze at each other” “in the silence of happiness.”

[Kumiko Nishi]

No inventor arises out of nothing but owes more or less to the achievements of his/her forerunners. Born in Vienna 150 years ago, Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951) is counted among a handful of revolutionary composers in history by establishing atonal music around the late 1900s, and then the twelve-tone technique (dodecaphony) in 1921. However, the early style of the almost self-taught composer prior to sparking revolutions is characterized by its highly expressive style of late-Romanticism, especially of Wagner, combined with Brahms’s Classical sense of form.
Representative of Schönberg’s pre-revolutionary period are Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) Op. 4 (1899) and Pelleas und Melisande Op. 5. A turning point arrived in Schönberg’s life right before and while he was penning Pelleas und Melisande (July 1902 through February 1903): he, with his new wife, moved to Berlin in 1901 to compose for a local cabaret and then to write operettas to earn his living. Impressed by Schönberg’s talent, Richard Strauss, one of the musical influentials in Berlin, arranged that the Viennese man should receive the Liszt Stipendium (scholarship) and obtain a teaching post at the local Stern Conservatory. Thanks to that, Schönberg could lead an artistically fruitful life in Berlin and went back to Vienna in July 1903 with the finished score of the symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande in his hand. It was premiered in 1905 in Vienna under the composer’s own baton.
In this work based on the Symbolist play (1893) by the Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck, Schönberg develops further Wagner’s chromatic language. The music meticulously follows Maeterlinck’s plot—a story of forbidden love as with the aforementioned Tristan und Isolde—with the aid of the Wagnerian leitmotif technique as explained above.
The work is cast in four sections performed without pause, reminding us of the structure of Classical symphony. The first section is set in a mysterious forest at dusk. Soon after it starts, a bass clarinet announces the gloomy, falling “fate” motif which will recur repeatedly throughout the piece. Lost in the forest is Melisande, a young woman of unknown origin. Golaud, the king’s grandson, finds her there and wed her. The first appearance of Pelleas (Golaud’s younger half-brother) is indicated by a trumpet blowing the rhythmical, bouncy “Pelleas” motif. The lively second section, a scherzo, relates two well-known scenes of the original play: the merry scene at a well into which Melisande accidentally drops her wedding ring, and the sensual scene at the foot of a tower where Pelleas embraces passionately Melisande’s long hair hanging down from the tower’s high window. The slow third section describes the love scene of Pelleas and Melisande: Golaud finds them and kills Pelleas. The finale has the opening forest music return. Then the stormy atmosphere reflects Golaud’s jealous rage. Melisande, worn-out, breathes her last, and the “fate” motif echoes through the brass to recapitulate the story at the close.

[Kumiko Nishi]