Wuppertal Symphony Vol. 2 - Wagner & Berlioz

SINFONIEORCHESTER WUPPERTAL JONES

Many values and patterns emerged in the 19th century that continue to influence our desires for a passionate, fulfilling love, as well as questions about its livability, in day to day life. These include the concept of marrying for love, in which the partners choose each other; the ideal of monogamy and fidelity; and many other longings that are not easily resolved and that therefore often draw people into complex situations where love and madness are sometimes uncomfortably close together. The artist, as a kind of seismologist of social wellbeing, has always been afforded a special position. His feelings were deemed more passionate. The lives and works of composers Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner back up this assertion. As a man and artist, Richard Wagner was a passionate, valiant and controversial contemporary. In Tannhauser und der Sangerkrieg auf der Wartburg, right at the outset of his career, he composed a romantic opera about precisely this fraught zone between artist and society, and about the conflict of instinctive emotions, as his protagonist experiences in excess in Venusberg, with the pure, selfless love of Elisabeth. The real title of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique is “Episode in the Life of an Artist.” The classification of Symphonie fantastique was to be understood as a subtitle, meant to indicate that something completely new, and indeed fantastic, would transpire here with the form of the symphony- a truly groundbreaking, unique work in music history.

Price: $35.98