Program Notes

RICHARD WAGNER

born: May 22, 1813 in Leipzig, Germanydied: February 13, 1883 in Venice, Italy

Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde (1865)

premiere: June 10, 1865 in Munichapprox. duration: 17 minutes

Richard Wagner completed his opera Tristan und Isolde in the wake of his doomed passion for Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a wealthy merchant. From Venice, Wagner wrote to Mathilde: “I am now going back to Tristan, so that the profound art of sonorous silence can speak for me to you through him.” When the first performance of Tristan und Isolde finally took in 1865 (thanks to the support of Wagner’s patron King Ludwig of Bavaria), Wagner begged Mathilde to attend, but she refused. Perhaps Mathilde feared that the experience of seeing her relationship with the composer depicted on the operatic stage would be too much to bear.

When Irish princess Isolde and Cornish knight Tristan unwittingly drink a love potion, they are unable to resist their feelings for each other — even after Isolde's marriage to Tristan’s uncle, King Marke. When they are discovered and Tristan is challenged to a duel, the knight offers no defense and is mortally wounded. In the final act, Tristan and Isolde are briefly reunited before their deaths. King Marke blesses the lovers, as the opera concludes.

The music of Tristan und Isolde has enjoyed an independent life in the concert hall. The Prelude, begun softly by the cellos, soon leads to the winds’ statement of the aching, hypnotic “Tristan Chord.” The ensuing music depicts, according to Wagner, the lovers’ “anxious sighs, hopes and fears, laments and desires, bliss and torment…” The Prelude closes with pizzicato notes in the cellos and basses. This leads directly to the ecstatic Liebestod (“Love-Death”), in which Isolde celebrates death as the consummation of her love. Wagner wrote, “As the music rises higher and higher and floods on to its magnificent climax, Isolde is swept away on the crest of the song, past the sorrowing onlookers, to join Tristan in the vast wave of the breath of the world…Night and Death and Love are one.”

OSKAR BÖHME

born: February 24, 1870 in Potschappel, Germany died: October 3, 1938 in Orenburg, Russia

Trumpet Concerto in F minor Opus 18 (1899)

premiere: 1899 in St. Petersburg, Russiaapprox. duration: 16 minutes

In the late 1890s, German trumpeter and composer Oskar Böhme relocated to St. Petersburg, Russia. For decades, Böhme thrived in Russia as an orchestral musician, soloist, composer, and teacher. But Oskar Böhme’s career in Russia, and ultimately his life, were ended by Joseph Stalin’s bloodthirsty dictatorship. Böhme was accused of being an enemy of the Soviet regime. He was exiled to Orenburg, near the Ural Mountains. Böhme was finally convicted, sentenced to death, and executed on October 3, 1938. Böhme’s confession, procured under torture, was posthumously annulled.

One of Oskar Böhme’s most famous works is the Trumpet Concerto, Opus 18 (1899). Böhme dedicated the work to Ferdinand Weinschenk, a professor of trumpet at the Leipzig Conservatory. The Concerto is in three movements. The opening movement (Allegro moderato) is in sonata form. Following the orchestra’s bold introduction, the trumpet presents the wide-ranging first principal theme. The soloist also introduces the contrasting lyrical second theme (cantabile). The development and recapitulation of the themes leads to the coda (Più mosso) and its brilliant passagework for the soloist. The arrestingly beautiful slow-tempo second movement is a fervent prayer (Adagio religioso). A short bridge episode (Allegretto) heralds the finale (Rondo. Allegro scherzando), based upon a playful, skipping melody, introduced by the soloist. High spirits and virtuoso fireworks prevail right to the closing measures.

JULIA PERRY

born: March 25, 1924 in Lexington, Kentuckydied: April 24, 1979 in Akron, Ohio

A Short Piece for Orchestra (1952)

premiere: 1952 in Turin, Italyapprox. duration: 8 minutes

American composer Julia Perry attended the Westminster Choir College, the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, and the Juilliard School of Music. Perry studied with Luigi Dallapiccola both in the US and Italy, and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. The winner of numerous grants and awards, Julia Perry was a prolific composer, whose works span a wide variety of instrumental and vocal genres, including several symphonies and operas. Although Perry’s works were acclaimed by musicians, critics, and audiences, the composer suffered financial hardship in the 1960s. The first of a series of strokes in 1970 culminated in her untimely death in 1979, at the age of 55. In recent decades, Perry’s music has undergone a muchdeserved renaissance.

Perry composed A Short Piece for Orchestra in 1952, a period when she studied in Italy and France. That same year, Dean Dixon conducted the work’s world premiere in Turin. In 1965, the New York Philharmonic and conductor William Steinberg performed Study for Orchestra, a revised version of Perry's work. It marked the first time in the Orchestra’s history that it programmed a work by a black woman. A Short Piece for Orchestra opens with an arresting presentation of the work’s central thematic material, the foundation for a remarkable and dramatic study in contrasts of mood and instrumental colors.

RICHARD STRAUSS

born: June 11, 1864 in Munich, Germanydied: September 8, 1949 in Garmisch, Germany

Tod und VerklärungDeath and Transfiguration, Opus 24 (1889)

premiere: June 21, 1890 in Eisenach, Germanyapprox. duration: 24 minutes

Richard Strauss composed his orchestral tone poem, Death and Transfiguration in 1889, and conducted the world premiere in Eisenach, Germany, on June 21, 1890. Strauss maintained a lifelong identification with this early work. Strauss later quoted the ascending motif associated with the transfiguration of Tod ’s protagonist in his autobiographical tone poem Ein heldenleben (1898), and again, a half century later, at the conclusion of the valedictory Four Last Songs (1948). There the transfiguration motif complements the words “ist dies etwa der Tod?” (“is this perchance death?”).

The following September, Richard Strauss lay on his deathbed at his Garmisch home. He turned to his daughterin-law and exclaimed: “It’s a funny thing, Alice, dying is just as I composed it in Tod und Verklärung.”

In an 1894 letter to a friend, Richard Strauss provided the narrative of Death and Transfiguration:

It was six years ago that it occurred to me to present in the form of a tone poem the dying hours of a man who had striven toward the highest idealistic aims, maybe indeed those of an artist. The sick man lies in bed, asleep, with heavy, irregular breathing; friendly dreams conjure a smile on the features of the deeply suffering man; he wakes up; he is once more racked with horrible agonies; his limbs shake with fever — as the attack passes and the pains leave off, his thoughts wander through his past life; his childhood passes before him, the time of his youth with its strivings and passions and then, as the pains already begin to return, there appears to him the fruit of his life’s path, the conception, the ideal that he has sought to realize, to present artistically, but that he has not been able to complete, since it is not for man to be able to accomplish such things. The hour of death approaches, the soul leaves the body in order to find gloriously achieved in everlasting space those things that could not be fulfilled here below.