Love Fantasies

Richard Strauss [1864-1949]
Don Juan, Tondichtung (nach Nikolaus Lenau) für großes Orchester, op. 20
Sechs Lieder nach Gedichten von Clemens Bretano op. 68

Robert Schumann [1810-1856]
4. Sinfonie in d-Moll op. 120

 

Could there be a more beautiful declaration of love? When Robert Schumann heard Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony, he wrote to his fiancée Clara Wieck that he ‘desired nothing more than that you were my wife and I might compose such symphonies’. And indeed: it was not long after their wedding that, in 1841, the most splendid symphonies began flowing from his pen. The Fourth was his most formally original and was, in Clara’s words, drawn ‘from the very depths of the soul’. But with Richard Strauss’ tone poem Don Juan, the focus is on an entirely different facet of love – and not the marital kind. In the verse epic by Nikolaus Lenau on which it is based, this is stated plainly: ‘Within the wide circle of fair women, my love for each is ever new.’ And truly, ‘the fiery pulses of youth’ are set to music with incomparable brilliance by the still-youthful Strauss. Decades later, in his song cycle based on poems by Clemens Brentano, Strauss showed that he was by no means untouched by love’s more painful aspects: ‘In loving there dwells sorrow, and it cannot be otherwise’. A journey through the entire cosmos of love – nothing less awaits you in this symphonic concert under the baton of Music Director James Gaffigan.