Thu, 8. 12. 2022, 7.00 p.m.

A3 WAGNER / BEETHOVEN

Venue: Zlín Congress Centre  |  Organizer: Filharmonie Bohuslava Martinů, o.p.s.  | 

Our December concert in Zlín's Congress Centre features works by two German giants whose remarkable output was a fundamental influence on whole generations of composers.

Richard Wagner is undoubtedly one of the greatest opera reformers in musical history. Disaffected with the musical status quo, he sought new avenues which might give rise to artistic expression of true value and dignity, taking as his model the ideal of classical Greek drama, which subsequently led him to the idea of "total work of art" or Gesamtkunstwerk. Wagner was firmly convinced that the only certain way out of this malaise was to bring together all the arts (music, poetry, dance and the visual arts) into mutual equilibrium, and this is the idea he went on to apply in all his major operas, which rank as jewels in the crown of that genre.

The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, Richard Wagner's only comic opera, was completed in autumn 1867, and is set in mid-16th century Nuremberg in the time of the poet Hans Sachs, one of the last notable mastersingers. Our concert opens with the overture to this almost four-and-a-half-hour opera. It's followed by Wagner's cycle of five songs for female voice and orchestra written by the composer's muse, the German poetess Mathilde Wesendonck. One of Wagner's few non-operatic works that are still performed regularly, it is sung tonight by the mezzo-soprano Václava Krejčí Housková, a soloist with the Brno National Theatre's Janáček Opera company, accompanied by our Philharmonic Orchestra here in Zlín.

The concert culminates in Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, the "Pastoral", an enchanting programmatic work in five movements reflecting the composer's love of nature, exemplified in its depiction of a bubbling stream, birdsong and country folk dancing and merry-making.