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Symphonic Cycle 12 |
Symphonic Cycle 12

25/26JUN2025|20:00H

Teatro de la Maestranza |
20:00 h.

ROBERT SCHUMANN | Concierto para violonchelo y orquesta, en La menor, Op.129
RICHARD STRAUSS | Una vida de héroe

Violoncello | Pablo Ferrández
Conductor | Lucas Macías

Symphonic Cycle 12 | Program notes
Symphonic Cycle 12
Program notes

Nearly fifty years, but from the 19th century, separate the creation of the two highly personal works performed today. From the exacerbated, elegiac, and intimate romanticism of Robert Schumann, which will make the cello "Archinto," the 1689 Stradivarius played by Maestro Pablo Ferrández, weep with a human voice, to the egotistical post-romanticism of Strauss, who portrayed himself in his symphonic poem (a marvel of orchestration and chromaticism) as the new Prometheus of German music, successor to Wagner.

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With these works, the ROSS enthusiastically welcomes its new principal conductor, Lucas Macías, in his first performance after his appointment, with the orchestra that is now his and to which he will fully join on the podium in September.

 

Cello Concerto ("A Single Musical Note for Schumann")”)

With Robert Schumann (1810-1856), German music reached its Romantic peak. While Beethoven, like a titan, paved the way for the expression of will and Schubert, like a swan, for the expression of vital, poetic, and tormented feelings, Schumann crystallized all the Romantic temperaments: the primordial expression of the self, the transcendence of the sublime, the mystical faith in art, the intense dialogue between music and literature, the struggle between form and idea, and, paraphrasing Stefan Zweig, the relentless battle against inner demons that led to madness.

"I will call demonic that innate restlessness that drags towards the infinite, towards the elemental, towards excess, ecstasy, renunciation, and even self-annihilation".

Stefan Zweig

The testimonies of his time, including that of Wagner, describe periods of apathy and complete silence in Schumann ("one cannot speak alone all the time," the author of Tannhäuser noted irritably). These depressive episodes alternated with periods of intense creativity and loquacity, suggesting the presence of bipolar disorder as the origin of the intense psychological suffering he endured, which led him to throw himself into the freezing waters of the Rhine on Carnival Monday in 1854. Rescued by a boatman, the composer himself requested to be admitted to the Edenich asylum near Bonn, where he would die two years later. During those years, it was advised that his wife avoid visits. When the meeting was finally allowed, Schumann recognized Clara, but would pass away two days later, as a Romantic hero.

We owe to Clara and her great human and spiritual sacrifice, even though she continued to fill Europe's concert halls as a virtuoso, that Robert was able to channel his career as a composer and music critic, in which he was the first to draw attention to the genius of Chopin and Brahms. In one way or another, Clara is present in all of Schumann’s music. In today’s concerto, written in just two weeks during one of his episodes of overwhelming creativity, his love for Clara is reflected in the intense and lyrical adagio of the second movement, with quotes from the first piano sonata Robert composed for her at the start of their tumultuous courtship: “a solitary cry for you from my heart... in which your theme appears in all possible forms.” The slow movement is preceded and followed, without pause between sections, by two more agitated movements. The first is intensely elegiac, and the third very demanding for the soloist, though without theatrics, seeking to expand the expressive range of the cello.

It is said that just before succumbing to his demon on the banks of the Rhine, Robert was reviewing this piece, which would not be premiered until 1860, four years after the composer’s death. In his monumental compendium The Great Composers, Harold C. Schonberg concludes his portrait of Schumann with these words: "In him, everything was pure: his life, his love, his dedication, his death, and his music", words that bring to mind the poem by Gimferrer "Una sola nota musical para Hölderlin", dedicated to that other genius of German Romanticism who, like Schumann, was also defeated— or were they victors?— by the demon of madness and the boundless impulse of their century: "if I lose my memory, what purity".

Ein Heldenleben - A Hero's Life

“I wish I could write in music a glass of beer with such precision that every listener could tell whether it’s a Pilsener or a Kulmbacher!”.

“In Don Juan, I illustrated one of the seducer’s victims with such precision that everyone should be able to see that she is red-haired”.

Fully aware of his dazzling expressive powers, Richard Strauss (1864–1949) joked this way with the music press, which on occasion took such statements seriously—even though the composer didn’t entirely say them in jest. If Liszt is the founder of the symphonic poem, where the orchestra sonically recreates a plot or a landscape based on a script or program often accompanying the score, Strauss elevated the genre—quite literally—to Alpine heights.

As a departure from Beethovenian symphonism, which he deemed unattainable, Strauss’s programmatic music draws on personal experiences (as in Aus Italien, his first piece in the genre, written at the age of 22 and inspired by memories of a summer trip, or in the Domestic and Alpine symphonies) or on characters from literary works such as Don Juan, Don Quixote, Till Eulenspiegel, or Zarathustra.

Liszt imbued his musical poems with evocative emotion and subjective lyricism. The German term Tondichtung (“tone poem”) refers to such compositions. In the case of Strauss, given his extraordinary orchestration and ambition, the term “symphonic poem” fits even better. Without abandoning lyricism, Strauss pioneered the use of sound effects that were onomatopoeic and synesthetic.

Thus, in Don Quixote, one hears the bleating of a flock of sheep or the ascent of Clavileño to the heavens in the form of a rocket—leading critics to claim that Strauss rivaled Cervantes as a storyteller. Indeed, Strauss invented the soundtrack before the Lumière brothers had even invented cinema.

This avant-garde music was misunderstood by critics but highly appreciated by the public, making Strauss, even before his operatic career began, the leading German composer of his time. This prominence was not always easy for Strauss himself to digest, as he was quite pleased with his own achievements: “I see no reason why I shouldn’t write a symphony about myself; I consider myself as interesting as Napoleon or Alexander the Great.”

Strauss decided to make himself the hero of his last symphonic poem. For the two that followed, composed later, he chose to call them symphonies—Domestic and Alpine—although they remain extensive "Tondichtungen".

If Schumann’s music epitomizes the Romantic era and the exaltation of the self, this glorification of the individual began to take a more unsettling turn with figures like Wagner and the writings of Nietzsche, whom Strauss set to music. This would tragically culminate in the 20th century with the cult of personality. “Egolatry” was the title Pío Baroja—a long-lived contemporary of Strauss—gave to his youthful memoirs.

In any case, Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life) marks a moment of personal exhaustion in Strauss’s exploration of the genre, which he abandoned after this piece to focus on opera. In this medium, he would rise even higher with Salome, Elektra, and Der Rosenkavalier, achieving undisputed status as the foremost composer of his time. On the one hand, Strauss sought to contrast this work with Don Quixote—an emblem of the anti-hero—insisting that the two be programmed together for a potent ironic effect. On the other hand, Ein Heldenleben serves as a kind of summation and retrospective. The work incorporates fragments from all his earlier tone poems, representing the hero’s “peaceful works”.

Inspired by Beethoven’s Eroica, Ein Heldenleben opens with an epic motif drawn from the Beethoven symphony, with which it shares a key. It is structured in six sections:

  1. The Hero
  2. The Hero’s Adversaries
  3. The Hero’s Companion
  4. The Hero’s Battlefield
  5. The Hero’s Works of Peace
  6. The Hero’s Retirement from the World and Fulfillment.

Strauss, who saw himself as Wagner’s direct heir and the torchbearer of German music, portrays his struggles with critics. Given the Bavarian composer’s expressive perfection, the critics recognized themselves—one by one—in the dissonant and discordant scenes representing them, and they attacked or ignored a work that, as absolute music, possesses immense orchestral and chromatic richness.

In the section dedicated to the hero’s companion, Strauss celebrates his love and encapsulates the personality of his wife, the fiery soprano Pauline de Ahna (1863–1950), a formidable prima donna of the old school, with whom Strauss enjoyed a long and happily dominated marriage.

This is the third of the tributes that the ROSS is paying to the great Richard Strauss on the 75th anniversary of his death in autumn 2024, following performances in the chamber cycle of the lush and intense Metamorphosen for string orchestra and the epoch-making, resounding interpretation of Ariadne auf Naxos, a memory to treasure for the fortunate attendees.

José María Jurado García-Posada