Schoenberg’s music stands where one least expects it. Certainly, it responds point by point the founding myth of modernity, yet it also charts its undoing. Its attempt at rebellion against the system is as important as the modern system itself. That to which it offers resistance is as unifying as that which it preserves.
Danielle Cohen-Levinas
From Joseph Haydn to Arnold Schoenberg, by way of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, this programme offers a perspective on Austrian music through three glimpses into key moments of its history. It also stands as a discreet homage to the history of the Orchestre de chambre de Paris, for it was nearly half a century ago that Symphony No. 49, known as La Passione, entered its repertoire at the initiative of Daniel Barenboim, who conducted it in 1977.
While under the protection of Prince Esterházy, Joseph Haydn, himself at the head of an orchestra, was able to compose and to experiment. With La Passione, first performed in 1768, he plunged into the pre-Romantic current of Sturm und Drang, “storm” and “passion”, or “impulse”, thereby lending new legitimacy to the symphonic genre.
Completed in 1791, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s final Piano Concerto plays upon the complementarity between soloist and orchestra, opening new perspectives in which modulations and digressions herald the coming of Romanticism. It is this very legacy that Arnold Schoenberg inherits when he sets to music a poem by Richard Dehmel, in which a woman confesses to the man who loves her that she is expecting a child by another man.
A tonal work, drawing as much upon Johannes Brahms as upon Richard Wagner, Verklärte Nacht, originally written for string septet in 1899, was transcribed for string orchestra in 1917, then revised in 1943 by the composer himself, and now stands among the masterpieces of the music of the first half of the twentieth century.
Programme
Joseph Haydn
Symphonie no 49 en fa mineur, Hob. I : 49, dite « La Passione »
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Concerto pour piano no 27 en si bémol majeur, KV 595
Arnold Schoenberg
La Nuit transfigurée, op. 4
