Program Notes RICHARD WAGNER “Prelude and Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde DURATION: ca. 17 minutes Overview Wagner provided a synopsis of the emotional progression of the action of Tristan whose voluptuous prose is a not only a sketch of the events of the story, but also a key to understanding the surging sea of passion upon which the entire world of this opera floats: “Tristan, the faithful vassal, woos for his king her for whom he dares not avow his own love, Isolde. Isolde, powerless than to do otherwise than obey the wooer, follows him as bride to his lord. Jealous of this infringement of her rights, the Goddess of Love takes her revenge. As the result of a happy mistake, she allows the couple to taste of the love potion which, by the burning desire which suddenly inflames them after tasting it, opens their eyes to the truth and leads to the avowal that for the future they belong only to each other. Henceforth, there is no end to the longings, the demands, the joys and woes of love. One thing only remains: longing, longing, insatiable longing, forever springing up anew, pining and thirsting. Powerless, the heart sinks back to languish in longing, in longing without attaining; for each attainment only begets new longing, until in the last stage of weariness the foreboding of the highest joy of dying, of no longer existing, of the last escape into that wonderful kingdom from which we are furthest off when we are most strenuously striving to enter therein. Shall we call it death? Or is it the hidden wonder-world from out of which an ivy and vine, entwined with each other, grew up upon Tristan’s and Isolde’s grave, as the legend tells us?” What To Listen For The sense of longing is generated right at the beginning of the opera. Its Prelude is built, in the composer’s words, from “one long series of linked phrases,” each of which is left hanging, unresolved, in silence. Of the remainder of the Prelude and its progression to the Liebestod (“Love-Death”), Wagner wrote, it moves from “the first timidest lament of inappeasable longing, the tenderest shudder, to the most terrible outpouring of an avowal of hopeless love, traversing all phases of the vain struggle against the inner ardor until this, sinking back upon itself, seems to be extinguished in 50 THE FLORIDA ORCHESTRA | 2016-2017 death.” The Prelude is constructed as a long arch of sound, beginning faintly and building to a huge climax near its center before dying away to silence. In Wagner’s concert version, the Liebestod follows without pause, and it, too, generates a magnificent tonal gratification at the point near the end of the opera where the lovers find their only possible satisfaction in welcome death. Of this sublime moment, Wagner wrote, “What Fate divided in life now springs into transfigured life in death: the gates of union are thrown open. Over Tristan’s body the dying Isolde receives the blessed fulfillment of ardent longing, eternal union in measureless space, without barriers, without fetters, inseparable.” JOAQUÍN RODRIGO Concierto de Aranjuez for Guitar and Orchestra Duration: ca. 22 minutes Overview The small town of Aranjuez, thirty miles south of Madrid on the River Tagus, is a green oasis in the barren plateau of central Spain. In the mid-18th century, a palace, set amid verdant forests and parks, was built at Aranjuez as a summer retreat for the Spanish court. Generations of Spanish kings thereafter settled into Aranjuez every spring, when the countless nightingales would serenade them from the cedars and laurels, the court ladies would promenade in the cooling shade, and the men would hone their equestrian skills with the famous cream-colored Andalusian horses bred nearby. When Rodrigo sought inspiration for a new concerto in the difficult, war-torn year of 1939, it was to the elegant symbol of by-gone Spain represented by Aranjuez that he turned. “Having conceived the idea of a guitar concerto,” he recalled, “it was necessary for me to place it in a certain epoch and, still more, in a definite location — an epoch at the end of which fandangos transform themselves into fandanguillos, and when the cante and the bulerias vibrate in the Spanish air.” What To Listen For In his Concierto de Aranjuez, Rodrigo adapted the three traditional movements of the concerto form to reflect different aspects of the soul of Spanish music — the outer movements are fast in tempo and dance-like, while the middle one is imbued with the bittersweet intensity of classic flamenco cante hondo (“deep song”). The soloist opens the
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