Metropolitan opera star sings Mahler
Don’t miss the next evening in the “When Classical is a Passion” season-ticket holders’ series at the Rudolfinum’s Dvořák Hall featuring the world-renowned Austrian baritone Markus Werba.
Werba is familiar to audiences at the globe’s most famous opera houses, such as the Teatro alla Scala, Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House, the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, the Vienna State Opera, the Semperoper Dresden, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires and New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Markus Werba is also in great demand as a concert singer and will demonstrate his prowess in Gustav Mahler’s cycle Songs on the Death of Children, a moving opus based on texts by Friedrich Rückert. When the composer began the piece in 1901 he had yet to meet the woman of his life, the Viennese beauty Alma. When he completed the cycle in 1904 they were a married couple with two daughters.
Alma made no secret of her displeasure over his work on the cycle, imploring her husband to not bring down ill fortune on them. It is a sad fact that one of Mahler’s daughters did in fact die in July 1907. The Songs on the Death of Children are Mahler’s most intimate work. Though supremely tragic, the way the composer renders consolation in musical form makes them compelling.
Summer Breeze
The whole evening will be devoted to German culture and also includes the idyll Im Sommerwind, an early piece by Anton Webern that was not shaped by his later innovative style of composing, which gave rise to atonality and dodecaphony. The title comes from a poem by Bruno Wille, a German novelist, poet and playwright.
The text represents a passionate celebration of nature, an impressionistic depiction of a summer’s day among forests and fields. Webern was a great nature lover, a fact reflected in his conception of the orchestral idyll, to which he ascribed the expressions feierlich, celebratory, and weihevoll, sanctified or solemn.
Hero’s Life
The second half of the concert is given over to Richard Strauss and his Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life). For a piece with an autobiographical tone, such a title is none too modest. And indeed, Strauss was somebody with great confidence. With good reason. At the age of 34 he was sought-after throughout Germany as a guest conductor, the premieres of his work were very well received, he had been married for four years to the outstanding soprano Pauline de Ahna, he boasted a son, Franz Alexander, and, at the time he was completing Ein Heldenleben signed a contract to become music director of the Royal Court Opera in Berlin…
It was entirely understandable, therefore, that he sensed the time to look back had come and embarked on self-reflection in musical form. Whatever way one looks at this fact, Ein Heldenleben demonstrates tremendous use of the modern orchestra and in this regard represents a significant milestone in the history of music.
Our attractive programme gets underway at 19:30 on Monday 9 January at the Rudolfinum’s Dvořák Hall. If you won’t be at the venue in person, you can tune in to a live transmission on Czech Radio’s Vltava station.
