Aspen Festival Orchestra

Robert Spano, conductor

Joyce Yang, piano

Prelude to Act I, from Parsifal (1857–81) 13'

Good Friday Spell, from Parsifal 11'

Richard Wagner was born on May 22, 1813, in Leipzig, and died on February 13, 1883, in Venice. Orchestral selections from his opera Parsifal to be performed today are scored for four flutes, three oboes, English horn, three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons (one doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings.

Richard Wagner took decades to complete his last opera, Parsifal. It was first staged at his new custom-built theater at Bayreuth in 1882, just a year before his death. The idea for an opera addressing the spiritual themes of redemption, faith, grace, compassion, and chastity had been germinating in his mind since 1845, when he came across the thirteenth-century Romance poem Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach. Parsifal, or Percival, was one of the legendary Knights of the Arthurian Round Table who went in search of the Holy Grail, believed to be the cup Jesus Christ used during the Last Supper. Many different versions of the Parsifal story exist in literature, and Wagner, always drawn to allegorical subjects based in mythology and legend, combined several of them in the libretto he eventually produced. Wagner called Parsifal a Bühnenweihfestspiel—a “festival play for the consecration of the stage.”

In 1865 Wagner completed his draft for the libretto. But over the next eleven years, his attention was given to several other projects: building the Bayreuth opera house, preparing the first performance of the Ring Cycle, and finishing Die Meistersinger. While he was composing the music in 1880, he wrote the essay “Art and Religion,” which discussed Parsifal’s treatment of religious faith. “One could say that when religion becomes artificial, it remains for art to salvage the true essence of religion by perceiving its mythical symbols—which religion would have us believe to be the literal truth—only according to their figurative value, in order to make us see their profound, hidden truth through idealized representation.”

The hero Parsifal is an innocent searcher for truth. Raised in the forest where he was protected from the sins and venality of the outside world, he met the Arthurian Knights in a chance encounter. Inspired by their devotion, he joined in their guardianship of the Holy Grail. Because he feels compassion and experiences the pain of others, Parsifal becomes a figure of salvation and redemption. Maintaining his chastity, he rejects the sexual advances of Kundry, a magical and sinful seductress. Through his virtue, he gains ownership of another holy relic, the spear used to stab Christ on the cross of crucifixion. This spear inflicted a wound upon the knight Amfortas when he fell to Kundry’s seduction, and that wound has never healed. Parsifal, now king of the Grail Knights, heals Amfortas’s wound with the spear and orders the Grail’s unveiling, freeing it from the curse of Amfortas’s transgression. Parsifal becomes the new redeemer who restores sanctity to the Knights’ brotherhood.

With a running time of 4 hours and 30 minutes, Parsifal is a marathon for both singers and orchestra. The opera opens with a lengthy orchestral Prelude that is often performed as a separate concert piece, usually paired with another episode from Act III, the “Good Friday Spell,” which is played in an orchestral arrangement without voices.

Three motifs central to the opera’s journey from spiritual transformation to redemption appear in the Prelude. These motifs will recur at many points throughout the score in various altered forms that represent different phases in Parsifal’s character and quest. The first is the “Redemption” theme, heard in the deep-toned home key of A-flat major in the opening measures over an accompaniment of slowly rising and falling arpeggiated figures. Conveying a sense of reverence and majesty, it repeats in the related key of C minor. After a dramatic pause and a shift from 4/4 to 6/4 meter, the “Grail” theme enters in the trumpet line, ascending stepwise by an octave. Also known as the “Dresden Amen,” this inspiring tune was familiar to audiences of the time as an Amen setting composed by Johann Gottlieb Naumann (1741–1801) and used in the Kreuzkirche in Dresden.

After another pause the “Faith” motif resounds in the trumpet, centered around the dominant key, E-flat. Wagner develops and intertwines these three motifs at length for the remainder of the Prelude, establishing an atmosphere of solemnity and deep spiritual contemplation. The expected A-flat cadence fails to appear at the end. Instead we are left with an unresolved dominant seventh chord that sounds like a question the following acts will answer. Wagner scholar Ernest Newman described the Prelude as “the most expressive piece of music that had ever been written until that time.”

The “Good Friday Music” or “Good Friday Spell” (Karfreitagszauber) comes during a crucial moment in Act III, scene 1, when Parsifal, having gained possession of the spear, assumes the role of King of the Knights of the Grail. Kundry bathes Parsifal’s feet in an act of redemption and forgiveness before he in turn receives baptism from the Grail Knight Gurnemanz. In the music we hear Parsifal’s heroic fanfare motif, the “Dresden Amen” theme, and the glowing new motif of “Nature Redeemed,” which is sung in exquisite serenity by the oboe. The episode ends as Parsifal “gazes in quiet ecstasy upon field and forest, which are glowing in the morning light,” seeing beyond the grief of Good Friday to the coming resurrection of Christ. — © Harlow Robinson.

Thomas Adès

Inferno Suite, from Dante

Thomas Joseph Edmund Adès was born in London on March 1, 1971. A leading composer of our time, he has also appeared regularly as conductor and pianist with world-class orchestras. The Inferno Suite from Dante consists of selections from his Dante Project, a full-scale ballet setting Dante Alighieri’s three-part Divine Comedy to music. The Inferno Suite is scored for three flutes (one doubling piccolo), two clarinets, bass clarinet, three oboes (one doubling English horn), three bassoons (one doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, one tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and strings.

Dante’s Inferno begins with the author “per una selva oscura” (in a dark wood), having lost his way in the journey of life. By contrast Adès’s Inferno Suite begins two cantos later in medias res, with Dante (the narrator) already brought by the poet Virgil, his guide and literary hero, to the gates of Hell: “per me si va ne l’etterno dolore . . . lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” (through me the way to everlasting pain . . . abandon hope, you who enter here).

This is the touch that has made Adès one of the greatest musical storytellers of our times: paring down complex stories to the most essential and evocative images that keep the dramatic trajectory intact. The Inferno Suite consists of excerpts of the first part of Dante, a ballet that mirrors the whole span of the Divine Comedy. Without Purgatorio and Paradiso to balance it, this Suite skips over some offenders and punishments, focusing on the highest and lowest circles of hell.

Having entered the gate, the travelers see those whose sins did not earn them a place in the circles of Hell but whose self-interest does not qualify them for Heaven; they are eternally stung by wasps that zip unpredictably but relentlessly through the musical texture. Next, Charon the Ferryman, a pagan deity pressed into the service of hell, terrifies with his “occhi di bragia” (eyes like burning coals) but carries out his duties fairly, initially refusing to carry the not-yet-damned Dante. The rocking motion of the music accompanying him is too slow and sinister to be that of any normal boat, but it unfolds with dignity and without malice.

Limbo is home to the virtuous unbaptized, including Virgil himself, whose sole torment is their now-irreversible separation from God. While some of Dante’s categorizations of sin can now seem bizarre—astrologers are cast deeper into Hell than murderers—and his revenge fantasies against the corrupt politicians who banished him from Florence can be difficult to parse, his treatment of these characters is sympathetic. Adès provides them with a slow, sad, stately dance, always poised on the verge of sweetness.

The Popes—guilty of simony, the sale of ecclesiastical favors—are plunged headfirst into fire, a mockery of baptism to match their mockery of divine authority; their music begins with opulence and superficial grace but gradually succumbs to corruption ending in despair. The hypocrites process endlessly, wearing leaden robes covered in gold; what could be an unctuous and smarmy melody is weighted down, unresponsive, and no longer believable. The thieves, for their crimes against others’ property, are to be bitten by serpents forever, a punishment jeered at by the excessively exuberant music.

Satan, trapped in a lake of ice, lies at the bottom of Hell. Adès’s music is almost afraid to look right at him—his three mouths eternally gnawing on infamous traitors, his six eyes weeping bloody pus—focusing on the frozen lake but stealing glances at his horrendous form. But the Inferno does not end there: having made it past Satan, Dante and Virgil (for probably the last time in his eternal damnation) see, through the hidden passage that will take them to Purgatorio, the stars in the heavens above. — © Joel Rust

Johannes Brahms

Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, op. 15

Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany, on May 7, 1833, and died in Vienna on April 3, 1897. His First Piano Concerto took shape over the years 1854–58. Brahms played the solo part in the first performance, which took place in Hanover on January 22, 1859, with Joseph Joachim conducting. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.

The D-minor Piano Concerto, coming at a time of disappointment, frustration, and doubt, caused a young Brahms enormous trouble, more so than any other work. He was disturbed by the tragic breakdown and death of his friend and mentor Robert Schumann in July 1856, and even more perturbed by the inherent conflicts in his feelings toward Clara Schumann, which reached a pitch of romantic adoration and teetered on the precipice of an overt declaration of love before receding, after Schumann’s death, to a warm and supportive friendship that lasted four decades.

Even after starting the work, Brahms was not exactly sure what it was going to be—first a sonata for two pianos, then an orchestral score, finally a piano concerto. Months of worry, revising, questioning, and doubt followed. Brahms played it privately for Joachim in March 1858, but at the end he could only say, “It will never come to anything.” Eventually though, Joachim persuaded him to let the piece go, to send it to a copyist, and finally out into the world.

During preparations for the premiere in January 1859 the Gewandhaus Orchestra took a dislike to the piece, and there was open hostility from the audience, who expected brilliant, virtuosic elaborations of bright, tuneful melodies. The D-minor Concerto was, above all, serious and closely argued, a solid, craggy monument and a truly symphonic work in what was normally a popular genre. The emotional range is generally limited to the darker moods, from tragedy to poignant resignation.

Though the work is in D minor, the opening purposely avoids announcing the key. Joachim claimed that the tonally unstable opening was Brahms’s reaction to the news that Schumann had attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine. Brahms extends the introduction with such ingenuity, such expressive drama, and such a wealth of resources that it becomes a monumental preparation for the arrival of the real home key at the first entrance of the solo piano.

The opening movement is one of the largest symphonic movements composed since Beethoven, and it is dramatic in the manner of Beethoven, employing musical ideas and keys and sonorities almost as characters in a play. The piano appears as a real dramatic foil to the thundering orchestra. It enters in a quiet, murmuring pensive mood; it also introduces, as a solo, the richly consoling second theme. And, though the pianist has much difficult music to play, there is no solo cadenza.

The second movement, in D major, offers a striking contrast to the storminess of the opening, but to Brahms it still seems to have evoked Schumann. Over the opening piano theme, Brahms wrote the words “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini” (Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord), a text from the Sanctus of the Mass, and the music shares the spirit of the small sacred choral works he was composing about the same time. But Brahms also frequently referred to Schumann as “Mynheer Domini,” and, as Malcolm MacDonald suggests, he may have intended this serene passage as a kind of instrumental Requiem for that composer’s troubled spirit.

For the finale Brahms returns to the demonic energy of D minor, a fast-moving rondo that is more grim than cheerful, yet exhilarating too. Brahms builds almost all of the themes in this movement on a rising arpeggio that seems to have grown out of the lyrical second theme of the opening movement.

We know that young Brahms had one of the great musical minds and we can take as many opportunities as we like to hear it again and penetrate its core. Brahms later developed to a higher pitch the surface variety in his music, but here he revealed its rock-solid skeleton. — © Steven Ledbetter