Can music that its composer rejected tell us more about him than the works he chose to leave behind? And do we have the right to such an experience, listening in when the composer never invited us to do so? #0 is a story of beginnings and endings, of hope and doubt, and of the moment when music stepped beyond its comfort zone.
La clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus) is one of Mozart’s last operas, composed just a few months before his death. Written in haste to celebrate the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia, it explores themes of power and its imagined responsibility, clemency and reason. Despite intrigue and betrayal, the Emperor Titus chooses forgiveness over revenge. The overture encompasses a wide range of emotions and finely nuanced tensions.
Joseph Haydn’s Symphony in D major, Hob. I:104, known as the ‘London’ Symphony, was the last symphony by the composer widely regarded as the father of the genre. The work is not only the culmination of his creative output, but also a synthesis of an aesthetic era defined by proportion and a reassuring sense of balance. Within the programme, the ‘London’ Symphony marks a turning point – the moment when the Classical symphony reaches its fulfilment while at the same time opening itself to its first fissures and more radical transformations.
The Bruckner work that concludes the programme is regarded as one of the most enigmatic in the history of 19th-century symphonic music. The Symphony in D minor was withdrawn by the composer from the official catalogue of his works. Bruckner considered it insufficiently successful and marked the score with the words gilt nicht (‘does not count’). Paradoxically, it is now Symphony No. 0 that is regarded as the moment when Bruckner’s distinctive and much-admired musical style was born.
Maria Peryt