Thanks to Johann Strauss II’s most famous waltz, An der schönen blauen Donau, Op. 314, we will first travel to the Austrian capital at the end of the 1860s and immerse ourselves for a moment in the atmosphere of the famous carnival balls.

Not related to the master of dance music, but bearing the same surname, Richard Strauss achieved his greatest success as an opera composer. Although he gained European renown at the beginning of the twentieth century as a composer of blood-filled musical tragedies, Salome and Elektra, it was his comic operas, like Der Rosenkavalier and Arabella, staged in the early 1930s, that won him the sincere affection of the public. We will hear the most beautiful pieces from the latter work: the soprano-baritone duet of Arabella and Mandryka from Act II, ‘Sie woll’n mich heireten’, Arabella’s aria from Act I, ‘Mein Elemer!’, the orchestral introduction to Act III and the closing scene of the work, ‘Das war sehr gut, Mandryka’.

For his five-movement Symphony No. 1 in E flat major (‘Landliche Hochzeit’), Op. 26, first performed in early March 1876 in Vienna under the baton of Hans Richter, Karl Goldmark received praise from Johannes Brahms himself, who considered the work to be perfect in every respect and compared it to Minerva emerging from the head of Jupiter. The programmatic titles of the individual movements may indicate the suite-like structure of the composition and encourage listeners to imagine the course of the celebrations suggested in the overall title of the work (‘Wedding March’, ‘Bridal Song’, ‘Serenade’, ‘In the Garden’, ‘Dance’). From the very first bars, however, Goldmark reveals his lofty compositional artistry, realising a truly Mozartian ideal of musical beauty, which in fact has little in common with the neoromantic aesthetic. The first movement, in the form of variations, can be considered a nod to the legacy of the Viennese classics.

Grzegorz Zieziula