ARNOLD SCHÖNBERG
Sei Lieder for voice and orchestra op. 8
NIKOLAJ RIMSKIJ-KORSAKOV
Shéhérazade symphonic suite op. 35
Soprano
Francesca Paola Geretto
Conductor
Donato Renzetti
Opera Carlo Felice Genova Orchestra
Arnold Schoenberg’s Six Lieder Op. 8, composed between 1903 and 1905, testify to the important connection with the late Romantic tradition that characterised the composer’s early artistic period. Schoenberg was in his thirties at the time, and had behind him a largely self-taught education assisted by Alexander Zemlinsky’s counterpoint lessons. Several of his works had already been performed and appreciated, but a new creative impulse was maturing within him, a desire to develop a musical language in detachment from tradition and akin to the nascent expressionist current. The compositions of the early 20th century represent the pinnacle of romantic Schoenberg and gather the first chromatic tensions that would lead to later atonal explorations. The orchestral writing of the Six Lieder recalls the models of Mahler and Strauss and is articulated through a dense ensemble with great timbral richness in dialogue with the soloist voice, whose lyricism it exalts. The link with tradition also emerges in the choice of texts: the first, Natur, is by Heinrich Hart, a German naturalist poet who lived in the second half of the 19th century. The second and third – Das Wappenschild and Sehnsucht – are taken from the folk song collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the same one that inspired Gustav Mahler for his Lieder. The last three are Sonnets 82, 116 and 279 from Petrarch’s Canzoniere in the German translation by Karl August Förster. The first performance of the Lieder took place almost ten years after their completion, in 1914, in Prague. The first performer was the tenor Hans Winkelmann, under the baton of Zemlinsky.
The Symphonic Suite Shéhérazade is one of Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov’s most famous and performed compositions. The composer worked on it in the summer of 1888, at a particularly prolific time when he was alternating his activities as composer and orchestrator with teaching at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Already established were his style and poetics, centred on the rediscovery and reworking of the heritage of Russian folk music – a poetics shared by the composers of the Group of Five (Balakirev, Kjui, Musorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky Korsakov). Shéhérazade is divided into four episodes inspired by the Thousand and One Nights: The Sea and the Ship of Sinbad, The Tale of Prince Kalender, The Young Prince and the Young Princess and Party in Baghdad. The sea. The shipwreck . The content is strongly expressive, the choice of such a markedly ‘Orientalist’ evocation is in continuity with the exploration of the roots of the Russian tradition also in contrast to the Western tradition. The episodes are conceived as independent sections, the extra-musical contents are in fact unconnected. Only Shéhérazade’s theme – entrusted to a violin – returns at the beginning of the first, second and fourth episodes, as the princess proceeds in her tale to the sultan. There is no lack of cross-references and motivic echoes between the episodes, but the composer himself emphasises that these are not thematic leitmotifs, but rather ‘purely musical materials, motifs of symphonic development’. Rimsky Korsakov claimed to have achieved with this and other contemporary works – such as the Great Russian Easter Overture – his most personal orchestral expression, free from the influences of Western cultured symphonism. The first performance of the Suite took place in October 1888 at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, with the composer conducting.
Ludovica Gelpi
