Bruckner 3

Program

Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883) – Eine Faust Ouvertüre

Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911) – Rückert-Lieder (1901)

Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883) – Wesendonck Lieder (1858)

Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphonie Nr. 3 in d moll WAB.103 (1873)

The discovery of Wagner’s Tannhäuser on 13 February 1863 in Linz was a prodigious aesthetic shock for the 39-year-old Bruckner, who had not yet composed a single symphony. The following year, at the Munich premiere of Tristan und Isolde, he finally had the opportunity to meet the man he would come to regard as “the Master of Masters”. In 1873, he dedicated to him his Symphony No. 3, which, especially in its original version, more or less perceptibly quotes and draws inspiration from the leitmotifs of the Ring as it was being composed by Wagner.

So it is just natural that Anima Eterna and Pablo Heras-Casado chose to illuminate this rare version of the score playing Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder in a number of concerts on this European tour. Both intimate confidences of a secret love and laboratories of Tristan, they hint at a more discreet Wagnerian influence on Bruckner, and revive the memory of the tristanian encounter between the two composers. In other performances, Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, the spiritual children of both Wagner and Bruckner, will project the latter’s work into his near future. After Bruckner, it was Mahler more than anyone else who would take the symphonic genre to a new – and final? – summit.

The concerts in Besançon, Linz and Brugge were produced with the support of the tax shelter measure through Flanders Tax Shelter.

• Anton Bruckner
• Bruckner 3
• Christiane Karg
• Dame Sarah Connolly
• Pablo Heras-Casado