Christian Thielemann conducts Beethoven’s “Eroica”

These are orchestral works that refer to literary or mythological figures in completely different ways: on the one hand, Hans Werner Henze’s orchestral piece Sebastian im Traum, which premiered in 2005 and is based on a poem by Georg Trakl. As the composer himself notes, his music tries to “follow the traces of the poet’s words (as someone with a movie camera tries to capture the course of events or as another perhaps takes down the communication of subject matter in shorthand)”. The piece, to which Henze gave the subtitle Salzburg Night Music, is full of allusions “to the rustic Baroque, to the biblical, to the wooden crucifix, to the nearness of death, to the moonlight, to Traklish evening sonatas”.

This concert also includes two works that refer to the legends of the ancient world: Franz Liszt’s symphonic poem Orpheus, composed precisely 150 years before Henze’s composition, and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Eroica, bearing witness to the composer’s grappling with a symbolic figure of the European enlightenment: Prometheus. It was no coincidence that Beethoven based the finale of his Third Symphony, originally titled “Bonaparte”, on a melody from his ballet music The Creatures of Prometheus, which premiered in 1801: for – as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe later remarked – Napoleon also brought to mankind “light: a moral enlightenment.”

Berliner Philharmoniker

Christian Thielemann