Seeking and confession: Identities in Classical music
Not only today do we ask ourselves questions like “Who am I, who do I want to be and who may I be?”. Composers such as Mozart and Beethoven already explored them in their works. The focus of the 2022/23 season was identities. Chief conductor Kirill Petrenko opened the season with Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony – our playlist brings together these and other works that deal in different ways with the role of the individual in the world.
The search for identity in musical works that Kirill Petrenko has made the focus of his 2022/23 season programme reveals itself in very different ways. There is the desire to express a national or ethnic affiliation: Jean Sibelius composed Finlandia, the unofficial national anthem of Finland, long occupied by Russia. Zoltán Kodály travelled through his native Hungary and the neighbouring regions to collect folk songs – this inspiration was reflected in, among other works, his Dances of Galánta.
Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, not only struggled with self-doubt, but above all, as a homosexual, he searched for his place in an environment that made same-sex love a punishable offence. This identity struggle seems to be directly depicted in his Pathétique. Kirill Petrenko conducts the symphony here, in which lamentation turns into despair and finally resignation.
A humanistic worldview shaped the work of both Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. “Mortals will become like the gods”, is how self-confidently man emancipates himself from religious rule in The Magic Flute. Beethoven also longed for freedom for all people. The fact that Napoleon bitterly disappointed him as a reformer, however, led him to unceremoniously erase the dedication of his Eroica.
In the 20th century, we find two examples of identity localisation in Gustav Mahler and Dmitri Shostakovich. As a Jew, Mahler faced hostility not only in anti-Semitic Vienna. Each of his symphonies is also a reflection of the individual’s confrontation with an overwhelmingly turbulent world. Shostakovich, on the other hand, composed in a courageous balancing act between national hero and enemy of the people in the shadow of Stalinist censorship.
