In the booklet Ilka Seifert starts from the ideas of love that took shape in the 19th century – marriage for love, monogamy and fidelity – and from longings that are not easily fulfilled and sometimes bring love and madness close together. The artist, a kind of seismologist of society’s state of mind, was granted more passionate feelings than others; all the more did he seem destined to express the passions repressed by social consensus, even to excess, and so to allow his audience a catharsis. The lives and works of Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner bear this out.
With “Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg” Wagner conceived in 1842, right at the start of his career, a romantic opera about precisely this field of tension: the conflict between the instinctive emotions the title hero experiences in the Venusberg and Elisabeth’s “pure”, selfless love. He set the story in a mythical Middle Ages, combining the legend of Heinrich von Ofterdingen and the minstrels’ contest with that of the Venusberg (Hörselberg) near Eisenach; from here on he developed the leitmotif technique with ever greater refinement. With “Tannhäuser” he hoped to make his name in Paris in 1861. Since he refused to include a ballet in the second act, he inserted, at the management’s behest, a scene directly after the overture: the Overture passes attacca into the Venusberg Music, the Bacchanale in the Venusberg – not a ballet but a danced or mimed orgy, which Wagner’s stage directions in the score populate with nymphs, bacchantes, satyrs and fauns. The sold-out Paris performances were shouted down by the claque, which Wagner had not paid; he withdrew the opera after the third performance, but the scandal contributed not a little to his fame.
Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique Op. 14 bears the actual title “Épisode de la vie d’un artiste” and was conceived as the first part of a monodrame lyrique whose sequel is called “Lélio ou le retour à la vie”. Instead of the customary four movements following similar formal plans, Berlioz wrote five movements of a different structure, through which a melody runs as an “idée fixe” in ever new guises; he enlarged the orchestra with additional instruments and prefaced the work with a detailed programme telling of a young artist’s obsessive, unrequited love, which leads through fantasies of murder and punishment to a witches’ sabbath. Robert Schumann reacted to this programme almost with irritation: the five main headings, from “Reveries, Passions” to “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath”, would have sufficed. The crisis turned into music is autobiographical: at a guest performance of “Hamlet” in Paris the 23-year-old Berlioz had fallen in love at first sight with Harriet Smithson, who played Ophelia, and courted her in vain for more than two years. The premiere in 1830 at the Paris Conservatoire laid the foundation of his fame. In 1832, at a performance of “Lélio”, Smithson evidently realised that she herself was the “idée fixe” of this music; less than a year later the two were married, but they soon separated.
In August 2016 the British conductor Julia Jones became general music director of the Sinfonieorchester Wuppertal, which Toshiyuki Kamioka had led since 2004/2005. She had previously been chief conductor at the Theater Basel from 1998 to 2002 and at the Teatro Nacional de Sao Carlos and the Orquestra Sinfonica Portuguesa in Lisbon from 2008 to 2011; as an opera conductor she has made her name above all with Mozart and the Italian repertoire. Under Kamioka the orchestra had toured to Milan and Japan and made its debut at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in 2011. The recording was made at the concerts on 11 and 12 March 2018 in the Historische Stadthalle Wuppertal; following the volume with works by Dohnanyi and Brahms, it is the second instalment of the Wuppertal live series in hd-klassik’s 3D binaural stereo series.