Lohengrin: Overture

On November 1, 1871, the Teatro Comunale in Bologna was Wagner’s gateway to Italy. After long negotiations and exhausting preparations, encouraged by the mayor of the time Camillo Casarini, Angelo Mariani conducted Lohengrin, the first Wagnerian opera to be seen and heard in our country. It was a historic event, bringing the city of Bologna back to the center of the musical debate, later assigning it the sceptre of four other national premieres, from Tannhäuser to Olandese Volante, from Tristan und Isolde to Parsifal.

Parsifal: “Good Friday Spell”

Slow and troubled was the path of Wagner’s last opera, the most mystical, the most symbolic. For 30 years the Parsifal-Schutz clause denied the right to perform the opera outside Bayreuth. Despite some exceptions, the ban remained in effect until December 31, 1913. Then, as midnight struck, dozens of European theaters competed to be first on the monumental score. Barcelona’s Liceu won, staging the drama at the precise stroke of the new year. But Bologna did not have to wait long: on January 1, 1914, the Comunale was the first Italian theater to play the last visionary Wagnerian masterpiece, under the direction of Rodolfo Ferrari.

Tristan und Isolde: “Isolde’s Death Prelude.”

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66 seems to anticipate the fate of Šostakovič, “the genius gagged by authority.” A fine artist, driven by a desire for independence and originality, he found himself facing the brutal power of Stalin and his paranoid, devouring dictatorship, which despised works of art not accessible to the general public, preferring to turn artists into propaganda tools, advertisers of his image and curators of the cult of his person. The Fourth Symphony runs on this cataclysm: Šostakovič wrote it in the two years that changed his life, from 1934 to 1936, in the span of time that took him from the resounding success of A Lady Macbeth of the Mcensk District to its censorship, sanctioned in the pages of “Pravda.” For this reason he chose to keep this symphonic masterpiece in the drawer, appearing only in 1961, eight years after Stalin’s death.

Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54

There is no challenge between soloist and orchestra in Schumann’s only Piano Concerto: instead, there is a relationship, almost chamber-like, built on mutual listening and tension. Schumann, moreover, does not write a “concerto” in the usual sense, but in a new, more fluid form, where each gesture has expressive weight, “something halfway between symphony, concerto and grand sonata,” said the composer himself, “because I realize that I cannot write a ‘virtuoso’ concerto and that I must aim at something else.” So the piano enters immediately, decisively, as if surprised in a discourse that has already begun. The writing is nervous, poetic, never predictable. In the middle, a short, suspended Intermezzo; then the finale, which shines with an inner light. A masterpiece that seems to contain — like few others — the complexity, melancholy and indomitable soul of its author.