BRAHMS SYMPHONY NO. 4
Kateryna
Sokolova
Having graduated in
2012 from the Royal
Central School of
Speech and Drama
with a master’s degree, Kateryna
Sokolova went on to work in theaters
such as Deutsche Oper Berlin, Theater
an der Wien, De Nationale Opera
in Amsterdam and Schauspielhaus
Zürich. During this time, she was
assistant to directors such as Christof
Loy, Alvis Hermanis, Barbara Frey,
René Pollesch, Stefan Pucher, Hans
Neuenfels and Kasper Holten.
In 2014 she staged A Hero Of Our
Time, which was based on the novel
by Mikhail Lermontov. This was
her first work at the Schauspielhaus
Zürich. In 2016 and 2017, she
staged Verdi’s Macbeth and Mozart’s
Entführung Aus Dem Serail at the
Staatstheater Oldenburg. Future
projects include Sancta Susanna at
the Wiener Konzerthaus and Genia
at the Wiener Kammeroper.
Sokolova is a member of the European
Academy of Music Theatre. She won
the German federal competition Jugend
musiziert for piano in 2004 and 2006,
as well as a fellowship from the German
Academic Scholarship Foundation.
Kateryna Sokolova makes her BSO debut.
Women's Voices
of Peabody Opera
The Opera Theatre Program at the
Peabody Institute performs five to
seven operas per year throughout
Baltimore and the Mid-Atlantic
region. Performances are free at their
home venue of Friedberg Hall on
the Peabody campus. Peabody Opera
aims to define the future of opera
from two angles: provide training
of the whole opera artist and provide
our community with socially aware
productions of significant standard
and contemporary repertoire.
The Women’s Voices of Peabody make
their BSO debut.
About the Concert
PRELUDE AND LIEBESTOD FROM
TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
Richard Wagner
Born in Leipzig, Germany, May 22, 1813;
died in Venice, Italy, February 13, 1883
“Forbidden Love” is the theme of tonight’s
concert, and two of tonight’s works
epitomize it more powerfully than almost
anything ever written.
Richard Wagner had been at work
for the better part of a decade on his
monumental Ring cycle —he had already
completed Das Rheingold, Die Walküre and
two acts of Siegfried —when the romantic
legend of Tristan and Isolde began
obsessing him. Though Wagner knew this
story through the 13 th -century German
poem of Gottfried von Strassburg, the
Tristan legend originated in Celtic Ireland
or Wales many centuries earlier. It tells of
the Cornish knight Tristan who, to prove
his loyalty to his uncle King Mark and
bring peace between Ireland and Cornwall,
woos the proud Irish princess Isolde to
be Mark’s bride. But as in so many real
and fictional cases of courtship by proxy,
Tristan and Isolde fall passionately in love.
Though Tristan brings her back to Mark,
the two carry on a clandestine love affair,
which is ultimately resolved by their deaths.
At the moment this legend seized his
imagination, Wagner was in the midst of
a clandestine affair of his own with the
beautiful Mathilde Wesendonck, wife of
his then-patron, the wealthy German-Swiss
businessman Otto Wesendonk. However,
the theme and musical expression of
Tristan und Isolde suggests this affair was
never consummated. For instead of being
a conventional love story, Tristan und
Isolde sings of the inability of love to find
satisfaction on this earth. Only when the
lovers are united in death, can their love
achieve fulfillment and the music find rest
in harmonic consonance.
Wagner wrote the opera’s libretto during
the summer of 1857 on the Wesendonk
estate outside Zürich and then composed
its famous Prelude that October. When
things became too hot in the Wagner/
Wesendonk menage, he moved on to
Venice and Lucerne, where he completed
the opera in August 1859.
Because Tristan und Isolde had to wait
another six years to reach the stage in 1865,
Wagner sanctioned concert performances
of the Prelude as a sort of sneak preview.
Eventually, he also permitted it to be linked
directly with the opera’s final scene, Isolde’s
aria to the dead Tristan known as the
Liebestod (“Love-Death”).
The opera’s philosophical theme—
the yearning of love, the frustration of its
fulfillment—is musically established in
the Prelude’s first chords with harmonies
riddled with dissonance, only briefly
touching consonance before being
destabilized again. The most famous of
these chords is the first one we hear, known
as the “Tristan” chord, made more bitter
by the tang of woodwinds; it is never fully
resolved during the Prelude.
As the Prelude subsides, we suddenly
skip more than four hours to the end
of the opera, which is Isolde’s beyond-
this-life rapture over her lover’s body
(Liebestod). This aria — played here
without its soaring soprano part—
features one of the most powerful
musical moments as Wagner traps the
orchestra, dominated by the violins, in a
prolonged rising sequence. Finally, this
explodes into the Liebestod’s climax: a
fortissimo release on the violins’ highest
C-sharp. And in the music’s final
moment—with Isolde’s death — comes
complete harmonic resolution at last in
a radiant B major chord.
Instrumentation: Three flutes including
piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets,
bass clarinet, three bassoons, four horns, three
trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, harp
and strings.
SANCTA SUSANNA
Paul Hindemith
Born in Hanau, Germany, November 16,
1895; died in Frankfurt, Germany,
December 28, 1963
In 1921, the 25-year-old Paul Hindemith
wrote a one-act opera Sancta Susanna
(“Saint Susanna”) that rocked the world
S E P– O C T 201 9 / OV E R T U R E
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