The event is part of the Big Concert Night. More information...
An error is a deviation from what we expect, this year’s festival theme asserts. Only by deviating can we switch to a new course. A total reset in musical terms was created by 27-year-old Hector Berlioz. He composed Symphonie fantastique and thereby put on the market—or, rather, launched an epoch with—a musical work that deviated outrageously, made a hurtling head-on impact, and was actually decades ahead of its time.
Here, the unimaginable happens. The modern artist openly portrays his private passion infernale, showcases his obsession (with Irish actress Harriett Smithson) for all to see. An imaginary inner-world theater that reveals—and segues into—a totally different Romanticism that sings less of dreams than of Kafkaesque nightmares. Berlioz was far out on the leading edge of style, structure and orchestration, and anticipated tonal developments well into the 20th century. With unusual instrumental colorations, rhythmic and harmonic liberties, and with the help of a leitmotif present in every movement—an idée fixe, as it were—Berlioz invents a program music whose imaginativeness goes forth into (previously) unknown realms of expression. In the first movement, he composes drug-induced dreams; in the second movement, the festivities of a vivacious ball; in the third movement, a pastoral as an island of tranquility; in the fourth movement, a macabre film scene; in the fifth movement, a hellish orgy with fearful screams, scornful laughter and scoffing godlessness. The explosive power of this fantastic symphony is eternal and always utterly the music of the time in which it is heard.
Text von Norbert Trawöger
Credits:
in cooperation with Internationales Brucknerfest Linz 2018
Hector Berlioz Épisode de la vie d’un artiste
Symphonie fantastique en cinq parties, op. 14 (1830)
Dirigent:
Markus Poschner (DE)
