NOSPR / Marin Alsop / Ewa Tracz / Katowice Culture Nature Festival - medici.tv livestream - NOSPR

Live streaming of the concert available at medici.tv.

The motto of this concert could be a poem by Jan Lechoń: “You ask what in my life is prime among all the things…/I will tell you: love and death – both the same”. The idea for the introduction to Tristan und Isolde was presented by Richard Wagner in a letter to his ‘muse’, Mathilde von Wesendonck: “Insatiate desire rises only once, in a long and disjointed sequence (...), in order to find a breakthrough that will open the way for the heart of boundless desire to the sea of infinite amorous delight. In vain! The heart collapses impuissant to wither in a longing that does not reach its goal, because each achievement only gives rise to a new desire, until in the last agony a premonition of the attainment of supreme delight flashes through the dying eyes: it is the delight of death”. Karol Szymanowski’s orientalizing Love Songs of Hafiz celebrate mystical ecstasy, rapture of love, the dance, wine and death. This is music, as in Tristan und Isolde, ‘of eternal longing’ but without a shadow of pathos and pessimism, even in the final song in which flowers bloom on the grave of Hafiz (as on Tristan’s grave) spreading the ecstatic scent of wine. In the ballet Romeo and Juliet, Sergey Prokofiev drew on Shakespeare’s universal tragedy, the same one that has already inspired the great Romantics – Berlioz and Tchaikovsky. He wrote music that is romantic in spirit and, for those times, semplice. The tragic love of Romeo and Juliet, lovers belonging to conflicting families, found one of its greatest artistic incarnations in his music.