RO NOW: Inner Choices

This RO NOW is all about exciting quests and choices: when was the last time you made a choice that turned your world upside down?

What are you going to listen to?

Mahler

Head over heels in love was Gustav Mahler in 1884, at that time conductor of the opera in Kassel, with singer Johanna Richter. But it came to nothing and he soothed his heartbreak by writing the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen about the wanderings of a craftsman who, migrating from one master to another, muses on his unhappy love.

As a result, the piece is doubly autobiographical. On the one hand, the hopeless passion for Johanna Richter; on the other, his feeling that as a young composer he still felt like a student. Mahler originally wrote the songs for voice with piano accompaniment. Only much later, between 1891 and 1896, did he turn them into a version for voice and orchestra.

Franck

César Franck was one of the few French composers of the nineteenth century to devote himself to the symphony, and even he did so only once. The organist Franck is unmistakably recognizable in his 1888 Symphony . His orchestration is conceived in blocks of instruments, similar to the different possibilities of the organ. Sometimes that sound is robust and direct, but sometimes of a wonderful refinement and subtlety, reminiscent of impressionism. Unique is Franck's inventiveness in this symphony. Like the structure: in deviation from the traditional four-part structure, the composer settled for three movements.

And there is more. Inimitably, Franck employs a theme that recurs again and again, showing melodies in ever new variations and colors. Actually, the symphony has only one main motif that Franck allows to develop into its own theme in each movement, from the fierce allegro of the first movement, the melancholy melody of the cor anglais in the second movement, to the boisterous fanfare of the finale. With all this, this symphony belongs with Berlioz's Fantastique and the Organ Symphony of its contemporary Saint-Saëns among the best that France has produced in terms of symphonies this century.