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Wagner and Beethoven Christmas Concert - Teatro Verdi, Florence

What you will find

EVENT NAME: Christmas concert played by the Orchestra della Toscana
EVENT PLACE: Verdi Theatre
EVENT DATE: 24 December 2024
EVENT PRICE: full €22
EVENT TIME: 5pm


EVENT DESCRIPTION:

To celebrate the Christmas holidays, a score heard for the first time on Christmas Day was chosen. It is Siegfried's Idyll, a gift offered by Richard Wagner to his wife Cosima Liszt on 25 December 1870, the day of his thirty-third birthday. A surprise for her, who that morning was awakened by the sound of fifteen musicians arranged on the staircase of their villa in Triebschen, near Lucerne. With that private gift, Wagner sealed a happy period in his family life that had begun a year and a half earlier with the birth of his third son Siegfried. A token of love is also Träume (“Dreams”) which our main conductor Diego Ceretta places at the opening of the concert.

It bears witness to the passion between Wagner and Mathilde Wesendock that blossomed in Zurich around 1857, while the composer and his first wife Minna were guests in the Wesendonck couple's villa. A relationship transfigured in the musical drama Tristan and Isolde, whose poignant atmosphere Träume prepares and echoes, given that its genesis is intertwined with that of the opera. The last of a collection of five songs for female voice and piano on verses by Mathilde herself, Träume is proposed here in the version for violin and small orchestra reworked by Wagner much later. In the second part of the program we listen to Ludwig van Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, "apotheosis of dance", as Wagner defined it, "dance in its maximum essence, the action of the body translated into sounds, so to speak, ideal".




Copyright: Marco Borrelli


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Where / Meeting point

Via Ghibellina 99 - 50122 Firenze (FI)