The NFM Wrocław Philharmonic concert, conducted by Thomas Sanderling, will open with two compositions by Romantic masters, intended as introductions to bigger works. Today, they are acclaimed as stand-alone pieces. After the intermission, we will hear Antonín Dvořák’s masterpiece, worthy of more frequent inclusions in concert programmes.

The opening work will be the overture to the only opera written by Robert Schumann. Born in 1810, the artist chose to use the story of Genevieve of Brabant – according to legend, the wife of a knight, wrongly accused of adultery while her husband was on a crusade. The orchestral opening to the opera, contrary to accepted practice, was composed before Schumann wrote the rest of the music. Although the opera was met with hostility at its premiere, the overture continues to impress with its dark atmosphere of a medieval tale, phenomenally conveyed by the score. The history of Liszt’s symphonic poem, The Preludes, is linked to his cycle of choral works, Les quatre éléments. Ultimately, he decided to perform The Preludes separately, under a title taken from the fifteenth poem of Alphonse de Lamartine’s collection Méditations poétiques. In the introduction to the score, the composer asked: “Is life not a series of preludes to that unknown song whose first sublime note is intoned by death?” Liszt created an orchestral masterpiece. He employed vast masses of sound, yet its form was based on the transformations of just a few musical ideas.

In the second part of the concert, the orchestra will perform Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 in D minor. Its expression is at least as dramatic as the works from the first half of the evening, and its inspiration was the Czech national awakening. The composer was most impressed at that time – in July 1884, to be precise – by the arrival in Prague of a train carrying audiences to the National Theatre. Their journey became an opportunity for anti-Habsburg rallies (the country was then part of Austria-Hungary) and the singing of patriotic songs. Surprisingly, in this particular work, Dvořák avoids any references to folk culture. “I think of nothing else but this new work, which must be capable of moving the world – may God grant it so!” he wrote in a letter, overcome with creative zeal.