Festival of Music

In 1888, the German philosopher and scholar Friedrich Nietzsche wrote one of the most scathing yet entertaining polemical pamphlets in the history of music. It was about his former friend, the composer Richard Wagner, whom he had once held in high esteem. Entitled The Case of Wagner. A Musician’s Problem, it was just under 60 pages in length. Nietzsche began its preface with a charming understatement: “I am writing this to give myself a little relief”. He then proceeds to take the composer and his music apart using every rhetorical trick in the book. The sound of Wagner’s orchestra, thus Nietzsche, is “artificial” and “brutal”, his art itself a conjuring trick, the composer a “clever rattlesnake”. “He is a master of hypnotism, upending even the strongest like bulls”. As his positive counterexample, Nietzsche chooses none other than Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen. Once an ardent Wagnerian, Nietzsche claims that listening to Carmen has turned him into both a “better philosopher” and even a “better human being”. Its music, he says, is light, charming, rich and cheerful. It “doesn’t sweat”. Bizet’s atmosphere – figuratively speaking – is dry, pure and clear, thus Nietzsche. His music symbolises a return to “Nature, health, cheerfulness, youth and virtue”.

But what does any of this have to do with this concert by the Swiss Orchestra? Well, first of all, there’s Franz Waxman’s Carmen Fantasy for violin and string orchestra, which brings the loveliest melodies from Bizet’s opera into the concert hall. And that’s not the only thing that would have delighted Nietzsche. Much of the rest of our programme would also match his criteria for “good music” (criteria that were admittedly rather different in his earlier writings), for these works are cheerful, youthful and very much in touch with Nature. First we have two Nature-inspired pieces for the unusual combination of string orchestra and alphorn (played here by Lisa Stoll): Hans-Jürg Sommer’s Alp-Sommer and Leopold Mozart’s Sinfonia Pastorella. Edvard Grieg’s Two Nordic Melodies for string orchestra, as their title suggests, are derived from Norwegian folk music, though with a deeply atmospheric sense of harmony. Alexey Shor’s Violin Concerto (with Yuki Hirano as soloist) combines virtuosic passages with youthful cheerfulness. Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings offers a very different mood – it’s even been voted the saddest piece of classical music by listeners of the BBC. But a little metaphorical counterpoint of sadness in an otherwise cheerful programme surely wouldn’t offend Nietzsche’s ears!