Romantic
night

The Opera's Chorus invites us to a tender transfiguration. In his Hymns to the Night, Novalis wrote “A low melancholy plays across my heartstrings”. A melancholy full of nostalgia and delight for those who know how to grasp the spirit of romanticism at its source, as did Schubert and Fanny Mendelssohn — the beloved and much mourned sister of Felix — or the lesser-known Josef Rheinberger. Like the latter, Brahms was a belated offshoot of that passionate and poetic fervour, except he opened it up to broader horizons. Case in point, the Liebeslieder in which compound rhythms of Schubert’s Ländler and Strauss’s waltzes converge in the love songs born of writings from all the European folkloric traditions. The Zigeunerlieder (Gypsy Songs), a score from his penultimate years, radiate a hidden, tortured, incandescent passion in which greatness of character and Romany pride bursts forth as never before.