‘Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège’

19:00 CONTEXT: Introduction and encounter with Christian Arming

Setting death to music frequently inspired sublime art in the course of the 19th century. In Isolde's "Liebestod" from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (1865), for example, with its orchestral ecstasies, and in Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (1905), a lieder cycle inspired by a poet's grief for the death of his children. First performed in Leipzig in 1846, Schumann's Second Symphony shows that beauty can emerge out of a dark place.