Staatskapelle Berlin / Daniel Barenboim

On the one hand, the programme features the Prelude and »Liebestod« from Richard Wagner’s opera »Tristan und Isolde«: a piece of music that shocked audiences and critics alike in its day. Why? This is where people heard the infamous »Tristan chord« for the first time, an ambiguous phrase full of tension that no composer had ever written down in this form hitherto. Wagner broke a taboo here, not only calling the conventional theory of music into question in the years that followed, but even triggering a full-blown crisis in the world of Romantic harmonics.

The other work in this evening’s concert is the forward-looking Ninth Symphony by Anton Bruckner, himself a great admirer of Wagner’s. With this last symphony, which remained incomplete, Bruckner reached for the stars, and even planned to dedicate it to »our dear Lord«. Shortly before his death in 1896, he composed in a style that was more extreme and revolutionary than ever: dissonant, abrupt and on the brink of despair. With the Ninth, Bruckner threw the door to the 20th century wide open and paved the way for his younger colleagues Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg.