James Conlon

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The overture to Idomeneo, the title that will open the Comunale’s 2026 opera season, is one of the highest examples of dramatic symphonic writing by a composer still only twenty-five, here on the threshold of his first true masterpiece for the stage. With tragic, stormy accents, this overture announces the conflict between man and destiny that runs through the drama. The strings swirl like waves, evoking the fury of the sea, symbol of Neptune’s anger and of human passions. Only at the end, before the curtain rises, does a sudden turn to D major foreshadow hope and final reconciliation.

The ballet music that closes Idomeneo, re di Creta (1780) has an independent number in the Mozart catalogue (K367, while the opera itself is K366). These extraordinary 25 minutes of music are generally omitted in staged performances, and even in purely symphonic dress they are a rarity. Mozart was able to write with the fullest technical means partly thanks to the Mannheim orchestra, among the best ensembles of the day, which gave the first performance at the Residenz in Munich, in the Cuvilliés Theatre. Though rarely performed, Idomeneo is a fundamental stage in Mozart’s theatrical development; in the late 1770s, in Paris, he had studied the operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck closely and absorbed their models.

The Brahms of the Fourth and last symphony, written over two summers between 1884 and 1885, seems to curve inwards into a private world, far now from the debates of the post-Wagnerian musical scene; it is marked by an open songfulness not divorced from Bachian counterpoint, which in the last movement becomes the supreme guide of the musical argument. Is it the swansong of a civilisation? Not yet, to judge by the arrival, soon afterwards, of a giant like Gustav Mahler, «set in motion» by the example of another titan of the nineteenth-century symphony, Anton Bruckner. But certainly the sorrowful call of the horn, almost a distant echo of the Romantic golden age, seems to write the final word on a certain way of understanding music.