Blex

Programme

Coriolano ouverture in do minore op. 62

by Ludwig van Beethoven

The drama of Coriolanus is inspired by Caius Marcius, nicknamed Coriolanus for having taken the ancient city of the Volsci, whom he then joined after falling victim to a plot against his election as Roman consul. His wife Volumnia and his mother Veturia beg him not to betray his homeland and he, torn between honour and revenge, is murdered by the Volsci. That is the version used by William Shakespeare, while that of the dramatist Heinrich Collin, a contemporary of Beethoven, has Coriolanus take his own life, because of the irreconcilable conflict of conscience between his given word and his inability to march against Rome. It was therefore the drama of the «Austrian Schiller», as Collin was nicknamed, that inspired Beethoven to write this terse and intensely dramatic overture, able to distil into barely seven minutes the psychology of a complex, tormented character whom the music makes as alive and present as a contemporary of our own.
Sinfonia n. 7 in la maggiore, op. 92

by Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was born in a very fertile period, between 1811 and 1812, and was first performed in Vienna in 1813, at a patriotic evening in aid of the soldiers wounded in the battle of Hanau against Napoleon's troops. Despite the enormous success of another Beethoven work on the programme, Wellington's Victory, it was the Allegretto of the Seventh that won the audience over, so much so that it had to be encored at once. The work as a whole struck contemporaries with its originality, considered by some even excessive in rhythmic terms. In time, though, it was precisely those features that were reassessed, to the point that Richard Wagner called the Seventh «the apotheosis of the dance», catching its distinctive mark: a continuous rhythmic energy that runs through every movement and achieves a miraculous fusion of the listener's body and mind.