Jordi Bernàcer

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«It will be hard for me to find words to express the feelings your illustrious city has stirred in me». So begin the five pages Wagner sent from Bayreuth on 3 October 1872, thanking the City of Bologna for his honorary citizenship. Those courteous words did not stay on paper. On 4 December 1876 Wagner and his wife Cosima Liszt arrived in the city, as they had promised. «In Bologna — he admitted — I found true friends, excellent people and a whole set of things that could have decided me to settle there, were it not by now too late». The idyll between Wagner and Bologna began a couple of years after the other Idyll, the Siegfried, first performed in the composer’s home, a piece with which he wanted to celebrate the birthday of his wife Cosima, who had recently given birth to their son Siegfried.

Paying affectionate homage to Rossini’s genius, in 1941 Benjamin Britten composed a brilliant orchestral suite that begins with motifs from the dances in the first act of William Tell. But the Matinées Musicales, written for a production by the American Ballet Company, are something more and better than a mere exercise in style. From the Nocturne onwards, with the dreamy figuration of the celesta, one catches Britten’s full orchestral skill; in «Solfeggi e gorgheggi» he even manages to reproduce Rossini’s famous crescendos, evoking them in all their overwhelming rhythmic force.

His marriage to his pupil Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova, a cover imposed on himself to silence the rumours about his homosexuality, forced Tchaikovsky into a reckoning. Having recognised the wreck of that union, the composer wandered from city to city, finishing the Fourth Symphony. A letter to the baroness and patron Nadezhda von Meck offers an interpretation useful in understanding it: the work opens by evoking a baleful force able to destroy the author’s hopes of happiness, an invincible force that bars the way to well-being and peace. As it goes on, the mood of sadness and despair grows sharper, then swerves into a forced gaiety, in which Fate has abruptly woken him from dreams and fleeting visions of happiness. More than a symphony, a mirror: «In these pages — Tchaikovsky writes — there is the truthful echo of what I was feeling».