6th Symphony Concert

The lively, sparkling comic music of Richard Strauss’s orchestral suite Le bourgeois gentilhomme (Der Bürger als Edelmann) and Ludwig van Beethoven’s groundbreaking, heroic Symphony No. 3 stand in striking musical contrast to one another. With his radical Sinfonia Eroica, Beethoven shattered the boundaries of what had previously been conceivable. Composed in 1803–04, it marks that famous “new path” that ushered the symphonic genre into a new era. Not only its monumental scale, but also its confessional character and burning idealism suddenly allowed the music to engage with the great questions and challenges of the time. Beethoven drew his inspiration from none other than Prometheus—the mythological bringer of fire and enlightener of humanity.

Richard Strauss, too, broke new ground, so to speak, when he collaborated with Hugo von Hofmannsthal to adapt Molière’s ballet comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, written some 240 years earlier, using the music of Jean-Baptiste Lully, and reshaped it into something entirely new. Echoes of Lully’s French Baroque style blend with late Romantic melody and harmony, foreshadowing Igor Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism. With springy rhythms, slender melodies, and colorful instrumentation, Strauss creates a charming, tongue-in-cheek portrait of the nouveau riche Monsieur Jourdain, who tries by any means necessary to rise into aristocratic circles—yet is undone by his own vanity and pomposity.