Tristan Generation

After “Wanderer Without Words” (Alpha 984), with which she proved her talent as an arranger and pianist, Juliette Journaux now ventures into “a declaration of love to German post-Romanticism,” which emerged at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century and unites “the sublime and the trivial, beauty and ugliness, ecstasy and torment, the divine and the fleshly.” Composers gradually detached themselves from classical structures, the boundaries of tonality were pushed, and the system of organizing sounds around a stable central point of attraction was turned upside down: “Post-Romanticism muddies the clear water,” continues the French pianist. These tensions are embodied in a particularly impressive way in a work whose shockwaves shook the entire late 19th century: Tristan und Isolde, premiered on June 10, 1865. The “Wagner case” would captivate the musical world for decades, and young Viennese composers followed in the master’s footsteps: Wolf, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Schreker, Braunfels, and Korngold are on the program of this recital, which includes numerous transcriptions by the pianist and provides a fascinating insight into this historical turning point.