Forbidden Love

From Debussy’s and Wagner’s doomed lovers to Richard Strauss’ colourful Fantasy, this program explores the passion and catastrophe of forbidden love, conducted by Fabien Gabel.

Adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist play of the same name, Debussy’s 1898 suite of music from his the opera Pelléas and Mélisande tells the tale of doomed lovers through swirling, impressionistic musical language.

Despite being forbidden by her father to marry Robert Schumann, Clara did just that, the day before her 21st birthday. A renowned concert pianist and talented composer, Clara had premiered her own Piano Concerto, filled with ravishing, memorable themes, at the age of just sixteen. While she continued to perform across Europe to great acclaim after marrying Robert, her own compositional works were largely overlooked by the male-dominated world of classical music. In recent years, her brilliance as a composer has been recognised, due to this compelling concerto.

If a single work had to be named to have shaped the course of history, it may well be Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. Tristan demonstrated the profound capacity of music to create drama and reveal the inner emotions of characters on a level that was, at that time, unimaginable. The opera’s bookends – Prelude and Liebestod (Love-Death) – ache with the passion and catastrophe of these lovers’ fates.