Liberation: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Spring Festival

at Orpheum Theatre

05 April —

Friday 8:00 pm

Orpheum Theatre

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Artists

Otto Tausk
VSO Music Director
Robyn Driedger-Klassen
Soprano
Eve-Lyn de la Haye
Soprano
Tracy Cantin
Soprano
UBC Opera Ensemble
Choir

Approx. 90 Minute Performance

1 Intermission

Program

Mendelssohn
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Overture, Scherzo, Lied with Choir*, Allegro appassionato, Con Moto tranquillo, Wedding March, Ein Tanz von Rupeln, Finale)
Wagner
Götterdämmerung (Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey, Siegfried’s Death and Funeral Music, Brunnhilde’s Immolation+)

Richard Wagner’s music was appropriated by Nazi Germany, used for inspiration and a road map to a "vision of the future" of Germany – particularly his extraordinary Ring Cycle. Götterdämmerung, recounting the final fate of Earth and the Norse Gods, closely paralleled what the Nazi command envisioned of their Reich.

During the time of the Nazi party’s ascendancy, the music of Mendelssohn was banned, but in a concert that declared liberation from the Reich, his was the first music performed by the Berlin Philharmonic after the end of the war and the defeat of Nazi ideology.

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