“O stay, beloved day,” sings Daphne in her first appearance, “Do not yet bid farewell! / Do not yet surround / My face with the red of melancholy.” In the end, she undergoes a transformation, must say goodbye – and yet can remain by taking on another form, becoming a laurel tree.
Finiteness is an indispensable part of existence, the knowledge that farewell will come at some point. Farewell also resonates when Franz Welser-Möst makes his final guest appearance as chief conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra in the Great Hall of the Musikverein in October, before stepping down from this position in 2027 after a quarter of a century. The world has certainly changed since 2002 and does not seem to have become any safer: ‘I believe,’ Franz Welser-Möst said recently in an interview, ‘that in a time that is considered so fearful and difficult, art has the task of spreading something else: hope, for example.’
Hope, then. Hope such as that which pulsates through Bohuslav Martinů’s Symphony No. 2 with its dance-like verve and melodic charm, even in difficult times: The work was commissioned by Cleveland’s Czech émigré community and premiered in 1943 by the Cleveland Orchestra under Erich Leinsdorf – a delightful gift, accompanied by Johannes Brahms‘ Second Symphony, which also ends in radiant D major, and Franz Liszt’s ‘Orpheus’, which evokes the transcendental power of music.
The fact that all this cannot happen without knowledge of suffering and pain, and that beauty only has value if we recognise it as transitory, is the theme of the second Cleveland evening: with a suite compiled by Franz Welser-Möst from Richard Strauss’s late work ‘Daphne’, composed entirely in this spirit, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s sombre Symphony No. 8, written at the same time as Martinů’s cheerful Second.
