Appassionatamente

World premiere 25. march 1995

Wien · Großer Musikvereinssaal
Wiener Philharmoniker
Conductor Christoph von Dohnànyi

In my music drama “The Ocean betrayed”, written in the late 1980s, which bears the Italian title “Lo sdegno del mare” there is a number of ritornellos and interludes which, like bridges and links, serve to lead from one scene to the other while sustaining the thematic and motivic relationships between them.

In the one-movement fantasy presented here, I have combined excerpts from those instrumental sections, though not in their original order and succession, but rather according to the purely musical logic of a symphonic discourse. The human passions and emotions of the plot are mixed like the glass fragments in a kaleidoscope. Their musical equivalents are brought into new relationships with one another, undergoing strong changes in illumination and meaning, like the reflections on the surface of wildly agitated, angry waters.

Hans Werner Henze