This edition is the second SACD release of the 3D Binaural Series by hd-klassik with live productions of the Sinfonieorchesters Wuppertal in 3D Binaural Stereo, recorded in one of the most beautiful concert halls in Europe, the Historische Stadthalle in Wuppertal (Germany), under the direction of GMD Julia Jones.
Love, art and society – many values and patterns emerged in the 19th century that continue to influence our desires for a passionate, fulfilling love. The lives and works of the composers Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) and Richard Wagner (1813–1883) back up this assertion. Tannhäuser is about the struggle of two principles that chose the human heart as their battleground: conflict between body and spirit, hell and heaven, Satan and God. (Charles Baudelaire: Richard Wagner and "Tannhäuser" in Paris, 1861)
As man and artist alike, Richard Wagner was a passionate, valiant and controversial contemporary. In Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg (1842), right at the outset of his career, he composed a romantic opera about precisely this fraught zone between artist and society, and about the conflict of instinctive emotions.
The real title of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique op. 14 is Episode de la vie d’un artiste (Episode in the Life of an Artist) and was envisioned as the first part of the monodrame lyrique Lélio ou le retour à la vie op.14b. The classification as Symphonie fantastique was to be understood as a subtitle only, meant to indicate that something completely new, and indeed fantastic, would transpire here with the form of the symphony – a truly groundbreaking, unique work in music history, through which Berlioz became the model for Richard Wagner, Liszt, Dvořák, Mahler or Schumann.
