Lucerne Festival Orchestra | Riccardo Chailly by Various, Ġim 08 Apr 2022, Minn (2022/2022), Surmast Direttur Riccardo Chailly, KKL Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland

Felix Mendelssohn and Richard Wagner: this hot-potato combination is weighed down by Wagner’s devastating anti-Semitic pamphlet titled Das Judentum in der Musik (“Judaism in Music”), in which he accused his colleague, who was four years his senior, of never having achieved a “deep effect capable of gripping the heart and soul” with his works. When this pamphlet came out in September 1850, Mendelssohn had already been dead for three years, so he could not defend himself. Nor could he point out the fact that Wagner had previously entreated patronage from him in submissive letters. This concert will demonstrate how much Wagner actually admired Mendelssohn. In his operas, he repeatedly took up Mendelssohn’s ideas. Even in his late Parsifal, the Grail theme quotes the “Dresden Amen,” which Mendelssohn had used 50 years before in his Reformation Symphony. With the Scottish Symphony, meanwhile, not only did the first movement’s stormy sounds inspire Wagner in The Flying Dutchman: the work is also close to the sound world of Die Walküre. Music knows better than words. And it speaks a language other than calumny.