Schumann Wagner Lang Janowski

Marek Janowski’s Wagner recordings have been hailed as milestones. He recorded all of Wagner's operas in advance of the Wagner bicentenary in 2013 and conducts the Ring Cycle during the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth in 2016 and 2017. Petra Lang has sung leading roles at the same festival since 2006, most recently this summer as Isolde in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) was born in Zwickau, far south and east in today's Germany, and lived in Leipzig and Dresden as an adult. In September 1850 he moved with his family to a new job as music director in Düsseldorf on the Rhine. The stay ended with disaster, but his first months in the new city was very encouraging.

Symphony no. 3, "The Rhenish” was written in autumn of 1850 and is characterized by the refreshing encounter with the river, the city and the people who lived in the area. The most tangible inspiration appears in the fourth of the five movements, which are based on the composer's visit to the Cologne Cathedral a bit farther south.

Some 20 years later, the Rhine was a central element in the first of Richard Wagner’s (1813-1883) four operas in the cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen; the prelude to Das Rheingold depicts the river. In these orchestral excerpts from Götterdämmerung, which concludes the Ring Cycle, the river is still central, especially in Siegfrieds Rheinfahrt.