Befreite Ernährung Christian Opitz

Symphony No 4 was quickly acclaimed as the composer’s symphonic masterpiece after its first performance. It is a forward-looking, programmatic work based on a poem by Carl Pfeiffer, ‘The Consecration of Sounds’. Unusually, it features a slow finale, and in this way was an important example to future composers including Tchaikovsky and Mahler. Symphony No 5 is a deeply felt work, pouring out pent-up emotions from dramatic events in the composer’s life at the time of writing with real expressive power. The disc also features the overture to a cantata Das befreite Deutschland (‘Germany liberated’), composed following Napoleon’s disastrous defeat at the battle of Leipzig in October 1813.

Though held in high regard by many of his colleagues as being worthy of a pedestal next to Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven in the pantheon of Western music’s great composers, Ludwig (Louis) Spohr (1784–1859), along with Christoph Read more Le nozze di Figaro and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde were composed during Spohr’s lifetime. Eight years younger than Rossini and 13 years Schubert’s junior, Spohr wrote music that is Janus-like, specifically it looks to the formalism and clarity of the Classicists and at the same time sows the seeds of Romanticism via its harmonic and structural experimentation.