Love theme for Symphony finale

Love, it’s said, makes the world go ‘round. You will get lots of denials from physicists, but not many from musicians.

Love, especially romantic love, has been in the main current of music even before music was written down. The Spokane Symphony ends its 2007-08 Classics season with a tribute to romantic love Saturday and Sunday at the Martin Woldson Theater at The Fox.

Conductor Eckart Preu titled the program “Infinite Love,” and it features well-known orchestral works on the subject by Richard Wagner, Pitor Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Robert Schumann.

For the 19th-century romantics, the fascinating part about love was not fulfillment, but longing. All three works Preu has chosen carry a load of frustration.

“Schumann’s Fourth Symphony is the happiest of the three,” he says, “but the other two definitely end in tragedy. But that’s what love was for the romantics: bad love, lost love and unattainable love. And that’s what you hear in the pieces.”

Preu opens the concert with the music that begins and ends Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde,” the troubled medieval tale of the first reluctant, then illicit, passionate love of an Irish princess and a Cornish knight.

Wagner wrote “Tristan” against the background of his own (apparently) frustrated longing for Mathilde Wesendonk, the wife of one of his patrons.

“The ‘Prelude’ and ‘Liebestod’ make a wonderful arc that tells you practically everything you need to know about Wagner and his music without your having to sit in the opera house for five hours,” says Preu.

Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” has drawn composers as different as Berlioz and Prokofiev, or Gounod and Tchaikovsky. The “Romeo and Juliet” Fantasy-Overture is Tchaikovsky’s musical working out of his own frustrated love for the famous Belgian operatic soprano Desirée Artôt, a feminine attraction that was unique in the composer’s life.

Tchaikovsky’s fellow composer and mentor, Mily Balakirev, suggested he deal with his feelings by writing and orchestrating pieces based on Shakespeare’s tragedy of the ill-starred lovers.

That, too, had it share of frustration; Balakirev repeatedly sent back Tchaikovsky’s drafts with scornful comments. The criticism paid off, though.

Like the Wagner pieces on the program do for that composer, Preu says, ” ‘Romeo and Juliet’ … summarizes Tchaikovsky the man and Tchaikovsky the music.

“Everything is in there – the beautiful melodies, the virtuoso work, the drums and cymbals – a condensed version of what he does in a 40-minute symphony.”

Preu selected Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 to end the concert.

“Nowadays we don’t have the chance to hear recitals of Schumann’s songs or to hear Schumann’s piano music nearly often enough,” he says. “So it is really with his symphonies that we get to know him.

“And again, it’s all there; Schumann the song writer is so much a part of this piece.”

Schumann was enjoying the heady bliss of having finally married his sweetheart, Clara Wieck, despite her father’s implacable opposition (suppressed only by legal intervention).

After writing his successful Symphony No. 1 (“The Spring”), he immediately wrote two more symphonies. One he discarded altogether; the second he held back for 10 years, doing serious tinkering with it before permitting its premiere as his Symphony No. 4. It was not a success.

“People have been complaining about Schumann’s problems as an orchestrator ever since he was still alive,” Preu says. “But for me, those ‘problems’ are a part of his attraction.

“It’s up to us as conductors to make those ‘awkward’ things sound right. And when we can make that happen, the music itself is just incredibly beautiful.”

Preu will discuss the music on the program an hour before curtain time each day as part of the Gladys Brooks Pre-Concert Lecture series.