Wagner – Lohengrin

When Lohengrin was premiered in Weimar in August 1850, it was Franz Liszt who took up the baton to conduct.

The opera’s 37-year-old composer was hundreds of miles away in Switzerland where he had fled after facing arrest for his part in the 1849 Dresden uprising and where he would live after being banned from his native Germany for more than a decade.

It was in exile in Switzerland that Wagner would start to work on his Ring Cycle.

Lohengrin, the son of Parzival, is a character in epic German Arthurian legend - a knight of the Holy Grail sent in a boat pulled by swans to rescue a maiden who is never allowed to know his identity.

The most famous musical theme from the three-act opera is the “Bridal Chorus”.

Did you know? Aged 15, Wagner wrote a sprawling five-act play called Leubald which referenced Hamlet, Lear and Goethe. It was this which inspired the teenager to start composing.

Listen to the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin.

Shostakovich Cello Concerto No1

Dmitri Shostakovich was the first of Russia’s composers to come to attention after the 1917 Revolution – and unlike Prokofiev, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky who made new lives abroad, he remained a resident of the USSR.

It might be an understatement to say he didn’t always have an easy relationship with Mother Russia however, where it was deemed that art should serve the revolution and his music came under attack with the rise of Stalin when Shostakovich was denounced not once but twice for the crime of ‘Formalism’.

In later years, the Soviet state grudgingly softened its position – and Shostakovich finally joined the Communist Party in 1960, but reportedly under duress.

His Cello Concerto No 1 was composed in 1959 – the same year Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra performed Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony in Moscow.

Listen to Anastasia Kobekina play the Cello Concerto No.1

Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique

In September 1827, a 24-year-old Louis-Hector Berlioz found himself in the audience of a performance of Hamlet by a company led by the great Charles Kemble (whose elder brother John Philip was incidentally born in Prescot) and visiting from England.

The evening started both a life-long love of Shakespeare for Berlioz and a grand, overwhelming passion for the woman playing the Bard’s doomed Ophelia – Anglo-Irish actress Harriet Smithson.

It was a grand – at that point unrequited – passion which in 1830 was channelled into the Early Romantic composer’s Symphonie Fantastique, charting the progress of a torrid love affair through five turbulent movements.

The couple would eventually marry, but it wasn’t a happy union and within a decade they had separated.

Listen to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra perform Symphonie Fantastique in France.

Did you know? While Berlioz was a composer and conductor, he principally earned his living as a music critic and was a particular champion of Beethoven.