Weekly SpinOn: Awakening

Awakening and decline are basic experiences of human life. Myths and religions speak about the beginning of the world, nature wakes up every year when spring returns, and every day begins with the change from night to morning. Moments like these have inspired composers for a long time. Music can show the first appearance of sound, the end of chaos, or the slow arrival of a new day. The following tracks present different musical pictures of awakening.

Track 1: Das Rheingold – Prelude – Wagner
Berliner Philharmoniker · Herbert von Karajan

The opening of Das Rheingold is one of the most extraordinary awakenings of music ever conceived. Wagner starts with a single, sustained E-flat in the deepest register of the orchestra. For several minutes, nothing seems to move—yet, almost imperceptibly, additional tones slip in, and the texture begins to expand.

Out of this single held sound, the music seems to breathe itself into life. Wagner shapes the entire prelude as one vast, unbroken crescendo: the sound unfolds step by step, swelling into a broad orchestral current that suggests the quiet, inexorable flow of the Rhine before the story itself begins.

Karajan had a particular affinity for these kinds of long, organic musical developments. As Richard Osborne observed, he often built their tension through meticulously controlled crescendi, letting the music’s energy unfold gradually across great spans of time.

This recording was made in December 1967 with the Berlin Philharmonic in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche, Berlin, and first issued by Deutsche Grammophon in 1968. It forms part of Karajan’s complete studio recording of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen.

Interestingly, Karajan’s work on the Ring did not follow Wagner’s own sequence. The project for the Salzburg Easter Festival began in 1967 not with Das Rheingold but with Die Walküre. When the production later travelled to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a piano reduction with annotations and stage directions was prepared to document the staging — a copy of which is now preserved at the Karajan Institute.

Having heard Wagner’s awakening of sound itself, the next track turns to another kind of creation: Joseph Haydn’s depiction of the moment when musical order rises out of chaos.

 

Track 2: The Creation – Introduction: The Representation of Chaos – Haydn
Berlin Philharmonic · Herbert von Karajan

Joseph Haydn begins The Creation with something unusual for the late eighteenth century: music that deliberately avoids clear tonal order. In the introduction titled The Representation of Chaos, harmonies shift unexpectedly and phrases resist the symmetrical balance typical of classical style.

Instead of settling into a stable key, the music moves through changing harmonies and pauses that interrupt the musical flow. The orchestra seems to search for direction, as if musical order has not yet fully emerged.

This introduction prepares the moment of creation that follows in the oratorio. Only later does the music find the clarity and balance usually associated with Haydn’s style.

Wagner awakened music from a single sound, and Haydn begins with chaos before order appears. Now we arrive on earth and experience the awakening of a new day in Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony.

 

Track 3: An Alpine Symphony – Sunrise – Richard Strauss
Berliner Philharmoniker · Herbert von Karajan

Richard Strauss begins An Alpine Symphony in darkness. The opening section is titled Night. Low strings and quiet brass create a deep, shadowed sound. Gradually the orchestra begins to move. The music rises step by step until the moment marked Sunrise.

With the sunrise, the full orchestra enters. Brass and strings unfold a broad ascending gesture, and the sound expands from darkness into bright daylight. Strauss uses a very large orchestra to depict this transformation, moving from the quiet depth of the night to the brilliance of the morning within only a few moments.

Herbert von Karajan recorded An Alpine Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon in 1980 in the Berlin Philharmonie. This studio production is the central recording of the work in Karajan’s discography. Other performances were preserved in radio or television productions, but the Deutsche Grammophon version represents his studio interpretation of the score.

Moments like the sunrise depend on a carefully shaped build-up. Karajan often described changes of tempo, dynamics or musical energy as decisive structural points in a work. If a crescendo grows naturally, the climax appears as the necessary result of the musical tension rather than something imposed from outside.

In Strauss’s Sunrise, we experience the awakening of a new day on a vast orchestral scale. The final track now leads into the morning itself. In Edvard Grieg’s Morning Mood from Peer Gynt, we encounter the quiet atmosphere of the early day as it begins to unfold.

 

Track 4: Peer Gynt – Morning Mood – Edvard Grieg
Berliner Philharmoniker · Herbert von Karajan

Edvard Grieg composed Morning Mood as part of the incidental music to Henrik Ibsen’s drama Peer Gynt. In the play, the scene takes place in the desert, where the rising sun marks the beginning of a new day.

The music unfolds slowly and calmly. A gentle flute melody begins the piece, soon joined by the oboe and strings. The orchestra grows gradually, but the atmosphere remains light and transparent. Rather than depicting a dramatic sunrise, Grieg focuses on the quiet unfolding of the morning.

Morning Mood has become one of the most widely recognized melodies in classical music. The piece has been used countless times in films, television, advertising and video games, often whenever a new day begins. For many listeners, it has become the musical image of morning itself.

—  Pia Bernauer (Karajan Institute, Salzburg)