Weekly SpinOn:
Floral Fantasies

Gardens, with their bright colors, soft shade, and still ponds, have long inspired composers. They appear in music either as social spaces, where children play and adults gather, or as idealized visions, more dream than description. It’s not incidental that many cultures imagine paradise as a garden. Eden is described not as a city or temple, but as a garden — a space marked by boundaries, cultivation, and coexistence between nature and human presence.

This playlist brings together four compositions that reference gardens and floral imagery in different ways: Mussorgsky’s Tuileries portrays a 19th-century Parisian park; Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune suggests a natural landscape as a backdrop for myth; Tchaikovsky’s Valse des fleurs forms part of the ballet The Nutcracker and depicts flowers in stylized motion; and Strauss’s Im Abendrot places two figures in a quiet outdoor setting at the end of life. The selections span from the late 19th to mid-20th century and reflect changing approaches to orchestral color and form.

Track 1: The Tuileries (Gardens) – Modest Mussorgsky / Maurice Ravel

The first track brings us directly into one of the most iconic gardens in Europe: the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris. Mussorgsky’s The Tuileries (Gardens) is part of his masterpiece Pictures at an Exhibition, a ten-movement suite first written for solo piano in 1874. The work was composed in memory of Mussorgsky’s friend, the painter and architect Viktor Hartmann, whose death the previous year had deeply affected him. Each movement was inspired by one of Hartmann’s artworks, and The Tuileries reflects a drawing of children playing and bickering in the famous Parisian garden that gives the piece its name.

Originally a modest piano miniature, The Tuileries was transformed into an orchestral work when Maurice Ravel created his now-famous orchestration of the entire suite in 1922. Ravel’s version gave each scene a unique instrumental voice, and in The Tuileries, he captured the lightness and motion of the children through agile woodwinds, delicate phrasing, and a subtle sense of playfulness. It’s not a romantic depiction of a quiet garden — it’s busy, brief, and full of motion, like a slice of urban life on a summer afternoon.

 

The Tuileries Garden itself is central to the piece’s character. Located between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, it was once part of the royal palace complex but became a public park after the French Revolution. By the 19th century, it was a space where Parisian families and children came to stroll, play, and escape the density of the city — a place structured by design, but animated by everyday life. It’s this atmosphere that Mussorgsky — through Hartmann — seeks to capture.

In Karajan’s 1966 recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, the scene is rendered with elegance and clarity. Rather than exaggerating the playful energy, Karajan keeps a refined balance between color and detail. The children’s voices are present in the fluttering woodwinds, but the performance is restrained, almost observational — like watching the garden from a shaded bench rather than being in the middle of it.

As the opening track of this playlist, The Tuileries places us directly in a real, historical garden: full of people, movement, and summer air. It isn’t yet an escape from the city — it’s the garden within the city. The music doesn’t idealize nature, but rather shows the garden as it often is: alive with noise, joy, and passing moments. From here, the playlist begins to move away from public space into more inward, fragrant territory.

 

Track 2: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune – Claude Debussy

The second track of this playlist by Claude Debussy shifts the mood entirely.

“His music is like a dream that unfolds and transports listeners to another world.” ¹ Herbert von Karajan, 1973

Where Mussorgsky’s Tuileries brought us into a bustling garden full of people and noise, Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune leads us away — into a dream of a fragrant garden in stillness and calm. Composed in 1894, this piece is often considered the beginning of modern orchestral music. It doesn’t follow a clear narrative or traditional structure; instead, it unfolds like a drifting thought — or like the light filtering through branches on a warm afternoon.

Debussy based the piece loosely on a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé about a faun — a half-man, half-goat figure from classical mythology — who drowsily recalls, or perhaps dreams, his encounters with forest nymphs. But the music isn’t programmatic. There’s no story being told. Instead, Debussy creates an atmosphere, a kind of suspended reality where time slows and everything seems to move in soft focus.

The instrumentation plays a big part in that. The famous opening flute solo sets the tone — airy, ambiguous, and fluid. Harmonies shift without resolution. Rhythms breathe more than pulse. Debussy avoids clear-cut contrasts or climaxes; the piece is held together by tone and color, not by form.

“The colors and sounds in Debussy’s music are unique and unmistakable. […] He expanded the boundaries of classical music and opened up new paths.”¹ Herbert von Karajan, 1973

Karajan had great adminiration for the Debussy’s revolutionary soundscapes and spoke very fondly of his music in an interview in 1973. He played the french repertoire including the music of Debussy and Ravel quite often in concerts and made several recordings of it. The particular recording chosen for the playlist of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune comes from a recording made as part of his French orchestral program, filmed between November 1985 and February 1986 and released by Deutsche Grammophon as audio only. The project included Debussy’s La Mer and Trois esquisses symphoniques, as well as Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2 — works that share a refined sense of orchestral color and atmosphere. The performance of Prélude in particular reflects Karajan’s late style: polished, flowing, and immaculately balanced.

In the context of this playlist, it serves as a turning point. After the vivid, city-bound energy of The Tuileries, this track invites us to pause. The garden is no longer social; it’s becoming personal. The noise has faded, the air is warmer, and the surroundings feel less like a designed space and more like a private vision. Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune isn’t about flowers or fountains in any literal sense — but it opens a door to an imagined garden, one made of color, scent, and sensation. In that sense, it lies at the heart of Floral Fantasies: a moment where the world becomes less concrete and more internal, shaped by memory, feeling, and the drifting logic of dreams.

Track 3: Valse des fleurs – Pjotr Iljitsch Tschaikowsky

With Valse des fleurs, Tchaikovsky offers one of the most direct musical tributes to the idea of blooming, decorative beauty. Composed in 1892 as part of his ballet The Nutcracker, the piece appears near the end of the work’s second act, which takes place in the fantastical Land of Sweets. Here, the flowers are no longer background decoration — they become the protagonists. The waltz turns them into graceful dancers, moving in carefully layered patterns, rich with elegance, light, and symmetry.

While The Nutcracker is a ballet meant for the stage, Valse des fleurs has long stood on its own in the concert hall. It’s both a showpiece and an atmosphere — structured with clarity but lush in its orchestration. The sweeping main theme, introduced by the harp and then taken up by the strings, is instantly recognizable. Tchaikovsky’s talent for melody is on full display here, but so is his ability to manage pacing, orchestral layering, and harmonic color.

The Nutcracker is a representative example of Karajan’s recording philosophy: returning to the same repertoire across different decades, orchestras, and technologies. He recorded Valse des fleurs as part of the ballet four times in the studio. The first was in the 1950s with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London; the second followed in the early 1960s with the Vienna Philharmonic. Remarkably, a third version came as early as 1966 with the Berlin Philharmonic — well before his third versions of other repertoire, which typically appeared in the 1970s. His final Nutcracker recording came in the 1980s, as part of his early ventures into digital production. This pattern — revisiting core works at different points in his career — reflects Karajan’s evolving approach to sound, interpretation, and technology.

Karajan in the studio in 1962, ©Siegfried Lauterwasser, Karajan-Archive

In Floral Fantasies, this track plays a central role. It’s the one moment in the program where the flowers are not symbolic or imagined, but directly named. The fantasy here is stylized, choreographed, and beautifully artificial — a cultivated garden in full bloom, seen from above.

Track 4: Im Abendrot – Richard Strauss

Im Abendrot (“At Sunset”) is the final song in Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs), composed in 1948, just a year before his death. Written for soprano and orchestra, the song sets a text by Joseph von Eichendorff — a quiet reflection on life, aging, and the peaceful end of a journey. Of all the works in this playlist, Im Abendrot moves most directly toward stillness and resolution. It is the last of the Vier letzte Lieder (“Four Last Songs”), composed by Richard Strauss in 1948, when he was 84 years old. Though he didn’t originally conceive them as a formal cycle, the four songs are now almost always performed together, and Im Abendrot was the first he composed. It sets a poem by Joseph von Eichendorff, one of the great figures of German Romanticism, and it’s widely understood as Strauss’s own farewell to life, written in the final year of his long career — after a lifetime spent mastering late-Romantic orchestral and vocal writing.

The song begins with calm, spacious orchestration: long, slow-moving harmonies in the strings, distant horn calls, and gently breathing melodic lines. The soprano enters not as a soloist in the spotlight, but as part of the overall texture — singing lines that float more than push forward. The poem asks simple questions: “How weary we are of wandering—is this perhaps death?” But it does so without fear or darkness. The music, too, avoids tragedy. Instead, it offers acceptance, warmth, and a kind of dignified release.

©Siegfried Lauterwasser, Karajan-Archive

Karajan recorded Im Abendrot with the Berlin Philharmonic and soprano Gundula Janowitz in 1973, in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche in Berlin-Dahlem — a venue known for its clear, warm acoustics and frequently used by Karajan throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Many of his most refined Berlin recordings were made there before sessions moved to the Philharmonie. The setting contributes to the character of this performance: luminous, carefully balanced, and emotionally restrained. Janowitz’s voice — pure, centered, and almost weightless — floats above the orchestra with extraordinary control. Karajan supports her with a deliberately unhurried pace and transparent textures, avoiding dramatization in favor of calm clarity. It remains one of the most admired interpretations of the work.

As the final track in Floral Fantasies, Im Abendrot returns us to the garden — not one filled with sunlight and color, but a quiet landscape at the end of the day. Two lovers rest side by side, looking out into the fading light after a lifetime of shared wandering. The orchestra breathes slowly; the soprano’s line hovers gently over a hushed harmonic field. Then, in the final lines of Eichendorff’s poem, the question appears:

„Wie sind wir durch Not und Freude gegangen, Hand in Hand: Ist dies etwa der Tod?“ — “How we have wandered through sorrow and joy, hand in hand. Is this, perhaps, death?”

It is not a dramatic ending, but a quiet suspension. Strauss doesn’t answer the question; he simply lets the music dissolve into stillness. In that sense, Im Abendrot closes the playlist like an evening spent in the garden under a rising moon — quiet, companionable, and unresolved.

—  Pia Bernauer (Karajan Institute, Salzburg)