elegia.brahms.

ELEGY. BRAHMS. presents two strands of the work of the German Romantic composer Johannes Brahms — his symphonic output as well as songs for orchestra and choir.

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The first part of the evening is a concert performance of Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 (1876). The musicians of Capella Cracoviensis will be conducted by Jan Tomasz Adamus.

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The second part of the evening is the premiere of the performance “Five Images from the Life and Death of Rosalind Franklin” by Krystian Lada.

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How much are we willing to sacrifice in order to fulfil our ambitions? Drawing on the poetry of Goethe, Schiller, and Hölderlin — which served as the starting point for Brahms’s songs — the creators of the performance pose a question about the nature of fulfilment. Faustian ambition, which, in defiance of human imperfection, fuels the desire to approach the ideal, is presented through the figure of Rosalind Franklin. The British scientist produced the first-ever image of DNA, significantly contributing to a discovery that revolutionized science. Scientific work was her entire life — Franklin neither started a family nor formed close personal relationships. In letters she regularly wrote to her father, she declared complete devotion to the ideal of science and clearly defined her stance on questions of faith and the afterlife. As a result of her research using X-ray radiation, she died of ovarian cancer at the age of 37. After her death, her findings made it possible to determine the structure of DNA. For this discovery, three of her colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. When publishing the discovery based on Franklin’s research, the so-called fathers of DNA omitted her name. For decades, Franklin’s contribution to uncovering the secret of life — the structure of DNA — was diminished.

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The performance draws on the form of the rhapsody as a whole composed of several contrasting segments and references. This is the form Brahms employed in the choral-orchestral works that serve as the point of departure for the performance: Alto Rhapsody, Schicksalslied, Gesang der Parzen, and Nänie. The rhapsody also becomes the main dramaturgical principle of the piece, which consists of five images from the life and death of Rosalind Franklin.