“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who look beneath the symbol do so also at their own peril,” stated the writer Oscar Wilde in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890. A few years earlier, Franz Liszt composed one of his most experimental works: Grey Clouds, with which he seemed to anticipate Schoenberg’s atonal explorations.

In his celebrated Treatise on Harmony, published in 1911, Arnold Schoenberg asserted that dissonance “is as natural as consonance” and that, as a living language, music should “evolve.” This program features two works from his early period: the quintet A Rendezvous (Ein Stelldichein), replete with post-Romantic echoes, and the First Chamber Symphony.

In 1899, Schoenberg drew inspiration from a poem by Richard Dehmel for Transfigured Night. Six years later, he returned to the same author for Ein Stelldichein, which evokes another nocturnal love scene. This quintet, still tonal and late Romantic, is stylistically close to the First Chamber Symphony.

In 1907, the Viennese public was scandalized by the premiere of Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony. People talked and laughed, whistled and stamped their feet in protest. What they were hearing was one of the key works in the composer's catalog, with which Schoenberg reacted against the orchestral "gigantism" and musical conventions of the post-Romantic music of the time.

Divided into five sections that are presented as a unified whole, the work is one of the first great modernist compositions, “a true turning point,” as Schoenberg himself described it, and marks the beginning of his journey toward the emancipation of tonality. This concert will feature the chamber arrangement later made by Anton Webern.

Having emigrated to New York, Hans Eisler was commissioned in 1940 to explore new possibilities for the use of music in film. The result is his quintet Vierzehn Arten den Regen zu beschreiben (14 Ways to Describe Rain), inspired by Joris Ivens' short film Rain (1929). The work is also Eisler's homage to his teacher Schoenberg; both the instrumentation (inspired by Pierrot Lunaire ) and the material are dedicated to him, as the quintet is based on 14 variations of a 12-tone scale containing an "anagram" of Schoenberg.

The program is completed with the premiere of Anhelo , the winning work of the VI Young Composers Competition “Juan José Olives”, in which its author puts “the invariable into dialogue with the dynamic”, as well as with an extract from the writings of Oscar Wilde, a key figure to understand the avant-gardes of the 20th century.