Oct 18
The Cleveland Orchestra, under the leadership of Franz Welser-Möst since 2002, is one of the most sought-after performing ensembles in the world. Year after year, the ensemble exemplifies extraordinary artistic excellence, creative programming, and community engagement. In recent years, The New York Times has called Cleveland “the best in America” for its virtuosity, elegance of sound, variety of color, and chamber-like musical cohesion.
Founded by Adella Prentiss Hughes, the Orchestra performed its inaugural concert in December 1918. By the middle of the century, decades of growth and sustained support had turned the ensemble into one of the most admired around the world.
The past decade has seen an increasing number of young people attending concerts, bringing fresh attention to The Cleveland Orchestra’s legendary sound and committed programming. More recently, the Orchestra launched several bold digital projects, including the streaming platform Adella.live and its own recording label. Together, they have captured the Orchestra’s unique artistry and the musical achievements of the Welser-Möst and Cleveland Orchestra partnership.
The 2025–26 season marks Franz Welser-Möst’s 24th year as Music Director, a period in which The Cleveland Orchestra has earned unprecedented acclaim around the world, including a series of residencies at the Musikverein in Vienna, the first of its kind by an American orchestra, and a number of celebrated opera presentations.
Since 1918, seven music directors — Nikolai Sokoloff, Artur Rodziński, Erich Leinsdorf, George Szell, Lorin Maazel, Christoph von Dohnányi, and Franz Welser-Möst — have guided and shaped the ensemble’s growth and sound. Through concerts at home and on tour, broadcasts, and a catalog of acclaimed recordings, The Cleveland Orchestra is heard today by a growing group of fans around the world.
Music Director
Franz Welser-Möst has forged one of the most transformative artistic legacies in the history of The Cleveland Orchestra, as its seventh and longest-serving Music Director. Now in his 25th and final season, he has shaped its sound with extraordinary care and imagination, cultivating greater warmth and flexibility, while preserving precision and transparency. Since beginning his tenure in 2002–03, his leadership has characterized a quarter century of artistic excellence, community outreach, and global prominence.
Welser-Möst first appeared with The Cleveland Orchestra as a guest conductor in February 1993 and has returned every season beginning in 1995. By the end of the 2026–27 season, he will have led the Orchestra in more than 1,200 performances in 93 cities spanning 15 US states and 26 countries, including 701 concerts at Severance Music Center. He has appointed 56 of the Orchestra’s 100 current musicians, profoundly shaping its sound for a new generation. Welser-Möst’s tenure ushered in major milestones, from innovative opera stagings to the launch of its streaming platform, Adella.live, and its recording label.
Widely admired for his interpretations of Central European and Russian repertoire, Welser-Möst has also championed living composers, specifically through the Orchestra’s Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellowship. His artistic partnerships have resulted in dozens of commissions and co-commissions, and at the close of the 2026–27 season, he will have led The Cleveland Orchestra in 27 world premieres and 21 US premieres.
Welser-Möst has made opera an annual tradition at Severance Music Center, culminating in the creation of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival in 2023. Acclaimed productions of Dvořák’s Rusalka, Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, and Mozart’s The Magic Flute demonstrated his commitment to large-scale storytelling. In May 2027, Welser-Möst leads a fully staged production of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, a fitting capstone to his enduring artistic vision and remarkable legacy with The Cleveland Orchestra.
A defining aspect of Welser-Möst’s Cleveland career has been his work with The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. He has consistently advocated for the all-volunteer ensemble as an essential artistic partner in performances ranging from symphonic masterworks to staged opera productions. In 2010, Welser-Möst appointed Lisa Wong to work with the Chorus and, in 2018, he named her Director of Choruses. Together, they have elevated the Chorus with performances at home and on the road.
Beyond Cleveland, Welser-Möst maintains a distinguished international career, marked by a longstanding artistic partnership with the Vienna Philharmonic. He regularly leads the ensemble at the Musikverein and on major international tours, and has already conducted the celebrated annual New Year’s concert three times. In 2024, he was named an Honorary Member of the Vienna Philharmonic, one of its highest honors. He is also celebrated for his interpretations of opera, conducting productions which have been widely acclaimed at the Salzburg Festival and the Vienna State Opera.
composer
Franz Liszt was a man of exceptional energy. He was active throughout his life as pianist, composer, conductor, and teacher, with constant commitments in France, Germany, Italy, and Hungary. He was also a lifelong reviser of his own music. As such, it is not clear to us over a century past his death which piece he was working on at any given moment. Liszt sketched, drafted, completed, revised, and revised again before many of his works were ever published or performed — and even then, they were often subject to further tinkering. His output of original compositions and transcriptions (of his own and others’ works) was so vast, it is likely that his mind, if not his desk, was always a traffic-jam of pieces in various stages of completion.
The symphonic poem Orpheus is exceptional, then, because it enjoyed a relatively simple birth and was never revised. While Liszt was known for his virtuosity on the piano and for the great brilliance of his compositions, this work presents a total contrast in tone and sensibility. In this work is the contemplative Liszt, absorbed not by his lifelong religious devotions, but by the legacy of Greek culture.
In the printed score, this beautiful work is prefaced by a short essay in which Liszt explains how, as conductor of Weimar’s opera house in the 1850s, he was preparing a performance of Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice. The “sublime simplicity” of Gluck’s music led him to think of Orpheus as a symbol for the essence of art. Calling to mind an Etruscan vase he had seen at the Louvre in Paris, Liszt pictured “the first poet-musician, draped in a star-studded robe, his brow crowned with a mystically royal bandeau, his lips open to utter divine words and music, and his long, slender fingers energetically plucking the strings of his lyre.” Around the figure of Orpheus on the vase lie the wild beasts he has tamed with the beauty of his singing; all nature is subdued by the power of art. The essay insists that the modern world has much to learn from this artistic vision. In his symphonic poem, Liszt made his point by composing music not in an imagined style from ancient Greece, but in a modern, 19th-century orchestral language.
Liszt’s orchestral music has sometimes been dismissed as being derived from Berlioz or ghosted by his disciple Joachim Raff, but in works such as Orpheus, his mastery of orchestration is both personal and obvious; it is a short step from here to the new soundworld of Wagner’s music dramas.
For this work, the two harps play a crucial role in representing Orpheus’s lyre. The opening sections are scored with the character of chamber music, giving expressive solo entries to the woodwinds. Solo violin and cello also contribute, and the mood remains serene and abstracted until a certain quickening of the pace generates a modest climax for the full orchestra. Calm returns, and the final page has a visionary quality with string and wind chords alternating in celestial harmony.
The work was first performed in February 1854 as the overture to a performance of Gluck’s opera. While Orfeo has its own overture, it is, by common consent, a somewhat bland piece that has little in common with the marvelous music of the opera itself. Liszt would have had no hesitation in substituting his own much more appropriate piece; such shifting and substitution was quite normal in the 19th century.
Later that same year, Liszt’s Orpheus was performed in Weimar as a concert work, and in due course it took its place as “No. 4” in the series of 12 published symphonic poems — composed by Liszt throughout the 1850s as part of his enduring legacy after he had given up concertizing as one of the century’s greatest virtuoso pianists.
— Hugh Macdonald
Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.
Composer
Marriage, parenthood, and the intimacies of family life, for most of us, are of consuming importance, permanent and inescapable. They are usually also private, personal matters, and the source of happiness, misery, or both. Painters and novelists have explored domestic subjects for centuries, and the self-portrait is an honored form of art. Why, then, was Richard Strauss ridiculed for portraying himself and his family in his music? How can the subject of domestic life be deemed unworthy of a composer’s creative efforts, condemned as in bad taste, when other artists and art forms have plunged its intimate and emotional depths to the fullest?
If a symphony can be pastoral, or fantastique, or Italian, or Rhenish, or pathétique, why not domestic? This was what the composer was thinking when he attempted to portray — and celebrate — the everyday private world he shared with his wife, Pauline, and son, Franz.
The Symphonia domestica belongs to the series of tone poems Strauss had been composing since the stunningly successful Don Juan of 1889, each more ambitious than the last. The new one was to be called a symphonic poem, not a tone poem (and it has recognizable scherzo and adagio sections, not unlike symphonic movements). Yet it is much more of a narrative with three principal characters. Two of them, his wife and himself, featured prominently in the previous tone poem, Ein Heldenleben. They are now joined by the baby, known as “Bubi,” whose squeals and tantrums — as well as his heavenly repose — are represented in the music.
The listener may prefer to know no more than that and let each section suggest what it will. Strauss originally explained events in considerable detail, then later removed most of the tags and cues, sensing the embarrassment that over-descriptive music can cause.
The musical themes for Strauss and his wife are a reflection of each other in diametrically opposing keys, F and B. They reappear constantly — his not always gently, hers not always angrily, although Strauss lays his cards on the table early on. His own themes at the opening are in turn comfortable (cellos), dreamy (oboe), morose (clarinets), fiery (violins), joyful (trumpet), and fresh (rushing scales).
Her themes follow immediately, but without labels. Pauline did not always make her husband’s life easy and even sometimes sneered at his music. One of their rows became the basis of his 1924 opera Intermezzo. Nevertheless, he remained devoted to her and recognized that he needed her, as the closing pages of the Symphonia domestica celebrate. Their marriage lasted more than half a century, until his death in 1949; she died 10 months later.
A folklike passage suggests bourgeois comforts (interrupted by passionate exchanges) before a sudden hash introduces the baby. He is represented by an important theme played by the oboe d’amore, an instrument familiar to J.S. Bach but not widely used in Strauss’s time. The baby is, of course, sweet when quiet but also capable of screaming. During his playtime, his theme is transformed into a gentle scherzo somewhat in Mahler’s manner.
As the baby gets drowsy, father looks on with pride. A gently rocking lullaby appears, and as the two parents each say “good night” to their own themes, a clock chimes 7 in the evening. All is calm and father settles down to his desk (the adagio, or third movement). The rich sound of horns introduces his thoughts taking shape and, although he is interrupted by his wife, the music flows freely and leads directly into a love scene. Strauss is at his descriptive best here, and why not? He did not need to apologize for any lack of delicacy since no words are needed.
The couple are soon asleep, although they are troubled by worried thoughts about the child in a surreal passage scored mostly for high instruments. They are woken by the clock again striking 7 in the morning.
The new day provides material for the extensive final scene (or movement). The baby’s theme, sped up, is the subject of a vigorous fugue, with the wife’s theme as a second subject, also treated as a fugue. In the course of this energetic music, tension grows between husband and wife, leading to a blazing row — but ending in reconciliation. Strauss’s sheer joy in composing and his unstoppable invention take over, well beyond the point where any storytelling is needed. This is no dirge on the miseries of home life — it is a triumphant celebration of a good and ideal life, brilliantly expressed.
Once again Strauss shows himself the master of the modern orchestra, in this case an orchestra larger than any he had called for before. A horn section of eight (as in Wagner’s Ring cycle) was established in Ein Heldenleben, but here he adds the oboe d’amore and a full quartet of saxophones, although Strauss is strangely cautious in their use, for they only play in sections for full orchestra and are never heard on their own. Indeed, in his own performances he did not use saxophones.
Strauss once boasted he could portray a teaspoon in music and compose the differences between a knife and a fork. Music can transform the trivial into the sublime, and the Symphonia domestica proves it quite admirably.
Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in I853: The Biography of a Year.
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