Tristan Generation

Tristan Generation is pianist Juliette Journaux’s exploration of German post-Romanticism through her own solo piano transcriptions — a genre born at the turn of the 20th century that fearlessly fused opposites: the sublime and the trivial, ecstasy and anguish, the divine and the carnal. The program traces the shockwave that Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde sent through the fin-de-siècle Viennese generation that followed in its wake.

Opening with the Potion Scene from Tristan, the recital moves through Schoenberg (the Gurre-Lieder Prelude and Schenk mir deinen goldenen Kamm), Zemlinsky (the Fantasien on poems by Dehmel and the ecstatic-anxious Psalm 23), Braunfels’s Die Vögel Prelude, Hugo Wolf’s intimate Verborgenheit, Liszt’s Cantique d’amour, more Wagner (Brangäne’s Warning), Schreker’s incandescent Die Gezeichneten Prelude, and Korngold’s Tanzlied des Pierrot — closing a lineage that runs from Wagnerian chromaticism to the Second Viennese School and beyond, toward Hollywood.

Almost all of these works were conceived for orchestra, voice, or chorus; rendered here for solo piano, Journaux’s transcriptions strip away timbral difference to expose the sheer harmonic daring of this repertoire at its most naked. Recorded on a 1894 Steinway Model D at the MC2 Auditorium in Grenoble, the album captures — in the artist’s own words — the sensation of inhaling “a fragrance that is heady, intoxicating and dangerously addictive.”

Juliette Journaux – piano