Artistic Director’s Description

Home is not always a place—it can be a person, a memory, or a moment of profound belonging. In Your Arms at Last explores the deep human longing to return to love and safety through music of devotion, intimacy, and transformation.

The program opens with Richard Wagner’s tender “Siegfried Idyll”, originally written as a birthday gift for his wife Cosima and first performed on the staircase of their home as she awoke on Christmas morning. In this intimate arrangement for string ensemble, the music unfolds like a private love letter—gentle, luminous, and filled with domestic warmth.

Songs of devotion follow: Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Zärtliche Liebe (Ich liebe dich)”—meaning “Tender Love (I love you)”—and Robert Schumann’s ecstatic “Widmung” from “Myrthen”, written as part of a wedding gift for his wife Clara Schumann. Heard here in a virtuosic arrangement for violin and piano, these works express love in its most direct and heartfelt form.

The evening culminates in Richard Strauss’s “Metamorphosen”, a profound meditation on loss, memory, and transformation written in the final months of World War II. Strauss’ sketches for the work included lines from Goethe’s poem “Widmung”, and when heard alongside Schumann’s “Widmung”, Strauss’ work gains an added dimension—suggesting a journey from the intimate devotion of love to a broader spiritual transformation. Together, these works trace a path from private tenderness to profound reflection, reminding us that home can be found both in the arms of the beloved and in the lifelong search for meaning.

Program

Richard Wagner    Siegfried Idyll (arr. Glynn Davies for String Quintet)

Ludwig van Beethoven    Zärtliche Liebe (Ich liebe dich), WoO 123

Robert Schumann    Widmung (arr. Auer for Violin and Piano) from Myrthen, Op. 25

Richard Strauss    Metamorphosen (arr. Rudolf Leopold for String Septet)

Performing Artists