Description
Commissioned to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Adophe Sax’s birth, each of the movements of this piece (beyond the expository prelude) presents miniature vignettes of music written in Belgium’s past as seen through the lens of Sax’s invention. It is, in that sense, an homage to not only the great musical minds that came before Sax, but also to his own keen inventive mind and incomparable contributions to music history.
The Postlude involves a curious intersection of Sax with another brilliant musical mind: Richard Wagner. Sax was the stage director for a performance of Wagner's Tannhauser, and he put some saxophones offstage with French horns because he couldn't find enough horn players in Paris. Wagner was so angry he rescored the Shepherd's Tune from Act 3 of Tristan und Isolde from saxophone to English horn. A portion of that tune appears in the Postlude to this piece, “rectifying” this petty bit of vengeance for Sax.