Stories & Dreams at Benjamin and Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center

First Story: It’s Bohemia. The Thirty Years' War is winding down. This is the scenario for Der Freischütz (The Freeshooter), Carl Maria von Weber’s three-act opera, for which Weber used German folk music as his inspiration for much of the piece. Because it is based on a folk legend that deals with the supernatural and gruesome and is possessed of desolate feelings, many critics at the time considered it the first important German Romantic opera.

Second Story: Author Norton Juster’s The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics is your typical "line loves dot, line loses dot, line gets dot back" story. Composer Robert Xavier Rodriguez’s musical telling of the tale, narrated by Nancy Cartwright (the voice of Bart Simpson and others on The Simpsons), narrates how the dot falls for a squiggle, requiring the line to change his shape to compete and win back the fickle dot.

Now the dream—or rather, the daydream. When Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote his Symphony No. 1 in 1866, it had brought him more exertion and pain than he ever had previously known. Tchaikovsky realized that the piece was, in his own words, "…in many ways very immature, yet fundamentally it has more substance and is better than any of my other more mature works." The symphony’s four movements are entitled Dreams of a Winter Journey; Land of Desolation, Land of Mists; Scherzo; and Finale. Tchaikovsky dedicated the symphony to pianist, conductor, and composer Nikolai Rubinstein.