Beethoven's Piano Trio in D Major got the nickname "Ghost" because of its ominous and spooky slow movement. It's eerie, mournful, and almost painfully slow. In contrast, the two movements that surround it are short, cheerful and light-hearted, making for an interesting spooky sandwich. George Bernard Shaw wrote of Beethoven that "he could write music whose beauty will last you all your life; he could take the driest sticks of themes and work them up so interestingly that you will find something new in them at the hundredth hearing." Listen and enjoy the simple "sticks" of themes in the very beginning of both outer movements.

The Summer Season concludes with two pieces from Richard Strauss: his tone poem Death and Transfiguration and the suite from his opera Der Rosenkavalier. Tone poems are compositions that relate to stories in the “real world,” such as a hike in the alps in Eine Alpensinfonie. This one explores mystery of death and what lies beyond. Strauss wrote: “It occurred to me to present in the form of a tone poem the dying hours of a man who had striven towards the highest idealistic aims, maybe indeed those of an artist.” Der Rosenkavalier gives us the finest music from Strauss’s happy, funny, and sentimental opera. Listen for the famous waltz towards the end – a beautiful but also funny bit because waltzes didn’t really exist during the time of the opera’s setting in Mozart’s Vienna. Critics of the day gave Strauss a hard time for that, but we get to enjoy it.