Overture is a timeless reflection of the Opus One estate vineyards.

After 18 months of ageing, the wine is bottled and held an additional 15 months until its release on October 1 st each year. Unlike Opus One, which only ages in new French Oak barrels, Overture ages in French oak barrels that have been used before. Overture is Opus One's second wine, using grapes from the densely planted estate vineyards that surround the winery. The grapes are hand-harvested in individual lots, and then each lot is sorted and fermented separately, requiring over three dozen giant steel fermentation tanks. Rather than being sorted by hand, harvested grapes are processed by a custom-made optical sorter, which uses cameras to analyse the size, shape, and colour of every grape. The winery was established in 1978 and uses its state-of-the-art facilities to produce two wines only: Opus One and Overture.Ī stunning blend of five varieties: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot and Malbec. Located in Oakville, California, Opus One was an ambitious joint venture between two of the world’s most esteemed winemaking figures: Robert Mondavi and the late Baron Philippe de Rothschild. The piece has been deemed among Schumann's most moving works, and a pinnacle of his quintessential Romantic concern with the extra-musical (and especially literary) potential of musical expression.Without a doubt, Opus One is one of Napa's most famous wineries. Scenes from Goethe's Faust has often been overlooked within Schumann's impressive oeuvre, but has enjoyed a resurgence since the 1970s. The final scenes, drawing the work to its placid yet unsettled conclusion, hold some of Schumann's best choral writing. The second part of the work opens with stark contrast: on the one hand, the lively, fresh music of Ariel and the spirits calls Faust to savor the beauties of nature on the other hand, in the scene following, Schumann's restless orchestration brings to the fore Faust's delusions upon hearing of a new world being created and its rapturous promise of an everlasting present. For Gretchen's story, Schumann employs operatic music, beginning with a love duet, proceeding to Gretchen's passionate and desperate aria, and concluding with a church scene. After the overture, the music depicts Faust's wooing of Gretchen. Schumann's music suggests the struggle between good and evil at the heart of Goethe's work, as well as Faust's tumultuous search for enlightenment and peace. Schumann explained the weight of the task before him in an 1845 letter to Felix Mendelssohn: 'ny composer would not only be judged by his treatment of one of the seminal and most-widely acclaimed works in German literature, but would also be setting himself up to be compared to Mozart.' Yet despite Schumann's expressed reservations about the work, it has been labeled his 'magnum opus.' Schumann is 'eeply sensitive to the all-inclusiveness of Goethe's drama' From the work's dark and tense overture, to its elegant and tranquil conclusion, Schumann opens wide 'a manifold musical world' that coherently draws together elements of ' lied, horror opera, grand opera, oratorio, and church music.' Goethe himself declared only Mozart fit to write the music for it (though Mozart died in 1791, almost 20 years prior to the completion of Part One of Faust).

Many contemporary readers of Faust found Goethe's epic poem daunting and difficult to grasp. This was just over a decade after the death of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who completed Part Two of the dramatic poem Faust in his final year. Schumann's work on what he labeled an oratorio began in 1842. Eric Sams comments 'There is no coherence in the orchestration, which audibly dates from two different periods (hand-horns in Part III, valve-horns elsewhere)', leading him to conclude that Schumann did not conceive the work as a whole, although late nineteenth-century ideas of performance mean that in the modern era the piece is predominantly heard with all three parts.

Schumann never saw all three parts of the work performed in the same concert, or published together. The work was written between 18 and is scored for SATB chorus, boys' chorus, orchestra, and a number of solo parts which, even with doubling, require seven solo singers, although eight (three sopranos, two mezzos, one tenor, one baritone, and one bass) is the usual number for a performance. The work has been described as the height of his accomplishments in the realm of dramatic music. Scenes from Goethe's Faust ( Szenen aus Goethes Faust) is a musical-theatrical work by composer Robert Schumann.

Overture opus one