uchicagosymphonyorchestra

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Maestra Barbara Schubert leads the USO into the New Year with a concert of orchestral variations, from the perspective of three different composers. The program features Johannes Brahms’ well-known Variations on a Theme by Haydn, French composer Vincent d’Indy’s eclectic Istar Variations, and Paul Hindemith’s masterful Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber. Together these three works offer a fascinating view into how diverse composers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries treated this traditional musical form. A reception will follow. Admission is free. Donations are requested at the door: $10 general, $5 students.

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Program Notes:

Johannes Brahms: Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56a (1873)

Johannes Brahms lived and worked at a time when the Austro-German canon of classical music had very recently solidi ed. A new idea of musical historicism (or antiquarianism) was emerging on top of that canon as well: the Bach Society, whose purpose was to edit and publish the complete works of that recently rediscovered Baroque composer, was formed in the year 1850, and a similar Handel Society appeared in 1858. This historicism was fed by the desire for a national pantheon of Classical composers, which grew throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. This desire was  nally ful lled in the 1890s by two gargantuan collected editions: the  rst was called Monuments of German Musical Art, and the second was titled Monuments of Musical Art in Austria. In the late nineteenth century, then, the story of classical music in Germany and Austria was a story of roots:  nding them, creating them, and then using them to propagate a new national culture.

Brahms’ career lined up perfectly with the development of this national historicism: his  rst published opus (his Piano Sonata in C Major) was written in 1853, and his last published opus (the Bach-inspired Eleven Chorale Preludes for Organ) was written in 1896. Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56, emerged against this historicist background. Even in the early nineteenth century, the trio of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven represented a holy trinity of Austro- German compositional practice. One needs only to look to the famous words of the music patron Count Waldstein, when he funded Beethoven’s studies with Haydn: “You shall receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.�� For Brahms to write a set of variations on Haydn, then, was like an act of intercession, intended to connect oneself to the musical divine.

Brahms took the theme for this work from a manuscript shown to him by an early Haydn scholar, Carl Ferdinand Pohl. It was the second movement of a piece for winds, and above it was written “St. Anthony Chorale.” Brahms was enamored with the chorale’s expansiveness, and set out to write a set of variations with the chorale as its theme. Brahms thought of variation form as a balancing act: on one hand, one needed a unique theme (but not odd enough to be distracting); and on the other, one needed inventive variations (which should still be recognizably related to the theme). With the new backdrop of nineteenth-century historicism, there was an additional factor to balance: a set of variations on a classic theme ought to pay its respects to the greats without being overly conservative — and it ought to innovate but it could not leave its theme behind. Brahms had previously written a set of piano variations on a theme by Handel, which demonstrated his ability to write music that blossomed from the hardy seed left behind by a great master. He hoped that this Haydn chorale would be just as fertile for a new composition.

It might be surprising, then, to learn that Haydn actually had nothing to do with the wind version of the “St. Anthony Chorale” that caught Brahms’s imagination. Musical misattributions were common before the twentieth century for two reasons:  first, copyright laws were few and far between; and second, much music was copied by hand and disseminated in manuscript form without careful oversight. Musicologist H.C. Robbins Landon has purported that this “St. Anthony Chorale” was in fact composed by Haydn’s student, Ignaz Joseph Pleyel. (And in any case, the original inspiration for the chorale tune did not come from Haydn: the chorale was based on a hymn sung by pilgrims in Padua, where the tongue of St. Anthony was kept as a relic.) Brahms’s theme, then, lacks the authentic connection to Haydn that Brahms had hoped would tie him to a venerable tradition. 

Of course, none of this changes the sheer joy of listening to Brahms’s Variations. The listener’s curiosity is immediately kindled by the opening statement of the theme: it is organized into five- measure phrases, which thwart our deeply ingrained, foursquare Classical expectations. Brahms preserves this unique detail in every one of his eight successive variations. The melody of the theme also provokes curiosity: it’s an oddly static melody, mostly hovering around the same notes (D and E- at above it).

The  first variation takes us into definitively Brahmsian territory: over a static bass we hear a bustle of triplets in the strings, set against duplets in the other instruments. This sort of melodic three- against-two is one of Brahms’s favorite maneuvers, as many beleaguered pianists know. The second variation gives us the first hint of storm and stress: sharp timpani strokes are followed by quiet flurries of motion in the strings. The third variation soothes the anxiety of the previous one with sinuous lines played by the woodwinds over a placid string accompaniment. The fourth variation grows out of the previous one, with the same hushed lyricism now cast within the less con dent minor mode. The  fifth variation is a lively Poco presto, serving the same function as a scherzo movement within classical sonata form. In the sixth variation the horns take center stage, playing a version of the opening melody that is decorated with skipping sixteenth notes. Here Brahms changes the underlying harmonies of the theme, closing the initial phrases with unexpected cadences in a minor key. The seventh variation has a kind of courtly magnanimity, with slow lilting rhythms recalling the Baroque siciliano dance. The eighth variation, which calls for the strings to play with mutes, casts us into a state of mysterious groundlessness. We regain our footing with a stately passacaglia finale. (A passacaglia is a form in which the bass line repeats the same figure over and over, while the other parts play constantly-changing countermelodies over it.) This passacaglia leads us seamlessly back to the original St. Anthony Chorale, played triumphantly by the whole orchestra to cap the work.

Vincent d’Indy: Istar: Variations Symphoniques, Op. 42 (1896)

Vincent D’Indy’s Istar: Variations Symphoniques, Op. 42, is based on a story from the Epic of Gilgamesh that describes the descent of Ishtar, goddess of love, into the underworld in order to save her imprisoned lover. Ishtar is forced to remove a piece of jewelry or an item of clothing at each of the four gates through which she passes. This slow and methodical disrobement was the inspiration for d’Indy’s reversal of variation form: instead of beginning with the theme, d’Indy begins with his most far-flung variation. Each subsequent variation is pared-down and re ned, and the piece ends with the “naked” theme. A concertgoer who is familiar with Richard Strauss’ opera Salome (with its infamous “Dance of the Seven Veils”) might expect a garishly orientalist Ishtar — but not so. D’Indy’s Istar is much closer in character to the nineteenth-century orchestral genre called the “symphonic poem,” which is best represented by Liszt’s allegorical works of the 1850s. Istar projects this same sort of allegorical abstraction. We do not hear the urgency of a determined goddess here; instead, we hear the story of ornament and simplicity, told in a late- romantic Franco-German voice.

This piece’s unusual form, and the myth that inspired it, is worth examining. Why would the Babylonian Ishtar be a promising subject for a French symphonic piece in the German genre of the “symphonic poem”? What would have made it feasible — or necessary — for such a piece to be penned in fin-de-siècle Paris?

Istar was composed in 1896, during a period of European fascination with ancient cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. As the Ottoman Empire began its slow dissolution over the late nineteenth century, the Europeans swept in — and when they left, they took local artifacts and mythologies with them. The tale of Ishtar (from the Epic of Gilgamesh) is one of those mythologies. The Gilgamesh story was first translated into English by the Assyriologist George Smith, who attracted international attention by comparing the flood myth in the Epic to Noah’s flood in the Bible. Smith further declared that Gilgamesh was the same figure as Nimrod of the Old Testament. These similarities to more familiar European myths were what put early Assyriology into the public eye.

Indeed, the story of Ishtar descending into the underworld is remarkably similar to the myth of Orpheus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Orpheus was a hero who plied his way into Hades with the musical power of his lyre to save his beloved Eurydice. The Orpheus myth appears throughout the history of European music like a leitmotif. Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607), for example, was a seminal early opera. Likewise, the musical reformer Christoph Willibald Gluck also turned to Orpheus when he wrote Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), his first opera written in a new, streamlined style. Victorian readers of the Gilgamesh epic were quick to point out the similarity between Ishtar and Orpheus — and d’Indy’s Istar, in turn, appears to triangulate the distance between the Babylonian Ishtar and the Greek Orpheus. While Monteverdi’s Orfeo began with simple pastoral forms that became more formal, more ornate, and more filled with pathos as Orpheus journeyed into the world of the dead, D’Indy does the exact opposite: his most inventive material comes at the beginning, with ravishing orchestration for the initial variations, gradually lessening as Istar’s (literal) divestment proceeds, and resulting in a knowing and elegant simplicity in the final section of the work. D’Indy’s Istar, then, is a reversed Orpheus.

Paul Hindemith: Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Weber (1943)

Paul Hindemith began his work on the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber shortly after leaving Germany for the United States. In Germany, the composer had alternated between resisting the Nazi government and making concessions to them: thus, a man whose music was officially catalogued as “degenerate” could at the very same time receive praise from Josef Goebbels, who praised Hindemith as the foremost composer of his generation. Despite Hindemith’s popular success, though, political tensions mounted. Wilhelm Furtwängler, the legendary conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, was even forced to step down from his post temporarily because of his vigorous defense of Hindemith. The composer emigrated to the U.S. in 1940, and joined the music faculty at Yale University.

The Symphonic Metamorphosis began its life as a series of sketches for a ballet. Hindemith had planned to collaborate with Léonide Massine on a ballet based on the music of classical composer Carl Maria von Weber, but Hindemith and Massine’s artistic differences over the staging eventually killed the project. Hindemith refashioned his sketches into the orchestral piece we hear tonight. The themes that Hindemith selected for “metamorphosis” were all fairly obscure Weber tunes: three of the Metamorphosis’ movements were taken from Weber’s Op. 60 collection of piano duets, and the middle scherzo was based on Weber’s music for the Friedrich Schiller play Turandot. One might speculate that Hindemith chose these little-known and little-appreciated themes so he could showcase his compositional skill. (You might recall the balancing act that Brahms was faced with: don’t pick a theme that will steal the show from your variations!)

The Symphonic Metamorphosis ultimately turns Weber’s original pieces into empty molds that are then filled with Hindemith’s inventive fire and flash. The first movement, a raucous Allegro, transforms a Turkish march by Weber into something far more foreboding. The second movement, crafted from music originally for Turandot, is a set of variations on a Chinese melody (drawn by Weber from Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique of 1768). The Chinese tune is repeated over and over, to create a feverish perpetual motion machine whose ceaseless whirring is underscored by the almost never-ending trills in the woodwinds. By the end of the movement, this off-kilter tune completely exhausts itself of significance: it’s as if one had repeated a word so many times that the word is now a string of unfamiliar sounds. The third movement, a soothing Andantino, hews closely to the original structure of Weber’s piano duet but adds two new elements: first, a cushion of harmony in the strings, and second, a final flute solo that is foreign to Weber’s style. The final movement is yet another march, introduced with horn-calls and martial beats of the snare drum. One of the goals of the Metamorphosis was to show the new possibilities that were unlocked by the huge, post-Romantic, twentieth-century orchestra. The piece requires an extensive percussion section: over and above the standard percussion instruments we hear a tambourine, gong, wood blocks, tom-toms, and chimes. Hindemith’s use of percussion gives every movement an edge of danger.

The bizarre exoticism of the “Turkish” first movement and “Chinese” second movement are worth exploring. The Ottomans were a legendary military opponent of the Habsburgs for the entire existence of the Habsburg empire, and it was commonplace for Biedermeier-era composers to mimic the sounds of a Turkish military band (think of Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca”). It’s not surprising, then, to encounter a Turkish march by Weber. But why would Hindemith choose a Turkish march for his Metamorphosis? The Turandot scherzo is even more confusing: Weber wrote his music for Schiller’s play Turandot, which was in turn based on an eighteenth-century commedia dell’arte play by Carlo Gozzi, who in turn was inspired by the Sassanid Persian tale of Princess Turandokht (“daughter of Turan,” Turan being the ancient name for Central Asia). European whimsy gradually transformed Turandokht into the Chinese Turandot, the thwarted empress of Puccini’s eponymous opera.

And what can we make of Hindemith’s putative homage to Weber? Weber was a composer idolized in his own time, but after a few generations he was remembered only as a composer of a few famous operas. It might surprise the reader to learn that the nineteenth-century critic A. B. Marx wrote that Weber’s work was on par with Beethoven’s: it “often surpassed [Beethoven’s work] in grandeur and elaboration.” But Hindemith isn’t bowing to the old master, Carl Maria von Weber. His piece does not seem to highlight the original features of Weber’s music in same the way that Brahms’s Variations paid tribute to the simplicity of “Haydn’s” chorale. Neither does Hindemith scorn Weber: even though Hindemith’s transformed final product is overwhelming in its fire and brilliance, it still seems to depend on the structure of the Weber pieces on which it was based. (The first movement of the Metamorphosis, for example, preserves the exact same phrase structure as Weber’s original.) Finally, Hindemith’s treatment of the Chinese melody from Turandot raises questions: this is not a metamorphosis of Weber, but a metamorphosis of Weber’s original metamorphosis. In sum, Hindemith’s Metamorphosis doesn’t point backwards to its original source material in the way Brahms’ piece does — but it doesn’t call attention to its own structure like d’Indy’s Istar, either.

The intended subject of this Metamorphosis isn’t the beginning of the transformation, or its final product: it’s the process of metamorphosis itself — a process that inadvertently creates a formless but threatening Orientalized “Other.” (A painter might set out to turn the story of Ishtar into a painting, but he would shudder to imagine the real Ishtar who eluded his brushstrokes.) This “Other” emerges as a threat only after it has passed through the ears of Rousseau, of Schiller, of Weber, and finally through Hindemith’s ears to us — like a racializing game of “telephone” (a game that was once called “Chinese whispers”).

Hindemith’s Metamorphosis, then, is an object lesson in how music is inextricably bound up in the political conditions of its creation. Is it possible, as a composer, to connect your music to the past in just one specific way, and to scrub away all other traces of intervening history? Is it possible to write music based on a theme penned by a composer as monolithic as Haydn, without calling attention to a Bloomian “anxiety of influence”? Can the genealogy of a melody, or of a myth, be wiped away to create a clean musical slate to work on? We listen to Variations on a Theme by Haydn, though, whose theme has nothing to do with Haydn, and we suspect the answer is “no.”

— Notes by Andrew Malilay White Ph.D. Student in Music

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Program Notes: Samuel Barber

On Saturday, December 3 at 8pm, rising star Alexi Kenney, recipient of a prestigious 2016 Avery Fisher Career Grant, joins the University Symphony Orchestra for Samuel Barber’s magnificent "Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 14". Barber’s "First Essay for Orchestra" and slightly earlier "Symphony No. 1 in One Movement" – an overtly dramatic work that incorporates the lyricism, intensity, and expressiveness typical of the composer’s idiom – balance the program. Reception to follow. Donations requested at the door: $10 general, $5 students

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Program Notes “Skyscrapers, subways, and train lights play no part in the music I write.” Thus pronounced the young American composer Samuel Barber in a 1935 newspaper interview. With this polemical claim, Barber (then 25 years old) wanted to make clear to his audience that he intended to be a composer of the people, and that the music he wrote was a continuation of the traditional Western tonal language with which they were familiar. The biographer Barbara Heyward suggests that with this statement, Barber was making a sly reference to the modernist ballet Skyscrapers (1924) by John Alden Carpenter, but he could also have been thinking of the Italian futurists who crafted music that echoed the noise of the city, or the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger who wrote the influential orchestral piece Pacific 231 (1923), mimicking the sound of a steam locomotive. But Honegger’s music wasn’t widely embraced by the American public – nor was the music of the futurists, for that matter. In that 1935 interview, Barber continued: “My aim is to write good music that will be comprehensible to as many people as possible, instead of music heard only by small, snobbish musical societies in the large cities.” 

Barber stuck to that goal all his life – and indeed, he achieved it. Thirty-five years after his death, his music remains a perennial audience favorite, securing his reputation as a composer who wrote music for all Americans. Barber’s music is widely programmed in the United State during the regular concert season, but it also is summoned to provide comfort during moments of national crisis. Barber’s mournful, elegiac Adagio for Strings – probably his most well-known piece – was broadcast live during the announcement of John F. Kennedy’s death in 1963, and was also performed during memorial services for the September 11th attacks of 2001. How did this composer’s music become such a cultural fixture in postwar America? What is it about its sound that people find so compelling and relatable? We might glean some clues by exploring the history and character of the music on our program tonight.

First, we have the laconic Essay for Orchestra (later retitled First Essay for Orchestra, after the composer decided to revisit the form in 1942 and 1978). The Essay was premiered in 1937, with its composer fresh out of school and on the brink of international recognition. Barber, a native Pennsylvanian, had graduated from the now-famous Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, which had only recently been established. The young musical prodigy had just won two awards (a Pulitzer fellowship and the Prix de Rome) that allowed him to study composition in Italy for two years. Shortly afterwards, legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini gave Barber the premiere that would make his career. Toscanini, who had become the conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra that very year (for an orchestra that was created expressly for him), conducted a program that included Barber’s Essay and Adagio for Strings. This performance was an enormous success, and established a strong working relationship between the composer and conductor. Toscanini is said to have marveled at the simplicity and beauty of Barber’s Adagio. 

The Essay, too, has the kind of Steinbeckian simplicity and elegance that undoubtedly contributed to the success of that performance. Barber invented the “essay” form himself. Like its literary corollary, the compact Essay explores a single theme from multiple angles, in attempt to reach a resolution. The piece begins with a slow, melancholy, questioning theme played by the string section. This melody’s main rhythmic motive is a distinctive long-short-short-long idea that repeats with each subsequent phrase, sounding almost like a repeated word, or a painful question searching for an answer. This initial quiet theme gradually swells with emotion, spilling over into an agitated forte before dropping off into an eerie canon in the brass section. Barber cast the Essay in a two-part contrasting structure with the hope of making the literary essay analogy more tangible – but the second contrasting section is actually a clever elaboration of the first; it uses the same basic cellular theme but speeds up its rhythms, taking on the attitude of a sprawling, insistent scherzo whose short-short-long rhythms saturate the parts of every instrument of the orchestra. The tone in this work is decidedly more dissonant and daring that of the Adagio for Strings. The second section of the Essay combines the two themes, with a quick Scherzo swirling above like the eddies of a swift river and the mournful Adagio coursing underneath, like a powerful emotional undercurrent. The concise Essay for Orchestra ends with the return of the eerie trumpet-calls, which signals that the piece has reached an abrupt close – a hushed conclusion that feels both resigned and icy.

Even if the Essay was a formal invention by Barber himself, Barber’s symphonic forms have their foundation in the “New German School” of the mid-nineteenth century, a group of composers that include Wagner and Liszt. Within his Symphony in One Movement, Barber introduces short and memorable motives, transforms those motives over the course of a segment, and ultimately comes back to them with a new background and a fresh context. The sort of motivic development in Barber’s Symphony is much like Wagner’s use of Leitmotifs. Of course, this is not to say that any use of motivic development would place a composer in company with the New German School: what counts here is the way those motives are transformed within the structure of the piece. Liszt’s famed Piano Sonata in B minor, for instance, is an example of “cyclical form”: the single-movement sonata uses two main motives that morph and evolve over the course of the piece, to emerge at the end with a sense of clarity and depth. Barber’s Symphony in One Movement likewise compresses the four movements of the classical form into a sweeping, unified panorama. The first section of the symphony introduces three themes that are then woven together throughout the remainder of the piece. When these themes recur, sometimes the repetition is highlighted: for example, when the Andante tranquillo third section of the symphony begins, the lyrical oboe that soars over a bed of muted strings immediately calls to mind the way the theme was first introduced at the beginning of the piece. At other points, however, Barber disguises his themes. Earlier in the Essay, the Scherzo section utilized a primary motive that was basically a quick, rhythmic version of the main theme – and in the exact same way, this symphony’s Scherzo takes material from the first section and speeds it up to a scampering pulse. And again, like the Essay, the Symphony in One Movement ends with all its themes combined in a dramatic crescendo of emotion. 

Barber used a cyclical approach to his motives: that is, the motives grow and change over the course of the piece, and at the end they return transformed, as though they had reached their full potential. If the Barber Symphony were a novel it would be a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, tracing the emotional development of an intrepid main character. In this way Barber’s tonal language (or, perhaps, rhetoric) was rooted in the practice of nineteenth-century Germanic music. This “rootedness” even landed the composer a performance of the Symphony in One Movement by the Vienna Philharmonic at the 1937 Salzburg festival. Before that year, the conservative festival had never featured a symphonic work by an American composer. Barber’s Symphony received glowing reviews from the Austrian press, who were quick to point out that his “firm handling of the theme, the strict adherence to form, his constancy to the basic principles of tone can all be traced to Vienna.”

Finally, the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 14, is Barber’s most popular and enduring work after the Adagio for Strings. In the other two works on this program, we hear a constant tension between unfettered lyricism and an eccentric Scherzo crackling with energy;  the Violin Concerto likewise exemplifies this uneasy balance. It was originally commissioned for Iso Briselli, a violin prodigy who attended the Curtis Institute with Barber. The composer wrote the first two movements of the concerto in 1939, during a summer in Switzerland. The violinist, however, did not think the opening movements were flashy enough and asked for more virtuosic writing. Barber continued his work on the concerto, hoping to write a Finale that would fit the bill, but his stay in Europe was interrupted. All Americans were given the warning to leave Europe because of the anticipated Nazi invasion of Poland. Barber’s initial cable to his parents in August was: “Both sailing Brittanic September first . . . not worried.” But that ship cancelled its journey at the last hour. By this time, foreigners were desperate to leave Europe. Luckily, Barber was able to work his connections and find ship reservations for the following morning. That night, Barber wrote in his notebook: “Increasing war anxiety . . . Americans warned to leave Paris. Black nights, Pantheon by moonlight.”

The masterful concerto that Barber eventually finished manages to balance a glowing, burnished lyricism against an ever-present threat of dissonance and darkness. In the first movement, the violin enters with a rhapsodic stream of melody over a mellow G Major harmony in the orchestra. Its second theme sounds like a quick, lilting Scottish folksong with snappy dotted rhythms, balancing out the lyrical first theme. The first hint of darkness does not surface until late in the exposition of this movement, and then there it is short-lived, fading back into the folksong. A parallel moment occurs toward the end of the Allegro when the heart-pounding dissonance threatens to take over, but the soloist’s cadenza delivers us safely back to a shimmering conclusion in the major key.

The second movement begins with an extended oboe solo that reminds us of Barber’s commitment to vocal melody: as a student at Curtis, he was careful to cultivate his own voice with weekly singing lessons, with the express purpose of nurturing his understanding of cantabile line. In this movement, the violin soloist does not enter for almost a full three minutes – and when the soloist does enter, it is quietly, tentatively, over a hushed cushion of sound. The violin’s “voice” gradually becomes more restless, alternating between the initial cantabile and an uneasy, shifty agitato.

For the last movement of the Violin Concerto, Barber takes a completely different turn: the Finale, more thoroughgoing in its dissonance than the first two movements, is a blisteringly fast Moto perpetuo with punchy, irregular accents. This eccentric Finale, in fact, almost derailed Barber’s commission. The violinist Briselli (who was to premiere the work) was disappointed with the final movement, claiming it was not appropriate to the tone set by the first two movements. His stated reason was that it was “too lightweight,” but we might speculate that the Finale’s more dissonant, modern tinge turned off Briselli – or perhaps it was the technical difficulty of the solo line. In any case, Briselli requested that Barber alter and expand the middle section of the Finale, but Barber refused. Incensed, the composer decided to exhibit the Finale to a group of influential Curtis compatriots and prove its worth. He recruited a talented student, Herbert Baumel, to practice and play the movement with only two hours’ notice. Baumel’s impromptu performance took place before a small audience in the piano studio of Josef Hofmann. Fortunately the student gave a dazzling and wholly satisfying show. After a round of applause, all those present at the performance promised to ask the original violinist Briselli to relinquish his privilege of premiering the work, to allow a different violinist to play the concerto as it stood.

Over the course of these three works, e can discern three facets of Barber’s musical personality: his canny synthesis of other compositional styles, his penchant for the development and combination of themes in a literary fashion, and, finally, the uneasy electric energy of the sonic landscapes he created – a brightness that nevertheless teeters on the edge of pensive nostalgia at every moment. In a radio interview towards the end of Barber’s life, the composer admitted: “I myself wrote always as I wished, and without a tremendous desire to find the latest thing possible. . . . I wrote as I wanted to [write,] for myself.” These words seem to reinforce the pillars of Barber’s style exhibited by tonight’s program: they make plain his insulation from more avant-garde twentieth-century modernism and his populist self-image, for sure, but they also confirm his fundamental ambivalence, his melancholy, and his unique and intensely personal compositional voice. –– Notes by Andrew Malilay White

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Program Notes: Alumni Weekend Concerts (Part 2)

The University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra presents two concerts during Alumni Weekend, June 3-4. These concerts celebrate the 40th anniversary of conductor Barbara Schubert’s time as Conductor of the USO. To honor her, the Department of Music commissioned a piece by Ricardo Lorenz–”Catalogo Fantastico”. The concerts also feature Ravel���s Daphnis and Chloe and Shostakovich’s Festive Overture.

Concerts are June 3 (8pm) and June 4 (4pm) in Mandel Hall. Free, donations requested at the door. Details: https://www.facebook.com/events/1628268857500089/

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Ricardo Lorenz:  Catálogo Fantástico:  Fantastic Catalogue of Strange and Unusual Subjects

Catálogo Fantástico (Fantastic Catalogue) was composed to honor Barbara Schubert’s fortieth anniversary as Music Director and Conductor of the University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  The piece was commissioned by The University of Chicago with funds provided by the Leona Bachrach Gerard Endowment Fund for Music.  Through this 27-minute long composition, I seek to draw a musical connection between Barbara Schubert’s longstanding contribution as Conductor of the University Symphony and The University of Chicago’s most fundamental goal of offering a rigorous and at the same time daring curriculum.

I like to imagine that while Chicago students rehearse every week under Barbara’s meticulous care, the subject matters they study during the day in the classroom filter through Mandel Hall and mingle with great musical works.  The subject matters I am thinking about are not Calculus 101 or Evolution 300 of course.  To understand what I mean, one has to only peek inside the University’s course catalogue in order to appreciate the breadth of subject matters that entice Chicago students every year.  What jumps out immediately are the alluring titles of many of the courses in the catalogue.  Some of these read like tweeted poetry.  They are clever, unusual, poignant, seductive, and, yes, fantastic.  How could one not crave to sit in a biology class titled The Problem of Evil: Disease?, or peek through the classroom door while a visual arts professor teaches Site, Strategies, Preoccupations, and Something Like Art?

This is what motivated me to borrow the titles of four courses listed in the 2015-16 University of Chicago catalogue as source of inspiration for Catálogo Fantástico.  The fantastic titles of the four courses I borrowed spawned music that evokes the relation between philosophy and magic trickery (I. Wonder, Magic and Skepticism);  our longing for past religious experiences and objects (II. Archaeology of Religious Experience);  the challenge and irony behind studying the brain with our brains (III. Peering Inside the Black Box: Neocortex);  and the consequences upon ordinary people caused by the collusion of governments and markets (IV. States, Markets, and Bodies).  The unusual subjects of these courses generated equally unusual musical subjects —I mean melodies and motives— that provide continuity and musical logic to each of the movements in Catálogo Fantástico.

The first movement opens with a prickly motive that is intersected by a grave, sustained melody that travels through different instrumental families of the orchestra as it fends off different manifestations of the opening motive along the way.  Without interruption, the second movement follows with the tolling of tubular bells, creating a resonant and richly textured sound that supports different plaintive melodies and calls associated with various religious experiences I have enjoyed throughout my life.  Progressively, the tolling of bells morphs into the polyrhythmic layering of percussion instruments loosely associated with Afro-Caribbean religious practices.  I end this movement with a Latin chant of my own creation that translates as “everyone experiences religion in a different way.”  The motivic and melodic content of the third movement is based on the irregular rhythms produce by brain cells’ electrical activity as amplified and recorded in a lab.  After an opulent introduction, a field drum plays an erratic rhythmic pattern that serves as skeleton for the main motive of this movement.  This intermittent melody, almost Morse code-like, contracts, expands, and becomes super-sized to the point at which a climax seems inevitable.  What sounds like a breaking point signals the start of the last movement which quickly gives way to a less unstable motive that slowly becomes more soulful, later turns almost bluesy, and eventually, and unexpectedly, becomes a flaunting, kitschy tune.  The character of the last movement, titled States, Markets and Bodies, skirts the line between the discreet and the gaudy, between the modest and the ostentatious.  It was not lost upon my knowledge of popular music that the subject matter of the course used as source for this movement is the reason why such great folk and popular music exists.  History has proven over and over again that music is one of the most potent antidotes ordinary people have against the shenanigans of states and markets.

As a closing thought, let me say that most of the subjects and titles that fill The University Chicago’s course catalogue show a degree of imagination and allure that equal the spellbinding orchestral works by Berlioz, Barber, Stravinsky, Lutoslawski and so many others that Barbara Schubert has performed with the University Symphony Orchestra during the past forty years.  This is something that Barbara has tapped into.  The bottom line is that in a place where knowledge, thought, and creativity of the highest order reign across the board, the boundaries between different subject matters, between course work and extra-curricular activity, between laboratory and concert hall become extremely porous.  It is not farfetched therefore to think that the sharply-focused, and at the same time magical ambience that is created on the Mandel Hall stage feeds off the unusual subject matters taught at Chicago by some of the most extraordinary faculty on the planet.  Seen from this perspective, one can say that Barbara Schubert has been at the helm of a truly symbiotic relationship between brilliant subject matters studied in classrooms and breathtaking symphonic works performed at Mandel Hall.  I feel fortunate and honored to have followed and benefited from her dedicated work.  

–– Notes by composer Ricardo Lorenz, PhD ‘99

[uchicagosymphonyorchestra]

Program Notes: Alumni Weekend Concerts (Part 1)

The University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra presents two concerts during Alumni Weekend, June 3-4. These concerts celebrate the 40th anniversary of conductor Barbara Schubert’s time as Conductor of the USO. To honor her, the Department of Music commissioned a piece by Ricardo Lorenz--”Catalogo Fantastico”. The concerts also feature Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe and Shostakovich’s Festive Overture.

Concerts are June 3 (8pm) and June 4 (4pm) in Mandel Hall. Free, donations requested at the door. Details: https://www.facebook.com/events/1628268857500089/

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The works by Shostakovich and Ravel featured on tonight’s program are radically different from one another in almost every way: in character, affect, intended function, and in their musical materials.  The one connection between these disparate works is that each emerged after a period of struggle and uncertainty in the lives of their composers.  Both Shostakovich and Ravel were battling with authority figures before and during the composition of these pieces (although in radically different contexts);  out of periods of insecurity and despair emerged two stunning works of the orchestral repertoire.

Dmitri Shostakovich:  Festive Overture, Op. 96

Just as it opens tonight’s concert, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Festive Overture was commissioned in 1954 to open a concert celebrating the 37th anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution.  Joseph Stalin had died only the year before, in 1953, and life for Soviet artists like Shostakovich was changing rapidly.  Shostakovich himself (1906-1975) had experienced a great deal of strife between 1936 — when his opera Lady Macbeth was publicly denounced by Stalin and high-ranking officials and he was dethroned as the leading composer of Soviet music — and the overture’s composition in the early 1950s.  He spent much of his career struggling to deal with political interventions that hindered his compositional output, the pressure of official requirements, and the suffering of his countrymen.  In 1954, the dust had not yet settled in Shostakovich’s artistic life.  Yet the Festive Overture reveals the most energetic, effervescent side of Shostakovich’s artistic personality, the side of him that had, in 1934, wanted “to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in ‘serious’ music.”  Whether the laughter in this short composition originates in the composer’s newfound freedom or acts as a more sarcastic response to the circumstances surrounding the commission is impossible to tell.

The story behind Shostakovich’s Festive Overture is the stuff of legends.  The work was commissioned at the very last minute by Vassili Nebolsin, the conductor of the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra, for a concert celebrating the anniversary of the October Revolution.  Three days before the performance, Nebolsin approached Shostakovich, desperate for a work to open the event.  According to the composer’s friend, Lev Lebedinsky, Shostakovich sat down at the piano and notes poured out of him immediately: “the speed with which he wrote was truly astounding. Moreover,  when he wrote light music he was able to talk, make jokes and compose simultaneously, like the legendary Mozart.  He laughed and chuckled, and in the meanwhile work was under way and the music was being written down.”  Accounts of the event seem to have been exaggerated in the retelling: some claim that Shostakovich wrote the overture in three days, some in two, and some in mere hours.  The stories agree, however, that Shostakovich sent the manuscript pages back to Nebolsin by courier, each page with its ink still wet.

The speed, the enthusiasm, the laughter with which Shostakovich composed the Festive Overture shine through in the work itself—not in the sense that it is rushed or carelessly composed, but in its bubbly excitability, its “vivacious energy spilling over like uncorked champagne,” as Lebedinsky put it.  The work begins with a rather ostentatious brass fanfare before the clarinets enter with the sparkling main theme.  A passionate second theme in the cellos provides much-needed contrast to the main theme’s bouncy quality, although an offbeat accompaniment figure ensures a constant sense of motion and drive.  The return of the main theme material leads to Shostakovich masterfully combining the two themes in counterpoint before bringing back the  opening brass fanfare to bookend the work.  Ultimately, the overture becomes an exuberant race to the finish, speeding faster and faster still through the fanfare and coda, towards a wildly energetic close that will leave listeners (and the wind players) thoroughly breathless!

Maurice Ravel:  Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2

Like Shostakovich, Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) encountered a number of obstacles to achieving success as a composer.  Both composers struggled with authority: Shostakovich with the Communist government, Ravel with the conservative French musical establishment.  Born in the Basque village of Ciboures to engineer and amateur pianist Pierre Joseph Ravel and Marie, née Delouart, Maurice showed an early interest in music, producing his first compositions by the age of twelve.  He entered the Conservatoire two years later, in 1889, but failed to win any prizes and left the Conservatoire by 1895.  Two years later he returned to study composition with Gabriel Fauré and counterpoint with André Gédalge, but was passed over for the fugue or composition prizes and once again dismissed from the composition class.  All of these were mere hiccups compared to the disastrous five-year span between 1900 and 1905, during which Ravel attempted to win the Prix de Rome five times, emerging unsuccessful on each occasion.  By the time Sergei Diaghilev commissioned Ravel to write Daphnis et Chloé for the Ballet Russes in 1909, Ravel had experienced a number of setbacks in his career and had formed an uneasy relationship with authority.

In contrast to the impressive three days Shostakovich took to write the Festive Overture, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé did not make it to the stage until 1912, three years after it was commissioned.  This was largely due to Ravel’s troubled relationship with the ballet’s choreographer, Michel Fokine.  In June of 1909, Ravel complained of his troubles in a letter to Madame René de Saint-Marceaux: “I must tell you that I’ve just had an insane week: preparation of a ballet libretto for the next Russian season.  Almost every night, I was working until 3 A.M.  What complicates things is that Fokine doesn’t know a word of French, and I know only how to swear in Russian.  Despite the interpreters, you can imagine the flavor of these discussions.”  Beyond linguistic differences, there were artistic ones as well. While Ravel envisioned a “vast musical fresco” faithful to the Greece he saw in his dreams, Fokine was inspired by the “ancient dancing depicted in red and black on Attic vases.”

Unfortunately, Daphnis et Chloé was not a success at its premiere on June 8, 1912.  Between multiple delays in premiering the ballet caused by the disagreements between Ravel and Fokine, its subsequent near-cancellation by a frustrated Diaghilev, a reduced number of performances, and the fact that it was overshadowed by Nijinsky’s scandalous performance of Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune just ten days before, the ballet was destined for a lukewarm reception.  Ravel was clearly discouraged by what he saw as another failure;  in August 1912, he wrote to Ralph Vaughan Williams:  “My various works which were performed last season, and, above all, Daphnis et Chloé, left me in pitiful condition.  I had to be sent to the country to take care of an incipient neurasthenia.”  Despite the ballet’s failings, Ravel’s rich orchestral score, brilliantly orchestrated, was an enormous success.  Ravel divided the score into two suites;  of these, the second is undeniably a classic in the symphonic repertoire.

Ravel’s ballet adapts the pastoral tale of two lovers, Daphnis and Chloé, written by the fifth-century Greek author Longus.  The second suite features music from the ballet’s third part, in which the titular lovers reunite after Chloé is captured by pirates in the first act and subsequently freed by Pan and his warriors in the second.  Ravel crafted the suite from the three final excerpts of the ballet: “Lever du jour” (Daybreak), “Pantomime,” and the “Danse générale.”

The curtain opens on Daphnis sleeping before the nymphs’ grotto;  all is still but for the murmur of water as rivulets of morning dew trickle down the rocks, and the deep humming breaths of the sleeping earth.  The upper woodwinds mimic the water’s gentle movement above a simple, undulating melody in the lower strings.  As the sun rises and the music intensifies, the solo piccolo, first flute, and three violins flutter above the rest of the orchestra, their birdcalls heralding the breaking dawn.  Out of this dramatic wave of sound the melody breaks free, rising through the orchestra;  the gentle murmur of the upper woodwinds fades into the background.  The world awakens and the scene comes to life: in the distance, we hear a shepherd pass with his flock, and then another.  They play idle melodies as they wander through the fields — we catch snippets as they float by on the breeze, played by the piccolo and E-flat clarinet.

Soon, a group of herdsmen arrive in search of Daphnis and Chloé;  they awaken Daphnis as the music swells.  The mood quickly changes when he wakes to find that Chloe is absent;  anguished, Daphnis searches for her, his fear and anxiety apparent in the disjunct, fragmented melody played by the clarinets and violas.  At last, the melody transforms into an ascending line as Daphnis emerges, surrounded by shepherdesses.  The lovers embrace, and the orchestra builds to a passionate climax.

A brief transition leads to the Pantomime, in which the lovers reenact the story of Pan wooing the nymph Syrinx.  First, a playful oboe melody shows Chloé miming the nymph Syrinx as she frolics through a field. Daphnis appears as Pan, declaring his love for Chloe, but she repeatedly rebuffs him before disappearing into the reeds.  A desperate Daphnis forms some reeds into a flute and, in one of the most stunning flute solos in the orchestral repertoire, lures Chloe back to dance to his seductive song.  The dance, growing ever faster, spins wildly out of control until the breathless Chloé falls into Daphnis’s arms.  After a weighty pause, the lovers swear their fidelity at the nymphs’ sacred altar:  a moment of solemn ritual made enormously powerful by the music’s rich texture and the luxurious melody in the trumpets.

Heralding the start of the third and final part of the suite, the upper woodwinds enter with a lively melody representing a group of young girls who enter, shaking their tambourines and dressed as followers of Bacchus, and kick off a final celebratory dance.  The “Danse générale” was the source of a great deal of trouble for Ravel, who spent a year agonizing over it, and for the dancers, who struggled with the uneven 5-beat measures.  These difficulties aside, Ravel’s attention to detail in crafting the final part of the score produced a stunning dance, exultant and joyful, which brings the ballet to a dazzling conclusion in a unison cry of overwhelming joy.

–– Notes by Anabel Maler

[uchicagosymphonyorchestra]

Final concerts for 2015-2016

The first of our two final concerts of this season happen TODAY at 8pm in Mandel Hall!

We're celebrating conductor Barbara Schubert's 40th year as USO conductor, and the program will feature the premiere of Ricardo Lorenz's "Catalogo Fantastico", commissioned by the Department of Music in tribute to Barbara.

We'll also perform Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe and Shostakovich's Festive Overture.

FREE, donations requested

We’ll have to concerts, one today (6/3) at 8pm, and one tomorrow (6/4) at 4pm.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1628268857500089/

[uchicagosymphonyorchestra]

Program Notes: Bloch and Dvorak

The University Symphony Orchestra presents a program featuring Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony no. 7 and Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo, with Andrew Molina, cello, winner of the Biennial Concerto Competition. Admission is free with donations requested at the door ($10 general/$5 students and children). Information here: https://www.facebook.com/events/203744186671860/

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Reflecting upon his career in 1954, Ernest Bloch — who was renowned for composing specifically Jewish music — wrote the following to his friend and New York Times music critic Olin Downes:  “It is Godet, the friend of Debussy, … and the creator of Hitler in a way, who is responsible for my Jewish music. …  It is the absolute truth, but who could understand it?  How could anyone who writes the story of my life reconcile this kind of contradiction?”  Twists and turns, contradictions, incongruities and irreconcilable conflicts: how can these make up an identity?  How can a person, or the art that person produces, be defined by such an extraordinary paradox?

Both of the compositions featured on tonight’s program emerged from moments of acute self-doubt and crisis, while simultaneously representing their composers’ identities in perhaps their purest forms.  For Ernest Bloch, it was his Jewish identity, filled with complexities and conflicts, that would come to fruition in Schelomo: Rhapsodie Hébraïque for Violoncello and Orchestra, the crowning work of his Jewish Cycle.  For Antonín Dvořák, his Symphony No. 7 marked the apex of the composer’s internal struggle between his provincial roots and his international aspirations.

Each of these celebrated works implores us to wonder: what defines a person? a nation? a religion? a race?  What in music is universal, and what is deeply personal?  It was Bloch again who wrote:  “Art for me is an expression, an experience of life and not a puzzle game or icy demonstration of imposed mathematical principles,” yet the same sentiment could apply to either of tonight’s composers, in whose works the most intimate inspirations coexist with the most public statements of identity.  

Ernest Bloch:  Schelomo: Rhapsodie Hébraïque for Violoncello and Orchestra

Ernest Bloch was born to Maurice (originally Meyer) and Sophie Brunschwig Bloch in Geneva, Switzerland, on July 24, 1880.  Music was so thoroughly entwined with Bloch’s identity even as a child that, before the age of ten, he wrote out his intention to become a composer on a scrap of paper, went into the countryside, and set his vow ablaze upon an altar of stones.  His identity as a musician came, in a sense, before his identity as a member of the Jewish faith — despite his being known today mainly as a Jewish composer.  Bloch’s upbringing was secular:  his father, who had once planned to study for the rabbinate before deciding instead to become a merchant, was content to celebrate only the major religious holidays.

Nonetheless, Bloch’s ancestral heritage was essential to his Jewish and musical identity, even though he came to fully embrace the religion only later in life.  Despite his father’s lack of profound faith, the elder Bloch sang Hebrew melodies around his children, including the traditional gemara nigun or teaching melody that would later form the basis of the second half of Schelomo.  This familial connection to Jewish music-making forms one of the many tangled threads that compose Bloch’s complex musical identity, but like all of these threads, it was often pulled tight and frayed by internal conflicts.  Maurice Bloch was vehemently opposed to his son’s desire to become a composer, calling his son’s compositions Scheiss Musik [“garbage music”] and making it abundantly clear that his son was to follow his father into the family business.

It was ultimately Robert Godet, the aforementioned anti-Semite and critic, who brought Bloch’s own Judaism to the composer’s attention, with his 1904 anonymous review of Bloch’s Symphony in C♯ minor.  The composer observed:  “It was that man who, in an article in the Times, drew my attention to what could be Jewish in me, in citing Franz Liszt’s marvelous passage on Jewish themes.”  Godet was one of the young and timid first supporters of Bloch, and the two struck up a deep friendship that would last ten years.  Godet encouraged Bloch to express his Jewish heritage in his compositions, a decision also supported by Bloch’s close friend, and the librettist for his opera Macbeth, Edmond Fleg.

In 1917, Bloch declared:  “I am a Jew.  I aspire to write Jewish music because racial feeling is a quality of all great music which must be an essential expression of the people as well as the individual.”  Judaism was an essential part of Bloch’s aesthetic, but it was not limited to the surface features so often mentioned in relation to his music:  i.e., the augmented seconds, the liturgical modes and exotic scales, the allusion to the shofar through the use of perfect fourths and fifths, the flexible meter, and the typical Scotch snap rhythm.  Indeed, Bloch’s approach was quite the opposite:  he insisted that he did not think of his Jewish music in terms of these external characteristics, but instead “hearkened to an inner voice, deep, secret, insistent, burning, an instinct rather than any cold, dry reasoning process.”  It was Bloch’s Jewish heritage as a whole, rather than any surface characteristics, that inspired and drove his musical output.

Bloch experienced a number of setbacks before he wrote his famous Jewish Cycle.  His opera Macbeth, with Fleg’s libretto, was not received favorably in its first production at the Paris Opéra Comique;  critics attacked the opera as “barbaric,” and ultimately the jealousy and hostility among cast members led to the opera being dropped from the program.  Due to this setback, and to his father’s declining health, Bloch withdrew to run the family business in Switzerland before turning firmly towards a Jewish musical identity with the four works of his so-called Jewish Cycle, composed between 1912 and 1916.  These works, of course, include the rhapsodic Schelomo.

“I have seen all the works that are done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and vexation in spirit… Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”  Having turned over these words from the Book of Ecclesiastes in his mind for years, Bloch set about writing his Hebraïc Rhapsody in 1915.  His intent was to set passages from the Ecclesiastes in a vocal work, but the rhythm of the French language seemed wrong to him, as did those of German or English, and he would not begin his studies in Hebrew for many more years.  Instead, a fortuitous meeting with cellist Alexander Barjansky inspired him to use the “soaring unfettered voice of the cello” rather than the human voice.  Of all the works in Bloch’s Jewish Cycle, it is the voiceless Schelomo that seems to speak most directly to the soul.

By the time Bloch began work on Schelomo in 1915, he and Godet had experienced a dramatic falling-out instigated by Godet, who sent Bloch the translation of a book over which he had been laboring for many years.  The book, as it happened, was Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, an anti-Semitic treatise on the superiority of the Aryan race incorporated so seamlessly by Hitler into his Nazi ideology.  In 1913, with the publication of Godet’s French translation, their friendship shattered — the greatest tragedy of Bloch’s life, as he often lamented.  Even after Bloch left Europe for the United States in 1916, after finishing Schelomo, he attempted to repair his friendship with Godet, who responded by attacking Schelomo in La Revue Musicale.  For the remainder of Bloch’s life, even through his move from Switzerland to America, he kept with him a life-size wooden carving of Christ on the cross, which Godet had encouraged him to buy.  This incongruous object stayed with Bloch until his death, a constant reminder of the mysteries of human relationships and of his own disillusionment.

After having finished Schelomo, Bloch reflected that the voice of the solo cello could be understood as the voice of King Solomon, or King Schelomo in Hebrew.  The solo cello is thus strongly associated with a single character in Schelomo, while the orchestra acts at times in consort with the voice of the King, and at other times works against it, taking on the role of Schelomo’s environment.  The soloist’s part is thus a single, immutable voice, the outcry of an individual soul.  When in 1930 the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s conductor, Serge Koussevitzky, requested to play Schelomo with the solo part performed by four cellos, Bloch responded that “the cello part in Schelomo personifies the one voice of the King.  It is as senseless to give this part to four cellos as to play Hamlet with four actors talking at the same time.”  Bloch’s analysis of the work similarly reveals an understanding of the solo cello as a character capable of speech:  the lamentation that opens the work is the cello’s soliloquy on the idea “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”  From the very beginning we hear the cadence of specifically Hebrew speech in the cello’s speech, the supple expressivity of Hebrew prosody expressed in bow strokes.

Then the violas enter, and the world comes into focus around our speaker.  The orchestra slips into a kind of dance, led by the cello, who seems at one moment to guide the orchestral forces and at other times to struggle against them.  Bloch describes the orchestra’s rhythmic dance as the seductive movements of King’s wives and concubines;  and while King Solomon enters into the dance at first, he quickly turns away in revulsion, interrupting the dancing with multiple cadenzas.  The orchestra finally builds to an enormously powerful tutti, which quickly disintegrates into nothing once more.

The next section is built upon that traditional gemara nigun sung by Bloch’s father during his childhood.  The theme is introduced by the solo bassoon before being taken up by the rest of the orchestra; finally, the cello joins in.  The music soon becomes anguished, fevered;  the orchestra is internally divided, shouting in cross-rhythms before abating once more into a pensive cello solo.  Bloch describes Schelomo’s meditation here as a “shudder of sadness” at the orchestra’s wasted effort.

The third and final section Bloch describes as the orchestra’s vision of a better world, where “peace, justice, and love” reign.  The cello is swept up by this enchanting dream, but soon it crumbles again, revealed to be nothing but an illusion.  These orchestral fantasies fail to sway Schelomo, whose voice cuts mercilessly through the orchestral texture and descends, ultimately, into utter despair.  Bloch notes that, alone among his works, Schelomo concludes in complete negation and dejection with the cello’s final statement:  “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!”

Antonín Dvořák:  Symphony No. 7 in D Minor, Op. 70  (first published as Symphony No. 2)

“A new Symphony (for London) now occupies me, and wherever I go I think of nothing but my work, which should move the world;  God grant that it be so!”  Writing these words to his friend Antonín Rus at the end of the year 1884, Antonín Dvořák found himself poised on the cusp of international recognition.  His Seventh Symphony, commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society after the composer’s numerous successes in England — and inspired by the Third Symphony of his longtime friend Johannes Brahms [which the University Symphony performed in March] — seemed bound to elevate Czech music in the eyes of the international musical community. Dvořák had not always enjoyed such success in his career.  Born a butcher’s eldest child in the humble village of Nelahozeves, Bohemia in 1841, he received his musical education first from the village school and later from Kantor Antonín Liehmann in the nearby town of Zlonice.  Having shown great musical promise, Dvořák began his studies at the Organ School in Prague at the age of sixteen, in 1857.  After graduating second in his class, young Antonín joined a dance band as a violist, while also offering piano lessons and privately honing his compositional craft.  Finally, in the late 1870s, his years of hard work paid off in the form of the Austrian State Stipendum, which garnered not only financial support for Dvořák but also the attention of Johannes Brahms, thus launching a lifelong friendship between the two composers.  Brahms went on to recommend the younger composer to his own publisher, Fritz Simrock in Berlin, which — perhaps predictably — resulted in a much rockier relationship.

While the link between Simrock and Dvořák was initially beneficial to our composer, leading to the publication of his Slavonic Dances in 1878, it quickly went downhill when Simrock offered Dvořák too little money and repeatedly changed his name to the German spelling on scores.  Dvořák felt torn between loyalty to his homeland and the desire to appeal to the international musical community, despite having been recently snubbed by the Viennese due to a prevailing anti-Czech sentiment.  Luckily, the composer was received with considerably more enthusiasm in London, where he was celebrated as a musical hero.  The Royal Philharmonic Society commissioned his Seventh Symphony (numbered the Second by Simrock, who acknowledged only the symphonies published by his firm), which he wrote between the end of 1884 and spring of 1885 and which was premiered in London in April of that year.  Although this new D minor symphony would indeed launch Dvořák’s international career, it remained strongly tied to the concerns of the composer’s Bohemian homeland, and to Dvořák’s personal struggles.

The main theme of the Seventh Symphony seems to emerge from some gloomy abyss, the cellos and violas crawling upwards out of an ominous bass tremolo.  The atmosphere is tense and stormy, filled with an indefinable dread;  the melody turns in circles before landing abruptly on a fully diminished seventh chord.  This opening melody, and the ones that follow in the presentation of the main theme, are all strongly motivically linked both to Dvořák’s most political work, the Hussite Overture, and to Tabór and Blaník, the fifth and sixth works in Bedřich Smetana’s Má vlast (a symphonic cycle commemorating the fifteenth-century Hussite Wars and championing Czech religious nationalism).  The symphony’s main theme is thus inextricably tied to Dvořák’s homeland, but these Czech melodies are more richly developed in their presentation here, with dramatic contrasts both in texture and in emotional tone. The second theme, blown in on a gentle exhalation from the flutes, could hardly be sweeter by contrast.  It rocks gently back and forth, until the main theme creeps back in to darken it and bring the exposition to a close.  The development reveals Dvořák’s attention to detail as well as the rigorous development of his themes.  At the dramatic height of the development, the main theme interrupts to bring about a foreshortened recapitulation and coda.

The symphony’s second movement was the first segment of the piece that Dvořák wrote, and truly represents the emotional heart of the work.  Where the first movement presents a dark thundercloud of anxiety, constrained and obsessive, the second is expansive:  it expounds on three themes, developing them luxuriously and reaching multiple climaxes.  The tenderness with which Dvořák treats each theme and the mournful tone of the entire movement reminds one that this symphony was written not just in the throes of Dvořák’s identity crisis, but soon after the death of his beloved mother.

The third movement, a scherzo, hints at the shifting accents and cross-rhythms of the furiant, a type of Bohemian dance.  Swinging wildly between the delicate, the sublime, and the boisterous, this movement is the most uplifting of the symphony.  Its melodies seem to trip over one another in contrapuntal exhilaration, entering and dancing away again, cajoling and subsiding before whirling through to its conclusion.

The finale sweeps in with a cry of despair, a howl that soon descends into a low, insistent march.  The aggressive main theme gives way to a second theme, swaying delicately from the cellos to the woodwinds.  Soon, though, even that gentle theme turns bold and angular.  The first theme returns to prowl through the development, quickly rousing the orchestra into a wild polyphonic display.  The delicate second theme tries to break through but is constantly overwhelmed and frustrated until the recapitulation intrudes with the belligerent first theme once more.  Some may say that the change of mode that ends the symphony in D major rather than the prevailing D minor indicates triumph or exaltation, but it is instead at the very last moment that the most stunning transformation of the opening cry appears, straining upwards before plummeting once more into despair.  To the writer, these final major chords seem not to represent victory or loss, but the most pained outpouring of Dvořák’s troubled soul.

— Notes by Anabel Maler

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Program Notes: Brahms and Stravinsky

The University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra presents a program of Brahms Symphony no. 3 and Stravinsky’s Petrushka. The concert will take place on Saturday March 5, at 8pm in Mandel Hall. Details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/236498953352741/ Concert is free, donations requested at the door.

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Johannes Brahms:  Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Op. 90  (1883)

Johannes Brahms’s Third Symphony, composed in 1883 and first performed on December 2 of that year, had its American premiere the following October 25 at New York’s Steinway Hall, under the baton of Frank Van der Stucken.  The music critic of the New York Times was not overly impressed:  “[T]he opinion may be ventured that the work has none of the qualities that endow music with vitality.  It is of large proportions, and full of ingenious combinations and writing, but its three divisions [sic] offer no proof of the inspiration or originality of thought that can alone give durable popularity to a production of this order.”  Theodore Thomas, the German-born first conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, played the Third Symphony during the 1892 edition of the Cincinnati May Festival, which was also his creation.  On that occasion, the printed program warned listeners that Brahms’ music was not easy to appreciate: “Brahms’ influence is likely to be deeply, rather than widely, felt.  At first hearing the beauties of his compositions sometimes elude our grasp . . .  ‘Brahms,’ says Dr. Louis Ehlert, ��does not stand before us like Mozart or Schubert, in whose eyes we seem to look, whose hands we seem to press.  Twilight surrounds him; his heights melt in the distance; we are at once lured and repelled.’”

In hindsight, it is obvious why Brahms’s F Major Symphony could be perceived as arid, cerebral, or esoteric in 1884 New York or 1892 Cincinnati.  Absolute music— that is, music devoid of any literary or visual references— was still consumed less avidly than vocal or program music.  The diet of the 1892 May Festival consisted mainly of oratorios, sacred music, and opera excerpts;  the only other symphony by a living composer, Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, was described in picturesque terms, encouraging the audience to imagine “the proud Slav risen in his might, the tramp of barbaric hordes marching on their foe.”  The New York Times reviewer who damned Brahms had kinder words for Antonín Dvořák’s Hussite Overture, performed in the same Van der Stucken concert, as a “highly colored and vigorous” piece of program music.  Now that many symphonies from the 1880s and 1890s — by Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, but also Anton Bruckner and César Franck — have become staples of the orchestral repertoire, we tend to forget how writing symphonies was, at the time, a bold choice.  It meant writing “difficult,” possibly unpopular works, committing to an avant-garde aesthetics of “pure” music, and confronting a daunting musical past — in particular, the legacy of Beethoven.  German Romanticism had idealized Beethoven and the “great symphony,” and the permanent orchestras that had sprung up in German-speaking Europe during the nineteenth century were more interested in promoting the cult of dead composers than in encouraging living ones.  (Yes, even then!)  As musicologist Walter Frisch has written, “for young composers symphonic writing certainly presented a double whammy at mid-century: they would have difficulty getting their new symphonies played and perhaps published; and if they were fortunate enough to get that far, their new work would likely get pulled apart by the critics [for not meeting the impossibly high standard set by Beethoven] and would drop into oblivion. . . .  In the 1850s, 1860s, and early 1870s — the period of Brahms’s artistic development and early maturity — critics, conductors, and concert organizations created a kind of stranglehold on new symphonic composition.”  This explains why Brahms, who had been fiddling with the idea of writing a symphony since his early twenties, delayed his debut as a symphonist until 1876 — when he was 43 and widely regarded as the leading German composer of his time (a fame he largely owed to his German Requiem, first performed in its definitive form in 1869).  Brahms’s four symphonies were then seen as the embodiment of the long-cultivated ideal of the “echt symphonisch,” or the “authentically symphonic”.  For the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, the most prominent advocate of absolute music in the second half of the century, by mastering the symphonic form Johannes Brahms had achieved “the supreme consecration of the instrumental composer.”

The Third Symphony’s Allegro con brio is set in motion by the symphony’s motto, the three ascending notes F–A flat–F.  First heard in the woodwinds and horns in the opening bars, these motto pitches provide a scaffolding for the movement’s first theme, appearing first in the bass and then (transposed on various degrees) in an internal voice, while the dramatic melody has the violins run frantically across their whole range.  Even though the opening Allegro is in sonata form (and even though it repeats the exposition, by the time of Brahms an old-fashioned trait), it thwarts expectations by renouncing the usual dialectic between the home key and the key of the dominant, avoiding the latter altogether.  The second theme — a charming pastoral tune first presented by the clarinet — appears in the “wrong” keys, that of the third degree in the exposition and that of the sixth in the recapitulation (much like in Beethoven’s opus 53, the “Waldstein” Piano Sonata), as well as in a different compound meter of 9/4 rather than the opening 6/4.  The listener is further confounded by the fact that modal ambiguity (i.e., ambiguity between major and minor) is omnipresent, and that the exposition, between the F Major of the first theme and the A Major of the second, touches D flat Major.  Moving between tonal centers that are equally spaced within the octave, as is the case here, is a strategy proven to disorient the listener.  

The key that we have been denied in the first movement, C Major, is reached with the second movement, a beautiful Andante.  Its first theme sounds like a simple, straightforward chorale, performed by an organ-like ensemble of woodwinds and horns, to which the low strings respond at the end of each phrase.  The second theme, on the contrary, is a tonally ambiguous, expressive melodic line embellished with sinuous triplets, standing out in the woodwinds against a string background.  While the first theme is repeated in many different guises, Brahms seems soon to forget the second.  The following Poco Allegretto in C minor is in triple meter and in ABA form, and thus clearly serves as a hybrid Scherzo with a central Trio.  Its character, though, is not the playful, energetic one we would expect of a traditional Scherzo.  Instead, it is sentimental, even melancholy, with its cantabile, dragging melody, memorably launched by the cellos and reprised after the trio by a solo horn — an instrumental color that suggests distance and mystery.  

The final Allegro begins in F minor with a powerful unison and never loses momentum along its sonata-form trajectory.  It rewards the listener with two surprises.  Early in the movement, a short but eloquent homo-rhythmic episode, punctuated by the trombones, is clearly derived from the second theme of the second movement, which had previously failed to make a return.  Towards the end of the Finale, the symphony’s motto makes a comeback, followed by the incipit of the first movement’s first theme, for a bright, serene close in F Major.

Conductor’s Addendum:   The complicated interplay of rhythm and meter, so fundamental to Brahms’ mature idiom, reaches a new pinnacle in his masterful F Major Symphony No. 3.  From the duality of its opening 6/4 meter  — which asserts a basic 3 +3 structure but simultaneous hints at a 2 + 2 + 2 patterning (also known as hemiola)  — both the local phrase structure and the overall architecture of the work’s opening movement are defined, in large part, by this musical parameter.  Long segments in which the primary stress is shifted from the expected downbeat to the preceding sixth beat of the measure, then ultimately resolve to coincide with a downbeat;  multi-layer textures that assert both 6/4 and 3/2 voices simultaneously, as well as transition sections in which one or the other grouping takes precedence;  plus intricate shifts from duple to triple subdivision of individual beats, both within melodies and in complicated accompaniment figures:  all of these rhythmic and metrical features heighten the sonata-form dialectic of tension and repose normally defined by harmonic means.  In addition, the reappearance not only of the symphony’s opening theme at critical junctures in the symphony but also of the mysterious sequence of harmonically ambiguous chordal pairs, first introduced in the second movement, within the Finale gives the overall four-movement structure an extraordinary but still subtle thematic coherence.  For these reasons, as well as for the sheer beauty of its yearning melodies and exquisite instrumental colors, the Symphony No. 3 is often cited as Brahms’ greatest symphonic achievement.

Igor Stravinsky:  Pétrouchka, scènes burlesques en quatre tableaux  (1910–11)

The late spring of 1911 was exceptionally rich for music-loving Parisian theatergoers.  On May 19, the first of Maurice Ravel’s two operas, L’heure espagnole (The Spanish Hour), opened at the Opéra-Comique.  On May 22, the Théâtre du Châtelet saw the premiere of Le martyre de Saint Sébastien (The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian), a miracle play by Gabriele d’Annunzio for which Claude Debussy had written the music — his first stage work since the 1902 opera Pelléas et Mélisande.  On June 13, also at the Châtelet, the Ballets Russes, the ambitious dance company of impresario Sergey Diaghilev, gave the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Pétrouchka.  The Russian composer, not yet thirty, had risen to fame the previous year with L’oiseau de feu (The Firebird), the first Ballet Russes production with an original score.  Between 1910 and the outbreak of World War I, Stravinsky — suddenly a star of the Parisian musical scene — enjoyed the support of the veteran Debussy and consorted with the circle of young musicians, poets, and artists of which Ravel was part, the Apaches.  Debussy started his letters to Stravinsky with “dear friend,” Ravel with “buddy” (vieux), all while the Ballets Russes provided an outlet for the creativity of all three composers: in 1912 Diaghilev staged Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé; in 1913, in the space of a single month, Debussy’s Jeux (Games) and Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring).

If L’oiseau de feu had launched the career of Stravinsky, Pétrouchka marked his consecration.  The music critic Émile Vuillermoz, a member of the Apaches, wrote: “Pétroucka, this irresistible masterwork, violently took hold of us since the very first measure of its dazzling score, and only let us come back to real life, drunk with completely novel sounds, after the last chord. . . .  We should learn from the Russians how to lay out a palette.  We are incapable of handling pure colors with that unerring virtuosity and to discover those mixtures, those juxtapositions, and those bold contrasts, outrageous in theory, yet actually more sensuous to the eye than the tried-and-tested tricks of the trade employed by our subtle magnifiers of illuminations.”  Debussy used a similar metaphor a few months later, in a letter to a friend: Stravinsky’s music “is made of pure orchestral matter, directly applied on a sketch that only obeys the whim of emotion.  There is neither caution nor pretentiousness.  It’s childish and wild.  And yet to achieve it is an extremely delicate business.”  What both were essentially saying is that for Stravinsky timbre was a primary concern, not a detail as it was for a certain French academic tradition (in which orchestration was left to the final stage of composition, much like the filling in of an illumination with color).  And both made clear that, while seemingly unruly, Stravinsky was in absolute control of his technique.

Pétrouchka, whose scenario was devised in collaboration by Stravinsky and set designer Alexandre Benois, transports us to nineteenth-century Russia — more precisely, to Saint Petersburg, Stravinsky’s and Benois’s hometown.  The Shrovetide Fair (which takes place the three days preceding Ash Wednesday) is in full swing, and among the attractions is a puppet booth.  The means Stravinsky chose to convey the chaotic atmosphere of the fair are as simple as they are effective: the background tremolo evokes the alternation of pitches one obtains by pulling and pushing the bellows of some models of concertina (or, perhaps a more common experience nowadays, by exhaling and inhaling through a mouth organ), while the melodic interjections are based, as musicologist Richard Taruskin has demonstrated, on the cries of Russian street vendors.  Stravinsky might or might not have been aware of it, but there was a distinctive French tradition of incorporating street cries in operas, operettas, and plays to conjure a Parisian cityscape: Louis Clapisson had done it in La Fanchonnette (1856), Jacques Offenbach in Mesdames de la Halle (1858), playwright Adolphe d’Ennery in the melodrama Les deux orphelines (The Two Orphans, 1874), and Gustave Charpentier in Louise (1900).  Stravinsky later mimics a barrel organ, with flutes and clarinets, and a music box, with glockenspiel and celesta: the former plays a French cabaret song about a woman with a wooden leg, the latter a Russian song, and the two tunes are subsequently superimposed.  A drumroll announces a magician, whose antics are rendered by bassoons and clarinets.  When the Magician plays a solo on the flute, the curtain of the puppet theater opens revealing three puppets: Pétrouchka, the Ballerina, and the Moor.  As the magician touches each of them in turn with his flute (we hear three groups of two notes), they come to life and dance a jubilant Russian dance.  

In the second tableau, the scene changes to Pétrouchka’s house.  Pétrouchka’s torments (since he knows that he cannot escape the power of the Magician) are expressed by another memorable stroke of genius, the famous bitonal fanfare (a clarinet arpeggiates a C major chord while another arpeggiates an F sharp major chord).  The Ballerina visits Pétrouchka, but his declaration of love falls flat;  Pétrouchka is distressed.  The third tableau is set in the Moor’s house.  The Moor dances on a music that exhibits several Orientalist clichés: a modal flavor, prominent reed instruments, static harmony, and liberal use of bass drum and cymbals for a “Turkish” effect.  The Ballerina enters on a cornet tune accompanied by a snare drum and seduces the Moor with a waltz.  Stravinsky here has appropriated two dances by the Viennese Biedermeier composer Joseph Lanner and arranged them for an odd-sounding ensemble of winds, harps, pizzicato cellos and double basses, and percussion.  The result anticipates Stravinsky’s bittersweet neoclassical pastiches of the interwar period: Pulcinella (1920), based on music by or attributed to Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, and Le baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss, 1928), crafted after salon works by Tchaikovsky.  Pétrouchka then enters, to previously heard musical material, and fights with the Moor.  

For the fourth and final tableau we are back to the Shrovetide Fair.  We hear more concertina-like tremolos and yet another popular song, for the Wet Nurses’ Dance.  Then a peasant exhibits a tamed bear: the clarinets stand for the peasant’s pipe, while the bear’s steps are convincingly imitated by the low woodwinds and low strings.  Another episode involves a merchant dilapidating his money in the company of two gypsy girls;  it features, unsurprisingly, idiomatic passages in the strings, a Basque drum, and harps simulating a cimbalom in order to achieve a stereotypical Tzigane color.  It is then the turn of the Dance of the Coachmen and the Grooms, soon joined by the Wet Nurses, and finally the carnival Masqueraders lead the populace in a general dance.  Pétrouchka and the Moor enter, still pursuing their fight.  Pétrouchka falls to the ground, and so does, in the orchestra, the Basque drum (i.e., tambourine); the eerie sound of string harmonics then marks his death.  The Magician reassures the shocked crowd that Pétrouchka was nothing but a puppet, but as he goes near the puppet theater after the crowd clears, he is terrified by Pétrouchka’s reappearance as a ghost — his signature bitonal fanfare now transfigured by the sound of two trumpets.

–  Notes by Tommaso Sabbatini

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Program Notes: Musical Skamps

The University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra presents Musical Skamps, a concert featuring Edvard Grieg’s music to Peer Gynt, Englebert Humperdinck’s Dream Pantomime from Hansel and Gretel, and Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. The concert will take place on Saturday January 30th at 8pm in Mandel Hall. Details are here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1560557410932928/ . Concert is free, donation requested at the door.

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Little rascals oft become sensible people; clueless youngsters turn into slayers of dragons and rescuers of princesses. Or sometimes they don’t. The folk heroes who share tonight’s bill — Peer Gynt, Hansel and Gretel, and Till Eulenspiegel — illustrate what growing up, or not, meant in late nineteenth-century Europe, when emerging countries were forging their national identities.

Pinocchio, the mischievous puppet of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel, ultimately becomes a well-behaved boy, setting an example for the children of recently unified Italy: “How funny I was when I was a puppet! And how happy I am now that I’ve become a respectable boy!” The Grimms’ fairy tales were to Germany what Pinocchio was to Italy, and their protagonists — Hansel and Gretel among them — also go successfully though a proper initiation journey. But not everyone agreed that being a decent adult was preferable to being an amoral child. “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’ For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred ‘Yes’ is needed,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in Also sprach Zarathustra, published the same year as Pinocchio. Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel has everything of the self-propelling wheel and nothing of the respectable boy in his character. If the failure to grow up is Till Eulenspiegel’s strength, though, for another restless hero inspired by national folklore, the title character of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, it is a curse.

Edvard Grieg: Peer Gynt, Op. 23 (1874–5)

Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt, the first of his masterpieces, in 1867. Like other great plays of the Romantic age — Victor Hugo’s Cromwell (1827), Part Two of Goethe’s Faust (1832), Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio (1834), Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death (1835) — the work seemed at first (and may still seem today) impossible to stage: too long, too ambitious, too abstruse, too bitter. Of its five acts, written entirely in verse, four are set in the familiar (to Norwegians) Gudbrand Valley, but since they feature trolls and other supernatural characters as well as humans, it has been argued that their action takes place partly in Peer’s imagination. Act IV follows the protagonist all across North Africa, from the Atlantic coast to Egypt through the Sahara. Peer Gynt is a brazen-faced, resourceful ne’er-do-well, who misses the chance to marry the richest girl in the village, Ingrid, but then abducts her on her wedding day — only to abandon her in a forest a few hours later. He apparently fathers a child with a female troll, which prevents him from starting a family with Solveig, a girl he has met at Ingrid’s wedding, and who has broken all social ties to be with him. Peer then turns his back to Norway, amasses immense riches in highly unethical ways, loses everything, is hailed as a prophet by an Arab tribe, and elopes again with another woman, Anitra — this time, however, he is the one who gets ditched, in the middle of the desert. He ponders in front of the Colossi of Memnon and the Sphinx, ends up in an insane asylum in Cairo, and survives a shipwreck on his way back to Norway. Now an old man, Peer has nothing to show for his life: no noble deeds, no marriage, no wealth, no wisdom — and he has not even been exceptionally evil. He realizes that, instead of the moral of humans (which is “be yourself”), he has lived according to the moral of trolls (“be satisfied with what you are”). The only reason his existence has not been completely meaningless is that Solveig has continued loving him all the time, and when they finally reunite, he basks like a child in her motherly love.

Most of the “unperformable” plays mentioned above only reached the stage at the very end of the nineteenth century, or well into the twentieth. Peer Gynt did not have to wait that long, however. The 1870s saw a new trend in the European theatrical world: highbrow spoken drama started to embrace the procedures of melodrama, the popular genre that married spoken dialogue to music and spectacular visual effects. As a result, distinguished composers were increasingly called to write stage music: in France, Georges Bizet, Jules Massenet, Charles Gounod, and Jacques Offenbach all provided music to spoken plays between 1872 and 1874 (Bizet, famously, to Alphonse Daudet’s L’Arlésienne); in Russia, Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky wrote the score to Alexander Ostrovsky’s The Snow Maiden (1873); and in England, Charles Villiers Stanford was commissioned the music for Alfred Tennyson’s Queen Mary (1876). Ludvig Josephson, the manager of the Christiania Theater (later to become Norway’s National Theater) in what is now Oslo, was keen to keep up with these developments, and soon after his appointment in 1874 he arranged for a production of Peer Gynt with incidental music by Edvard Grieg. The composer was then a rising star in the Norwegian musical scene. He had impressed Ibsen favorably when the two met in in Rome in 1866, and he had already tried his hand at incidental music with Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s Sigurd Jorsalfar (1872). The Ibsen- Grieg Peer Gynt premiered at the Christiania Theater on February 24, 1876. In addition to songs, choruses, dances, and orchestral preludes to each, it featured — per Ibsen’s explicit request — orchestral underscoring of some of the dialogue, in true melodrama fashion. Out of roughly ninety minutes of music he wrote for the play, Grieg later carved two extremely popular orchestral suites, published in 1888 and 1893 respectively.

Tonight’s selections retrace, although not in chronological order, Peer Gynt’s journey from Norway to Africa and back. The prelude to Act I, At the Wedding, sets the scene for Ingrid’s wedding, with which the first act ends. The cheerful, dancelike music of the prelude frames a quieter central section where two musical images take center stage in turns: one is the poignant melody associated with Solveig, who makes her first appearance at the wedding; the other is the evocation — on a solo viola, with liberal use of open strings — of a folk fiddler. The fiddle music is heard again (this time from a violin) at the actual wedding, and consists of two traditional Norwegian folk dances: the first tune, in duple meter, is a halling; the second, in triple meter, is a springar.

The celebrated Morning Mood, the second selection on tonight’s program, is at first sight the most straightforward number of the Peer Gynt score. In the play it prefaces Act IV, at the beginning of which Peer Gynt is a successful entrepreneur: “a handsome, middle-aged gentleman in an elegant travelling-suit, with gold-rimmed spectacles hanging from his waistcoat” (from the English translation by Christopher Fry and Johan Fillinger), and it expresses unqualified happiness and serenity. Or does it? On closer inspection, its pastoral melody resembles the one Grieg used, in Act II, to introduce the troll girl Peer makes pregnant. Is Grieg subtly anticipating the final verdict on Peer, that he has been nothing but a troll?

The subsequent Arabian Dance is danced and sung in the play by the girls of the tribe that welcomed Peer as a prophet. If Norway, in At the Wedding, was painted from nature (so to speak), Grieg’s North Africa is conjured from Orientalist fantasies. Alas, though, Grieg does not seem on top of the latest trends: this Arabian dance is closer to the square, hypnotic brand of musical Orientalism popularized in the 1840s by Félicien David than it is to the sensuous musical arabesques adopted by composers like Giuseppe Verdi or Camille Saint-Saëns in the 1870s.

The Abduction of the Bride; Ingrid’s Lament, which is the prelude to Act II (but presented a bit later in tonight’s sequence), alternates between a mournful, cantabile melody and Allegro furioso interjections that are nothing but short, distorted quotations of At the Wedding. Ingrid’s Lament is thus an auditory equivalent of the costume Ingrid is wearing at the beginning of the act: that is, her wedding dress, in tatters.

Peer Gynt’s Homecoming: Stormy Evening on the Sea appears in the play as the prelude to Act V, and presages Peer Gynt’s shipwreck on the Norwegian coast. Storms and shipwrecks were favorites of nineteenth century melodrama and opera — one could cite Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine (1865) as well as two famous Flying Dutchmans: the English melodrama by Edward Fitzball (1826) and the German opera by Richard Wagner (1843). Given the rather stereotyped vocabulary of musical storms and the popularity of Wagner’s work, it is no surprise that Grieg’s prelude bears a rather striking resemblance to Der fliegende Holländer.

Solveig’s melody, first heard in the Act I prelude, is sung twice by Solveig in the play (in Acts IV and V) as she waits, in her lonely cabin, for Peer’s return. The first of her songs is known simply as Solveig’s Song: “Winter may go, and spring appear, / Next summer pass, and all the year. / And yet a time there will be, when / My love is in my arms again.” The gentle movement provides a poignant close to Grieg’s Second Suite, and to the set of excerpts featured tonight.

Engelbert Humperdinck: Sandman’s Song, Evening Prayer, and Dream Pantomime from Ha��nsel und Gretel (1890–93)

The fame of Engelbert Humperdinck rests essentially on one opera and on a few uncredited bars of music. The opera is the immensely popular Hänsel und Gretel (1893), which succeeded in reviving the genre of fairy opera, Märchenoper in Germany — a genre to which Humperdinck contributed again with Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty, 1902) and Königskinder (The King’s Children, 1910), and to which younger Austrian and German composers became attracted (among them Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, and Richard Strauss, whose Die Frau ohne Schatten of 1919 is set in a fairy-tale world). The uncredited bars are the ones that Humperdinck added to the Act I “transformation music” of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, to accommodate the slower-than-expected unfurling of a multilayered moving panorama at the 1882 Bayreuth premiere. In fact, Humperdinck was not just a lifelong admirer of Wagner’s music, but, in his late twenties, he became the master’s friend and assistant, and served in that capacity from 1880 until Wagner’s death in 1883. Later, he was handpicked by Wagner’s widow Cosima as a composition teacher for Siegfried, Richard and Cosima’s youngest son.

It is not surprising, then, that Hänsel und Gretel sounds quite Wagnerian. The old Grimm tale of the two young siblings lost in the woods who defeat a witch living in a gingerbread house is treated with a sumptuous orchestral palette, intricate textures, and elaborate motivic cross-references. The association of children’s literature and Wagner is actually not as preposterous as it might sound. Both Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who started collecting folk tales during the Napoleonic Wars, and Wagner, who conceived his Ring cycle right after the failed revolution of 1848, sought to codify a shared mythical heritage of the German people, albeit with different ideological nuances (the Grimms’ nationalism being more bourgeois, and Wagner’s outright reactionary). Moreover, as an 1851 letter to a friend attests, Wagner was well aware that the hero of his Ring recalled the protagonist of a Grimm tale, “that of the youth who sets out ‘in order to learn fear,’ and who is so stupid as never to be able to learn it. Think of my alarm when I suddenly discover that this youth is no other than the young Siegfried, who wins the hoard and awakens Brünnhilde.” Siegfried is, in fact, a classic dragon-slaying, princess-rescuing fairytale hero. But the “dumb” remark applies to Parsifal as well. As fairytale scholar Maria Tatar has argued with respect to Wagner’s source, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parsifal, “described as ‘der tumme’ (‘the young and inexperienced one’),” is consistent with the German fairytale type of the “naïve hero.” Siegfried Wagner himself did not see his father’s musical legacy at odds with the practice of his teacher: his Opus 1 would be a Märchenoper based on a Grimm tale and obviously written in a Wagnerian idiom, Der Bärenhäuter (Bearskin, 1899). Siegfried’s Bärenhäuter should not be confused with another Bärenhäuter that premiered a year later, with music by Arnold Mendelssohn (a distant relative of Felix) and a libretto by Herman Wette. Both operas, however, trace their influence to Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel: Hermann Wette was the husband of Adelheid, the librettist of Hänsel und Gretel and sister of Humperdinck.

Tonight’s excerpt, the Sandman’s song and Evening Prayer that leads into the Dream Pantomime, forms the conclusion to Act II of Humperdinck’s opera. Hansel and Gretel recite their bedtime prayer, on the tune of a chorale first heard in the overture. The words of the prayer are based on a poem from Des Knaben Wunderhorn — that is, from a Romantic, völkisch compilation like the Grimms’, due to two contemporaries and friends of the Grimms, Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. The collection is known to music lovers for having ignited the imagination of Gustav Mahler, who composed his Wunderhorn- inspired songs and symphonies in the 1880s and 1890s. “Abendgebet,” the poem used in Hänsel and Gretel reads: “In the evening, when I go to sleep, / fourteen angels are at my side: / two to my right, / two to my left, / two by my head, / two by my feet, / two to tuck me in, / two to wake me up, / two to show me sweet Paradise.” As Hansel and Gretel fall asleep in the opera, fourteen guardian angels descend from a stairway of clouds and recreate the image suggested by the poem. Rather than a pantomime, the scene could be more accurately described as a tableau vivant — or, given the subject, a living chapbook illustration — slowly taking shape before the audience.

Richard Strauss: Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Op. 28 (1894–5)

The titles of Richard Strauss’s early tone poems, written in 1888–89, could have been picked by Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, or any other member of the Romantic generation that had come to the fore in the 1830s: Macbeth, Don Juan, Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration). Then came his encounter with the writings of Nietzsche. For Strauss, it was essentially a second parricide: he had betrayed the musical conservatism of his father Franz Strauss to embrace Wagner; now he was betraying Wagner (also personally, through Cosima, who had welcomed him at Bayreuth) to embrace Nietzsche, the most damning critic of late Wagner. In his next cycle of tone poems, composed between 1894 and 1898, Strauss did away with morbidity, suffering, and transcendence and chose red-blooded, life-affirming subjects. He did not, however, repudiate the Wagnerian traits of his musical style. His former mentor Alexander Ritter was eager to point out the contradiction to Strauss, in a letter from 1893: “What alone of Wagner has survived in you? The mechanics of his art. But to use this art for the glorification of a worldview that directly contradicts the Wagnerian is not to build upon Wagner’s achievement, but: to undermine it.” The composer, though had chosen his path.

The folk hero that Strauss made the protagonist of the first tone poem of this new phase could not, of course, be a “naïve hero” submitting himself to initiatory trials, like Parsifal: that would have amounted to promoting slave morality, to borrow Nietzsche’s expression. Instead, Strauss chose (and would choose again with Don Quixote) a self-reliant, antisocial character: Till Eulenspiegel, the trickster consigned to German literary history by an anonymous text of the early sixteenth century (the first extant edition dates from 1515). Even if Strauss did not pen a specific program for Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks), he definitely had in mind a story arc, which he had even considered developing into an opera. In fact, since at least 1887 he had been looking forward to writing for the stage; his operatic debut, with Guntram (1894), immediately predates Till Eulenspiegel, and the tone poems can be regarded as a stepping stone to Strauss’s eventual success as an opera composer, which he achieved with Salome (1905). We can actually catch a glimpse into the “plot” Strauss conceived for Till Eulenspiegel, thanks to a letter he wrote to the conductor of the 1895 premiere, Franz Wüllner, and to the information collected from the composer by Wilhelm Mauke. The very first measures of the piece present the two motives that will serve as a unifying thread throughout Till’s adventures, the first in the violins, the second from a solo horn. When the first one appears again soon afterwards, a quicksilver rhythmic figuration and the sassy timbre of a sopranino clarinet lend it a grimace-like quality: Strauss spoke, for this passage, of Till as Kobold — that is, as the German equivalent of a troll. Unlike Peer Gynt, who tried to be a man and failed, Till is perfectly happy with being a troll, and his creator is perfectly happy with him being a troll, too. A cacophonic tutti depicts Till wreaking havoc in a crowded marketplace; a plain, folksong-like melody, punctuated by the tongue-in-cheek aside of the Kobold motive, represents Till disguised as a priest; a mock-saccharine section describes Till’s amorous pursuits. A minor-mode section then portrays Till making fun of pedantic professors: the highly contrapuntal texture Strauss displays here is obviously a parody of “learned” music. After an impressive buildup in texture, at the end of which we hear again the false priest’s song, a drumroll announces Till’s trial. Despite the lugubrious atmosphere of the courtroom, Till is undeterred, and so is the Kobold motive, irreverent as ever. Two notes presented fortissimo in the low winds, however, outlining a descending major seventh, spell the verdict: “der Tod,” Death! Till is hanged. But, as the radiant epilogue demonstrates, his irrepressible energy has not been defeated: Till lives on, in spirit.

--Notes by Tommaso Sabbatini

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Program Notes: Barber, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich

The University Symphony Orchestra presents Barber, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich on December 5th, 2015 at 8pm in Mandel Hall. The program features Samuel Barber’s Overture to “The School for Scandal”, Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Julie Suite No. 2, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9. Free, donations requested at the door. Details here.

Samuel Barber:  Overture to “The School for Scandal,” Op. 5  (1931–32)

Tonight’s concert offers a fresh perspective on the music of the first half of the twentieth-century — a perspective different from the one generally afforded by familiar historical narratives.  Instead of focusing, as is often the case, on a few European capitals (such as Vienna, Paris, and Berlin) and on the aesthetic currents that broke with the Romantic tradition (variously labeled as “avant-garde” or as “modernistic”), our program brings together music from Stalinist Russia and the United States, two countries that, for completely different reasons, had a conflicted relationship to contemporary music.  In short, Russia wanted revolutionary music but asked its musicians to obey the rules;  America wanted truly American music, but until the 1930s, proud of its laissez-faire liberalism, was not willing to pay for it.  American composers, if they wanted to succeed, had to cater to a wealthy elite for whom displaying cosmopolitan (and conservative) tastes was a matter of social distinction.  No wonder, then, that American creations commissioned by a temple of European culture like New York’s Metropolitan Opera, for example, ended up sounding unadventurously European.  What we now consider the American sound par excellence, that of Appalachian Springs (1944) and other Aaron Copland works from the same period, is a product of the slightly later New Deal era, when state support for the arts was no longer taboo and left-wing sympathizers like Copland did not have to defend themselves from the accusation of being “un-American.”

Unlike Copland, though, Samuel Barber believed that his mission as an American composer was not to create an original American style, but rather to appeal to America’s public for art music.  He chose to write, in the words of the left-wing critic Ashley Pettis, “for people who listen with ears of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at latest — whose criteria are that ‘new’ music should have the familiar melodic, harmonic and rhythmic characteristics of the past.”  Nonetheless, his music was of the highest quality.  Even the leading modernist composer Virgil Thompson had words of praise for Barber’s music:  “. . . It’s extremely well constructed.  It’s not vulgar . . .  [and] it’s a pleasure to interpret it.”

Like the Russian composers with whom he shares tonight’s program, Barber was precociously talented.  He wrote his Overture to “The School for Scandal” between 1931 and 1932, while still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia;  the work was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1933.  Contrary to what its title may suggest, it was not composed for a production of Richard Sheridan’s 1777 comedy of manners.  Instead, it is a concert piece taking the play as an inspiration, like the overtures that Felix Mendelssohn and Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky derived from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet respectively (even though Mendelssohn would eventually write additional incidental music for Shakespeare’s Dream).  The result is a sparkling, colorful orchestral score with a relentless pace.  A 1938 reviewer compared Barber’s Overture to the music of Italian composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari;  the same parallel had been made a few days earlier for the opera Amelia Goes to the Ball written by Barber’s colleague and life partner Gian Carlo Menotti.  While the comparison to Wolf-Ferrari, a much older Italian composer, could be seen as damning for two young American musicians, in the case of Barber’s “School for Scandal” it can also be seen as complimentary.  In fact, in several of his operas Wolf-Ferrari had tried to capture the spirit of Carlo Goldoni, the eighteenth-century Venetian master of comedy.  Being mentioned in the same breath as Wolf-Ferrari, then, could mean to Barber that he had succeeded in his intent to conjure a feeling of eighteenth-century wit.

Sergei Prokofiev:  Romeo and Juliet:  Suite No. 2, Op. 64 ter  (1936–7)

Sergei Prokofiev’s most successful opera, The Love for Three Oranges, is also arguably the most famous opera to have received its world premiere in Chicago.  It opened on December 30, 1921, at the Louis Sullivan-designed Auditorium Theater on Congress Parkway, now owned by Roosevelt University.  (It was only in 1929 that Chicago’s resident opera company would move into the Civic Opera House, the current home of Lyric Opera of Chicago.)  The production had been made possible by Chicago diva — and, in that season, impresaria — Mary Garden, best remembered for creating the female lead in Claude Debussy’s Symbolist masterwork Pelléas et Mélisande (written in 1902).  By the time of Prokofiev’s opera premiere, the Russian composer was already a household name in Chicago, despite his young age (he was born in 1891).  At the time of his musical debut in the Midwestern city three years earlier, though, Prokofiev had had to dispel some suspicion.

In December 1918, barely thirteen months after the October Revolution, the Russian Civil War was raging.  Chicago — the scene of the Haymarket massacre, the setting of Upton Sinclair’s Socialist novel The Jungle, and in many ways the capital of the American labor movement — was not immune from the “red scare” that rippled around the world.  The same day as one of Prokofiev’s Chicago concerts, for example, evangelist Paul Rader was preaching a sermon titled “The Second Coming of Christ:  How Much Bolsheviki?”  In addition to being Russian, Prokofiev was the author of music that sounded aggressively modern, such his Scythian Suite, which was heavily indebted to the primitivism of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.  Prokofiev himself noticed that the applause that greeted the Scythian Suite at its first Chicago performance was rather timid.  “This can be explained,” he wrote in his diary, “by the fact that it was a weekday afternoon and so 90 per cent of the audience consisted of women whose gloved hands inhibited the making of a great noise.”  In truth, though, the gloved ladies were probably wondering:  is this Serge Prokofieff (Gallicization of Russian names was de rigueur back then) a revolutionary?  The author of a humor column in the Chicago Tribune voiced and then answered the same concern: “Mr. Prokofieff is the Russian equivalent of a humdinger.  We heard persons refer to his music as bolshevik;  but Mr. Prokofieff is the very and perfect opposite of a bolsh.”

In an ironic twist of history, the image that Prokofiev consigned to posterity is “the very and perfect opposite” of the picture sketched by the Chicago journalist:  instead of a non-Communist composer of radical music, Prokofiev is today remembered as a loyal Soviet citizen who wrote aesthetically conservative music.  In fact, Prokofiev’s present popularity rests largely on works he wrote or completed after his move back to the Soviet Union in 1936:  the ballets Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, the cantata Alexander Nevsky (after his score for the Sergey Eisenstein film), and the educational piece Peter and the Wolf.  It might seem a paradox that Western orchestras habitually champion, from amongst Prokofiev’s extensive catalogue of works, those of his Soviet period.  But the true paradox is another.  While it is fair to say that Prokofiev moved back to Russia expecting recognition and a fresh flow of inspiration but ended up encountering harsh censorship and persecution, it is impossible to deny that he also found that fresh flow of inspiration he was seeking after his return to his homeland.

One of the reasons for Prokofiev’s decision to return to Russia (after fleeing in 1918 following the tumultuous Bolshevik Revolution) was his genuine desire to maintain an intimate connection with his fatherland.  In other words, he did not want to be an exile like Sergey Rachmaninov, nor to renounce his Russianness like Stravinsky.  For almost twenty years he had pulled off a delicate balancing act, keeping connections in Russia while based in the West, but when faced with a clear choice, he chose Russia.  Afraid of being locked out of his country, he eventually (from his repatriation in 1938 to his death in 1953, on the very same day as Stalin’s) found himself locked inside it.  And then there was a practical reason as well for Prokofiev’s return:  the Soviets, for whom his return was a brilliant propaganda coup, would guarantee him commissions, performances, publications, and a comfortable lifestyle.  If it is true that the style of Prokofiev’s Soviet works is more conservative than that of the Scythian Suite, this does not necessarily mean that the composer had to renounce his musical personality in toto.  Perhaps, despite what the gloved ladies of Chicago might have thought, Prokofiev was no iconoclastic enfant terrible in the first place, but merely a Wunderkind with an inexhaustible musical vein and a perennial tendency to eclecticism.  As musicologist Richard Taruskin has argued, “In the antimodernist, doctrinally optimistic Soviet Union, the high-spirited, ‘life-affirming’ music . . . that came effortlessly to the mind of this old conservatory boy would be valued at a premium.”

The two large-scale commissions that weighed on Prokofiev’s decision to resettle to Russia were the ballet Romeo and Juliet and the Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October.  Ominously for Prokofiev’s subsequent career, both projects met considerable opposition.  The Cantata was never performed, and the ballet was shelved after the Bolshoy Theater director who had commissioned it was executed during the Great Purge, and Prokofiev was persuaded to substitute the originally specified happy ending with a tragic one consistent with the Shakespearean source.  Romeo and Juliet reached the stage only in 1938, in the Moravian capital Brno;  it was eventually produced in the Soviet Union, after further revisions, in 1940, at the Kirov Theater in Leningrad (known today, as it was before the Revolution, as the Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg).  Prokofiev’s first draft of the complete score was not heard until 2008, in a reconstruction by the Prokofiev scholar Simon Morrison.

Between 1936 and 1937, while he was waiting for Romeo and Juliet to be produced, Prokofiev arranged from the score two orchestral suites and a collection of piano pieces.  He performed the Romeo music during what would be his last tours in the West:  thus Paris and Chicago got to hear the First Suite (in December 1936 and January 1937, respectively), and Boston the Second (in March 1938).  The suites seem designed to arouse interest in the ballet, especially since listeners could be assumed to be familiar with the plot from Shakespeare.  The Second Suite, in particular, has a clear narrative line.  Only two movements out of seven, numbers 4 (“Dance,” in the ballet “Dance of the Five Couples”) and 6 (“Dance of the Girls with Lilies”) are self-contained pieces that do not further the action.  The remaining five movements, densely interwoven with recurring motives, tell in essence the Romeo and Juliet story, making the Suite akin to a symphonic poem on a literary program.

The first movement, “Montagues and Capulets,” introduces Verona’s two feuding families.  The dramatic opening bars correspond to what, in the ballet, is the “Duke’s Command”:  the two strident brass and woodwind explosions translate the Duke of Verona’s powerful indictment of the rival families, while the strings mimic the reaction of the crowd.  Fast-forward to the ball at the Capulets’ house, with the “Dance of the Knights” that follows this slow introduction:  its pompous, angular theme made familiar by countless references in popular culture originally stood for the bellicose pride of the Capulets, and in particular of the young Tybalt, with whom it is associated again later in the ballet.  But in a contrasting internal episode within the first movement, the rising arpeggiation of a minor triad that characterized the theme of the Capulets takes on a completely different guise:  this luminous, soft moment marks the apparition of Juliet (a Capulet herself, hence the motivic relation) dancing with Paris.  Juliet is also the protagonist of the next movement of the Second Suite, “Juliet as a Young Girl”:  quick scales and figurations suggesting the vivacity of the teenage girl alternate with lyrical sections depicting her romantic reveries.  Pay attention in particular at the dreamy theme presented by the flute.  After the third movement, “Friar Laurence” — which stages a conversation between Romeo and his confessor — and the ensuing, lighthearted “Dance,” we reach the emotional heart of the Suite, “Romeo and Juliet Before Parting.”  This central movement opens with the love scene between the two protagonists after Romeo has been banished (Act 3, Scene 4 in the Shakespeare play).  After a flute melody already heard in the scene of Romeo and Juliet’s wedding (a discreet allusion to the fact that they have just consummated their marriage), we hear, in a crescendo of passion, the themes that accompany the lovers’ farewell.  The second, more cantabile melody is particularly memorable:  for its first appearance, Prokofiev asked for a viola d’amore, with its fuller and richer sound.  This archaic instrument had already been used to suggest love in a Renaissance setting by nineteenth-century composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, in his immensely popular opera Les Huguenots (1836).  Prokofiev’s musical fabric then segues into the scene where Juliet stages her death:  a four-note ostinato builds up tension, while low woodwinds and double basses spell out the theme associated in the complete ballet with Friar Laurence’s apparent-death potion.  The potion theme shares the initial arpeggiation of the theme of the Capulets, so Juliet’s family is again casting its sinister shadow.  But we also get a glimpse of Juliet’s more hopeful thoughts, with a recollection of the dream-like theme from “Juliet as a Young Girl.”  The sixth movement, the “Dance of the Girls with Lilies” serves as a temporary diversion, but with “Romeo at Juliet’s Grave,” we reach the emotionally charged epilogue of the story.  Romeo’s despair over discovering Juliet’s body is scored to a gut-wrenching elaboration of the poison theme, where the cantabile theme from the love scene then resurfaces.  We then hear again the theme from “Juliet as a Young Girl,” set pianissimo in the violins, as Juliet wakes up.  And since this is where the masterful Suite ends, you are free to choose what happens next:  will Juliet discover Romeo’s dead body and commit suicide, as in Shakespeare’s original play and in Prokofiev’s ballet as it was performed?  Or will Friar Laurence have stopped Romeo from killing himself, so that the lovers can be reunited, as Prokofiev had first imagined?  The listener is left to interpret the future.

Dmitri Shostakovich:  Symphony No. 9 in E flat Major, Op. 70 (1945)

Unlike Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich — who was just eleven at the time of the October Revolution — spent his whole life in Soviet Russia, and struggled throughout his career to reconcile his often-irreverent musical personality with loyalty to his country.  Although he did suffer stringent official condemnation (in 1936 he was viciously attacked for his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, and after World War II he was targeted by the infamous repression campaign led by Andrey Zhdanov), he was not really a secret dissident:  Testimony, the alleged memoir published four years after his death that suggested so, is generally considered to be a fabrication by its editor, Simon Volkov.

World War II, during which the Soviet Union contributed at an enormous human cost to the defeat of the Third Reich, prompted Shostakovich’s most deeply heartfelt patriotic composition, the colossal Seventh Symphony, “Leningrad” (1941), which was written as his hometown was enduring possibly the most deadly siege in military history.  The Eighth Symphony (1943) had a similarly epic tone and proportions.  Between 1944 and 1945, Shostakovich was planning — and also expected — to conclude his wartime trilogy with an equally monumental Ninth celebrating Soviet victory.  To the perplexity and even dismay of some of his contemporaries, the Ninth Symphony he ended up composing (and which was first performed in November 1945) was nothing of the sort.  Instead, it was the diametrical opposite:  concise, understated, and playful.

The opening Allegro of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9 is a brilliant exercise in classical sonata form.  The exposition, in particular, is pellucid.  Both the first and second themes have incisive, tonally unambiguous incipits.  A trombone, a snare drum, and a piccolo, none of which had been heard before, make the appearance of the second theme stand out:  if the resulting marching-band sound might seem un-Classical, it is also true that the surprise effect it has on the listener is very much in the spirit of Franz Joseph Haydn — the “father of the symphony” who loved this sort of musical joke.  For maximum clarity, the exposition is repeated, as in the most canonical examples of classical form.  After a wonderfully imaginative development comes a recapitulation with a tweak:  the first trombone seems impatient to launch the second theme (which is also in a different key than expected), and tries for five times to interrupt the rest of the orchestra, which is still busy with the first theme.  The slow movement is a Moderato built on the contrast between an eloquent cantilena, first given to a solo clarinet, and the tormented sighs of the string section.  The following Presto movement is a vertiginous scherzo that again uses the full palette of the orchestra to great effect (including trumpets, trombones, tuba, and percussion, all of which were silent during the Moderato).  The fourth movement, an instrumental recitative for solo bassoon marked Largo and framed by powerful incantations by unison trombones, is somewhat puzzling.  It recalls the symphonic tradition of instrumental recitatives that mimic a stentorian voice and set the tone for some rousing peroration of high political or ethical significance:  think, for example, of the recitative for cellos and basses in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the one for trombone in Hector Berlioz’s Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale, which prepare the “Ode to Joy” and a chorus honoring the dead of France’s July Revolution, respectively.  (In his Third Symphony, “The First of May” (1930), Shostakovich had similarly written a recitative for three unison trombones that had a touch of irony to it, but it was followed by an earnest choral exaltation of Workers’ Day.)  The bassoon recitative of the Ninth seems at first genuinely solemn, even though the bassoon’s timbre is hardly heroic, and one wonders for an instant whether the Symphony is eventually going to pay tribute to the Soviet Union’s victory.  But, instead of some grandiloquent chorus, what ensues — the final Allegretto — is a sort of popular dance that gradually builds up to a jubilant whirlwind.  Ultimately, then, this Ninth Symphony does celebrate the end of the war:  simply and deliberately, though, as it eschews officialdom and captures the spontaneous popular sentiment of joy and relief.

—  Notes by Tommaso Sabbatini

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We rehearsed at Symphony Center!

The USO started off the year with a rehearsal at the beautiful Symphony Center, home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. For this Halloween concert, get ready for Tchaikovsky, Wagner, John Williams, and Lord of the Rings!

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Blank Space by Taylor Swift featuring J. S. Bach

Covered by Well-Strung

Who’s on your long list of lonely Starbucks ex-lovers?

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Program Notes for the 2015 Annual Cathy Heifetz Memorial Concerts

USO Program Notes – May 30 and 31, 2015

“Sublime Spirit, thou gavest them all;  thou gavest them Shakespeare and Milton, thou gavest them Westminster Abbey so that both great and small might be comfortably buried there, thou gavest them fleets and oceans, India and China, thou madest them supreme above all other nations.  Sublime Spirit, thou gavest them all—but not music!  The English can neither sing nor play music.  An Englishman will sooner learn how to earn a million pounds than how to keep a tune in his head.”  Though this judgment of English musical talent may seem severe to a contemporary reader—especially one attending a concert comprised exclusively of British works—Romantic author and traveler Georg Weerth was not alone in his detestation of English music.  Around the same time, for example, German poet Heinrich Heine returned from his own British expedition in 1840 with an even harsher appraisal of English artistic intuition: “There is verily nothing on earth so terrible as English musical composition, except English painting.  They have neither an accurate ear nor a sense of color, and sometimes I am befallen by the suspicion that their sense of smell may be equally dull and rheumy;  it is quite possible that they cannot distinguish horse-apples from oranges by the smell alone.”  One wonders whether this last was a standard test of cultural refinement.  

Regardless of its collective sense of smell, England remained infamous as a society that consumed but could not produce any of the art music celebrated in mainland Europe’s concert halls.  Despite numerous attempts by British musicians to produce an enduring English national style, the country’s last internationally esteemed composer was often cited as Henry Purcell, from the Baroque era.  This weekend’s musical selections, however, do not hail from the era Weerth and Heine were describing, but from a few generations later, in the first half of the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, little about the region’s international musical reputation had changed by the start of Edward Elgar’s and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ lifetimes.  In 1904, an author named Oskar Adolf Hermann Schmitz wrote a book entitled Das Land ohne Musik: “I have long tried to understand what kind of lack it is that manifests itself in so many English representations that have such a deadening effect.  I have asked myself what is missing from this nation: kindness, love of people, humor or aesthetic sense?  No, one can find all these attributes in England, some of them more noticeably than among ourselves.  Finally I have found something that distinguishes English people from all other cultures to quite an astonishing degree…The English are the only cultured nation without its own music.”

British concertgoers themselves did not especially respect their concert music either, preferring German and other continental compositions to domestic ones.  Vaughan Williams himself contemplated this trend in a 1912 essay entitled “Who Wants the English Composer?”  He answers: “Nobody wants the young English composer.  He is unappreciated at home and unknown abroad…The English composer is not and for many generations will not be anything so good as the great Masters.”

By the turn of the twentieth century, England had only become more “supreme over other nations” since Weerth’s 1844 description above; by the time of Vaughan Williams’ essay, his nation was arguably the most economically and industrially progressive power in Europe and the most expansive colonial presence the world has ever seen.  By 1922, the British Empire claimed domination over about 458 million people, covering one quarter of the earth’s populated area, with London simultaneously establishing itself as the financial capital of the world.  As a result, England’s distinctive linguistic, political, and cultural mores spread rampantly.  It is ironic, then, that the English musical scene at this time was colonized primarily by German composers.  Some attribute this creative lacuna to the very progressiveness that earned England its economic eminence, as the early elimination of royal patronage systems prevented British composers from pursuing their careers as uncompromisingly as other Europeans;  others cite the general conservatism in its musical educational institutions, likely a remnant of Puritanism with its emphasis on very simple (and largely choral) styles.  

The tides finally began to turn, however, with the establishment of the Royal College of Music in London in 1882, first conceived by composer Sir Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan) and headed by Sir George Grove (originator of the still-ubiquitous Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians).  The RCM explicitly aimed “to establish for the United Kingdom…a School which shall do for the musical youth of Great Britain what those Schools are doing for the talented youth of Italy, Austria, France, Germany, and Belgium.”

Though the RCM indeed began to achieve these aims, it was actually a young composer educated entirely independently of either British or Continental conservatories who inaugurated what has been dubbed the “English Musical Renaissance.”  This composer, Edward Elgar, is hailed as one of the first to successfully combine contemporary compositional techniques with the unique musical traditions and aesthetics of his homeland.  Even the highly critical German orchestras began to perform British music: conductor Hans Richter called Elgar’s Enigma Variations “the greatest symphony of modern times, written by the greatest composer.”  As this concert’s program will demonstrate in abundance, this English style established by our two featured composers is emotionally powerful, shrewdly crafted, and undeniably distinctive in the face of the German and French styles from the same era.  Today’s selections provide a diverse set of English portraits—from bustling London streets to the pastoral beauty of its distinctive countryside.

Despite the melodic magnificence, harmonic complexity, and originality of works like the ones on today’s program, controversy over the caliber of the composers from the English Musical Renaissance rages on.  To end with one entertaining example: Benjamin Britten, perhaps the most widely performed English composer on the international stage (a stage indisputably set by these two important predecessors) reminds us that there is no accounting for taste: “I am absolutely incapable of enjoying Elgar for more than two minutes,” Britten once remarked.  He conceded a few years later, however, that “the best way to make me like Elgar is to listen to him after Vaughan Williams.”

Edward Elgar:  Cockaigne Overture (In London Town), 1901

Edward Elgar was born in 1857 in a small town outside of Worcester to a poor but musical family.  His father was a shopkeeper and piano tuner for many of the wealthy households of Worcestershire, providing an income and a social network that enabled each of his seven children to grow up with a robust music education.  Edward, the fourth child in the household, became singularly proficient both as a violinist and as a keyboardist, and he began composing at a young age.  Raised Catholic (in an overwhelmingly Protestant country), Elgar recalls that his “first music was learnt in the Cathedral…from books borrowed from the music library, when I was eight, nine or ten.”  Though he dedicated months to learning German in hopes of studying at the Leipzig Conservatory, his family could not provide enough support for the journey.  Instead, Elgar continued his largely autodidactic musical pursuits at home while working a day job as a clerk at a local solicitor’s office.  Many Elgar enthusiasts cite this misfortune as a stroke of luck for the young composer, as he was able to develop his own unique approach to composition and immerse himself in the internationally unappreciated musical communities of his homeland.

Slowly, however, Elgar became able to support himself with purely musical pursuits, joining the local Glee Club, freelancing as a violinist, and taking up small composing duties around Worcester.  At age twenty-two, he eagerly accepted a position as conductor of the attendants’ band at the Worcester and County Lunatic Asylum, just outside of the city.  As the The Musical Times recalled in 1900, “This practical experience proved to be of the greatest value to the young musician…He acquired a practical knowledge of the capabilities of these different instruments…He thereby got to know intimately the tone color, the ins and outs of these and many other instruments.”

Elgar’s ascent to international stardom remained a gradual one—it took twenty years after his advantageous Lunatic Asylum appointment for the composer to gain more than regional recognition.  This recognition came in abundance, however, upon his composition of The Enigma Variations (Op. 36), first performed in London in 1899 and soon thereafter in cities across Europe.  By the time Richard Strauss publicly described Elgar as “a composer of real genius,” England’s reputation as “the land without music” finally began to dissolve after two centuries of denigration.  As The Cologne Gazette put it after the first performance of The Enigma Variations there, “Elgar stands on the shoulders of Berlioz, Wagner, and Liszt, from whose influences he has freed himself until he has become an important individuality.  He is one of the leaders of musical art of modern times.”

A matter of months after the resounding success of The Enigma Variations, Elgar composed three additional major works, one of which is tonight’s Cockaigne Overture, which paints a vivid and exciting musical portrait of fin-de-siècle London for Elgar’s international audience.  As Elgar explained, “it’s cheerful and Londony, stout and steaky.”  The portrait also contains an element of fantasy;  though “Cockaigne” had become associated humorously with London by Elgar’s time (perhaps because of its similarity to the word “cockney”), the term originally referred to a mythical land of plenty, often used by British moralists as a metaphor for gluttony and drunkenness.  After a rough premiere of Elgar’s previous work The Dream of Gerontius, where the composer famously despaired at the orchestra’s inability to play the complex score by exclaiming, “I always said God was against art,” the Cockaigne Overture is certainly a musical excursion into a markedly more secular setting.  As Elgar put it, “Here is nothing deep or melancholy—it is intended to be honest, healthy, humorous and strong, but not vulgar.”

Elgar contributed a detailed program for the piece, with the opening theme portraying “the cheerful animation of the London streets,” a secondary “citizen” theme that bears the first recorded instance of Elgar’s signature musical indication, “nobilmente,” and a scene of lovers flirting under the trees of a public garden as a military band emerges from around the corner.  There are brief excursions to the countryside as well, providing sweeping pastoral moments to contrast the increasingly exciting city scenes.  Whether based on fantasy or reality, the Cockaigne Overture is a joyful and exciting tribute to London and its people, and remains one of Elgar’s most popular orchestral works.

Ralph Vaughan Williams:  Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 (1905), March Past of the Kitchen Utensils from The Wasps (1909), and Dona Nobis Pacem (1936)

Fifteen years Elgar’s junior, Ralph Vaughan Williams grew up around London as the youngest child of three raised by his single mother.  Although Ralph was interested in music from a young age, a number of his earlier teachers doubted that he had any talent.  His cousin recalled overhearing his piano teacher describe “that foolish young man, Ralph Vaughan Williams, who would go on working at music when he was so hopelessly bad at it.”  Vaughan Williams was aware of this opinion of his potential, and dedicated himself to studying composition in an impressive plurality of ways.  He enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music mentioned earlier, studying under composer Charles Villiers Stanford and befriending fellow student Gustav Holst, then traveling to Cambridge, where he studied alongside Bertrand Russell.  The aspiring composer looked inwards as much as he looked outwards to develop a sophisticated but authentic English musical style:  he directed an unprecedented amount of energy towards collecting British folksongs from the gradually disappearing oral traditions, but also traveled to mainland Europe to study with Bruch in Germany and Ravel in France.  He openly expressed his equal enthusiasm for “high” and “low” art, maintaining that music’s purpose was to speak to a diversity of human experiences.  As he noted, “the composer must not shut himself up and think about art, he must live with his fellows and make his art and expression of the whole life of the community—if we seek for art we shall not find it.”

Like Elgar’s, Vaughan Williams’ career got off to a slow start, only contributing collections of English folk music and hymnals until his first composition was published at age 30.  The Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 (1905) was his first published work to incorporate direct quotations of the English folksongs he collected.  There were originally three Norfolk Rhapsodies intended to comprise a type of English folksong symphony, but only the one being performed today survives in its entirety.  The first Rhapsody begins with an introduction based on two folksongs, “The Captain’s Apprentice” and “The Bold Young Sailor,” followed by an Allegro incorporating three more: “A Basket of Eggs,” “On Board a Ninety-eight,” and “Ward, the Pirate.”  Overall, the piece provides a beautiful and diverse portrait of the Norfolk plains that serves as an evocative complement to Elgar’s city scene in the Cockaigne Overture.

Dona Nobis Pacem was written more than three decades after the rest of the works on today’s program, and received its premiere in 1936.  Vaughan Williams lost numerous friends in the carnage of the First World War and saw a second war lurking.  He composed this cantata for the centenary of the Huddersfield Choral Society as a plea for universal peace, his sights no longer focused merely on the residents of England but on all audiences in need of comfort in the face of fear and heartache.  He remained idealistic throughout the crises, insisting that music was the most powerful way to preserve civilization and promote peace.  The cantata incorporates a diversity of compositional approaches to express the diversity of wartime experiences, incorporating both cutting-edge uses of dissonance as well as simple melodies taken straight from the folk-centered style he cultivated earlier in his career.  The texts are equally diverse, ranging from Biblical verses to passages by American poet Walt Whitman and British orator John Bright.  The title, taken from the final movement of the Latin mass, was not included to convey a primarily sacred message, but rather serves as an eloquent and urgent cry for piece.

The first section, Agnus Dei, begins forcefully with such a cry by the solo soprano. The section’s tension builds until “Beat, beat, drums!” (Whitman) bursts forth and war erupts.  After percussive waves evocative of battle and accompanying wild fanfares from the brass section, the movement subsides in another movement set to Whitman’s text, “Reconciliation.”  It is a poignantly beautiful lullaby for the dead: “Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost, / That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly, softly, wash again and ever again this soiled world.”  After the following powerful “Dirge for Two Veterans,” which Vaughan Williams had composed years earlier after the traumas of the previous World War, comes “The Angel of Death,” taken from the famous speech of John Bright and the Book of Jeremiah.  The chorus’ basses sing from Micah: “Nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”  A soprano solo resurges at the end of the movement, at once nostalgic and hopeful.  The final section incorporates a medley of Biblical verses, beginning in Vaughan Williams’ earlier pastoral style and eventually erupting into a final glorious prayer for peace between a cappella chorus and solo soprano.  While the oratorio’s pleas for love and reconciliation were by no means satisfied at the time, the oratorio was performed at countless festivals and concerts in the years leading up to WWII.  It has also transcended its historical circumstance, still serving as an incredibly powerful musical response to the fear of impending war and a call to unite the citizens of the world—regardless of their national affiliations, their political attitudes, or even their previous doubts about the profound aesthetic potential of English concert music.  

–– Program Notes by Lindsay Wright

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Adults play their childhood instruments after a long hiatus.

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When I accidentally play something right and my teacher asks how I did it

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The morning of a performance

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Well it’s not called Department of Geophysical Sciences (DoGS!) for nothing.

Courtesy of Overheard at UChicago.

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Solos