sign in sign up
<<
Home , Benno Walter, Cello Sonata (Strauss), CSO Resound, Four Last Songs, Franz Strauss, Hermann Hesse

Program

One Hundred Twenty-Third Season Chicago Symphony Music Director Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

May 14, 2014, at 6:30 (Afterworks Masterworks, performed with no intermission) Vladimir Jurowski Conductor Eugene Izotov Music by Serenade in E-flat Major, Op. 7 Oboe

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBBM Newsradio 780 and 105.9FM for its generous support of the Afterworks Masterworks series.

Thursday, May 15, 2014, at 8:00 Friday, May 16, 2014, at 1:30 Saturday, May 17, 2014, at 8:00 Vladimir Jurowski Conductor Eugene Izotov Oboe Dorothea Röschmann Soprano Music by Richard Strauss Serenade in E-flat Major, Op. 7 Metamorphosen

Intermission Allegro moderato— Andante— Vivace Eugene Izotov Frühling September Bein Schlafengehen Im Abendrot Dorothea Röschmann

These concerts are sponsored by Linda and Tom Heagy in memory of Ruth and Clarence Heagy. Additional support is provided by a generous anonymous donor. This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Comments by Phillip Huscher

ichard Strauss’s life spanned nearly a century, from the age of Wagner to that of Boulez. As a boy, he heard Clara Schumann play the piano, yet he outlived both Bartók and Webern. Strauss Rwas born the year Abraham Lincoln was reelected president of the United States; the year he died, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. Strauss’s career could not keep pace with the staggering changes that took place in music. He first made his name as a leader of the avant-garde: his tone carried orchestral music to unforeseen heights of descriptive writing and instrumental opu- lence, his early operas and brought modern music to the brink of ato- nality. But Strauss was uncomfortable in the role of revolutionary, and, shortly after 1910 he appeared to change direction. As early as 1916, when Stravinsky and Schoenberg were making news with their radical ideas, Strauss recognized that he no longer played a Richard Strauss, his son Franz, and his wife Pauline major role at the forefront of serious musical activity. “I’m the only nowadays,” he wrote that year, “with some real humor and a sense of fun and a marked gift for parody.” Strauss continued to write music in the German romantic tradition—music that still embraced melody and tonality—and he grew increasingly indifferent to even the most advanced trends. “Haven’t I the right, after all, to write what music I please?” he asked in 1924. “I cannot bear the tragedy of the present time. I want to create joy. I need it.” Although his immediately became staples of the orchestral literature and his new operas were always eagerly awaited, in many quarters Strauss was written off as a nostalgic figure from a bygone era—a composer with a grand and distinctive voice who simply had nothing to say. But Strauss, in fact, had the last word. Near the end of his life he recaptured something of his old creative fire and energy, and he enjoyed one final, glorious Indian summer—the time in which he composed the three major works on this week’s program: Metamorphosen, the Oboe Concerto, and the Four Last Songs. But to open this concert, we begin with a flashback to the earliest work in his catalog that is still performed with any regularity, the Serenade for Winds—a quick glance back more than sixty years to the music with which one of the greatest careers in music began.

2 richard Strauss Born June 11, 1864, , . Died September 8, 1949, Garmisch, Germany. Serenade in E-fl at major, op. 7

“My mother tells of my magnifi cently, though he detested every note. earliest childhood that I “Strauss is an unbearable fellow,” Wagner once used to react with a smile said, “but when he plays his , one cannot to the sound of the horn be cross with him.” Th e last time the two men and with loud crying to spoke, during rehearsals for , there was the sound of a violin,” some disagreement about a communal lunch for Richard Strauss wrote in the orchestra, and they ended up arguing over his old age. Small wonder, sour gherkins. for Richard’s father, the tried to protect his son from man who stayed home to Wagner’s music, but one day he came home and practice his music while other fathers went to the heard Richard playing through a score of Tristan offi ce, was perhaps the most famous horn player at the piano. Despite his father’s eff orts, Richard in Europe. Franz Strauss was the principal horn was infatuated with the Wagnerian music drama. of the Munich Court Orchestra—a post he held Although that realization caused a serious family for forty-two years—and he encouraged and squabble, it helped Richard to fi nd his own voice steered his son’s musical ambitions. Neither one as a composer. Years later, when Richard Strauss ever lost respect for the other, though they once was nearly as famous as Wagner, Franz had to came to blows over the music of . admit that he was now bewildered by his own Franz Strauss scrupulously orchestrated his son’s music; listening to Salome, he said, made son’s musical education. He asked his colleague him feel as if he had ants in his pants. August Tombo, the orchestra’s harpist, to give Richard piano lessons when he was barely four, trauss wrote his fi rst compositions when and four years later he persuaded his cousin he was six—a Christmas carol and a little to teach him the violin. Franz polka for piano—and from then on writing raised his son on the classics. Th ey read Goethe Smusic remained a favored pastime. “I was always together by the fi re, and they admired and played fonder of composing than studying,” he recalled. the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. (In later years, playing cards became his other (Schubert and Mendelssohn also were favor- passion.) Strauss’s earliest signifi cant works—a ites.) Franz hated Wagner—both the man and pedestrian string quartet and a sonata his music. When the Munich Opera gave the straightjacketed by textbook form, both com- fi rst performances of Tristan and Isolde and Die posed in the early 1880s—reveal his father’s taste Meistersinger, he played the important horn solos for classical forms. But with the more individual

ComPoSED moSt rECEnt InStrUmEntatIon 1881 CSo PErFormanCES two fl utes, two , two , november 27, 29 & 30, 1985, Orchestra two and , FIrSt PErFormanCE hall. Erich Leinsdorf four horns november 27, 1882; Dresden, germany July 22, 1988, ravinia Festival. Edo de aPProXImatE waart conducting FIrSt CSo PErFormanCES PErFormanCE tImE April 20 & 21, 1900, Auditorium 11 minutes Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting

3 serenade for thirteen winds that opens this and Mendelssohn on the one hand, yet also prov- all-Strauss concert, we find the first stirrings of ing himself an ambitious original thinker. Strauss the composer who would soon conquer concert tips his hat to his father by borrowing the most halls and opera houses around classical of structures, sonata the world. Even so, Strauss form, for his single-movement later dismissed the serenade design, and then, in the as “no more than the respect- recapitulation, by giving able work of a music student.” the luscious main theme to the horns. But although the trauss had just turned serenade is steeped in the seventeen when he past and colored by mem- composed his serenade. ory, heritage, and tradition, SIn it, Strauss stands at the it also opens the door to a crossroads, honoring the new career as big and bold obvious models by Mozart Richard and Franz Strauss as any we have known.

POWER AND DRAMA Riccardo Muti and the CSO at their best!

Available at Symphony Center, cso.org/resound, on iTunes, and in stores everywhere.

CSO Resound is underwritten by a generous gift from Mr. & Mrs. Ralph Smykal.

Global Sponsor of the CSO

4 richard Strauss Metamorphosen, Study for 23 Solo Strings

Arturo Toscanini said, in Weimar and Munich, he gave in to grief and “To Strauss the composer outrage—his world had collapsed. Virtually every I take off my hat; to major opera house or concert hall in his land was Strauss the man I put it now rubble. He wrote: on again.” Toscanini could never forget how Th e burning of the Munich Court Th eater, easily Strauss stepped in where Tristan and Die Meistersinger received to conduct the production their fi rst performances, where I fi rst heard of Wagner’s Parsifal at Freischütz seventy-three years ago, where my Bayreuth in 1933 from father sat at the fi rst horn desk for forty-nine which he himself had withdrawn to protest years—it was the greatest catastrophe of my Hitler’s ban on Jewish artists. While many life; there is no possible consolation, and, at important conductors and performers fl ed their my age, no hope. homelands rather than cooperate with the Nazi regime, Germany’s most famous living musician Strauss had led a charmed life. In a very real stayed put, absorbed in writing music while the sense, these were the most shattering personal world waged war around him. It was Strauss’s losses he ever experienced—the great master- misfortune to live at a time that would pit his pieces of German music were his childhood text- creative abilities against his understanding of the books and the halls and theaters themselves were larger issues of the world—in a country where familiar guideposts in the landscape he dearly music and politics became inseparable at the loved. Shortly after the bombing of Dresden, the height of World War II. last German city to fall, Strauss began this work, Shortly after the Parsifal episode, Joseph a of sorts for German civilization, for Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, strings alone. It was fi nished in one month—a appointed Strauss president of the new state month during which Strauss fi nally confronted music bureau without even asking him. From his past and once again became a great composer. that point on, Strauss could no longer lead the During this time, Strauss was reading the self-contained, private life he always had enjoyed. complete works of Goethe from cover to cover, Even his work and his family no longer off ered and that’s probably where he found his title, refuge—his new librettist, , fl ed Metamorphosen (Metamorphosis), for it was a to Switzerland because he was Jewish, cutting word Goethe often used, as late as the titles of short a promising collaboration, and the welfare two of his last poems. Strauss never explained of Strauss’s own daughter-in-law, also a Jew, was the choice; most listeners assume it refers to the now in danger. way he develops his musical material. But in a Despite the ways the war touched his own work that’s as personal as anything Strauss ever life and the lives of many people he knew, it was wrote (including such autobiographical pieces as ultimately through music that Strauss came to and the Domestic Symphony), it’s terms with the devastation of Nazi power. When inconceivable that his title doesn’t suggest a more he learned of the destruction of the opera houses profound kind of transformation.

ComPoSED FIrSt CSo PErFormanCES InStrUmEntatIon 1945 February 10 & 11, 1949, Orchestra hall. ten violins, fi ve , fi ve , conducting three basses FIrSt PErFormanCE January 25, 1946; zurich, Switzerland moSt rECEnt aPProXImatE CSo PErFormanCES PErFormanCE tImE December 10, 11 & 12, 2009, Orchestra 26 minutes hall. nicholas Kraemer conducting

5 After he had begun work on this score, Strauss ith its dense chromaticism, intri- recognized the similarity between one of his main cate , and Wagnerian musical ideas and the famous funeral march from drive sweeping toward a great Beethoven’s Eroica climax,W Strauss’s score is a memorial to a Symphony. Like a type of music that had been abandoned long great novelist, he before 1945. Metamorphosen might well have made the most of been composed thirty or forty years earlier, sheer coincidence for Strauss had disdained all the more recent and even allowed the trends. After writing the early tone poems cellos and basses to (brilliantly launched by ) and the quote Beethoven’s spectacular operas Salome and Elektra, Strauss theme in the final turned his back on the musical advances measures, where of the day. For the next three decades, his he wrote in his music seemed to stand still, locked in another manuscript: “In time. Metamorphosen succeeds so brilliantly Stefan Zweig Memoriam!” Another because Strauss at last found a way to address passage recalls a the present with the voice of the past. theme from King Two days after Strauss finished Metamorphosen, Mark’s lament in act 2 of Tristan and Isolde and its the Americans took Nürnberg, where Wagner’s appearance in this requiem for German musical Meistersingers once triumphed; two weeks later, culture is apt. Hitler killed himself.

6 richard Strauss oboe Concerto

Richard Strauss spent few days before the composer and his wife much of World War II Pauline took refuge in Switzerland, where Strauss behind closed doors, taking could continue his work in almost total isolation. refuge from the destruction Temporarily living in Baden, halfway between of his beloved Germany and Zurich, Strauss fi nished the score in and from the politics he less than six weeks. Th e premiere was given in didn’t completely under- Zurich in February 1946. stand. American soldiers arriving at the Garmisch ike Metamorphosen and the Four Last villa which he had built Songs that follow, the Oboe Concerto with the royalties from Salome were greeted with “I is part of the composer’s fi nal creative am the composer of Rosenkavalier; leave me alone.” Lfl owering. Unlike Metamorphosen, it doesn’t But Strauss befriended some of the Americans, and refl ect on the diffi cult times, but off ers, one of those he invited back was , instead, “shavings from an old man’s work- an oboist in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra shop, unassuming and written primarily with before he joined the army. (He later was a member a desire to entertain.” Still, like so much of of the ; Strauss inexplicably Strauss’s music, it touches on deeper feelings. referred to him as “an oboe player from Chicago.”) Th e three movements are carefully woven One evening, de Lancie asked Strauss if he had together into one continuous fl ow of song. In the ever considered writing an oboe concerto. Strauss fi rst, the oboe revels in the kind of high-fl ying said that he had not. Case closed. rhapsodic melody often found in his operas or in Characteristically, it was the devastation of the Four Last Songs. At the very beginning, Strauss musical landmarks—the bombing of the opera asks of his oboe what he would never expect of a houses at Dresden, Weimar, and Munich—that singer: fi fty-six measures of seamless melody, bro- made Strauss look up from his desk and acknowl- ken only once by a split-second rest. From there, edge that the world was no longer the place he the music proceeds, passing the time-honored once knew. In the spring of 1945, he responded to signposts of sonata form, directly into a serene and the horror of war with Metamorphosen, and then thoughtful andante, which refl ects on material we in May, after the surrender of Germany, he began have just heard. Not Ariadne, nor the Marschallin this oboe concerto for the American soldier. in , nor the Countess in (Although Strauss downplayed his workload at has a more sublime aria. A cadenza, occasionally the time, calling composition mere “wrist exer- accompanied by recitative-like chords, leads us to cises,” a sketchbook discovered in 1980 reveals the rondo fi nale, full of the high spirits and colora- how much he struggled over this score, even tura that Zerbinetta sprinkles throughout Ariadne completely rearranging the sequence of musical auf Naxos. Another cadenza and a lovely, lilting phrases before he was done.) coda bring us back to where we started. Th e preliminary score (the so-called short As it turned out, John de Lancie didn’t play the score which contains the notes, without details of fi rst performance in Zurich, but he was given the orchestration) was the last music written at the exclusive rights to perform the work in America Garmisch villa. It’s dated 14 September 1945—a until the score was published. ComPoSED moSt rECEnt aPProXImatE 1945, revised 1948 CSo PErFormanCES PErFormanCE tImE May 23, 24, 25 & 28, 2002, Orchestra 26 minutes FIrSt PErFormanCE hall. Alex Klein as soloist, Iván February 26, 1946; zurich, Switzerland CSo rECorDIng Fischer conducting 1998. Alex Klein as soloist, Daniel FIrSt CSo PErFormanCE InStrUmEntatIon Barenboim conducting. Teldec november 23, 1957, Orchestra hall. ray solo oboe, two fl utes, english horn, Still as soloist, conducting two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, strings 7 richard Strauss Four Last Songs

Strauss didn’t live to hear Eichendorff says—now facing death. Outwardly these songs performed, Strauss brushed aside all thoughts of his—and although in a sense it Pauline’s—mortality with his characteristic dry didn’t matter, for the wit. (A reporter in London, where Strauss went lovingly remembered, that fall to attend a festival of his music, asked long since faded soprano the eighty-three-year-old composer of his future of his wife Pauline was plans. “Oh,” Strauss said, without missing a the only voice he would beat, “to die.”) But the setting of Im Abendrot he have wanted to hear began that year suggests how deeply he felt about singing this music. a subject he couldn’t bring himself to address Richard Strauss and made except in music. an unusually powerful, if often volatile, match. He and Pauline had been through so much Th ey met in 1887—she was twenty-fi ve, he together, from the dazzling early successes (the twenty-three—before either of their careers had royalties from Salome alone built them the villa taken off , and once they married, seven years in Garmisch where they lived out their days) to later, they became the music world’s most cele- the public failure of his recent music and the fear brated couple, although his fame and success as and anxiety of the Hitler years, when the life of a composer continued to soar while her days as a his own Jewish daughter-in-law was in jeopardy. leading soprano would soon be over. Th e ups and By 1947, Strauss knew that their best times were downs of their long marriage were chronicled not over, and that the world he had once known and only in the stories fondly recalled by friends and loved and—perhaps more than any composer family, but also in Richard’s music itself, begin- of the twentieth century—conquered, was now ning with the full-length, not-always-fl attering almost unrecognizable. But he had no way of portrait of Pauline played by the solo violin in putting all that into music until an admirer gave Ein Heldenleben in 1899, and climaxing, in 1924, him a book of poetry by Hermann , the when Richard turned one of their habitual mari- 1946 recipient of the for literature. tal spats into his new opera, . Strauss read Hesse’s poems not only with the In the autumn of 1947, their marriage stron- thrill of discovery (Hesse wasn’t yet widely ger than ever (inexplicably to many who had known, and far from the cult fi gure he would witnessed its daily storms) after fi fty-three years become), but also with the pain of recognition, in each other’s company, Strauss read a poem by for in these pages he saw himself and Pauline— Joseph Eichendorff that struck him like a thun- hand in hand—facing their last days together. derbolt. Im Abendrot tells of a couple at the end He immediately picked several poems to set to of their long lifetime together—hand in hand, as music. In the end he wrote just three songs that,

ComPoSED moSt rECEnt clarinets and bass , three bas- 1947–48 CSo PErFormanCES soons and contrabassoon, four horns, December 13, 14 & 15, 2001, Orchestra three , three , , FIrSt PErFormanCE hall. Jane Eaglen as soloist, Daniel harp, celesta, , strings May 22, 1950; London, Barenboim conducting aPProXImatE July 24, 2010, ravinia Festival. FIrSt CSo PErFormanCES PErFormanCE tImE renée Fleming as soloist, Christoph October 28 & 29, 1954, Orchestra hall. 25 minutes Eschenbach conducting as soloist, Fritz reiner conducting CSo rECorDIng InStrUmEntatIon 1977. as soloist, Sir georg soprano, three fl utes and two piccolos, Solti conducting. Decca (video) two oboes and english horn, two

8 together with Im Abendrot, extend his farewell to dictate his own final chapter. But Strauss had life and to love. He worked on virtually nothing always clung to his myths. At the end of Im else during the summer of 1948, and when these Abendrot, when Eichendorff wonders “Could songs were done, he found that he had little that be death?” Strauss changed das to dies, energy left. and, asking instead “Could this be death?” he The following May, Strauss and Pauline moved quotes the quiet, rising theme from his Death back to the Garmisch villa they had been forced and Transfiguration. to abandon at the In September, Strauss died at home in his height of the war. sleep. Pauline died the following May, just nine The night before his days before the premiere of her husband’s—and, eighty-fifth birthday, in the deepest sense, her—four last songs. They he somehow found were immediately acclaimed as among the very the strength to travel finest of Strauss’s achievements—music for which to Munich for the his entire career was preparation. Little in his dress rehearsal of output can match the beauty and depth of these Der Rosenkavalier, songs—from the transparency of the orchestral which had provided writing, with its burnished horn solos and shim- one of the greatest mering birdsong, to the radiant soprano lines— triumphs of his rising on Lüften (skies), taking off in breathless Joseph Eichendorff career thirty-seven flight at Vogelsang (birdsong), and—in one of the years before. Strauss most unforgettable moments in music—soaring asked to conduct in phrases of pure rapture, to match the violin’s brief portions of the opera—a rather sad and lofty melody, at Seele (soul). dispiriting stunt that was captured on film, to the continuing detriment of his reputation as a few last words. Since Strauss never great conductor. dictated that these four songs were to In August, he had several mild heart attacks be performed as a set, he indicated no at his Garmisch home and began to fail quickly. particularA order. At the premiere, they were Near the end, he is reported to have turned to sung neither in chronological order nor in the his daughter-in-law sequence that is now customary. It was Ernst Alice and said, Roth, the composer’s friend and publisher, and “Dying is just as I the dedicatee of Im Abendrot, who later estab- composed it in Death lished the performance order and provided the and Transfiguration.” not-quite accurate title that has stuck, Four Last But that was a young Songs. In fact, we now know of a fifth song, man’s idea of death as written for voice and piano, Malven, that was a great, transcendent composed later in 1948 for the soprano Maria experience—a Jeritza, who kept it hidden in her New York spectacular apartment until her death in 1986, when it was ending provided discovered among her papers. A few measures for a blockbuster of sketches for yet another Hesse song were left tone poem by its unfinished on Strauss’s desk at his death. fearless and callow twenty-five-year-old composer. Sixty years later, Strauss was bedridden; Pauline had been an invalid for Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago some time. Despite his clever words, he couldn’t Symphony Orchestra.

9 VIER LETZTE LIEDER FOUR LAST SONGS

Frühling Spring In dämmrigen Grüften In somber shadows träumte ich lang I dreamed long von deinen Bäumen und blauen Lüften, of your trees, your blue skies, von deinem Duft und Vogelsang. of your fragrance, and the song of birds.

Nun liegst du erschlossen Now you lie revealed, in Gleiß und Zier, glistening, adorned, von Licht übergossen bathed in light wie ein Wunder vor mir. like a miracle before me.

Du kennst mich wieder, You recognize me, du lockst mich zart. you beckon gently; Es zittert durch all meine Glieder my limbs tremble deine selige Gegenwart. with your blessed presence.

Hermann Hesse

September September Der Garten trauert, The garden grieves, kühl sinkt in die Blumen der Regen. the cool rain sinks into the flowers. Der Sommer schauert The summer shudders still seinem Ende entgegen. and silently meets its end.

Golden tropft Blatt um Blatt Leaf upon leaf drops golden nieder vom hohen Akazienbaum, from the tall acacia tree. Sommer lächelt erstaunt und matt Wondering, faintly, summer smiles in den sterbenden Gartentraum. in the dying garden’s dream.

Lange noch bei den Rosen Long by the roses bleibt er stehen, sehnt sich nach Ruh. she lingers, yearning for peace. Langsam tut er die [großen] Slowly she closes her [wide] müdgewordenen Augen zu. wearied eyes.

Hermann Hesse

10 Beim Schlafengehen Going to Sleep Nun der Tag mich müd gemacht, Now made tired by the day, soll mein sehnliches Verlangen so my ardent desire shall freundlich die gestirnte Nacht warmly greet wie ein müdes Kind empfangen. like a tired child.

Hände, laßt von allem Tun, Hands, cease your doing, Stirn, vergiß du alles Denken; brow, forget all thought; alle meine Sinne nun all my senses now wollen sich in Schlummer senken. would sink into slumber.

Und die Seele, unbewacht, And my soul, unguarded, will in freien Flügeln schweben, would soar free in flight, um im Zauberkreis der Nacht to live life deep a thousandfold tief und tausendfach zu leben. in night’s magic circle.

Hermann Hesse

Im Abendrot At Sunset Wir sind durch Not und Freude Through sorrow and joy gegangen Hand in Hand, we have walked hand in hand; vom Wandern ruhen wir [beide] now we are at rest from our journey nun überm stillen Land. above the silent land.

Rings sich die Täler neigen, The valleys descend all about us, es dunkelt schon die Luft, the sky grows dark; zwei Lerchen nur noch steigen only two larks yet soar nachträumend in den Duft. dreaming in the haze.

Tritt her und laß sie schwirren, Draw close and let them flutter; bald ist es Schlafenszeit, soon it will be time to sleep; daß wir uns nicht verirren let us not lose our way in dieser Einsamkeit. in this solitude!

O weiter, stiller Friede, O boundless, silent peace! so tief im Abendrot! So deep in the sunset! Wie sind wir wandermüde— How weary we are of our journeying— ist dies etwa der Tod? can this be death?

Joseph Eichendorff

Strauss omitted the words in brackets.

© 2014 Chicago Symphony Orchestra 11