Power Truth To

Home , Benjamin Britten, George Szell, Jaap van Zweden, Jean Martinon

Program

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

Thursday, May 22, 2014, at 8:00 Friday, May 23, 2014, at 8:00 Saturday, May 24, 2014, at 8:00

Jaap van Zweden Conductor

Britten TRUTH TO Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia from Peter Grimes, Op. 33a and b POWER Dawn Sunday Morning Moonlight Storm Passacaglia

Intermission

Shostakovich Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60 (Leningrad) Allegretto Moderato (Poco allegretto) Adagio Allegro non troppo

The Truth to Power Festival is made possible with a generous leadership gift from The Grainger Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Richard and Mary L. Gray; U.S. Equities Realty, LLC and the Susan and Robert Wislow Charitable Foundation; Mr. & Mrs. Richard J. Franke; and The Wayne Balmer Grantor Trust. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBEZ 91.5FM for its generous support as media sponsor of the Truth to Power Festival. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to 93XRT, RedEye, and Metromix for their generous support as media sponsors of the Classic Encounter series. 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

Benjamin Britten Born November 22, 1913, Lowestoft, Sussex, England. Died December 4, 1976, Aldeburgh, England. Four sea Interludes and Passacaglia FROM Peter Grimes, op. 33a and b

Britten set Peter Grimes, Th e B o r o ghu was the inspiration for Britten’s his fi rst major opera, in a opera. Th e interludes depict more than scenery; small fi shing village that in them we sense the plight of an outsider in could easily be the seaside an unsympathetic society—“he lived from all town of Aldeburgh in mankind apart,” Crabbe writes of Grimes—and Suff olk, which he helped the painful alienation that lies at the heart of all to make famous. Britten Britten’s work. was born some twenty Here’s the synopsis of the opera Britten pro- miles up the coast from vided for the opening-night audience: Aldeburgh, and he eventually established his own music festival In the life of his Suff olk fi shing-town Peter there. [Our cover art work depicts Maggi Grimes fi ts uneasily. He lives alone— Hambling’s Scallop Shell on the Aldeburgh shore. visionary, ambitious, impetuous, poaching Th e sculpture, which celebrates Benjamin and fi shing without caution or care for Britten, is pierced with a line from Peter Grimes consequences, and with only one friend in (see “CSO cover art” on page 1).] Th e sea is a town—the widowed schoolmistress, Ellen powerful presence in Peter Grimes—it dominates Orford. He is determined to make enough Britten’s characters, just as it has controlled life money to ask her to marry him, though too in Aldeburgh (of the fi ve streets that once ran proud to ask her till he has lived down his parallel to the coastline, two are now sub- unpopularity and remedied his poverty. merged). As the fi nal curtain falls, even the individual tragedy of Peter Grimes is washed He fi shes with the aid of an apprentice, away by the great, ceaseless tide. bought, according to the custom of the time, In the orchestral interludes which divide the from the workhouse. In the prologue, he scenes of Peter Grimes, Britten has painted the is chief witness in an inquest on his fi rst sea in all its “terrifi c splendour”—the phrase apprentice and the verdict is accidental of George Crabbe, the Aldeburgh poet whose death. In act 1 he is boycotted but obtains a

ComPoseD Moonlight four horns, three trumpets, three 1944–45 April 19 & 20, 1962, Orchestra Hall. trombones, tuba, timpani, side walter Hendl conducting drum, cymbals, gong, tambourine, FIrst PerFormanCe xylophone, tubular bells, harp, June 7, 1945; London, england most reCent celesta, strings Cso PerFormanCes FIrst Cso PerFormanCes Four Sea Interludes aPProXImate Dawn June 9, 10 & 11, 2005, Orchestra Hall. PerFormanCe tIme November 28 & 29, 1946, Orchestra Manfred Honeck conducting 23 minutes Hall. George Szell conducting July 17, 2013, ravinia Festival. James Cso reCorDIng Sunday Morning and Storm Conlon conducting 1967. Jean Martinon conducting. (From July 13, 1946, ravinia Festival. william the Archives, vol. 12: A Tribute to Jean Steinberg conducting InstrUmentatIon two ﬂ utes and two piccolos, two Martinon) [Four Sea Interludes] November 28 & 29, 1946, Orchestra oboes, two clarinets and e-ﬂ at clarinet, Hall. George Szell conducting two bassoons and contrabassoon,

2 second apprentice, whom Ellen goes to fetch the sea from different vantage points. The inter- for him and promises to care for. In act 2 she lude opens with a clear, high theme—like the discovers he has been using the boy cruelly. fine line dividing the water and the sky at dawn. Led by the rector, the men of the borough go Clarinet and harp arpeggios suggest the spray to investigate his of the waves, while quiet chords in the brass and hut. Frightened, low strings hint of a terrible undercurrent, even Peter takes the in the warming glow of dawn. This music returns boy down the at the opera’s end, to start another day, oblivious scar of a recent to Grimes’s suicide. landslide under Aldeburgh is in Constable country, and, in which he moors the second interlude, Sunday Morning, it’s easy his boat, and the to picture a lone church steeple against the wide boy falls down sky. This is the music that opens act 2: villagers the cliff. When it hurry through town on their way to church; the is discovered that sea sparkles in the sun. Four horns in pairs sound the boy is dead, a the ringing of the bells (they’re later joined by George Crabbe, the hue-and-cry from actual bells). Soon the streets are empty—a cloud Aldeburgh poet whose The the borough sets seems to have covered the sun. Borough was the inspiration out to find Peter, The final act of the opera opens in the calm of for Britten’s opera who commits night, with the moon shining over still waters. suicide by scuttling Moonlight, the third interlude, depicts not only his boat just out of sight of the town. This the sea’s repose (and, in the harp and flutes, the is in the small hours of the morning. The glimmer of the moon on the waves), but also its borough wakes up and goes on with its life underlying menace. The fourth interlude, Storm, as usual. links the two scenes of act 1. Alone, watching fierce clouds approach over the sea, Peter sings: ritten’s interludes are distinct from the rest of the opera (they are to be played What harbor shelters peace, with the curtain down), yet they’re Away from tidal waves, away from storms? Bindispensable to its meaning and impact—in What harbor can embrace that sense, they’re like the prose poems with Terrors and tragedies? which Virginia Woolf introduces each section With her there’ll be no quarrels, of her novel The Waves. After the triumphant With her the mood will stay. premiere of Peter Grimes on June 7, 1945, Britten Her breast is harbor too, realized that the interludes could stand alone as Where night is turned to day. evocative sea pictures, and he selected four to be played as a suite. The extensive passacaglia that The storm breaks and the music rises to a ter- links the two scenes of act 2 is often added at the rible climax. It finally subsides, in slow phrases end, as it is this week, as a powerful postlude. of eerie calm, but Grimes’s equilibrium is upset, The first interlude, Dawn, links the prologue and he soon comes to realize that his dreams are and the first scene of act 1, which opens on a beyond his reach. The concluding passacaglia street by the sea. Britten’s music is both beautiful weaves layer upon layer of ever-changing music and terrifying—it suggests the powerful paint- over a simple theme, introduced by pizzicato ings by J.M.W. Turner, the great English artist low strings and then lingering at the end, after of the nineteenth century who bought several a shattering outburst, suddenly eerily quiet houses so that he could watch the sun rise over and alone.

3 Dmitri shostakovich Born September 25, 1906, Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Russia. Died August 9, 1975, Moscow, Russia. symphony no. 7 in C major, op. 60 (Leningrad)

Shostakovich composed Leningrad Symphony. As Sandburg suggested, it most of his seventh was “music written with the heart’s blood.” symphony in Leningrad, Although the members of Leningrad’s most his birthplace, during the prestigious artistic institutions, including siege of the city that the conservatory and the philharmonic, were ultimately took nearly a evacuated that summer, Shostakovich chose million lives—roughly to stay in Leningrad, racing with his family to one-third of its the air raid shelters and returning to his desk at inhabitants—as a result of home to continue his symphony. “Even during hunger, cold, and air air raids he seldom stopped working,” his wife raids. Shostakovich, already a world-famous Nina wrote. “If things began looking too hot, he composer, joined the war eff ort in late June 1941, calmly fi nished the bar he was writing, waited right after the Nazi invasion. His time was until the page dried, neatly arranged what he divided between digging ditches throughout the had written, and took it down with him into the city and making arrangements of light music to bomb shelter.” Th e fi rst movement was completed be played at the front. He began writing his new on September 3. He originally had intended symphony on July 15. By the end of the month, it to stand alone as a symphonic poem, but he he was reassigned to the fi re-fi ghting brigade at now recognized that it was merely the opening the Leningrad Conservatory, and he subse- chapter of a long and deeply personal work. Two quently was photographed in his fi reman’s outfi t, more movements were written at great speed. standing on the conservatory rooftop [see “Our art is threatened with great danger,” he said page 14]. (He made the cover of Time magazine on Leningrad radio that month. “We will defend that month wearing his fi re helmet.) As our music.” On October 1, having fi nished three intended, the image of a great composer ready to movements, Shostakovich was evacuated from defend his city and his people did not go unno- the city against his wishes. He later moved to ticed. Th e American poet Carl Sandburg wrote: Kuibyshev, in the Volga region, where he fi nished “Sometimes as a fi re warden you run to the the fi nale in December. streets and help put out the fi re set by Nazi Shostakovich’s eventual oﬃ cial statement, “I Luftwaff e bombs. Th en you walk home and write dedicated my Seventh Symphony to our fi ght more music.” Th e music was the seventh sym- against fascism, to our coming victory over the phony, soon to be known everywhere as the enemy, and to my native city of Leningrad,” is

ComPoseD most reCent aPProXImate 1941 Cso PerFormanCes PerFormanCe tIme November 29, 30, December 1 & 80 minutes FIrst PerFormanCe 4, 2007, Orchestra Hall. Semyon March 5, 1942; Kuibyshev, russia Bychkov conducting Cso reCorDIng 1988. Leonard Bernstein conducting. FIrst Cso PerFormanCes InstrUmentatIon Deutsche Grammophon August 22, 1942, ravinia Festival. three fl utes, alto fl ute and piccolo, Frederick Stock conducting two oboes and english horn, three clarinets, e-fl at clarinet and bass October 27, 29 & 30, 1942, Orchestra clarinet, two bassoons and contra- Hall. Hans Lange conducting bassoon, eight horns, six trumpets, six trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drums, bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam, tambourine, triangle, xylophone, piano, two harps, strings 4 reproduced on the first page of the printed score Toscanini and his NBC Symphony introduced the merely as “Dedicated to the city of Leningrad.” symphony to this country in a radio broadcast that Although Shostakovich originally gave titles to reached several million listeners—an unparal- the four movements—War, Remembrance, The leled event for a piece of new music. (Toscanini Wide Spaces of Our Land, and Victory—he later beat out both Koussevitzky and Stokowski discarded them and provided only a few hints for the right to give the Western premiere.) about the meaning of the music: Seldom has a new work received so much advance publicity and attracted so many listeners I. War breaks suddenly into our peaceful or caused such a stir. A number of the leading life. . . . The recapitulation is a funeral composers of the era who had immigrated to the march, a deeply tragic episode, a United States, including Schoenberg, Stravinsky, mass requiem. Hindemith, and Rachmaninov, tuned in to the July broadcast to hear what their colleague was II. A lyrical intermezzo . . . no program up to. Schoenberg complained that “with com- and fewer “concrete facts” than in the posing like this, one must be grateful that he has first movement. not already gone up to Symphony no. 77,” and Hindemith simply went to his desk to write a set III. A pathetic adagio with drama in the of fugues, the Ludus tonalis, as a way of clearing middle episode. the air. Béla Bartók listened to the broadcast from his summer cottage in Saranac Lake, New IV. Victory, a beautiful life in the future. York, and was so outraged by the repetitious first-movement march that he wrote a parody of he symphony was performed for the first it in his Concerto for Orchestra, on which he was time on March 5, 1942, in Kuibyshev, by then at work. the evacuated orchestra of the Bolshoi In August, Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony Theatre.T Three weeks later, it was played in came home to Leningrad. After the devastations Moscow. Within a month, the score was micro- suffered during the city’s first winter under siege, filmed, placed in a tin can, and secretly sent to the only the conductor and fourteen members of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra—the only group of musicians who, like Shostakovich, had resisted evacuation—were still alive. Qualified musicians were brought in from the front line to fill out the orchestra, and somehow they managed to learn Shostakovich’s demanding, emotionally draining new score. Three of the players died of starvation before the premiere. The Leningrad performance, on August 9, was defiantly broadcast over loud- speakers to the German troops camped outside the city. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra played the work for the first time, under Frederick Stock, later that month, on August 22, at a benefit con- Shostakovich with his wife Nina in 1932, the year of cert for the Russian War Relief at Ravinia. Stock their marriage, with their close friend Ivan Sollertinsky died a week before he was scheduled to conduct (Novosti) the symphony in Orchestra Hall that autumn; those performances, in late October, were led by United States, by plane and by car, in a circuitous the Orchestra’s associate conductor Hans Lange, route through Teheran, Cairo, and South America who unaccountably took an intermission between before ending up in New York City. On July 19, the second and third movements.

5 Program book cover for the August 22, 1942, Ravinia Festival performance

6 hostakovich had prepared a program for the piercing song of the E-flat clarinet. Both the this new symphony that was drawing opening and closing pages show Shostakovich’s international attention. “This is the simple, mastery of a solo melody over simple, repeated Speaceful life lived before the war,” he wrote of the accompaniment figures. first movement. The symphony opens confidently The slow movement begins with great resound- with a grand, striding unison theme—the voice ing chords—wonderfully scored for full winds of “people sure of themselves and their future.” and two harps—followed by an eloquent string But, later on, in the development section, melody, strong and bracing in its naked simplic- ity (the lower strings occasionally offer a single war bursts into the peaceful life of these note or chord as support). The solo flute provides people. I am not aiming for the natural- a second theme, over plucked strings. Again, a istic depiction of war, the depiction of the more vigorous middle section suggests that war is clatter of arms, the explosions of shells and not over. At the end, the strings take up the vast so on. I am trying to convey the image of wind chords with which the movement began. war emotionally. “My idea of victory isn’t something brutal,” Shostakovich said. “It’s better explained as the The first movement is dominated by this great victory of light over darkness, of humanity over marching music—what Shostakovich himself barbarism, of reason over reaction.” In the finale, called the “invasion episode.” The theme itself victory does not come at once. Shostakovich could hardly sound more innocuous at first, begins with little more than the timpani roll but it’s based on an aria from Franz Lehár’s The that concluded the slow movement, and gradu- Merry Widow, a favorite of Hitler. Eventually the ally adds other voices. A broad climax quickly invasion music becomes so menacing and forceful unwinds; a single viola line is left hanging. that it overwhelms both the striding theme Finally the music slowly and deliberately moves which opens the symphony and the delicate, toward a grand conclusion, sprinkled with brass almost Mahler-like lyrical section that follows. fanfares and cymbal crashes, and forces its way Bartók was not alone in attacking the numbing into C major—the traditional key of victory. repetition (over the span of 350 measures) and Even then, when the symphony’s opening theme Boléro-like crescendo of the march, over a relent- returns to crown the moment, it is chock-full of less snare-drum rhythm. (Bartók mocks the notes that have no place in C major, and the final theme in the fourth movement of his Concerto chords in that most brilliant of keys have a bitter for Orchestra, where it is greeted with squawks ring to them. of derision.) Shostakovich had anticipated a violent response even before he finished the first movement: “Let them accuse me, but that’s how I hear war,” he told a friend. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago There is irony and humor, of all things, in the Symphony Orchestra. second movement—necessary relief after the For more information on the CSO’s first performance of relentless opening Allegretto. There are hints Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, please visit our From of military music midway through, launched by the Archives blog at cso.org/fromthearchives/Shost7.