Wednesday Evening, October 15, 2014, at 8:00 Isaac Stern Auditorium/Ronald O. Perelman Stage Conductor’s Notes Q&A with Leon Botstein at 7:00 presents Marriage Actually LEON BOTSTEIN, Conductor RICHARD STRAUSS Four Symphonic Interludes from Intermezzo Reisefieber und Walzerszene (“Travel excitement and waltz scene”) Träumerei am Kamin (“Reverie by the fireplace”) Am Spieltisch (“At the gaming table”) Fröhlicher Beschluß (“Happy conclusion”) Parergon on Symphonia Domestica, Op. 73 MARK BEBBINGTON, Piano Intermission RICHARD STRAUSS Symphonia Domestica, Op. 53 Theme 1: Bewegt/Theme 2: Sehr lebhaft/ Theme 3: Ruhig Scherzo (Munter) Wiegenlied (Mäßig langsam) Adagio (Langsam) Finale (Sehr lebhaft) This evening’s concert will run approximately two hours and 10 minutes, including one 20-minute intermission. ASO’s Vanguard Series at Carnegie Hall is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. American Symphony Orchestra welcomes the many organizations who participate in our Community Access Program, which provides free and low-cost tickets to underserved groups in New York’s five boroughs. For information on how you can support this program, please call (212) 868-9276. PLEASE SWITCH OFF YOUR CELL PHONES AND OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICES. FROM THE Music Director Marriage Actually possibilities of music and turned it into by Leon Botstein a cheapened illustrative medium. The musical language of late Romanti- But this division was more ambiguous cism, its rhetoric and vocabulary, were than it appears. Wagner’s grandiose inspired in part by the 19th century’s theatrical ambitions inspired him to use fascination with what music as an art repetition and musical signature motives form could accomplish relative to other to generate a clear narrative arc in his art forms. The 19th century witnessed music. But at the same time, Wagner’s the development of the realist novel and love of myth and philosophical preten- of historical and genre painting; art was tions led him to ascribe a metaphysical being used to evoke idealized versions dimension to his music, idealist proper- of an imagined past, a threatened pre- ties beyond its purely descriptive func- sent, and real and familiar objects and tion. In this sense he was much closer to events. It was inevitable that the nature Mendelssohn and Brahms in his recog- of music would be interrogated with a nition of the special power of music view to finding out whether music too than the surface of the conflict suggests. could weave its own illusions of real- And Mendelssohn and Brahms, for ism, tell a story, and communicate emo- their part, may have worked within the tions. Could music be used as a form of traditional framework of forms such as narrative, or were its beauty and con- chamber music and symphony, but they tent simply formal in character? Could had no doubt as to the collective emo- music actually illustrate or portray tional power of music, which worked something, or was it purely an abstract by evoking musings and memories, sen- art form? sations and experiences, just as poetry and painting did. These philosophical musings occupied the first generation of Romantic com- Of the composers of the generation posers, particularly Mendelssohn and after Wagner and Brahms, Richard Schumann. Mendelssohn famously Strauss was the most representative of a argued counter-intuitively that music synthesis of the two opposing camps. was more “precise” than language. Strauss was, for a composer, among the These issues became contentious in the most sophisticated of readers and the 1850s and 1860s as a rift grew between keenest of observers. Influenced by the defenders of the formalist traditions Nietzsche, he had little use for religion. of the 18th century and the practition- As much as he admired Wagner, he ers of “program” music, composers eventually became disenchanted by who rejected forms such as the quartet Wagner’s mythic and philosophical and traditional symphony in favor of claims on behalf of music. Strauss was instrumental “tone poems” with liter- suspicious of grandiose metaphysical ary titles, and, predictably, music with and political dreams, in which music words, notably opera. Liszt and Wagner, was required to play a role, though at the leaders of the “New German” school, the same time, he was never in doubt were characterized by the formalists as about the power of the Classical and debasers of the high art of music, apos- Romantic traditions to depict and illu- tates who abandoned the unique formal minate the human experience. Strauss began his career as a young and suffering within its epic propor- composer sympathetic to Brahms. He tions. Strauss makes it plain that a com- then turned to opera and embraced the poser does not have to resort to gods Wagnerian. But ultimately the com- and heroes to ascend to the height of poser he most revered throughout his meaning. No wonder the radical realism career was Mozart. Of Strauss’ contem- of Strauss’ writing in Symphonia Domes- poraries, the most distinguished was tica infuriated Charles Ives, among oth- Gustav Mahler, who was, for much of ers, who found it brash and vulgar. his career, an avowedly confessional composer whose symphonies had spe- Symphonia Domestica premiered in cific programs, some drawn from his 1904 in New York during Strauss’ tour personal life. Tonight’s program reveals of the United States (which also permit- how Strauss used the personal, but, in ted the photographer Edward Steichen contrast to Mahler, not in a confes- to make a stunning portrait of the com- sional, psychological sense. The “char- poser). It also received two perfor- acters” in Symphonia Domestica may mances a month later in Wanamaker’s be his own wife and child, but in department store in New York, which Strauss’ hands the experience of daily somehow seems fitting, given its domes- life, from the quarreling to the love- tic subject matter. making, are rendered believable but accessible and familiar through music This work, one of Strauss’ last major to the audience; they are human arche- orchestral compositions, forms the types built out of the detail of Strauss’ basis of tonight’s concert. When it was everyday life. In this sense, the predica- written, Strauss and his wife were still a ments that unfold in Symphonia Domes- youngish couple with an infant son; tica resemble, as a source, the universal thus the narrative draws its episodes sensibilities that are evoked by Mozart’s from the daily life of a young family. The Marriage of Figaro. The Intermezzo interludes and the par- ergon were written much later, in the Using a huge and highly differentiated 1920s. By then Strauss was already orchestra, Strauss manipulates every regarded as an old master and possibly sonority and technique available to a an outdated one. He resented this bit- symphonic composer. A Liszt-like illus- terly. He was shunned by a new gener- trative strategy is integrated with tradi- ation of modernists because he never tional formal procedures of thematic lost faith in tonality and in the possibil- development, as was the case in many ities of the grand musical tradition of of Strauss’ famous tone poems. But in the 18th and 19th centuries. Like Brahms Symphonia Domestica Strauss reveals before him, Strauss developed a bitter- his sense of humor. He pokes fun at all sweet nostalgia about the world in those who seek to elevate music as an which he lived. He thought of himself abstract, profound experience “above” as a witness to a dying golden age. He the mundane. What he desires to show came to suspect that he was the last instead is that music, like all great art, exponent of a grand tradition. must (in the late Arthur Danto’s words) “transfigure the commonplace” in its own Strauss was unusually consistent, produc- way. The ordinary life of people can be the tive and disciplined as a composer. He basis of art, because real human life is the hated the social delusions and pretensions only subject worth examining through of “artsy” bohemian artists. He por- art. The work contains triumph, heart- trayed himself explicitly as an unapolo- break, love, remembrance, aspiration, getic bourgeois who was shamelessly absorbed with making money, copy- were not playing cards but when he was rights, card playing, and his comfort- composing or reading. Strauss was the able life at Garmisch. He made no heir to Mozart, who also displayed apologies for his egotism and had no wide contrast between his visible social doubt about his own superior talent. self-presentation and the complexity, subtlety, and humanity audible in his One aspect of his domestic life that music. There are indeed few composers never ceased to puzzle his friends and who have written instrumental music followers was his deep devotion to his that illuminates and penetrates the con- wife, the soprano Pauline de Ahna, tradictions, shortcomings, and sufferings whom very few people seemed to have of the human condition as consistently liked. She badgered and criticized him, and persuasively as the music of Strauss was imperious and thought herself and Mozart. socially superior to her husband, the descendent of a brewer. She was In this concert we hear Strauss’ reflec- offended by Intermezzo. But something tions over a 20-year period on marriage, worked between them; Strauss and love, family, human frailty, and jealousy, Pauline were married for 55 years, and as well as the fear of death. The music is she survived him by only 8 months. personal and becomes personal for the That Strauss was truly a family man, listener.