Riccardo Muti Conductor Cherubini Overture in G Major Liszt Les
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Program ONe HuNDreD TweNTieTH 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 Friday, April 8, 2011, at 1:30 riccardo muti Conductor Cherubini Overture in G Major First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances Liszt Les préludes IntermIssIon shostakovich Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47 Moderato—Allegro non troppo—Largamente Allegretto Largo Allegro non troppo—Allegro Maestro Muti’s 2011 Spring Residency is supported in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Steinway is the official piano of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Comments by PHi LLiP HuSCHer Luigi Cherubini Born September 14, 1760, Florence, Italy. Died March 15, 1842, Paris, France. overture in g major n 1841, the year before he died, Beethoven and Haydn were in the ILuigi Cherubini had his portrait audience and spoke glowingly of painted by his close friend, the the work. Mendelssohn admired popular neoclassical artist Jean- Cherubini the opera composer for Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The “his sparkling fire, his clever and painting now hangs in the Louvre, unexpected transitions, and the where it is admired by millions of neatness and grace with which he visitors each year; it has become the writes.” Bruckner learned how to lasting image of a major composer write his own sacred music by copy- who is regularly overlooked, if not ing out movements of Cherubini’s nearly forgotten today. masses to study. Brahms, the most Born four years after Mozart, historically aware composer of and outliving Beethoven by fifteen the nineteenth century, revered years, Cherubini was a name to Cherubini, and he hung a copy of be reckoned with for a good half the Ingres painting on the wall of century. Beethoven, remarkably, his apartment (a large white bust of said that Cherubini was the greatest Beethoven, the only other composer composer among his contempo- so honored, sat over the piano). raries (which, just for the record, And Schumann said that “the more boasted a fair number of luminar- we come to understand him the ies, including Rossini). Beethoven more we come to respect him”— had written him an outright fan perhaps anticipating that one day letter about the opera Médée a people would make snap judgments decade before they finally met. on Cherubini’s importance based When Cherubini’s opera Faniska on knowing a mere fraction of his was staged in Vienna in 1806, both large output. In one of Schumann’s ComPosed InstrumentatIon aPProxImate 1815 one flute, two oboes, two PerFormanCe tIme clarinets, two bassoons, four 12 minutes FIrst PerFormanCe horns, two trumpets, three 1815, London trombones, timpani, strings These are the first CSO performances 2 most important essays as a critic, By the early years of the nine- he ranked Cherubini as “superior teenth century, Cherubini had as a harmonist to all his contem- already become that rarest of poraries,” calling him the “refined, musical figures at the time, an scholarly, interesting Italian whose international celebrity. So it is severe reserve of strength and hardly surprising that the new character sometimes leads me to Royal Philharmonic Society in compare him with Dante.” London asked him to write three Cherubini was born in Florence, works—an overture, a symphony, and he enjoyed success with both and an Italian vocal piece—for serious and comic operas in Italy its second season in 1815 and to and in London before moving come to London to oversee their to Paris in 1788. There he had a performance. The society had string of hits, including Lodoïska in been founded “to promote the 1791 and Médée in 1797 (decades performance, in the most perfect later Brahms still singled it out as manner possible of the best and “the work we musicians recognize most approved instrumental music,” among ourselves as the highest peak of dra- matic music”). His fame continued to spread. Les deux journées was so popular in Vienna that it was staged by two rival theaters on succes- sive nights. His most celebrated works were his so-called rescue operas, which were particularly apt during revolutionary times, when hairbreadth escapes were everyday occurrences. In the first years of the nineteenth century, when Beethoven decided to write an opera, Cherubini’s works were the obvious Luigi Cherubini and the Muse of Lyric Poetry. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1842 models. In fact, it was Emanuel Schikaneder’s staging of Lodoïska in Vienna in and its members wanted to prove 1802 that served as the immediate their seriousness by commission- inspiration for Beethoven’s Fidelio, ing the most important composers the only rescue opera that is still of the day. (Their track record performed today. is remarkable: both Beethoven’s 3 Ninth and Mendelssohn’s Italian quartet; it remains a rare visitor on symphonies were written at their concert programs in either version. request.) Cherubini was appar- The concert overture in G major ently the first composer the society that the Chicago Symphony plays approached—at the instigation of (for the first time) this week is one Muzio Clementi, the Roman-born of Cherubini’s finest works, a distil- piano sensation who then lived in lation of all he had learned writing England, and Giovanni Viotti, the overtures for the opera house. The famed violin virtuoso, who had only overture Cherubini wrote for first met the composer in Paris in the concert hall, it is dramatic—as the 1780s. “theatrical” as any opera overture— When Cherubini arrived in impassioned, impeccably crafted London on February 25, 1815, (this was a Cherubini hallmark), he had the overture and the vocal and highly inventive—a reminder work with him. (The symphony of how creativity flourished end- was written in March and April.) lessly within the supposedly limited The vocal piece, a cantata, Inno framework of classical style. It is a alla primavera, is almost never perfect curtain-raiser for a concert, performed today; the Symphony which is what Cherubini had in in D major, Cherubini’s only work mind, but it also opens a window in the benchmark classical form, for concertgoers today on a dis- was not a great success in London tinguished career that has largely and was later reworked as a string slipped from view. 4 Franz Liszt Born October 22, 1811, Raiding, Hungary. Died July 31, 1886, Bayreuth, Bavaria. Les préludes, symphonic Poem no. 3, after Lamartine n May 5, 1856, Liszt sent the toward a new frontier. Scholars and Onewly published scores of six musicians have argued over their of his symphonic poems, including comparative success ever since, Les préludes, to Richard Wagner. and, although it is Wagner, largely In return, Wagner sent off the by virtue of an advanced case of original scores to Das Rheingold self-promotion and a very modern and Die Walküre, followed by a understanding of public relations, letter full of kind words for Liszt’s who is generally seen as the greater newest efforts. The two compos- revolutionary, there are those who ers had been unusually close for would agree with the verdict of many years, each sometimes alone Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, who in appreciating what the other knew them both: “[Liszt] has was up to, although in the next hurled his lance much farther into decade, when Wagner fathered two the future than Wagner.” illegitimate children with Liszt’s In November of 1856, Liszt and daughter Cosima, the relation- Wagner took part in a concert ship was severely strained. But in in Saint Gallen, with Wagner 1856—Wagner never suspecting conducting the Eroica Symphony that he would one day have to and Liszt his own Orpheus and Les accept Liszt as his father-in-law— préludes. In 1856, Les préludes was they were united in pushing music new music: it had been finished ComPosed most reCent aPProxImate 1849–1855 Cso PerFormanCes PerFormanCe tIme May 10, 1992, Orchestra Hall. 16 minutes FIrst PerFormanCe Sir Georg Solti conducting February 23, 1854, weimar September 19, 2010, Cso reCordIngs Millennium Park. riccardo 1977. Daniel barenboim FIrst Cso Muti conducting conducting. Deutsche PerFormanCe Grammophon January 29, 1892, Auditorium InstrumentatIon 1992. Sir Georg Solti Theatre. Theodore three flutes and piccolo, two conducting. London Thomas conducting oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, harp, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, strings 5 and first performed only two years Without Les préludes and the rest before in Weimar. But it was also of the Liszt canon, Smetana’s Ma new in the more important sense vlást, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and of modern, fresh, and novel. That Juliet, and Strauss’s Death and is sometimes hard to accept today, Transfiguration are unthinkable. for Les préludes is arguably Liszt’s Perhaps the greatest confu- best-known composition and sion about Liszt’s works has to do certainly his most played orchestral with the relationship between the work; and because of its fame and music and the program—that is, familiarity, and all the music that which came first. In most cases, was later conceived in its image, we it was the music. Les préludes had fail to realize its novelty. a previous life as an overture to There are a number of com- an unpublished choral work, Les mon misconceptions about Liszt’s quatre elemens (The four elements), symphonic poems. Liszt did invent and Lamartine’s poem was only the name—the term sinfonische unearthed when Liszt decided to Dichtung (symphonic poem) was make something of his overture used for the first time in 1854—to and needed a title and general describe music that did not strictly game plan to accompany it.