PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher

Johan Wagenaar Born November 1, 1862, Utrecht. Died June 17, 1941, The Hague.

Cyrano de Bergerac, Op. 23

Wagenaar composed this concert overture, inspired by Rostand's play, in 1905. The score calls for three flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings. Performance time is approximately twelve minutes.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has performed Wagenaar's Cyrano de Bergerac on subscription concerts at Orchestra Hall twice previously: on November 12 and 13, 1915, and on December 17 and 18, 1926, with Frederick Stock conducting.

In 1902, Samuel Eberly Gross, a Chicago real estate developer who established more than 10,000 subdivisions and built rows upon rows of reasonably priced houses, won a lawsuit against Edmond Rostand, claiming that Rostand pirated a play Gross had written called The Merchant Prince of Corneville, when writing his own hit, Cyrano de Bergerac. Despite the federal judge's ruling, however, Gross's only enduring place in literature is as the model for the character Samuel E. Ross in Theodore Dreiser's novel Jennie Gerhardt. Rostand's play, on the other hand, has gone on to enjoy great success, on stage, in film (from José Ferrer's Academy Award–winning turn in Cyrano in 1950 to the knockoff Roxanne with Steve Martin in 1987), and in musical treatment--culminating in a 1936 full-scale opera by Franco Alfano, best known as the man who completed Puccini's Turandot.

Just two years after Rostand's play was premiered in 1897, Victor Herbert turned it into an operetta. (It was one of his rare failures.) Six years later, the Dutch composer Johan Wagenaar wrote the concert overture that opens this program--the work that would turn out to be his biggest hit. Wagenaar began his career in music in his native Utrecht, where he played violin in the local orchestra and later became well known as the organist at Utrecht Cathedral. In 1892, when he was thirty, he moved to Berlin to study with the Vienna-born composer and conductor Heinrich von Herzogenberg, who was Brahms's lifelong friend and champion. Eventually Wagenaar himself became an influential teacher (among his students was his son Bernard, who emigrated to the United States and taught composition--Jacob Druckman was one of his pupils--at the Juilliard School).

Wagenaar's main contribution was as a composer, and early in the twentieth century his music often was played. Although his symphonic poem Saul and David, written in 1906 to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of Rembrandt's birth, is considered his most ambitious work, it is this overture inspired by Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac that was his most successful piece. The Chicago Symphony played it under music director Frederick Stock in 1915 and again in 1926. (It was a particular favorite of Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg, also a native of Utrecht, who was Wagenaar's almost exact contemporary.) The overture recalls the spirit and style of Strauss's brand new tone poems, which Wagenaar openly admired, and it captures both the heroicism and poetic character of Rostand's hero.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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