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Program One HunDReD TWenTy-FiRST 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, January 12, 2012, at 8:00 Friday, January 13, 2012, at 1:30 Saturday, January 14, 2012, at 8:00 Sunday, January 15, 2012, at 3:00 Sir mark Elder Conductor Chicago Shakespeare Theater guest artists Barbara gaines artistic director greg Vinkler actor Delius The Walk to the Paradise Garden from A Village Romeo and Juliet Readings from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 GReG VinkleR Elgar Falstaff, Op. 68 InTErmISSIon rimsky-Korsakov Musical Pictures from The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya introduction: in Praise of the Wilderness— Fevroniya’s Wedding Procession— The Battle of kerzhenets— The Blessed Death of Fevroniya—The Road to the invisible City First Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription performances of the last three Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet 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 Frederick Delius Born January 29, 1862, Bradford, England. Died June 10, 1934, Grez-sur-Loing, France. The Walk to the Paradise Garden elius is an odd figure in English benefit of Leipzig apparently was Dmusic. Born in England to his contact and eventual friendship German parents, he came into with Edward Grieg, whose letter to his own as a composer in the Delius’s father convinced him that United States (while working as an his son was destined for a career orange grower in Florida, where in music. the pickers’ songs drifting across In the summer of 1888, Delius the Saint John River profoundly moved to Paris, where he came affected him), enjoyed his first to know Fauré and Ravel, artists taste of success in Germany and Gaughin and Munch, and the Norway, and ultimately settled in Scandinavian writer Strindberg; rural France. Although he studied became intoxicated with grand for a year and a half at the esteemed opera; met his future wife, Helene Leipzig Conservatory in the late “Jelka” Rosen, a German painter; 1880s, Delius always said that he and contracted the syphilis that learned everything he needed to would later shut down his career know the previous year from his and eventually take his life. Despite more informal lessons with Thomas his international itinerary, Delius Ward, a transplanted New Yorker has come to be closely identified who lived in Jacksonville. The main with England, a country he rarely ComPoSED moST rECEnT InSTrumEnTaTIon 1906 CSo PErFormanCES three flutes, two oboes and January 11, 1969 (Popular english horn, two clarinets FIrST PErFormanCE concert), Orchestra Hall. and bass clarinet, two bas- February 21, 1907, Berlin, as irwin Hoffman conducting soons and contrabassoon, entr’acte in A Village Romeo four horns, three trumpets, July 27, 2002, Ravinia and Juliet three trombones and tuba, Festival. andrew timpani, harp, strings FIrST CSo litton conducting PErFormanCE aPProxImaTE January 11, 1934, Orchestra PErFormanCE TImE Hall. Sir Hamilton 8 minutes Harty conducting 2 visited and later said he hated. piece. (Beecham conducted it Part of his reputation both in his here when he appeared with the native land and abroad was due to Orchestra in the advocacy of the great British February 1959.) conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, Delius composed who called Delius “the last great this interlude long apostle of romance, emotion, and after the opera beauty in music.” Delius’s work itself was com- was almost unknown in England pleted and shortly at the time he and Beecham first before the 1907 met, in 1907. (He was then just Berlin premiere, beginning to make a name for when it was clear himself in Germany, where several he needed extra conductors had started playing his music to cover the compositions.) But in the years last scene change Sir Thomas Beecham, Delius’s friend that followed, Beecham regularly from an outdoor and champion programmed Delius’s pieces (he fair to the interior organized major festivals of his of the country inn music in 1929 and in 1946). In known as the Paradise Garden. Beecham, Delius found that he The opera tells the story of a young had both a close friend—they took man and woman from quarreling a month-long walking tour of families who dance together one Norway together in 1908—and the evening at the inn and are found kind of champion most composers dead in a nearby meadow the next can only dream of. day. The Walk to the Paradise Garden, It was Beecham who first even though a late addition, is a extracted The Walk to the Paradise high point in the score, in the way Garden from Delius’s opera A that it gathers together several of Village Romeo and Juliet and began the opera’s musical themes and sets to play it as an independent concert the scene for the final tragedy. 3 Edward Elgar Born June 2, 1857, Broadheath, near Worcester, England. Died February 23, 1934, Worcester, England. Falstaff, Symphonic Study in C minor with Two Interludes in a minor, op. 68 dward Elgar learned to love graduating high school, he turned EShakespeare from a carpen- to Shakespeare for his title— ter, Ned Spiers, who worked Othello, act 3, scene 3: “Pride, pomp as a handyman for Elgar Bros., and circumstance of glorious war!”) his father’s piano-tuning shop. Elgar had considered a work about Spiers had done carpentry in Shakespeare’s Falstaff for years many theaters, and he had seen and wrote the knight’s name atop all the great actors of the day some sketches as early as 1901. But perform Shakespeare; he would Elgar’s Falstaffmight have become quote from the plays around the another idle dream, like Verdi’s Lear shop, and eventually got young or Tchaikovsky’s Othello, had he Edward to join him in reciting the not received a commission from the famous speeches. Leeds Festival in May 1912 for a Falstaffis the only one of Elgar’s new orchestral work. Elgar recently major works that was inspired by his had completed two symphonies and lifelong admiration for Shakespeare. a violin concerto; he felt it was time (It is not his only composition to for something programmatic. The show the bard’s influence: when work was to have its premiere on Elgar wrote the march that is October 2, 1913, and by May 25 of known by its tune, if not by name, that year, a day when the novelist to generations of Americans Henry James came to tea, Elgar ComPoSED moST rECEnT aPProxImaTE 1913 CSo PErFormanCE PErFormanCE TImE October 24, 1995, 35 minutes FIrST PErFormanCE Orchestra Hall. Daniel October 2, 1913, leeds Barenboim conducting Festival, england. The composer conducting InSTrumEnTaTIon two flutes and piccolo, two FIrST CSo oboes and english horn, two PErFormanCE clarinets and bass clarinet, October 26, 1972, two bassoons and contra- Orchestra Hall. Daniel bassoon, four horns, three Barenboim conducting trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, tambourine, triangle, two harps, strings 4 was “beginning to turn to Falstaff.” as a masterwork. When Elgar (Seeing James reminded him of a conducted it in London several passage in Curiosities of Law and years after the premiere, Bernard Lawyers, which he underlined: “His Shaw thought it magnificent and stop for a word, by the produce, “perfectly graphic to anyone who always paid for the delay.”) knows his Shakespeare.” He found Work on Falstaff progressed the musical storytelling superior to smoothly; on July 17, Elgar told a Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel and Don reporter, “I have, I think, enjoyed Quixote—“This ought to be played writing it more than any other three times to their once”—and music I have ever composed, and perhaps, for that reason, it may prove to be among my best efforts. I shall say ‘good-bye’ to it with regret, for the hours I have spent on it have brought me a great deal of happiness.” As it turned out, he bid farewell with haste as well; the Elgars planned to leave for a vacation in Wales on August 5, and Elgar got up at four in the morning to finish the score. The Leeds Festival premiere, under the composer’s baton, was a disappointment. Lady Elgar thought that her husband “rather hurried it & some of the lovely melodies were a little smothered, but it made its mark and place.” Elgar himself was depressed at the Falstaff unenthusiastic applause, and per- haps at the suggestion in the Daily felt that Elgar had created an ideal Telegraph that he was responsible: work of explicit, programmatic “I do not think even Elgar has ever music. “Composing operas is mere written more complicated music, piffle to a man who can do that,” he and it is for this very reason that I said. “It is the true way to set drama wish a greater conductor than he to music.” had explained his complications last During the month before the night.” But when it was performed premiere, Elgar wrote a lengthy in London under Landon Ronald, analysis of Falstaff which was its dedicatee, there were many published in The Musical Times as empty seats, and the response was a guide for the concertgoer. The no better. composer emphasized that his Falstaff won acceptance slowly, Falstaff was based on the historical but eventually it was recognized plays, the two parts of Henry IV 5 and Henry V, and not the later and music that aptly fits Morgann’s better-known “caricature” of Sir description: “in a green old age, John that appears in The Merry mellow, frank, gay, easy, corpulent, Wives of Windsor.

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