Season 20102010----20112011 The Philadelphia Orchestra Friday, October 151515,15 , at 888:008:00:00:00 Saturday, October 161616,16 , at 8:00 Sunday, October 1717,, at 2:00 Christoph von Dohnányi Conductor Brahms Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98 I. Allegro non troppo II. Andante moderato III. Allegro giocoso—Poco meno presto—Tempo I IV. Allegro energico e passionato—Più allegro Intermission Brahms Symphony No. 2 in D major Op. 73 I. Allegro non troppo II. Adagio non troppo—L’istesso tempo, ma grazioso III. Allegretto grazioso (quasi andantino)—Presto, ma non assai—Tempo I—Presto, ma non assai—Tempo I IV. Allegro con spirito This program runs approximately 1 hour, 45 minutes. In addition to guest engagements with the major opera houses and orchestras of Europe and North America, Christoph vovonn DohnányiDohnányi’s appointments have included opera directorships in Frankfurt and Hamburg; principal orchestral conducting posts in Germany, London, and Paris; as well as his 20-year tenure as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, with which he led 1,000 concerts and 15 international tours. He made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 1988. In North America this season, Mr. von Dohnányi returns to lead subscription concerts with the Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Boston Symphony. In the summer of 2010, he also conducted the Boston Symphony in a series of concerts at Tanglewood and was the music director for the Tanglewood Music Center’s production of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Internationally this season, Mr. von Dohnányi leads concerts with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, and the Israel Philharmonic, among many others. Mr. von Dohnányi’s recent season highlights include international tours with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, where he is honorary conductor for life; concerts with the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and a tour to China with the NDR Symphony, where he held the position of chief conductor from 2004 to 2010. Mr. von Dohnányi regularly conducts at the Royal Opera Covent Garden, La Scala, and the Vienna State Opera, as well as the opera houses of Berlin and Paris. He has also been a frequent guest conductor with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival. Mr. von Dohnányi has made many recordings for London/Decca with the Cleveland Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic, including Beethoven's Fidelio, Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu, Schoenberg's Erwartung, Strauss's Salome, and Wagner's The Flying Dutchman. His Cleveland Orchestra discography includes recordings of Wagner’s Die Walküre and Das Rheingold; the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, and Schumann; and symphonies by Bruckner, Dvořák, Mahler, Mozart, Schubert, and Tchaikovsky, among many others. FRAMING THE PROGRAM Brahms’s symphonies are now so central to the genre that it is surprising to discover how intimidated the composer initially was to write one. Beethoven’s legacy loomed large and despite the symphonies of Mendelssohn and Schumann (important models for Brahms), composers in the mid-19th century were more inclined to produce programmatic symphonies (like Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique ) or symphonic poems (such as those by Liszt). Rarer, and usually less successful, was a traditional “Symphony No. 1.” With expectations running high, Brahms kept delaying the completion of a symphony, although he started several. It took until 1876, at age 43, for the triumphant unveiling of his First Symphony. The Second, which concludes today’s concert, followed the next year. His final Fourth Symphony seemed to many of his contemporaries the culmination of the great 19th-century orchestral tradition. Parallel Events 1877 Brahms Symphony No. 2 Music Saint-Saëns Samson and Delilah Literature James The American Art Homer The Cotton Pickers History Edison invents the phonograph 1885 Brahms Symphony No. 4 Music Franck Symphonic Variations Literature Haggard King Solomon’s Mines Art Van Gogh The Potato Eaters History Galton proves individuality of fingerprints Symphony No. 4 Johannes Brahms Born in Hamburg, MMayay 7, 1833 Died in Vienna, April 3, 1897 “A storm of applause broke out at the end of the first movement, not to be quieted until the composer, coming to the front of the artists’ box in which he was seated, showed himself to the audience.” Thus Brahms’s friend Florence May described a Viennese performance of the composer’s Fourth Symphony in March 1897, in an emotional concert conducted by the great Hans Richter the month before the composer’s death. “An extraordinary scene followed the conclusion of the work. The applauding, shouting audience, its gaze riveted on the figure standing in the balcony, so familiar and yet in present aspect so strange, seemed unable to let him go. Tears ran down his cheeks as he stood there shrunken in form, with lined countenance, a strained expression, white hair hanging lank; and through the audience there was a feeling as of a stifled sob, for they knew that they were saying farewell.” Symphonic Pairs From the beginning Brahms knew that his Fourth Symphony was different from the other three, and he apparently entertained fears that it might not be received as warmly. Composed in 1884 and 1885, on the heels of the Third Symphony of 1883, the Fourth was at once the composer’s most passionate and his most abstract symphonic outpouring. His whimsical declaration, in a letter of 1884, that the new piece consisted of “a few entr’actes and polkas that I happened to have lying around,” seems to suggest an ironic self-consciousness about the untraveled path the work had taken. His first two symphonies—the serious First and the cheerful Second—had also been completed within a year of each other, during the mid-1870s, and like the earlier symphonies, the Third and the Fourth form a pair, one clear-eyed and direct, the other gray and troubled. The critic Donald Francis Tovey heard tragedy in the Fourth, calling the piece “one of the rarest things in classical music, a symphony which ends tragically.” Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that the source of this attraction to high drama stemmed not from personal crisis, but from Brahms’s interest during the 1880s in the Greek tragedies of Sophocles and others. A Work Declared “un“un----Brahmsian”Brahmsian” The friendship Brahms had established in 1881 with the conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow was also important for the Fourth Symphony, for several reasons. Von Bülow, who had just been named director of the Meiningen Court Orchestra, offered Brahms a first-class ensemble with which the composer could “try out” the Fourth and other works. Additionally, von Bülow became a primary promoter of Brahms’s works, establishing with the Third and Fourth symphonies a long tradition of Brahms performance by the Meiningen musicians. Finally, von Bülow’s awe-inspiring performances of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas in early 1881 endeared him to Brahms, and might have had a bearing, however indirect, on the last movement of the Fourth Symphony. Von Bülow prepared the Meiningen Orchestra’s first performance of the Symphony, which Brahms conducted on October 25, 1885. The composer then took the piece on tour with the Orchestra, performing it throughout northern Germany and the Netherlands, before allowing Hans Richter to present it to the Viennese public in January 1886. The initial response was surprisingly cool, considering the extent to which the city had lionized Brahms throughout the 1870s and early ’80s; the Fourth was declared “un-Brahmsian.” The composer had already had some inkling of this sort of reaction, when he and pianist Ignaz Brüll had performed a four-hand piano version of the Symphony for a private gathering in the fall of 1885. Present were von Bülow, the critic Eduard Hanslick, the surgeon Theodor Billroth, and the writer Max Kalbeck. All were dismayed at the piece; Kalbeck went so far as to suggest that the fourth movement be omitted. Brahms did not lay a finger on the work. As the testimony mentioned above by his early biographer Florence May indicates, at the end of the composer’s life Vienna had gained a deep appreciation not only for the Fourth Symphony but for a whole career of symphonic music that it seemed to sum up. Small wonder that hordes of admirers turned out for the composer’s funeral, four weeks after the triumphant Viennese concert of March 1897. A Closer Look “The first movement (AllegrAllegrAllegroo non troppotroppo),” writes Tovey, “acts its tragedy with unsurpassable variety of expression and power of climax. The slow movement (AndanteAndante moderatomoderato) ... has an eventful tale to tell. The third movement (AllegroAllegro giocosogiocoso), functionally the scherzo, has all the features of such a blend of sonata form and rondo as is common in finales; yet with all its bacchanalian energy it is evidently no finale. After three movements so full of dramatic incident, what finale is possible?” The finale Brahms devised for the Fourth (AllegroAllegro energicoenergico e passionatopassionato) was the chief point of controversy when the Symphony was introduced; it was perhaps also the work’s chief point of contact with the late Beethoven piano sonatas, and with the Renaissance and Baroque music that had recently occupied Brahms the scholar. Brahms’s movement is a set of variations on the ground bass from Bach’s Cantata No. 150, “Nach Dir, Herr, verlanget mich” (For Thee, Lord, Do I Long), which Brahms inflects with a tiny, “Romanticizing” chromatic alteration. This ground, which forms the basis of the variations, is not always heard in the bass line, and is gradually reduced to a vague, schematized scaffolding that calls to mind not only Baroque works such as Bach’s D-minor Chaconne for solo violin, but more to the point, late Beethoven.