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Home , Alfred Brendel, Beethoven and Mozart, Vladimir Ashkenazy

Program

One Hundred Twenty-Third Season Chicago Symphony Orchestra Music Director Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

Thursday, May 1, 2014, at 8:00 Friday, May 2, 2014, at 1:30 Saturday, May 3, 2014, at 8:00

Christoph von Dohnányi Conductor Lutosławski Musique funèbre Piano No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 37 Allegro con brio Largo Rondo: Allegro Paul Lewis

Intermission

Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 74 (Pathétique) Adagio—Allegro non troppo Allegro con grazia Allegro molto vivace Finale: Adagio lamentoso

The appearance of Paul Lewis is endowed in part by the Johnson & Livingston Families Fund for Piano Performance. 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

Witold Lutosławski Born January 25, 1913, Warsaw, Poland. Died February 7, 1994, Warsaw, Poland. Musique funèbre

When Lutosławski’s new to me, but it is certainly not my last one.” Concerto for Orchestra As the American critic Everett Helm reported was fi rst performed in in Th e Musical Quarterly after the work was 1954, it was immediately played in Warsaw at the International Festival of compared to Béla Bartók’s Contemporary Music that same year, the score landmark score of the “employs twelve-tone technique in a personal same name. Lutosławski’s idiom and in a fashion that the has was the fi rst important worked out over a number of years.” From concerto for orchestra that point on, the way that Lutosławski freely composed in the shadow incorporated the techniques and gestures of strict of Bartók’s 1943 masterwork, and, at the time, twelve-tone music into his own highly individ- that appears to have inspired rather than intimi- ual language proved to be one of the miracles dated Lutosławski. Although he would later of late twentieth-century music. Th e Funeral dismiss the work as immature and Music, then, is at once a farewell to Bartók unrepresentative—“I wrote as I was able, since I and his musical world, and, at the same time, could not yet write as I wished”—the concerto Lutosławski’s own calling card. helped launch his international career. But it was Th e score unfolds in four connected phases, with his next major work, dedicated to Bartók’s beginning with a funeral cortège and building, memory—this Musique funèbre (Funeral music) in intensity and rhythmic complexity, toward a for string orchestra—that Lutosławski found his great, sustained, triple-forte chord containing own voice. all twelve tones. It is a fi erce and alarming blow, “For me this is the beginning of a new period,” from which the music never fully recovers, and Lutosławski said at the time of the premiere in in the epilogue, silence carries as much weight as 1958. “Th is is my fi rst word spoken in a language the notes themselves.

ComPoseD FIrst Cso PerFormanCes InstrUmentatIon 1954–1968 July 31, 1966, Ravinia Festival. Seiji string orchestra Ozawa FIrst PerFormanCe aPProXImate April 18, 19 & 20, 1968, Orchestra Hall. March 26, 1958; Katowice, Poland PerFormanCe tIme Hans Schmidt-isserstedt conducting 14 minutes most reCent Cso PerFormanCes January 20, 21, 22, 23 & 26, 1999, Orchestra Hall. Pinchas Zukerman conducting

2 Born December 16, 1770, , Germany. Died March 26, 1827, , Austria. Piano Concerto no. 3 in C minor, op. 37

We’re not certain that few lessons from Mozart before his teacher was Beethoven and Mozart suddenly called home by the news of his mother’s ever met. Th eir names failing health. Th ere is, however, no mention of were mentioned in the Mozart in a letter Beethoven wrote at the time. same breath as early as When late in 1792, Beethoven returned to 1783, when Beethoven’s Vienna, where he would stay for the rest of his fi rst composition teacher, life, it was to study with Haydn, for Mozart lay Christian Gottlob Neefe, in an unmarked grave. We can sense disappoint- wrote these words in the ment in the famous words Count Waldstein earliest public notice of inscribed in the album that served as a farewell his promising pupil: “Th is youthful genius is gift from Beethoven’s friends: deserving of help to enable him to travel. He would surely become a second Wolfgang You are going to Vienna in fulfi llment of Mozart were he to continue as he your long-frustrated wishes. Th e Genius of has begun.” Mozart is still mourning and weeping over Neefe was suggesting that, with proper spon- the death of her pupil. She found a refuge sorship, his young pupil could tour the music but no occupation with the inexhaustible capitals and entertain kings with his dazzling Haydn; through him she wishes once more keyboard talent—like most musicians, Neefe to form a union with another. With the help assumed that Mozart would make his reputa- of assiduous labor you shall receive Mozart’s tion as a virtuoso performer, not as a composer. spirit from Haydn’s hands. Neefe didn’t live long enough to understand how limited his view was, but he did see his Beethoven arrived in Vienna in the second prize student take the fi rst steps to becoming week of November 1792. He quickly realized not a second Mozart, but more importantly, the that Haydn had little to teach him and took mature Beethoven. comfort in the fact that he was welcome in the It’s likely that these two great did same homes where Mozart was once popular. meet early in 1787, when the sixteen-year-old To Beethoven, Vienna was Mozart’s city. Beethoven made his fi rst trip from his native Th e fi rst music he published there was a set Bonn to Vienna, to breathe the air of a sophis- of variations for violin and piano on “Se vuol ticated musical city. Beethoven stayed no more ballare” from Mozart’s Th e Marriage of Figaro. than two weeks, and he may even have taken a In March 1795, he played Mozart’s D minor

ComPoseD most reCent 1800; sketches date to the mid-1790s Cso PerFormanCes Beethoven december 8, 9 & 10, 2011, Orchestra FIrst PerFormanCe Hall. Jeremy denk as soloist, Michael aPProXImate April 5, 1803, Vienna. with the Tilson Thomas conducting PerFormanCe tIme composer as soloist 34 minutes July 11, 2013, Ravinia Festival. emanuel Ax as soloist, Christoph von FIrst Cso PerFormanCes Cso reCorDIngs dohnányi conducting december 16 & 17, 1910, Orchestra 1959. Gary Graff man as soloist, walter Hall. ernest Hutcheson as soloist, Hendl conducting. RCA InstrUmentatIon Frederick Stock conducting solo piano, two fl utes, two oboes, two 1971. as soloist, clarinets, two horns, two trumpets, conducting. timpani, strings 1983. as soloist, conducting. Philips 3 piano concerto (K. 466) at a concert organized a quarrelsome revolutionary, heard the resem- by the composer’s widow Constanze. (He later blance in this music—both in its details as well wrote cadenzas for it as well, the only concerto by as its spirit and sensibility. Certainly the way Mozart he so honored.) And on April 2, 1800, the soloist continues to play right after the first at his historic first public concert, Beethoven movement up to the final bar can be included a symphony by Mozart on the program, found only in K. 491 among all of Mozart’s which also was supposed to have introduced his piano . Beethoven’s opening theme, brand new piano concerto (his third) in C minor. too, tosses a glance at Mozart’s. But on the big For reasons that we will never know, however, issues—how the music moves forward, the way Beethoven played one of his earlier concer- it approaches the turning points in its progress— tos instead. there is less agreement. As Donald Tovey pointed out, Beethoven doesn’t yet seem to have figured his C minor piano concerto is one of a out what Mozart always understood—that you handful of works in which the spirits of shouldn’t give too much away before the soloist Mozart and Beethoven convene. To sug- enters and the drama really begins. There are gest,T as some writers do, that Beethoven modeled touches of pure Beethoven, like the unannounced his concerto after Mozart’s own C minor piano entry of the timpani just after the cadenza—a concerto (K. 491) is to confuse the deepest kind complete surprise, even though it has been of artistic inheritance with plagiarism. The thoughtfully prepared by a main theme that imi- choice of key certainly can’t be taken as a homage tates the beating of a drum every time it appears. to Mozart, for Beethoven seemed unable to get There’s nothing Mozartean about Beethoven’s C minor out of his system at the time. (Think of choice of key for the central slow movement: the Pathétique Sonata, or, a bit later, the funeral E major, with its key signature of four sharps, is march from the Eroica Symphony, the Coriolan bold and unexpected in a concerto in C minor, Overture, and, of course, the Fifth Symphony.) with three flats. For a moment the first E major Obviously, Beethoven remembered Mozart’s chord, given to the piano alone, seems all wrong, C minor concerto when he was writing his as if the soloist’s hands have landed in the wrong own—they share too many musical details place; at the same time, it’s fresh and irresistible. for sheer coincidence. According to a popular Where Mozart generally wrote andante or ada- anecdote, Beethoven and the Johann gio, Beethoven dictates largo. Deliberately paced Cramer were walking together when they heard and magnificently expansive, this is the first the finale of the Mozart concerto coming from a great example of a new kind of slow movement. nearby house; Beethoven stopped and exclaimed: Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, “Cramer, Cramer! We shall never be able to do composers would profit from remembering this anything like that!” music, although it’s arguable that no one after But in his own C minor concerto, Beethoven Beethoven ever thought of anything like the does something far more remarkable: he writes lovely, fully blossomed romanticism of the duet music that pays tribute to this great masterpiece for flute and bassoon over plucked strings and and, at the same time, transcends the Mozartean piano arpeggios midway through. model. It was conceived in a complimentary, The way Beethoven glances over the final dou- rather than a competitive spirit. Mozart’s untimely ble bar of this movement at the opening of the death spared Beethoven a head-on rivalry with finale also is new. The two movements aren’t yet the one composer he worshiped, leaving him to literally connected, as they will be in later music, make his own way in Vienna. (He hardly knew but Beethoven uses all of his wit and wisdom that Schubert existed, even though they lived in to carry us from one to the next. He capitalizes the same city for years; once, when asked to name on the fact that G-sharp is the same note on the greatest living composer other than himself, the keyboard as A-flat, and he uses that note to he suggested Luigi Cherubini—although it took pivot from the remote world of E major back to him a moment to come up with anyone.) C minor. Our ears easily make the connection, Even nineteenth-century listeners, who and the rondo finale races forward, full of pranks thought Mozart a lightweight and Beethoven and good humor.

4 Having convinced his listeners (and himself, Nearly a year later, Beethoven finally got perhaps) that E major is no stranger to C minor, around to writing down the piano part for a Beethoven returns to the key of his slow move- performance given ment in the middle of the finale as if it were the by his student most logical move of all. Beethoven recovers Ferdinand Ries, C minor again, but, after a brief cadenza, he tears who provided his off at a gallop into C major, where he has been own cadenza. headed all along. The first reviewer of the t’s not clear why this concerto, evidently Third Concerto designed for Beethoven’s first Vienna commented concert in April 1800, wasn’t performed that the piece Ithat night. Perhaps it simply wasn’t ready. The should succeed manuscript suggests that last-minute changes “even in places were still being made before its premiere on like Leipzig, April 5, 1803, when Beethoven also introduced where people his new Second Symphony and the oratorio Beethoven’s student were accustomed Christ on the Mount of Olives. Even then, the Ferdinand Ries to hearing the music was more firmly fixed in Beethoven’s best of Mozart’s mind than on the page. , concertos.” He the new conductor at the Theater an der Wien, continued, suggesting that this music would agreed to turn pages for Beethoven, only to always require discover that it was easier said than done: a capable soloist who, in addition to every- I saw almost nothing but empty leaves, at thing one associates with virtuosity, has most on one page or another a few Egyptian understanding in his head and a heart in hieroglyphs wholly unintelligible to me and his breast—otherwise, even with the most scribbled down to serve as clues for him. He impressive preparation and technique, the played nearly all of the solo part from mem- best things in the work will be left behind. ory since, as was so often the case, he had not had time to put it all down on paper. He Those are wise words, particularly from a man gave me a secret glance whenever he was at working in a field that to this day expects sound the end of one of the invisible passages, and judgments on new music heard cold. What no my scarcely concealable anxiety not to miss critic could predict is that this concerto, rooted the decisive moment amused him greatly, in the previous century and a pioneer in its own, and he heartily laughed at the jovial supper would continue to speak as strongly and directly which we ate afterwards. to the centuries that followed.

5 Piotr tchaikovsky Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk, Russia. Died November 6, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia. symphony no. 6 in B minor, op. 74 (Pathétique)

Five days after he his fatal illness, coupled with the tragic tone of conducted the premiere of his last symphony—curiously titled Pathétique— this symphony, produced a mystique about the composer’s Tchaikovsky drank a glass last days that still persists today. In 1979, the of unboiled water, a Russian émigré musicologist Alexandra Orlova careless move that year in published a now-infamous article proposing Saint Petersburg, where that Tchaikovsky had in fact committed suicide countless cases of cholera by poison, on the orders of his fellow alumni had recently been of the School of Jurisprudence, to cover up reported. He died four his alleged aff air with the nephew of Duke days later. When the symphony was performed Stenbock-Th urmor. For a time in the 1980s, for a second time the following week, the hall suicide and homosexuality replaced the quaint was draped in black and a bust modeled after the old tale of cholera and drinking water, and, composer’s death mask was prominently dis- as Tchaikovsky’s obituary was rewritten, the played. An eleven-year-old boy, who would soon Pathétique Symphony became the chief musical become Russia’s most celebrated composer, victim in this tabloid tale. Even Tchaikovsky’s attended that concert with his father, the great biographer, David Brown, writing in the sac- baritone Fyodor Stravinsky. Little Igor, whose rosanct Grove, accepted Orlova’s theory. But own music would eventually refute everything in recent years scholars have wisely backed Tchaikovsky’s glorifi ed, understood, even at the off —evidence is almost totally undocumented— time, the magnitude of this loss—not just to his and a number of musicologists, including the family (his father was famous for his interpreta- biographer Alexander Poznansky, have refuted tions of several Tchaikovsky roles) but to the Orlova convincingly. larger music world as well. At the time he died, Tchaikovsky was one of he circumstances surrounding the the great fi gures in music: he was at the peak composition of the Pathétique Symphony of his creative powers, and he was both famous are dramatic and mysterious, if less and beloved far beyond his native Russia. His luridT than pulp fi ction. In December 1892, death came as a shock (he was only fi fty-three) Tchaikovsky abruptly decided to abandon work and the suspicious circumstances surrounding on a programmatic symphony in E-fl at major on

ComPoseD most reCent aPProXImate February–August 1893 Cso PerFormanCes PerFormanCe tIme January 13, 14, 15 & 16, 45 minutes FIrst PerFormanCe 2011, Orchestra Hall. Juanjo October 28, 1893, Saint Petersburg. Mena conducting Cso reCorDIngs with the composer conducting 1952. Rafael Kubelík conducting. July 31, 2011, Ravinia Festival. James Mercury Conlon conducting FIrst Cso PerFormanCes 1957. conducting. RCA April 27 & 28, 1894, Auditorium InstrUmentatIon Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting 1976. Sir Georg Solti conducting. three fl utes and piccolo, two oboes, London two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, 1986. conducting. CBS three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass 1998. conducting. drum, cymbals, tam-tam, strings Teldec

6 which he had been struggling for some time— orchestra seemed to like the piece, although two “an irreversible decision,” he wrote, “and it is days later he decided that “it is not that it wasn’t wonderful that I made it.” But the failure of the liked, but it has caused some bewilderment.” new symphony left Tchaikovsky despondent and The morning after the premiere, the composer directionless, and he began to fear that he was told his brother Modest that the symphony “played needed a title. (Tchaikovsky had originally out, dried thought of calling it the Program Symphony.) up,” as Modest first suggested Tragic and then Pathétique, he put it. which in Russian carries a meaning closer to pas- (“I think sionate, full of emotion and suffering. Tchaikovsky and I agreed at once, and in his brother’s presence wrote think, and on the first page the title that “remained forever,” I know as Modest later recalled, although the composer not what himself soon had second thoughts. (Tchaikovsky’s to do,” publisher, who knew the marketing value of a he wrote good title, ignored the composer’s urgent request to his that it simply be printed as Symphony no. 6.) nephew Like the abandoned E-flat major symphony, Bob the new B minor score was programmatic, but, Davydov, as he wrote to Bob, “with such a program that whose will remain a mystery to everyone—let them friend- guess.” Bob was only the first to ponder, in vain, ship and the meaning of this deeply personal work. (And Tchaikovsky with his nephew, encour- even he, to whom Tchaikovsky would ultimately Bob Davydov, in 1892 agement dedicate the score, couldn’t draw a satisfactory would answer from the composer except that it was help see “imbued with subjectivity.”) him through this crisis.) Although he felt Tchaikovsky carried his program with him that he should give up writing “pure music, to the grave. Cryptic notes scribbled among his that is, symphonic or chamber music,” within sketches at the time refer to a symphony about two months he had begun the symphony that life’s aspirations and disappointments—yet would prove to be his greatest—and his last. another manifestation of the central theme of Renewed—and relieved—by the old, familiar both Swan Lake and Eugene Onegin, and, in joy of composing, Tchaikovsky wrote frantically. fact, the great theme of the composer’s life: the Within four days, the first part of the symphony painful search for an ideal that is never satisfied. was complete and the remainder precisely out- As scholars have learned more about lined in his head. “You cannot imagine what bliss Tchaikovsky’s unfulfilled homoerotic passion I feel,” he wrote to Bob on February 11, 1893, for his nephew Bob—a mismatch of youth and “assured that my time has not yet passed and that middle age, and a tangle of sexual persuasions in I can still work.” The rest went smoothly and the a society fiercely intolerant of homosexuality— symphony was completed, without setbacks, by the temptation to read this symphony as the the end of August. composer’s heartbreaking confession of a painful, Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere repressed life has inevitably proved irresistible. of his new symphony on October 16 in In the inexhaustibly expressive, but sufficiently Saint Petersburg. The audience—“all Saint ambiguous language of music, Tchaikovsky Petersburg”—rose and cheered when the com- could tell the story of his life—honestly and poser appeared on stage. But after the symphony, unsparingly—without ever giving up its secrets. the applause was half-hearted; the crowd didn’t The abstract nature of music has, arguably, never know what to make of this sober, gloomy been so fearlessly tested. music. Leaving the concert hall, Tchaikovsky The temptation to read something tragic into complained that neither the audience nor the this score is as old as the music itself. Even

7 the composer, who didn’t want to divulge his “tenderly, very songfully, and elastically,” is one meaning, admitted before the premiere that it of Tchaikovsky’s greatest melodies. (Tchaikovsky had something of the character of a . carefully directs the emotional development of (The trombone incantations in the first move- this rich and expansive tune all the way down ment actually quote a Russian Orthodox chant to a virtually unprecedented thread of sound, for the dead.) And surely the first audience was marked pppppp.) The recapitulation reorders stunned—or bewildered, as Tchaikovsky noted— and telescopes events so that the grand and by the unconventionally slow and mournful expressive melody, now magically rescored, steals finale, trailing off into silence at the end, with in suddenly and unexpectedly, to great effect. just and basses playing pppp. When The central movements are, by necessity, Tchaikovsky died so suddenly and violently on more relaxed. The first is a wonderful, singing, the heels of the premiere, the symphony became undanceable waltz, famously set in 5/4 time. identified at once, perhaps inextricably, with its (There’s a real waltz, in 3/4, in Tchaikovsky’s composer’s death. By the memorial performance Fifth Symphony.) The second is a brilliant, on November 6, the Russian Musical Gazette dazzlingly scored march, undercut throughout by had already determined that the symphony was a streak of melancholy. “indeed a sort of swan song, a presentiment The finale begins with a cry of despair, and of imminent death.” (More than a century although it eventually unveils a warm and later, Orlova’s devotees were to make much consoling theme begun by the violins against of the slowly fading final pages as a depiction the heartbeat of a horn ostinato, the mood only of suicide.) continues to darken, ultimately becoming threat- ening in its intensity. In a symphony marked by he score itself, though perhaps dulled telling, uncommonly quiet gestures—and this by familiarity, is one of Tchaikovsky’s from a composer famous for bombast—a single most inspired creations. All of its true soft stroke of the tam-tam marks the point of no masterstrokesT are purely musical, not program- return. From there it is all defeat and disintegra- matic. It begins uniquely, with the sound of tion, over a fading, ultimately faltering pulse. a very low bassoon solo over murky strings. (This slow introduction is in the “wrong” key, but eventually works its way into B minor.) The entire first movement sustains the tone, although not the tempo, of the somber open- Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago ing. The soaring principal theme, to be played Symphony Orchestra.

© 2014 Chicago Symphony Orchestra

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