PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher

Detlev Glanert Born September 6, 1960, Hamburg, Germany.

Theatrum bestiarum, Songs and Dances for Large Orchestra

Detlev Glanert composed Theatrum bestiarum in 2005. The first performance was given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London, on July 26, 2005. The score calls for four flutes and two piccolos, three oboes and english horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, organ, and strings. Performance time is approximately twenty-two minutes.

These performances mark the United States premiere of Theatrum bestiarum and are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra‟s first performances of music by Detlev Glanert.

“I look at people as animals because sometimes they behave as animals,” Detlev Glanert says, referring to the subject of his orchestral songs and dances, Theatrum bestiarum, which is receiving its United States premiere at these concerts. “In Theatrum bestiarum I visit a zoo of human beings.” Glanert‟s score is a companion piece to his fourth opera, Caligula, which premiered in Frankfurt in 2006. In Caligula, Glanert and his librettist adapted the existentialist play by Albert Camus, which retells, in the age of Hitler and Stalin, the story of one of the Roman Empire‟s most depraved rulers. With that work still in his head, Glanert distilled the musical essence of his four-act opera, which included scenes of rape, stabbing, poisoning, and strangulation, into this single-movement symphonic score. Glanert once said he was drawn to the Camus play because it centered on one character who dominated all the others, as opposed to the more common operatic interplay of several principals. In a similar way, Theatrum bestiarum has a single-minded focus on the inner soul of a monster.

Glanert began to study composition at the age of twelve in his native Hamburg. In the mid-1980s, he moved to Cologne to work with Hans Werner Henze, the personal, often highly political German opera composer who has remained a guiding spirit throughout his career. Like Henze‟s output, many of Glanert‟s works are commentaries on the music of the past. His Symphony no. 1—one of his earliest compositions, written in 1985—is a further exploration of Mahler‟s vast symphonic landscape and even quotes from Das Lied von der Erde. “A symphony of today can only be a discussion of the symphonies of yesterday,” he once said. Mahler/Skizze, composed four years later, was inspired by a visit to Mahler‟s grave. Glanert has said that Mahler—in particular the Mahler who suggested that the symphony should embrace the world—and Ravel, with his impeccably detailed finishes, are the main influences on his own musical style. But he also has been deeply influenced by the work and sensibilities of Henze, which is most apparent in Glanert‟s music dramas.

Glanert‟s operatic subjects, regularly taken from history, further illuminate his take on the world and his interest in revisiting the past in a new light. His chamber opera, Joseph Süss, composed in 1999, examined the life and death of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, the Jewish banker and financial planner for Duke Karl Alexander of Württenberg, who was sentenced to death at a secret trial and executed in 1738 as the scapegoat for a corrupt, failed government. “My opera reacted to a story that took place in 1738, yet one must and should reflect the German situation between 1933 and 1945,” Glanert told The Guardian a few years ago.

As in Henze‟s output, where purely orchestral satellite works often continue to explore the music of the large music theater pieces, Glanert‟s Theatrum bestiarum is intimately tied to Caligula. Glanert compares the relationship to that between Beethoven‟s Leonore overtures and his opera Fidelio. “It has the same themes and even the same chord,” he said shortly before the premiere of the opera. “They both start with the same chord, a very complicated one that I worked on for a long time” he said, referring to Caligula’s signature twenty-five note chord that served as a repository for the opera‟s inventory of intervals used throughout that score.

Glanert has described Theatrum bestiarum as a “dark and wild series of songs and dances for orchestra, in which the audience looks in upon the dissection of „man as beast,‟ as if in an anatomical theater. The work is an exploration of dangerous dreams and wishes, with an uncomfortable undertow.” In Caligula, Glanert said that he used the orchestra as the musical representation of the dictator. Here in Theatrum bestiarum, the orchestra—large, imaginatively employed, and featuring the organ in a key role—takes center stage. It has become the embodiment of the drama.

The score is dedicated to Dmitri Shostakovich—Glanert singles out Shostakovich‟s Eleventh Symphony as the closest parallel—and even quotes from one of his string quartets at the very end. “His orchestral music was a potent critique of his society,” Glanert says. Like Henze, Glanert believes that all music has “to be connected to the life of people. It must tell you something about your life and something about what you are. Opera has to have this principle, and so does orchestral music. If it does not, it will die.”

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

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