Programnotes Clyne Beethove

PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

Thursday, May 28, 2015, at 8:00 Saturday, May 30, 2015, at 8:00

Ludovic Morlot Conductor Jennifer Koh Violin Berlioz Les francs-juges Overture, Op. 3 Clyne The Seamstress JENNIFER KOH World premiere CSO commission

INTERMISSION

Beethoven Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55 (Eroica) Allegro con brio Marcia funebre: Adagio assai Scherzo: Allegro vivace Finale: Allegro molto

These violin concerto performances have been enabled by the Paul Ricker Judy Fund. This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts. PROGRAM

Tuesday, June 2, 2015, at 6:30 Afterwork Masterworks Ludovic Morlot Conductor Jennifer Koh Violin Clyne The Seamstress JENNIFER KOH World premiere CSO commission

Beethoven Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55 (Eroica) Allegro con brio Marcia funebre: Adagio assai Scherzo: Allegro vivace Finale: Allegro molto

There will be no intermission.

This violin concerto performance has been enabled by the Paul Ricker Judy Fund. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBBM Newsradio 780 and 105.9FM for its generous support as a media sponsor of the Afterwork Masterwork series.

This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

2 COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher

Hector Berlioz Born December 11, 1803, La Côte-Saint-André, Isère, France. Died March 8, 1869, Paris, France. Les francs-juges Overture, Op. 3

Berlioz introduced his Les rejected it, one after another. Even once Berlioz francs-juges overture at a revised the score in 1829 and 1833—by then his concert he put together in was a name to reckon with—he still failed to stir order to win the admira- up any enthusiasm for producing it. Berlioz ulti- tion of the actress Harriet mately gave up on Les francs-juges. He recycled Smithson, with whom he portions—most famously turning a brassy march had fallen in love—and into the hair-raising March to the Scaffold in the who would be the subject Symphonie fantastique—and salvaged only the of his blockbuster overture, which he published independently as a Symphonie fantastique in concert piece. He destroyed the rest of the score. another two years. Neither their romance nor Berlioz’s first opera, Les francs-juges, would erlioz’s overtures were the first of his works survive, but the overture quickly became a to reach a large public. They were published popular success, and it is still often played. It is early in his career and widely performed, the only part of the opera Berlioz saved intact Beven when his larger compositions were slow to and published—the first orchestral work by a catch on. Within a decade of its composition, the composer who would quickly transform the overture to Les francs-juges was played not only in history of instrumental music. France, but also in London, Berlin, Vienna, and Berlioz set his sights on the opera stage early Saint Petersburg. Berlioz conducted it often on his in his career. It was his close friend, Humbert own concerts and on tour. From the majestic brass Ferrand, who suggested the subject and wrote statements at the opening to the urgent fast music the text for Les francs-juges (often rendered as that follows, the overture is quirky, distinctive, “the judges of the secret court,” but more usefully cheeky—Berlioz dares to combine the fast and translated as “the self-appointed judges”). Like slow portions near the climax—and quite like other so-called rescue operas in vogue at the anything known in music at the time. If it were time, Ferrand’s libretto is a medieval tale, set not done with such assurance, technical skill, deep in the dark forests, of a political prisoner and orchestral wizardry, it might be dismissed as who is saved from a chamber of secret judges by the work of a fearless newcomer, which, in fact, his fiancée. Berlioz wrote the opera quickly in the Berlioz was at the time. Written scarcely a year summer and early autumn of 1826. Then, to his after Beethoven’s death, Les francs-juges suggests dismay, major opera theaters throughout Europe that a new chapter in music had already begun.

COMPOSED MOST RECENT and contrabassoon, four horns, two September 1826 CSO PERFORMANCES trumpets and three cornets, three April 26, 1974, Orchestra Hall. trombones, two tubas, timpani, FIRST PERFORMANCE Sir Georg Solti conducting cymbals, bass drum, strings May 26, 1828; Paris, France. The May 3, 1974, Kennedy Center. composer conducting APPROXIMATE Sir Georg Solti conducting PERFORMANCE TIME FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES July 30, 1993, Ravinia Festival. Carlo 13 minutes October 26 & 27, 1894, Rizzi conducting Auditorium Theatre. Theodore CSO RECORDING Thomas conducting INSTRUMENTATION 1973–74. Sir Georg Solti. London two flutes and two piccolos, two July 8, 1972, Ravinia Festival. István oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons Kertész conducting 3 Anna Clyne Born March 9, 1980, London, England. The Seamstress, for Violin and Orchestra

In 2008, Anna Clyne Dufallo and Amy Kauffman by offering to write spotted an old violin in a a violin duet for them to play. Then, as a way of dusty case, leaning up remembering her mother, Clyne decided to write against a pile of vinyl six more violin pieces; she composed one each records in the basement of evening leading up to the day of the first anniver- a thrift shop in Oxford, sary of her mother’s death. (Something she could England. A European not have foreseen at the time: The Seamstress was baroque-style instrument, finished on the sixth anniversary, to the day.) dating from the late In 2010, after having been picked by Riccardo 1800s, with an elaborate Muti as one of the Chicago Symphony’s new hand-carved lion’s head scroll, it was a bargain at resident composers, Clyne moved to Chicago £5.99 (about $9), and Clyne snapped it up. and eventually rented a studio in the Fine Arts Clyne’s mother had just recently died at the time. Building, where she composed a number of new In ways that are both personal and musical, the works, including Night Ferry, her first commis- violin has accompanied Clyne ever since. The sion from the CSO. While exploring the city, she Seamstress, her new violin concerto that is being discovered the Old Town School of Folk Music, premiered this week—the latest product of her and she began to take old-time fiddle classes five years as the Chicago Symphony’s Mead there, and, later, Irish fiddle classes. “There’s Composer-in-Residence—marks the end of a something about folk music that resonates deeply journey, a stretch of six years writing a large body within me,” Clyne recently said. “Perhaps it’s of music for the violin. Chicago audiences have from my combination of English, Irish, and already heard Prince of Clouds, performed here in Polish roots, and also growing up in a home December of 2012, a double violin concerto that where the music heard was predominantly folk pays homage to the teacher-student lineage of music of that time, along with artists such as The the soloists for whom it was composed (Jaime Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Fleetwood Mac.” Laredo and this week’s soloist, Jennifer Koh), and at the same time to Bach’s famous concerto he solo violin melody that opens The for two violins. This past September, Clyne Seamstress came to Clyne as she played released The Violin, a DVD collaboration with her violin, trying out different ideas visual artist Josh Dorman that is a suite of pieces untilT she found this tune, as unassuming as for solo, duet, and multitrack violins. The a folk song. Even though she explored other Seamstress, the biggest work in this chapter of ways of starting the piece, she kept returning to Clyne’s career, is the capstone. this music, which lays the groundwork for the Clyne’s violin journey has taken her from whole concerto. “In beginning with this simple England, where her friend, violin maker Bruno melody—the violinist alone on the stage—I Guastalla, restored her new instrument in also came back to an idea I had several years exchange for composition lessons, to Brooklyn, previously,” Clyne says, “The Seamstress, a one-act where she bartered for violin lessons from Neil ballet that would open with a seamstress alone

COMPOSED INSTRUMENTATION suspended sizzle cymbal, crotales, 2015 solo violin, two flutes and piccolo, two bass drum, tam-tam, glockenspiel, oboes and english horn, two clarinets laptop, harp, strings Commissioned by the Chicago and bass clarinet, two bassoons and Symphony Orchestra contrabassoon, four horns, three APPROXIMATE These are the world trumpets, three trombones, tuba, PERFORMANCE TIME premiere performances. timpani, vibraphone, snare drum, 25 minutes

4 Anna Clyne on The Seamstress

I MADE my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world’s eyes As though they’d wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there’s more enterprise In walking naked.

—William Butler Yeats

he Seamstress is an imaginary one-act ballet. Alone on the stage, the seamstress is seated, unraveling threads from a beautiful cloth laid gently over her lap. Lost in her thoughts, her mind begins to meanderT and her imagination spirals into a series of five tales that range from love to despair, and that combine memory with fantasy.

5 on the stage.” Clyne already had a sense that the to record Yeats’s lines. “There’s a lyricism in the piece would unfold as a sequence of tales “that Irish accent that I have always loved,” Clyne range from love to despair and that combine said. “I remember listening to my grandmother memory with fantasy.” The image of a seamstress and my Auntie Gretta, who were from County unraveling threads of memory reminded her of Monaghan in Ireland, as a child and being a poem by William Butler Yeats she had read drawn to the musicality of their voices.” For The many years before that begins “I made my song Seamstress, she turned to the composer Irene a coat.” With that in mind, the new concerto Buckley, originally from Cork, Ireland, to record started to come together naturally—Clyne the poem, both in a whisper and in full voice. writes “in order,” working from beginning to Clyne then spliced, layered, and manipulated end—with each idea growing out of the previous Buckley’s recordings to add another layer to the one, linked by sparse pizzicato sections—the music. (In one section where the woodwinds “image/sound of the unpicking of stitches.” have rests to breathe, Clyne also incorporates the It is not surprising that Clyne’s new concerto sounds of Buckley’s prerecorded breathing.) was generated in part by the idea of an imaginary The Seamstress shared space on Clyne’s calendar ballet, because she regularly works with choreog- with another large-scale project driven by raphers, and because the act of collaboration— poetry, As Sudden Shut, a seventy-five-minute with filmmakers and video artists, as well—has multimedia chamber opera that sets five poems long characterized her method of composing. by Emily Dickinson. (Three of the sections have With Night Ferry, her first big orchestral score, been performed at concerts on the MusicNOW which was written for the CSO and Riccardo series that she and fellow resident composer, Muti to premiere here in February 2012, Clyne Mason Bates, oversee—most recently Postponeless chose for the first time to “collaborate” with Creature, which was premiered at the Harris herself, as she put it, by painting on her studio Theater for Music and Dance in March.) wall, to jump-start the composition process. This time, as Clyne was composing The Seamstress, she lyne was something of a newcomer to kept imagining how the music could be comple- the world of orchestral music when she mented by dance, and she hopes it will one day began her Chicago residency in 2010, be choreographed (several choreographers have Cand she has turned the experience into a great already expressed interest). exploration of the orchestra and its literature, Perhaps because of the unconventional way attending rehearsals and concerts, discovering the concerto was conceived, it does not follow new pieces and composers, getting to know the standards of concerto form, but unfolds as a individual musicians in the orchestra and in dialogue between soloist and orchestra that favors the community, learning how to create new conversation over showy solo display. Clyne also sounds with traditional instruments. Clyne weaves the violin line in and out of the orchestral came to know and love Chicago—she even fabric, so that at times it completely disappears, wrote a Chicago “street portrait,” A Wonderful as one thread among many. After working closely Day, incorporating the voice of Wooly Barber, with Koh on Prince of Clouds, Clyne wanted to a homeless man she heard singing on Michigan emphasize her dynamic versatility—“her ability Avenue—but her music has a wide reach these to play music with such tenderness, but then also days. She has been profiled in The New York with such fire, grit, and earthiness.” The Seamstress Times and was the subject of a Miller Composer is the third work Clyne has written for Koh, Profile concert in New York last month. She following Prince of Clouds and Rest These Hands, was commissioned to write Masquerade to open an arrangement of movements from The Violin. the famous Last Night of the Proms concert The Yeats poem that helped shape the concerto in August 2013—the CSO will play the piece also surfaces in the music. Clyne had used the in November under Marin Alsop, who led the verse once before, when she incorporated it into premiere—and she is working on a piece for a an interlude between two songs that she wrote as hundred cellos to be performed at the Hollywood a student at the Manhattan School of Music. At Bowl next May. The Seamstress will receive its the time. she asked a friend of hers, a Dubliner, South American premiere in São Paulo in July.

6 Ludwig van Beethoven Born December 16, 1770, Bonn, Germany. Died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria. Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55 (Eroica)

The story of how the of suicide. It was one of the lowest points in a Eroica Symphony got its life that understood despair only too well. The title is nearly as famous as composition of an important and substantial new the music itself. We know symphony was Beethoven’s great rallying cry—a that Beethoven intended heroic act in itself. The first draft was probably to name his third sym- completed by November 1803. Beethoven’s phony for Napoleon extensive sketches, nicely preserved and often Bonaparte and his fight studied, confirm that the new symphony gave its against political tyranny, composer a lot of trouble. In May 1804, when the that he tore up the title news reached Vienna that Napoleon had declared page in a fit of rage when he learned that himself emperor, Beethoven felt betrayed. Napoleon had appointed himself emperor, and According to the account later written by his that he opted for the title Sinfonia eroica (Heroic student Ferdinand Ries, when he broke the news symphony) instead. The subtexts—idealism and to Beethoven, the composer “went to the table, disillusionment, personal greed and the lust for took hold of the title page by the top, tore it in power, the struggle between art and politics, two, and threw it to the floor.” among others—are intense, and they have come What Ries didn’t mention was that to overshadow one of the most remarkable, even Beethoven’s own motives were sometimes suspi- revolutionary works of art we have. A century cious themselves. Although Beethoven had long after Beethoven, Toscanini tried to restore intended to name the symphony after Bonaparte, reason, famously brushing aside a hundred years he quickly dropped that plan when he learned of connotations: “Some say it is Napoleon, some that Prince Lobkovitz would pay him hand- Hitler, some Mussolini. For me it is simply somely for the same honor. Later, after he had Allegro con brio.” ripped up the title page, Beethoven temporarily Beethoven had been contemplating a sym- recanted when he realized that a Bonaparte symphony inspired by General Bonaparte since phony would be just the thing for his upcoming 1798. Most of the music was composed in the trip to Paris. summer of 1803, only months after Beethoven In 1806, when it came time to publish the wrote his most revealing nonmusical work—the E-flat major symphony, Beethoven suggested Heiligenstadt Testament—a painful confir- “Sinfonia eroica, composed to celebrate the mation of worsening deafness and thoughts memory of a great man,” without mentioning

COMPOSED MOST RECENT APPROXIMATE 1803 CSO PERFORMANCES PERFORMANCE TIME January 10, 11, 12 & 15, 2013, Orchestra 50 minutes FIRST PERFORMANCE Hall. Edo de Waart conducting April 7, 1805, Vienna. The com- CSO RECORDINGS February 7, 2013, Seoul Arts poser conducting 1954. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA Center, Seoul, South Korea. Lorin Maazel conducting 1973–74. Sir Georg Solti conducting. FIRST CSO PERFORMANCE London January 15 & 16, 1892, July 11, 2013, Ravinia Festival. Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Christoph von Dohnányi conducting 1989. Sir Georg Solti conducting. Thomas conducting London INSTRUMENTATION July 16, 1936, Ravinia Festival. Willem two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, van Hoogstraten conducting two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings

7 Napoleon. Beethoven’s last reputed words on concert hall, and knowing the length of a piece the subject, full of the anger and resentment he is one of them. But Beethoven’s Allegro con brio surely felt, came later, after Napoleon’s victory was longer—and bigger, in every sense—than at Jena: “It’s a pity I do not understand the art any other symphonic movement at the time (the of war as well as I do the art of music. I would first movement of Mozart’s Prague Symphony conquer him!” History doesn’t tell us what, if comes the closest). It’s also a question of pro- anything, Napoleon thought of Beethoven’s portion, and Beethoven’s central development music. When Cherubini, whom he did admire, section, abounding in some truly monumental once suggested that Napoleon knew no more statements, is enormous. about music than he knew of battle, the emperor It has been suggested that Beethoven was immediately stripped him of his offices and writing without themes at the beginning of power, leaving him with virtually no income. the first movement; the comment is not meant disparagingly, but as proof that the essence of he Eroica is perhaps the first great Beethoven’s language is not melody, but tension symphony to have captured the roman- and movement. Donald Tovey insisted that many tic imagination. It’s not as openly of Beethoven’s themes “can be recognized by suggestiveT as the later Pastoral, with its bird their bare rhythm without quoting any melody at calls and thunderstorm, nor as specific as the all.” The very opening of the Eroica consists of no Ninth, with its unmistakable message of hope more than two E-flat major chords, played forte, and freedom. But to the Viennese audience followed by the cellos jumping back and forth at the first performance, on April 7, 1805, over the notes of an E-flat triad. The first excep- tional event comes when the cellos stumble on C-sharp, a note we never expected to hear, and one that opens unforeseen vistas only seven bars into the piece. From there, Beethoven continues to spread his wings, even settling comfortably in the very remote key of E minor just moments before he whisks us back to the E-flat major chords with which he began. Beethoven’s writing, in the most expansive piece he had yet composed, is tight and closely unified. Although analysts often point out the unprec- edented use of a new theme The title page for the Eroica Symphony, showing where Beethoven deleted in the development section, the dedication to Napoleon it’s not unique (see Mozart’s Symphony no. 33), nor is the theme truly new. Beethoven’s vast and powerful first movement Ries was perhaps the first person to be misled and the funeral march that follows must have by the “premature” entry of the horn four bars sounded like nothing else in all music. before the start of the recapitulation, and he lost Never before had symphonic music aspired to Beethoven’s respect forever when he rushed up these dimensions. We’re told that a man in the to tell him that the player had come in at the gallery shouted down: “I’ll give another Kreutzer wrong place. It’s one of Beethoven’s little jokes, if the thing will only stop!” Audiences then, just all the more effective for being told at a whisper. as today, brought certain expectations to the The coda is as big and important as a movement

8 in itself, but something minuet of Haydn and Mozart has become some- of this stature is needed thing truly symphonic in scope. to bring us back to earth Beethoven’s finale is a set of variations on a before we move on. theme he had used several times before, prin- The Adagio is a funeral cipally in his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus. march of measured This is an unusually complex and multifaceted solemnity, pushed for- piece of music. It’s not just the conclusion, ward by the low rumble but the culmination, of all that came before. of the basses, like the Beethoven begins with a simple, unattached bass sound of muffled drums. line before introducing the theme itself. The vari- Beethoven raised some ety and range of style are extraordinary: a fugue eyebrows by placing on the bass line, a virtuoso showpiece for flute, a Ferdinand Ries the funeral music so swinging dance in G minor, an expansive hymn. early in the symphony, Beethoven moves from one event to the next, but this is music, not making their connections seem not only obvious, biography, and chronology is beside the point. but inevitable. Some of it is splendid solemnity, The two interludes are particularly moving—the some high humor, and Beethoven touches on first because it casts a sudden ray of sunlight on much in between. A magnificent coda, which the grim proceedings; the second, because it continues to stake out new territory even while carries the single thread of melody into a vast wrapping things up, ends with bursts of joy from double fugue of almost unseemly magnificence. the horns. The music ends with some consolation, but even more grief. Beethoven’s funeral music gives way to a brilliant (though often very quiet) scherzo, just as the prisoners in Fidelio emerge from the dungeon Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the into the blinding daylight. Here, the modest Chicago Symphony Orchestra.