Schubert's Symphonies

PROGRAM ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-THIRD 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, June 12, 2014, at 8:00 Friday, June 13, 2014, at 1:30 Saturday, June 14, 2014, at 8:00 Tuesday, June 17, 2014, at 7:30 Riccardo Muti Conductor David McGill Bassoon Schubert Symphony No. 6 in C Major, D. 589 Adagio Andante Scherzo Allegro moderato Mozart Bassoon Concerto in B-flat Major, K. 191 Allegro Andante ma adagio Rondo: Tempo di menuetto DAVID McGILL INTERMISSION Schubert Symphony No. 1 in D Major, D. 82 Adagio—Allegro vivace Andante Allegro Allegro vivace This series is made possible by the Juli Grainger Endowment. Sponsorship of the music director and related programs is provided in part by a generous gift from the Zell Family Foundation. CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to 93XRT, RedEye, and Metromix for their generous support as media sponsors of the Classic Encounter series. 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 Franz Schubert Born January 31, 1797, Himmelpfortgrund, northwest of Vienna, Austria. Died November 19, 1828, Vienna, Austria. Symphony No. 6 in C Major, D. 589 Symphony No. 1 in D Major, D. 82 Schubert’s contemporar- Schubert’s were privately performed in the ies—even the few who same city and quickly forgotten. All nine of understood the magni- Beethoven’s symphonies were published during tude of his talent—did his lifetime; not one piece of Schubert’s orches- not think of him as a tral music appeared in print during his. And composer of symphonies. yet, for all his apparent lack of public success Antonio Salieri, who was with the form, Schubert persisted. He started one of his fi rst teachers more symphonies than Beethoven and fi nished and a man who knew the nearly as many—all in a shorter period of time. Viennese music scene as (While Beethoven composed his nine over the well as anyone in the early years of the nine- span of twenty-fi ve years, Schubert completed teenth century, called Schubert a genius, and said seven and left another six unfi nished in just that “he can write anything: songs, masses, string seventeen years.) Schubert was working on his quartets . ,” but he failed even to mention newest one—the so-called Symphony no. 10—at the symphony. the time of his death. (In 1995, the Chicago Not one of the eight symphonies by Schubert Symphony performed Luciano Berio’s haunting that Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony and imaginative Rendering, which is based on perform this season was publicly known during Schubert’s sketches for this symphony.) the composer’s lifetime. Most of them weren’t For Dvořák, writing in 1894, Schubert’s fi rst even published until the very end of the nine- six symphonies were recent discoveries, as they teenth century, more than fi fty years after were for all musicians in the late nineteenth Schubert’s death. In 1894, while Antonín Dvořák century. (Th ey were published for the fi rst time was living in the United States, he wrote an article in 1884 and 1885.) He had recently begun to for Th e Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, con- conduct the symphonies and he highly rec- sidering the reasons Schubert “made his way so ommended them to others. “Th e more I study slowly to popular appreciation,” and why the sym- them,” Dvořák concluded, “the more I marvel.” phonies, in particular, did not gain the immediate Written in little more than four years—from admiration of those by other composers. “He was sometime in 1813 to February of 1818—they young, modest, and unknown,” Dvořák writes, are among the most impressive and substantial “and musicians did not hesitate to slight a sym- of Schubert’s so-called early works (although, as phony which they would have felt bound to study, Donald Tovey pointed out long ago, “every work had it borne the name of Beethoven or Mozart.” Schubert left us is an early work”). Th ey are so Th e comparison with Beethoven is both inev- refi ned and assured that it is diﬃ cult to remem- itable and misleading. Schubert and Beethoven ber that they are the works of a teenage boy. were composing symphonies at the same time in Schubert’s early symphonies come from the Vienna during the fi rst years of the nineteenth busiest time of his life. He was still a school- century—never once meeting nor even crossing master then, a prisoner of the classroom who paths until the very end of Beethoven’s life. Each fi lled his free time writing the music that would of Beethoven’s symphonies was premiered to one day make him famous. Not all this music considerable fanfare in one of Vienna’s main pub- is important or memorable; Schubert must lic theaters within a year or so of its completion. have been writing at breakneck speed and often 2 well into the night. But much of it is unusually finest works—they reveal a gift too strong and impressive regardless of the circumstances, and an imagination too vivid to be stifled even by the some of the songs, in particular, are among his dull rigor of drilling reluctant boys. Symphony No. 6 in C Major, D. 589 n November of 1816, the Italian Opera music. Yet, for all the ways the great Italian Company made its first visit to the great composer’s music enlivened and enriched music capital of Vienna, bringing with it Schubert’s orchestral writing, by 1817, with IRossini’s Tancredi and L’inganno felice. This was several symphonies already completed, Schubert Vienna’s first taste of Rossini’s operas, and soon had become an assured symphonic composer the city’s large musical public, including the with a voice of his own. One can still pinpoint nineteen-year-old Franz Schubert, could not influences and cross-references—a Mozartean get enough of this intoxicating music. Word introduction to open the score, the Haydn-like of Rossini’s recent extraordinary successes in touch of beginning the allegro with the winds Italy had sent shock waves through the musical alone, the instrumental fireworks of Rossini establishment in Germany and Austria—he through the movement, a speeded-up coda that had first drawn international attention in 1813 echoes the effect of Rossini’s signature windup with the serious Tancredi and the comedy, crescendos. The third movement, the first L’italiana in Algeri. In the home of the great in Schubert’s output to be labeled a scherzo, classical masters, his music had quickly been resembles Beethoven’s in its power and thrust. condemned: “He could have become one of But more revealing are gestures and ideas, the most outstanding vocal composers of our particularly in the finale, that are the seeds of time,” wrote the composer Ludwig Spohr, “if he the other C major symphony to come—the had been methodically instructed in Germany one that would eventually be called Great to and guided on the one true path through distinguish it from this somewhat slighter one in means of Mozart’s classical masterworks.” the same key. Schubert went to hear Tancredi and left the With the Sixth Symphony, we find Schubert theater enraptured. “You cannot deny that he steeped in the conventions of the classical has extraordinary genius,” he wrote to his friend symphony, but striving to break free and forge Anselm Hüttenbrenner. “The orchestration is his own path, as only the greatest of symphony highly original at times, and occasionally so is the composers can. It is a work of consolidation, vocal writing . .” In the thrall of the new Rossini but more importantly, one of anticipation. After rage sweeping Vienna, Schubert composed two completing this score in February of 1818, overtures “in the Italian style,” trying out a new Schubert began and abandoned several sym- way of writing that immediately changed his own. phonies, including the one we now know as the Schubert’s Sixth Symphony is the main Unfinished. But it would be another decade before beneficiary of his discovery of Rossini’s he would actually finish one last symphony. COMPOSED MOST RECENT APPROXIMATE October 1817–February 1818 CSO PERFORMANCES PERFORMANCE TIME January 26, 27 & 31, 1995, Orchestra 28 minutes FIRST PERFORMANCE Hall. Zubin Mehta conducting December 14, 1828; Vienna, Austria CSO RECORDING INSTRUMENTATION 1979. Sir Georg Solti conducting. FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, EuroArts (video) February 7 & 8, 1957, Orchestra Hall. two bassoons, two horns, two Sir Thomas Beecham conducting trumpets, timpani, strings 3 Symphony No. 1 in D Major, D. 82 chubert knew the orchestra from the melody, the harmonic progressions, and in many inside—he began playing in the student exquisite bits of orchestration.” In other words, ensemble of Vienna’s Imperial and Royal Schubert already sounded like Schubert, even in SCity College at the age of twelve—and we might a work as early as his First Symphony (it is only well guess from listening to his Symphony no. 1 number 82 in Otto Erich Deutsch’s comprehen- that closes this concert that, as an orchestral sive catalog of 998 compositions). musician, he regularly played symphonies by The teenage Schubert was unafraid to put his Haydn and Mozart as well the first two by own stamp on the symphonic design that Haydn Beethoven.

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