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Home , Minna Planer, Richard Specht, Siegfried Idyll, Tribschen

Program

One Hundred Twenty-Second Season Chicago Symphony 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, March 14, 2013, at 8:00 Friday, March 15, 2013, at 8:00 Saturday, March 16, 2013, at 8:00 Asher Fisch Conductor Michael Barenboim Idyll Schoenberg Violin Concerto, Op. 36 Poco allegro Andante grazioso Allegro Michael Barenboim

Intermission Mahler Adagio from Symphony No. 10 Wagner Prelude to

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

Richard Wagner Born May 22, 1813, Leipzig, Germany. Died February 13, 1883, Venice, Italy.

Siegfried Idyll

lthough was R. is her beloved Richard, Aborn on December 24, she and two of the five children are chose to celebrate her birthday Cosima’s from her previous mar- on the twenty-fifth. Her diary riage to Hans von Bülow, whom entry for Sunday, December 25, she abruptly left for the man that 1870, reads: even Hans, a talented pianist and conductor, admitted to be his When I woke up I heard a superior in the world of music. sound, it grew ever louder, I The other three are five-year-old could no longer imagine myself Isolde; Eva, three; and Siegfried, in a dream, music was sound- eighteen months—Cosima and ing, and what music! After it ’s children, all born had died away, R. came in to before their marriage on August 25, me with the five children and 1870. is the name of the put into my hands the score house on a promontory overlooking of his “symphonic birthday Lake , where Cosima and greeting.” I was in tears, but so, Richard made their home. Tribschen too, was the whole household; Idyll is, of course, the Siegfried R. had set up his orchestra on Idyll—though it wasn’t given that the stairs and thus consecrated name for many years, after the our Tribschen forever! The Wagners elected to publish their Tribschen Idyll—so the work private musical communication in is called . . . exchange for a nice sum of money.

Composed First CSO Instrumentation 1870 performance , , two , March 4, 1892, Auditorium , two horns, First performances Theatre. Theodore , strings private: December 25, Thomas conducting 1870; Tribschen, Lake Approximate Lucerne, . The Most recent CSO performance time composer conducting performance 18 minutes October 23, 2007, public: December 20, 1871; Orchestra Hall. Bernard CSO recording Mannheim, Germany Haitink conducting 1999. conducting. Teldec

2 (“The secret treasure is to become private joys: the domestic bliss of public property,” Cosima wrote in married life after years of secretive- her diary.) ness and scandal, the long-hoped- Richard and Cosima first declared their love for each other on November 28, 1863 (like all the important events in their life together—and many of much lesser significance—it is well docu- mented); at the time, both were married to others—she to Bülow, who was a student of her father, ; he to , an actress four years his senior, from whom he was estranged. The union between Richard and Cosima was consummated in June 1864. The following years brought artistic triumphs and personal scandals as well as an astonishing mixture of private and professional events, including the birth of Isolde, Richard and Cosima’s first child, on the very day that Bülow, still Cosima’s husband, began orchestral rehearsals for Wagner’s newest work, Tristan and Isolde. Richard and Cosima Wagner, 1872 In 1869, after the triumphant premieres of Tristan and Isolde and Die Meistersinger, Wagner resumed for birth of a son, his undying love work on the Ring (which he had for Cosima, and the composition of abandoned twelve years earlier), Siegfried (which in turn promised beginning with act 3 of Siegfried. the completion of the Ring, the In June his only son, inevitably single greatest artistic achievement named Siegfried, was born. The fol- of his life). It was designed to be lowing year, the Bülows’ marriage performed on the steps leading up was legally dissolved (Wagner’s to Cosima’s bedroom at Tribschen, wife Minna had died in 1866), and and its instrumentation was on August 25, Richard and Cosima dictated by the size of the staircase. were married in the Protestant (The first performance was given church in Lucerne. Wagner once by thirteen or fifteen players— called 1870 the happiest year of regarding this detail, oddly, there is his life. conflicting evidence.) The piece was Wagner composed the Tribschen secretly rehearsed by the conduc- Idyll later that year to celebrate his tor , who learned to

3 play the trumpet especially for the 1877—remains Wagner’s only occasion (the part is just twelve instrumental work that is regu- measures long). larly played. The main theme is a The Idyll, an astonishingly beau- generous and lilting melody sung tiful and extravagant birthday gift by Brünnhilde in act 3 of Siegfried from a man not always known for to the words beginning “Ewig war his generosity, was performed three ich” (I always was, I always am, times on Christmas Day in 1870. always in sweet yearning bliss). After the early morning, wake- Wagner claimed that this music up-call premiere, the household came to him during the summer of stopped for breakfast. The players 1864 at the Villa Pellet, overlook- then reassembled and the piece was ing Lake Starnberg, where he and repeated, followed by the wedding Cosima consummated their union. march from , Beethoven’s (He is contradicted, however, by Septet, and yet another perfor- his own obsessive record keeping: mance of the Idyll. the melody was composed that Cosima was used to hearing November 14, when he was alone snatches of extraordinary music in .) A second theme, around the house, but she immedi- introduced by the oboe, is a lullaby ately recognized that the Idyll was Wagner jotted down on New Year’s unique in her husband’s output. Eve 1868. The music is unusually Wagner called the Idyll a sym- intimate and restrained for a com- phony in the autograph score, and, poser who lived a life of excess. It’s when it was published in 1877, he the most personal of all his works: described it as a “symphonic birth- the title page of the published day greeting.” He had struggled score refers to “Fidi-Birdsong and with symphonic form as a young Orange Sunrise”; Fidi was a favor- composer—he remained fond of ite nickname for little Siegfried, a very Beethovenian symphony and the sunrise was the “incredibly in C major that he had composed beautiful, fiery glow,” in Cosima’s when he was twenty-nine—and words, of the wallpaper in his room continued to sketch ideas for other when it was struck by the morn- symphonies into his last years. ing sun. More than any other of The month before his death, he Wagner’s scores, the spoke to Cosima about a single- marries the private and public sides movement symphonic work in of the most famous composer of the which the melodies would flow one nineteenth century. The Siegfried into another. of the title is both the third music drama of the Ring cycle and he Siegfried Idyll—this title Wagner’s son—who was destined to Tapparently dates from a carry his father’s name and beaked performance in Meiningen in silhouette into the next century.

4 Arnold Schoenberg Born September 13, 1874, , Austria. Died July 31, 1951, Los Angeles, California.

Violin Concerto, Op. 36

n the summer of 1936, Arnold ill-at-ease, in its depiction of an ISchoenberg, his wife Gertrude, individual voice within the larger and their four-year-old daughter society of the orchestra, and in its Nuria moved into a new house on uncomfortable conflict between the now infamous Rockingham tradition and novelty—between Avenue in Brentwood Park, a conventional forms and a still-new suburb of Los Angeles. That twelve-tone technique. September, as he settled into the Schoenberg was a man torn place he would live for the rest between worlds. He left Germany of his life, Schoenberg finished in 1933, following Hitler’s rise to his Violin Concerto, one of the power, passed through Paris, taught landmarks of modern music and briefly in Boston, and settled in the piece he later called his favorite Los Angeles the following year. of all his orchestral works. In January 1936, when he wrote For Schoenberg, this was a to Werfel (twenty- time of many dichotomies, not five years after Gustav died, she least of all the mere presence of was married to the novelist Franz the stern-faced Viennese master Werfel) about the death of his for- in sunny L.A.—the awkward- mer student Alban Berg in Vienna, ness of his having settled in a city he complained about his new life of freeways neatly symbolized in a big American city that didn’t by the fact that he didn’t even appreciate his music. (Writing have a driver’s license. The Violin “Hollywood” at the top of his letter Concerto reflects Schoenberg’s state surely reminded Schoenberg just of mind as an exile, uprooted and how far removed he was from the

Composed Most recent CSO four horns, three , 1934–September 23, 1936 performance three trombones and tuba, February 24, 2004, timpani, glockenspiel, First performance Orchestra Hall. Nikolaj xylophone, bass drum, December 6, 1940; Znaider, violin; Daniel cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Barenboim conducting military drum, snare drum, tambourine, strings First CSO Instrumentation performance solo violin, three Approximate April 24, 1969, Orchestra and piccolo, three , performance time Hall. Esther Glazer, violin; , E-flat clarinet and 33 minutes Irwin Hoffman conducting bass clarinet, three bas- soons and contrabassoon,

5 intellectual circles of turn-of-the counterpart to his two famous century Vienna, but times had Viennese pupils, Anton Webern changed, and even Alma moved and Alban Berg. The father of to California in 1940.) Now, at the Second Viennese School had the age of sixty-two, he was barely become an Angeleno. Schoenberg’s making enough money to support American conversion was relatively his family, and he worried that swift and surprisingly easy—in he wouldn’t be able to finish the no time, he was tuning the radio theoretical works and compositions to football games and picking up he had already started, including a street lingo like “Take it easy.” violin concerto begun in a rented In 1938, the inventor of twelve- house in Hollywood and packed for tone music was even invited to the move to Rockingham. the Academy Awards to present But Schoenberg began to put the Oscar for best film score. (He down roots. In 1936, he talked of became ill and had to cancel, but building a house in L.A. for his he was thrilled that his speech was family, regretting that Adolf Loos, read aloud in his absence.) the great Viennese architect, had recently died. He always had felt he Violin Concerto reflects that he and Loos were kindred spir- TSchoenberg’s status as a man its and fellow adventurers—unlike between both countries and tradi- the other members of his artistic tions. In 1933, Schoenberg had generation, whom he dismissed as warmed up for the new project by “rather restrained, hesitant, always completely reworking two pieces of staying a few steps back, follow- eighteenth-century music—a key- ing along only when it was high board concerto by Georg Matthias time”—and he would have enjoyed Monn that he turned into a their collaboration. He considered concerto, and a concerto grosso turning to the Viennese modernist by Handel that became a work for Richard Neutra, who had recently string quartet and orchestra—so relocated to California and who the pull of the past was very strong had “Viennese taste,” but instead, as he set to work on a new score in Schoenberg bought a newly built a new country. house in Brentwood—a California Schoenberg began the first Mediterranean affair befitting a movement in 1934, composed movie star (and down the street the rest of the concerto late in the from Shirley Temple’s home). summer of 1936, and dedicated it to Anton Webern, his “dear n Los Angeles, the man who had friend and fellow warrior.” Otto Ionce befriended Klemperer, the conductor of the and now played Los Angeles Philharmonic, talked tennis with George Gershwin and about premiering the piece in L.A., hung out with Charlie Chaplin. London, and Moscow during the He soon took on a promising new 1937–38 season, but it was another student—John Cage, an L.A. “warrior,” Leopold Stokowski, who

6 conducted the first performances in performance of an important work Philadelphia in 1940. Always out- of mine,” he told Krasner. spoken and forward-looking (he led Although Schoenberg habitually the American premieres of Mahler’s gave the impression that he was Eighth Symphony and Stravinsky’s writing music without concern for Rite of Spring), Stokowski nearly its reception—“Those who compose lost his job for programming because they want to please others, Schoenberg’s new work. and have audiences in mind, are Louis Krasner, who had played not real artists,” he once wrote—he the premiere of Berg’s Violin did in fact crave an audience. His Concerto four years earlier, was children remember how thrilled the Philadelphia soloist. (Krasner he was to hear his works played recently had given the Chicago on the radio, or how he stopped premiere of Berg’s concerto under to listen, with childlike delight, Frederick Stock, in February 1939.) to Transfigured Night blaring from Before Krasner received the score, the loudspeaker at a juice stand Schoenberg wrote to him, warning on Highway 1. “There is nothing that “the difficulties of this work I long for more intensely,” he later are different ones and greater than said, “than to be taken for a better those of the Berg concerto.” Krasner sort of Tchaikovsky. People should was horrified when he first saw the know my tunes and whistle them.” music, but by the time he played Schoenberg already knew he through the part for an ecstatic would fight till his dying day to Schoenberg, he had cleanly mas- persuade audiences to listen to his tered its difficulties. Krasner later works “in the same manner as every drew a parallel with Brahms’s con- other kind of music, forget the certo, then little more than half a theories, the twelve-tone method, century old, which was at first called the dissonances, etc. . . .” He once “unplayable” and “unviolinistic.” told Alma Mahler simply to listen After the premiere, Schoenberg for “colors, smells, lights, sounds, wrote to his soloist to congratulate movements, glances, gestures,” him on the great achievement of knowing that even she came to his playing the concerto “in such a music hampered by certain precon- perfect and convincing manner so ceived notions. “Nobody,” he wrote shortly after it has been written in 1935, while the violin concerto and so shortly after it had been still sat on his writing desk, “can called unplayable.” Schoenberg imagine music which he has not dubbed Krasner the work’s “first heard before, and therefore nobody conqueror.” But the composer was could have the right expectations depressed by the general lack of before listening to it.” interest in his music, particularly Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto where he most expected it—“none was slow to catch on with violinists of my friends and relatives, and also and with the public, even though nobody from my publishers wrote Berg’s was programmed with sur- me one single word about this first prising regularity almost from the

7 start. As late as 1968, the composer many smaller unnamed ones. The Milton Babbitt complained that violin part is a great dramatic performances of Schoenberg’s score tour de force, ever-changing in “have been rare to a degree sadly its many moods and expressive unbefitting one of the most influen- faces, and it asks everything of the tial compositions of our time.” Only instrument—pizzicato, tremolando, in recent years, and with the rise of multiple stops, harmonics—and of a new generation of young violin- its “conqueror.” Schoenberg joked ists, has it slowly begun to take its that the piece required a violin- place in the repertory. ist with an extra finger on his left hand, but no doubt its extreme ike the Monn and Handel technical demands discouraged Lscores Schoenberg dissected performers from taking up the work and reassembled shortly before for many years. beginning this work, and like the The first movement is the most violin concertos by the compos- wide-ranging in its emotional ers he most admired—Bach, makeup. The middle movement is Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms— one of Schoenberg’s most deeply felt Schoenberg’s score has three move- creations. Schoenberg was particu- ments, with slow music at its center. larly fond of its opening melody—a The entire concerto is generated lovely arching theme in the violin— from a single row of notes that can and he quoted it in his essay “Heart be transposed and turned or twisted and Brain in Music” as an example into other shapes. (Schoenberg that demonstrates both. For all its was so attached to the twelve-tone newness, this is music of an almost- system that it even governed nam- nineteenth-century beauty. (Robert ing family members: the names of Craft, Stravinsky’s amanuensis, his son Ronald and his grandson remembers Pierre Boulez, at home Roland are both permutations of in his Paris apartment in 1956, Arnold.) But the concerto is far improvising a “funny Brahmsian from formulaic, and the still-new accompaniment” to the opening twelve-tone technique is handled violin theme.) The finale is lively, with extraordinary imagination and witty, and brilliant—two cadenzas, daring, and with surprisingly free- one at each end of the movement, wheeling disregard for the “rules.” are particularly dazzling—and the In all three movements, the conclusion is one of Schoenberg’s solo violin is a dominating voice, most stirring. The whole concerto although its relationship with still sounds amazingly fresh and Schoenberg’s big orchestra is novel. “Is it not the duty of every highly charged, complex, and artist,” Schoenberg wrote while mercurial. The solo role is daunt- he was working on the score, “to ing and demanding, and it’s filled tell you what you do not know, with cadenzas, both tradition- what you never have heard before, ally positioned “official” ones what you never could find out, or of significant length as well as discover, or express yourself?”

8 Gustav Mahler Born July 7, 1860, Kalischt, Bohemia. Died May 18, 1911, Vienna, Austria.

Adagio from Symphony No. 10

fter Gustav Mahler’s death, He who wants to go beyond Aword got out that he had it must die. It seems as if asked his wife Alma to burn the something might be imparted manuscript of his unfinished to us in the Tenth which we Tenth Symphony. As Arnold ought not yet to know, for we Schoenberg wrote in 1912, “We are not yet ready. Those who shall know as little about what his have written a Ninth stood Tenth . . . would have said as we too near the hereafter. Perhaps know about Beethoven’s Tenth the riddles of this world would or Bruckner’s.” Schoenberg lived be solved if one of those who long enough to learn how wrong knew them were to write a he was—that Alma couldn’t bring Tenth. And that is probably herself to carry out her husband’s not going to happen. wishes. She eventually even pub- lished the manuscript in facsimile Mahler had gone out of his way and arranged for the performance to sidestep the issue, calling his of the two movements that were ninth symphonic work Das Lied von most nearly complete. But Mahler der Erde, and taking pleasure in the died believing that his last sym- fact that his Ninth Symphony was phony would never be played. actually his tenth. Almost as soon Like Mahler, Schoenberg super- as he completed that work, he began stitiously believed that no composer the Tenth Symphony. But from the after Beethoven would live to write start, it had a troubled history. more than nine symphonies. “It Under the heading “summer seems that the Ninth is a limit,” 1910,” Alma Mahler wrote in he continued. her memoirs:

Composed Most recent CSO Approximate 1910 performance performance time January 23, 2001, 22 minutes First performance Orchestra Hall. Michael October 14, 1924, Vienna Gielen conducting CSO recording A 1966 performance of First CSO Instrumentation Mahler’s Tenth Symphony performance three flutes and piccolo, (realized by Deryck Cooke) May 19, 1966, Orchestra Hall. three oboes, three clarinets, conducted by Jean Martinon, Jean Martinon conducting, three , four is included in Chicago Deryck Cooke realization of horns, four trumpets, Symphony Orchestra: The complete Symphony no. 10 three trombones and tuba, First 100 Years. harp, strings

9 I took Mahler to Toblach and spotted him hiding under a bridge then had to go on to Tobelbad, when she and Mahler went out for as prescribed by the physi- a drive), Mahler demanded that cian, to cure my ailing nerves. Alma choose between them. The Mahler remained in Toblach, next morning she took Gropius to looked after by old, depend- the train station; on her way home able domestic servants, and he she ran into Mahler, who had come began to sketch the Tenth. after her, fearing that she had left him for good. “I would simply have On June 4, while Mahler worked gone out,” Mahler said later, “like a on his symphony, Alma was intro- torch deprived of air.” duced to Walter Gropius, a talented young architect who had just opened his is the background for the his own office in Berlin. That night Tfinal months of Mahler’s life—a they went for a long moonlit walk. tale of tabloid exploits, a damaged By the time Alma left the spa to marriage, an unresolved love affair, check in on Gustav in mid-July, she and an unfinished symphony. and Gropius had become lovers— Mahler worked on the symphony “two souls had found each other, almost obsessively throughout the their two bodies forgotten,” as she summer of 1910, and then put it tactfully put it in her memoirs. aside to resume his life as a conduc- Alma had only been back with her tor (there’s no evidence that he ever husband for a week or two when the touched it again after his encounter situation exploded, sparked by an with Freud), awaiting the next impassioned letter Gropius wrote to summer’s composing holiday that Alma but “inadvertently” addressed he wouldn’t live to see. He designed to Gustav. “Whether the young man the new score in five movements, made a mistake in the stress of emo- like his Fifth and Seventh sym- tion,” Alma later wrote, “or whether phonies, although the labels on it was his unconscious wish that it the large folders that he used to should come into Mahler’s hands, hold the music for each movement remains a mystery.” Regardless, suggest that he was uncertain it precipitated the most profound about their sequence. Mahler emotional crisis of Mahler’s life, wrote “adagio” on the folder for leading him, at the summer’s end, to the first movement, even though the Dutch town of Leiden to con- that tempo doesn’t appear until sult with Sigmund Freud. (Mahler measure sixteen. Instead, he begins was so nervous about their meeting with a single strand of melody in that he canceled the appointment the , marked andante, that three times; Freud interrupted his wanders quietly, almost without summer vacation to see the com- direction, before it encounters the poser, later saying he couldn’t turn grand adagio theme, rising and dip- down a man of Mahler’s impor- ping over full, deep chords. It’s one tance.) When Gropius showed up of Mahler’s greatest creations—a unannounced at Toblach (Alma theme so subtly inflected that its

10 mood and destination seem to In 1924, Alma Mahler Gropius shift with every turn of phrase. asked her new son-in-law, the This is already music of anguish twenty-three-year-old composer and impending drama, but, like Ernst Krenek, to “complete” Mahler’s life at the time, it’s headed Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. (Krenek for a full-blown crisis, unforget- had married Gustav and Alma’s tably depicted here by a screaming daughter, Anna, the previous year.) trumpet on a sustained high A and Although Krenek felt the job was by a giant, suffocating chord with “obviously impossible,” he managed dissonance piled upon dissonance. to prepare a performing edition (The chord contains nine of the for full orchestra of two move- twelve notes of the scale.) For a ments, the Adagio and Purgatorio, moment, we glimpse something the third movement, which was new in Mahler’s music—what nearly complete. Schoenberg had called that “which Shortly after Mahler’s death, his we ought not yet to know, for biographer Richard Specht sug- we are not yet ready.” The music gested that Arnold Schoenberg, quickly regains its composure, a “musician of high standing, however, eventually unfolding into devoted to Mahler, and intimate a glowing final cadence—a triumph with his style” would best bring of art over the reality of Mahler’s the Tenth Symphony to comple- life, shattered so badly that he tion. Alma didn’t follow his advice couldn’t put it right again. at the time, but many years later, in 1949, she invited Schoenberg, number of postscripts. Alma then seventy-five years old, to AMahler and Walter Gropius her apartment to discuss the continued to see each other and to project. Schoenberg examined exchange love letters, even while the manuscript in Alma’s study Mahler was dying. They married in for an hour and then declined to 1915 and divorced four years later. take the job. Eventually, however, Their daughter, Alma Manon, who performing editions of the entire died of complications from polio in symphony have been prepared by, 1935, was memorialized by Alban among others, Deryck Cooke and Berg in his Violin Concerto. Remo Mazzetti, whose versions Gropius, who founded the have been played by the Chicago Bauhaus movement at Weimar in Symphony Orchestra. 1919, became an internationally During her last years, Alma famous architect in his post-Alma proudly displayed the manuscript years. He and his associate Adolph of the Tenth Symphony in her Meyer entered the Chicago Tribune living room. The score was opened Building Competition in 1922. to the page where, at the height Their design, an austere modern- of the Gropius crisis, Mahler had ist structure wrapped in bands of scribbled “To live for you! To die Chicago windows, didn’t make for you! Almschi,” pointedly using the finals. his wife’s pet name.

11 Richard Wagner

Prelude to Parsifal

n April 14, 1865, Richard epic Parzifal on a summer holiday OWagner wrote to his adored and in Marienbad in 1845, and was cap- wonderful friend (to use his saluta- tivated by the story of a young man tion) King Ludwig II of Bavaria: who sets out to find his place in the world and instead discovers human A warm and sunny Good compassion and the Holy Grail. Friday, with its mood of sacred But over the next years, his reading solemnity, once inspired introduced other subjects that he me with the idea of writing wanted to set to music first, includ- Parzifal: since then it has lived ing the sixteenth-century guild of on within me and prospered, mastersingers and a magic ring. like a child in its mother’s Still, the hero Parsifal was never womb. With each Good Friday far from his thoughts. (Wagner it grows a year older, and I then changed the spelling because he celebrate the day of its concep- mistakenly thought that Parsifal tion, knowing that its birthday was Persian for “pure fool,” the per- will follow one day. fect representation of his guileless hero.) Wagner first wrote an opera The idea of Parsifal lived within about the hero’s son, Lohengrin, Wagner for thirty-six years, the lon- and later toyed with the idea of gest gestation of any of his works, having Parsifal appear at Tristan’s including the entire Ring cycle. bedside. But Parsifal didn’t take Wagner first read Wolfram von shape until a particularly lovely Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century morning in 1857, when he quickly

Composed Most recent CSO Approximate opera: 1877–1881 performance performance time May 21, 2005, 14 minutes First performance Orchestra Hall. Daniel prelude: December 25, 1878; Barenboim conducting CSO recording Bayreuth, Germany 1999. Daniel Barenboim Instrumentation conducting. Teldec opera: July 26, 1882; three flutes, three oboes Bayreuth, Germany and english horn, three clarinets, three bassoons First CSO and contrabassoon, four performance horns, three trumpets, April 1, 1892, Auditorium three trombones and tuba, Theatre. Theodore timpani, strings Thomas conducting

12 sketched a drama in three acts, later submerged orchestra pit, Wagner insisting, despite the evidence, that mixes orchestral colors with extraor- the day was Good Friday. It was dinary individuality and refinement. still another twenty years before (The opening phrase calls for just he actually began work on it, and one player on each stand of ; the score took him more than three using the entire section would years to complete. Wagner always subtly, but perceptibly, affect the intended Parsifal to be his final way the theme sounds.) work, and, in fact, he died seven So sensitive was Wagner’s ear months after the premiere was that a single sonority can change given in Bayreuth on July 26, 1882. the complexion of the music. A soft tremolo on one note in the low he prelude is the first music strings, for example, alters the way TWagner wrote for Parsifal; it we hear the opening theme when it was composed during the summer returns otherwise unchanged—it’s of 1877. Wagner orchestrated it as if a cloud has crossed the sun. a year later (the opera itself was Even the silences are conceived as only half done) so that it could be colors in the palette of this music; performed for his wife Cosima’s they aren’t merely pauses between forty-first birthday on Christmas phrases or sections, but indispens- Day, 1878. Wagner told Cosima, able elements in Wagner’s design. “My preludes must consist of the (It’s equally important where elements, and not be dramatic like they do not occur—a great brass the Leonore overtures, or the drama statement ends only to reveal the becomes superfluous.” The Parsifal strings already playing, to stunning prelude isn’t dramatic, but it is an effect.) The prelude is spacious and extraordinarily powerful piece that reflective; with each sentence in prepares us for the drama that fol- this measured opening paragraph, lows. Wagner sets out his elements Wagner suggests the pace and mag- side by side—often separating nitude of the opera that follows. them by wide-open spaces—but he When Wagner conducted a doesn’t throw them into action yet. private performance of the prelude Parsifal begins magically, with a for King Ludwig II of Bavaria striking sonority—muted violins on November 12, 1880, he gave and with a single clarinet and Ludwig a program note which bassoon (joined briefly by english outlines the music’s three themes: horn)—that’s as individual and Love—the opening melody, slow instantly recognizable as a familiar and seemingly unmeasured, like voice. A seamless melody unfolds plainchant; Faith—the choral slowly, as if without pulse or direc- “ Amen” Wagner appro- tion at first, leading, after reflection, priated from Lutheran usage; to new ideas. Writing for the first and Hope—the steady march of time in his long career for the acous- the brass. tics of the theater he had painstak- Phillip Huscher is the program annota- ingly designed at Bayreuth, with its tor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Symphony Orchestra © 2013 Chicago

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