Christoph Eschenbach Conductor Beethoven Overture to Egmont, Op
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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, December 19, 2013, at 8:00 Friday, December 20, 2013, at 1:30 Saturday, December 21, 2013, at 8:00 Christoph Eschenbach Conductor Beethoven Overture to Egmont, Op. 84 Rands . where the murmurs die . First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances INTERMISSION Bruckner Symphony No. 9 in D Minor Solemn. Misterioso Scherzo: Fast, lively Adagio: Slow, solemn The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to 93XRT, Redeye, The Onion, 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 Ludwig van Beethoven Born December 16, 1770, Bonn, Germany. Died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria. Overture to Egmont, Op. 84 Beethoven met Bettina and—perhaps above all, because of its theat- Brentano in May 1810, rical nature—the opera Leonore (later known when he was hard at work as Fidelio). Th e incidental music for Goethe’s on his incidental music Egmont that Beethoven introduced in Vienna for Goethe’s Egmont. He that June was Beethoven’s fi rst score for the stage sang and played two of since Leonore, and it shows the composer striving his recent Goethe settings for an ever-greater sense of dramatic intensity. for her, because he knew In the fi rst stern notes of the overture (as well that she was a good friend as in the impassioned fast music that follows), of the great poet. Bettina Beethoven conveys a seriousness and urgency wrote to Goethe about the composer with such unexpected in music. Th e story of Egmont is enthusiasm that he answered her at once, serious business, to be sure, for it’s not just a suggesting that Beethoven meet him that tale of freedom and national liberation, but also summer in Karlsbad. In letter after letter that of a hero who dies for his cause, a theme that month, Bettina boasted to Goethe about prompted Beethoven to write some of his most Beethoven’s remarkable talent, and in particular powerful music throughout his career. Even of the way he had uncovered a “new sensuous in Beethoven’s time, the event that inspired basis in the intellectual life.” On May 28, she Goethe’s drama was ancient history: Count even quoted Beethoven: “Music, verily, is the Egmont, who led the Flemish resistance against mediator between the life of the mind and the Spanish rule of the Netherlands, was the senses.” beheaded in the Brussels marketplace on June 5, We don’t know which of Beethoven’s works 1568. But to Beethoven it was both personal and Bettina knew (aside from the Goethe songs he timely, recalling his own Flemish ancestry and performed for her), but several of his recent scores closely paralleling the current political situation had revealed a thrilling union of masterly tech- in Vienna, which had been occupied by the nique and powerful expression—the Fifth and French since May 1809. (During the bombard- Sixth symphonies, the Appassionata piano sonata, ment, Beethoven hid in his brother’s cellar and the Violin Concerto, the Fourth Piano Concerto, covered his head with pillows to mute the noise.) COMPOSED MOST RECENT CSO RECORDINGS 1809–10 CSO PERFORMANCES 1954. Fritz Reiner conducting. VAI November 17, 18, 20 & 23, (video) FIRST PERFORMANCE 2004, Orchestra Hall. Mikko 1957. Fritz Reiner conducting. CSO June 15, 1810; Vienna, Austria Franck conducting (From the Archives, vol. 17: Beethoven) FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES INSTRUMENTATION 1972. Sir Georg Solti conducting. December 16 & 17, 1892, Auditorium two fl utes and piccolo, two oboes, two London Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, 1989. Sir Georg Solti conducting. two trumpets, timpani, strings London APPROXIMATE 1990. Sir Georg Solti conducting. PERFORMANCE TIME Sony (video) 8 minutes 2 he Egmont overture itself is a compact tone poem, and, like the Leonore over- tures Beethoven wrote for his opera Fidelio,T it previews not only the central conflicts of the drama, but its resolution as well. Here Beethoven depicts the oppression of the Spanish rule (the slow opening is particularly grave), Count Egmont’s determination and rebellious spirit, the uprising of the Netherlanders, and Egmont’s fate. In an unexpected pause near the end—followed by the emphatic rhythm of the opening—Beethoven even depicts Egmont’s beheading, noting in his sketches that death “could be expressed by a silence.” Egmont’s posthumous triumph, however, is clear from the overture’s victorious close. eethoven sent Goethe a copy of his The Incident at Teplitz. Goethe bows to passing royalty, Egmont music in the spring of 1811, while Beethoven walks on. but the two men didn’t meet until Bthe summer of 1812, when they spent time (he preferred Mozart’s music), but as a com- together at the spa town of Teplitz. Goethe panion he dismissed him without hesitation was never convinced of Beethoven’s genius as an “utterly untamed personality.” 3 Bernard Rands Born March 2, 1934, Sheffi eld, England. where the murmurs die . As the year of the big father got up and went to work every morn- Verdi and Wagner ing,” Rands once told an interviewer, “and anniversaries draws to a I believe I have to do the same.” Before close, we turn our turning to composition, he began his attention much closer to career with a degree in literature from the home, to one of our own University of Wales. (Th ese two interests giants, Bernard Rands, came together when he began to set texts who is celebrating his to music, as in apókryphos, which was pre- eightieth birthday in miered by the Chicago Symphony in 2003.) March. Since immigrat- As a composition student of Reginald Smith ing to this country in 1975, Rands has won Brindle in the 1950s, Rands became fascinated several of our most prestigious awards, including with the lyrically inclined serial music of the the Pulitzer Prize, and his music has been played Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola. Rands by our leading orchestras, including the Chicago went to Italy in 1958 to study not only with Symphony, which introduced Rands to local Dallapiccola, but also with Luciano Berio and audiences in 1993, with performances of the Roman Vlad. In the early 1960s, he attended suites from Le tambourin, which had won the the composition classes of Pierre Boulez and Kennedy Center Friedheim Award seven years Bruno Maderna at Darmstadt. (Less than a earlier. Music by Rands, who now lives in decade later, Boulez and the BBC Symphony downtown Chicago, was most recently on this Orchestra commissioned three works from orchestra’s programs in May of 2011, when CSO him.) In 1966, Rands was awarded a Harkness music director Riccardo Muti conducted the International Fellowship that brought him to the premiere of Danza petrifi cada—the title comes United States; he spent a year each at Princeton from Nobel Prize–winning poet Octavio and at the University of Illinois. He returned Paz—which was commissioned by the CSO as to England to teach at York and at Oxford, but part of Chicago’s celebration of the bicentennial immigrated to the United States in 1975 and of Mexico’s independence and the centennial of became a citizen in 1983. Within a year, this the Mexican Revolution. new U.S. citizen had won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his song cycle for tenor and orchestra, ands was born into a working-class Canti del sole (Songs of the sun), the second in family in the coal-mining com- a set of three cycles—the others are the Canti munity of Sheffi eld, England, and lunatici (Songs of the moon) of 1982 and the Rdeveloped his serious, no-nonsense work Canti dell’eclisse (Songs of the eclipse) from ethic regarding composition early on. “My 1992. Rands also won the 1986 Kennedy Center COMPOSED FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES APPROXIMATE 1993 These are the fi rst Chicago Symphony PERFORMANCE TIME Orchestra performances. 10 minutes FIRST PERFORMANCE December 11, 1993, New York City INSTRUMENTATION three fl utes, alto fl ute and piccolo, two oboes, three clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, strings 4 Friedheim Award for Le tambourin, Suites 1 and here the murmurs 2. The music is related to an opera about the die . is part of a series Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh that began, of pieces by Rands in a sense, when Rands visited the Vincent van whose titles are taken from a single early Gogh Museum in Amsterdam on its opening …Wpoem by Samuel Beckett—part of a group of day in 1973, and climaxed with the long-awaited four poems collectively titled Dieppe. These premiere of Vincent at Indiana University on compositions (Rands’s way of “mining the April 8, 2011. various images and meanings of the poem,” In this country, Rands taught at the California as he has said) are . body and shadow . for Institute for the Arts, the University of orchestra; . among the voices . for chamber California at San Diego (where he founded the choir and harp; . in the receding mist . for contemporary performing ensemble SONOR), flute, harp, and string trio; . and the rain . for Boston University, and the Juilliard School horn, harp, and string trio; and . sans voix of Music. In 1988, he was named Walter parmi les voix . for flute, viola, and harp, Bigelow Rosen Professor of Composition at commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Harvard University, and, in 1989, he began a Orchestra for Pierre Boulez’s seventieth birthday.