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 May 14, 2014, at 6:30 (Afterworks Masterworks, performed with no intermission) Vladimir Jurowski Conductor Eugene Izotov Oboe Music by Richard Strauss Serenade in E-flat Major, Op. 7 Oboe Concerto Metamorphosen The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBBM Newsradio 780 and 105.9FM for its generous support of the Afterworks Masterworks series. Thursday, May 15, 2014, at 8:00 Friday, May 16, 2014, at 1:30 Saturday, May 17, 2014, at 8:00 Vladimir Jurowski Conductor Eugene Izotov Oboe Dorothea Röschmann Soprano Music by Richard Strauss Serenade in E-flat Major, Op. 7 Metamorphosen INTERMISSION Oboe Concerto Allegro moderato— Andante— Vivace EUGENE IZotov Four Last Songs Frühling September Bein Schlafengehen Im Abendrot DORotHEA RÖSCHmaNN These concerts are sponsored by Linda and Tom Heagy in memory of Ruth and Clarence Heagy. Additional support is provided by a generous anonymous donor. 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 ichard Strauss’s life spanned nearly a century, from the age of Wagner to that of Boulez. As a boy, he heard Clara Schumann play the piano, yet he outlived both Bartók and Webern. Strauss Rwas born the year Abraham Lincoln was reelected president of the United States; the year he died, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. Strauss’s career could not keep pace with the staggering changes that took place in music. He first made his name as a leader of the avant-garde: his tone poems carried orchestral music to unforeseen heights of descriptive writing and instrumental opu- lence, his early operas Salome and Elektra brought modern music to the brink of ato- nality. But Strauss was uncomfortable in the role of revolutionary, and, shortly after 1910 he appeared to change direction. As early as 1916, when Stravinsky and Schoenberg were making news with their radical ideas, Strauss recognized that he no longer played a Richard Strauss, his son Franz, and his wife Pauline major role at the forefront of serious musical activity. “I’m the only composer nowadays,” he wrote that year, “with some real humor and a sense of fun and a marked gift for parody.” Strauss continued to write music in the German romantic tradition—music that still embraced melody and tonality—and he grew increasingly indifferent to even the most advanced trends. “Haven’t I the right, after all, to write what music I please?” he asked in 1924. “I cannot bear the tragedy of the present time. I want to create joy. I need it.” Although his tone poems immediately became staples of the orchestral literature and his new operas were always eagerly awaited, in many quarters Strauss was written off as a nostalgic figure from a bygone era—a composer with a grand and distinctive voice who simply had nothing to say. But Strauss, in fact, had the last word. Near the end of his life he recaptured something of his old creative fire and energy, and he enjoyed one final, glorious Indian summer—the time in which he composed the three major works on this week’s program: Metamorphosen, the Oboe Concerto, and the Four Last Songs. But to open this concert, we begin with a flashback to the earliest work in his catalog that is still performed with any regularity, the Serenade for Winds—a quick glance back more than sixty years to the music with which one of the greatest careers in music began. 2 Richard Strauss Born June 11, 1864, Munich, Germany. Died September 8, 1949, Garmisch, Germany. Serenade in E-fl at Major, Op. 7 “My mother tells of my magnifi cently, though he detested every note. earliest childhood that I “Strauss is an unbearable fellow,” Wagner once used to react with a smile said, “but when he plays his horn, one cannot to the sound of the horn be cross with him.” Th e last time the two men and with loud crying to spoke, during rehearsals for Parsifal, there was the sound of a violin,” some disagreement about a communal lunch for Richard Strauss wrote in the orchestra, and they ended up arguing over his old age. Small wonder, sour gherkins. for Richard’s father, the Franz Strauss tried to protect his son from man who stayed home to Wagner’s music, but one day he came home and practice his music while other fathers went to the heard Richard playing through a score of Tristan offi ce, was perhaps the most famous horn player at the piano. Despite his father’s eff orts, Richard in Europe. Franz Strauss was the principal horn was infatuated with the Wagnerian music drama. of the Munich Court Orchestra—a post he held Although that realization caused a serious family for forty-two years—and he encouraged and squabble, it helped Richard to fi nd his own voice steered his son’s musical ambitions. Neither one as a composer. Years later, when Richard Strauss ever lost respect for the other, though they once was nearly as famous as Wagner, Franz had to came to blows over the music of Richard Wagner. admit that he was now bewildered by his own Franz Strauss scrupulously orchestrated his son’s music; listening to Salome, he said, made son’s musical education. He asked his colleague him feel as if he had ants in his pants. August Tombo, the orchestra’s harpist, to give Richard piano lessons when he was barely four, trauss wrote his fi rst compositions when and four years later he persuaded his cousin he was six—a Christmas carol and a little Benno Walter to teach him the violin. Franz polka for piano—and from then on writing raised his son on the classics. Th ey read Goethe Smusic remained a favored pastime. “I was always together by the fi re, and they admired and played fonder of composing than studying,” he recalled. the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. (In later years, playing cards became his other (Schubert and Mendelssohn also were favor- passion.) Strauss’s earliest signifi cant works—a ites.) Franz hated Wagner—both the man and pedestrian string quartet and a cello sonata his music. When the Munich Opera gave the straightjacketed by textbook form, both com- fi rst performances of Tristan and Isolde and Die posed in the early 1880s—reveal his father’s taste Meistersinger, he played the important horn solos for classical forms. But with the more individual COMPOSED MOST RECENT INSTRUMENTATION 1881 CSO PERFORMANCES two fl utes, two oboes, two clarinets, November 27, 29 & 30, 1985, Orchestra two bassoons and contrabassoon, FIRST PERFORMANCE Hall. Erich Leinsdorf conducting four horns November 27, 1882; Dresden, Germany July 22, 1988, ravinia Festival. Edo de APPROXIMATE Waart conducting FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES PERFORMANCE TIME April 20 & 21, 1900, Auditorium 11 minutes Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting 3 serenade for thirteen winds that opens this and Mendelssohn on the one hand, yet also prov- all-Strauss concert, we find the first stirrings of ing himself an ambitious original thinker. Strauss the composer who would soon conquer concert tips his hat to his father by borrowing the most halls and opera houses around classical of structures, sonata the world. Even so, Strauss form, for his single-movement later dismissed the serenade design, and then, in the as “no more than the respect- recapitulation, by giving able work of a music student.” the luscious main theme to the horns. But although the trauss had just turned serenade is steeped in the seventeen when he past and colored by mem- composed his serenade. ory, heritage, and tradition, SIn it, Strauss stands at the it also opens the door to a crossroads, honoring the new career as big and bold obvious models by Mozart Richard and Franz Strauss as any we have known. POWER AND DRAMA Riccardo Muti and the CSO at their best! Available at Symphony Center, cso.org/resound, on iTunes, and in stores everywhere. CSO Resound is underwritten by a generous gift from Mr. & Mrs. Ralph Smykal. Global Sponsor of the CSO 4 Richard Strauss Metamorphosen, Study for 23 Solo Strings Arturo Toscanini said, in Weimar and Munich, he gave in to grief and “To Strauss the composer outrage—his world had collapsed. Virtually every I take off my hat; to major opera house or concert hall in his land was Strauss the man I put it now rubble. He wrote: on again.” Toscanini could never forget how Th e burning of the Munich Court Th eater, easily Strauss stepped in where Tristan and Die Meistersinger received to conduct the production their fi rst performances, where I fi rst heard of Wagner’s Parsifal at Freischütz seventy-three years ago, where my Bayreuth in 1933 from father sat at the fi rst horn desk for forty-nine which he himself had withdrawn to protest years—it was the greatest catastrophe of my Hitler’s ban on Jewish artists. While many life; there is no possible consolation, and, at important conductors and performers fl ed their my age, no hope. homelands rather than cooperate with the Nazi regime, Germany’s most famous living musician Strauss had led a charmed life. In a very real stayed put, absorbed in writing music while the sense, these were the most shattering personal world waged war around him. It was Strauss’s losses he ever experienced—the great master- misfortune to live at a time that would pit his pieces of German music were his childhood text- creative abilities against his understanding of the books and the halls and theaters themselves were larger issues of the world—in a country where familiar guideposts in the landscape he dearly music and politics became inseparable at the loved.