ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON … Muti Conductor ... copy of the score to Goethe, the poet recorded ... The mists are rent, the heavens shine, and Aeolus loosens

PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON

Chicago Symphony OrchestraRiccardo Muti Zell Music Director Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor EmeritusYo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

Tuesday, January 27, 2015, at 7:30

Riccardo Muti Conductor

MendelssohnCalm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Overture, Op. 27

DebussyLa merFrom Dawn to Noon on the SeaPlay of the WavesDialogue of the Wind and the Sea

INTERMISSION

ScriabinSymphony No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 43 (The Divine Poem)Lento—Luttes (Allegro)—Voluptés (Lento)—Jeu divin (Allegro)

CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines.

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

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COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher

Felix MendelssohnBorn February 3, 1809, Hamburg, Germany.Died November 4, 1847, Leipzig, Germany.

Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Overture, Op. 27

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Felix Mendelssohn met for the first time in 1821. The great poet was seventy-two and famous; the composer a precocious twelve-year-old. They walked together in Goethe’s garden in

Weimar and then had dinner. Afterwards, Mendelssohn played Bach fugues and improvised at the piano. On another evening in Goethe’s house later in the week, the poet put Mendelssohn to the test, asking him to improvise on favorite tunes, play the overture from Don Giovanni from memory, and sight-read from a nearly indecipher-able Beethoven manuscript. Goethe told Carl Friedrich Zelter, who was his friend and also Mendelssohn’s teacher, “What your pupil already accomplishes bears the same relation to the Mozart of that age that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child.” Mendelssohn continued to visit Goethe through-out the 1820s, as his fame grew nearly equal to his friend’s, the result of his astonishing early success—he wrote the brilliant Octet at sixteen and his first true masterpiece, the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at seventeen.

As Mendelssohn would come to learn, Goethe’s taste in music was surprisingly old-fashioned. Despite the efforts of Berlioz,

Beethoven, and Mendelssohn himself, Goethe said that Mozart was the only composer who could have set Faust to music. More than once during their encounters, when Mendelssohn would play the piano for Goethe, he tried to con-vert him to Beethoven’s cause, each time without success. Schubert sent Goethe some of his most impressive songs, all of them settings of Goethe’s poems, and he too was given the cold shoulder. (Oddly, when Mendelssohn once played through some of his sister Fanny’s songs, Goethe seemed pleased and wrote her a poem of thanks.)

I n 1828, undeterred—or perhaps not yet defeated by Goethe’s musical sensibilities—Mendelssohn wrote this concert overture,

titled Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage and based on two of Goethe’s poems (the poems appear on page 28). He was all of nineteen at the time. Beethoven had picked the same poems in 1814—just two years after he met the poet—and set them as a magnificent, utterly unconven-tional choral piece. (When Beethoven sent a copy of the score to Goethe, the poet recorded in his diary that he received it, but never wrote to Beethoven to acknowledge it.) In 1828, a year after Beethoven’s death, Mendelssohn chose to treat the poems not as a vocal piece, but as descriptive instrumental music, perhaps thinking of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, a kind of landscape painting unknown to music before, as a point of departure.

COMPOSED1828, revised 1834

FIRST PERFORMANCEDecember 1, 1832, Berlin. The composer conducting

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESNovember 11 & 12, 1892, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESSeptember 27, 2014, Orchestra Hall. Riccardo Muti conducting

October 29, 2014, Grosser Musikvereinsaal, Vienna, Austria. Riccardo Muti conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, two horns, three trumpets, timpani, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME13 minutes

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Like Beethoven, Mendelssohn was not a man of the sea—in 1828 he had seen the ocean just once—but he understood that the essence of Goethe’s journey was personal, not nautical. In Mendelssohn’s hands, Goethe’s subtext of stasis, crisis, and transformation becomes a grand orchestral narrative. Mendelssohn perfectly captures the “deathly stillness” of the opening and the sudden surge as the winds (quite literally,

launched by flute arpeggios) pick up. Clearly Mendelssohn had studied Beethoven’s setting well; the two scores share many similarities, including the key of D major. But Mendelssohn’s brings us much closer to the highly descriptive tone poems of the future, and it is probably no coincidence that he began to paint around the same time he composed this score. Mendelssohn’s ending is more triumphant than Goethe’s—the poem ends merely with the first sighting of land—with trumpet fanfares to celebrate a safe landing, but the last measures, diminishing from ff to a sudden pp, circle back to the opening, placing the entire journey in a different light.

M endelssohn saw Goethe for the last time when he stopped off for a visit in May 1830, just before he began the

Italian journey the poet had recommended—the trip that inspired Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony. Around the time of the premiere of Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage in 1832, Felix and Fanny gave a private performance of the score as a piano duet at home, dimming the lights to create the proper mood.

The two poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe which inspired Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Overture.

MEERSTILLETiefe Stille herrscht im Wasser,ohne Regung ruht das Meer,und bekümmert sieht der Schifferglatte Fläche ringsumher.Keine Luft von keiner Seite!Todesstille fürchterlich!In der ungeheuren Weitereget keine Welle sich.

GLÜCKLICHE FAHRTDie Nebel zerreißen,der Himmel ist helle,und Aeolus lösetdas ängstliche Band.Es säuseln die Winde,es rührt sich der Schiffer.Geschwinde! Geschwinde!Es teilt sich die Welle,es naht sich die Ferne,schon seh’ ich das Land!

CALM SEACalm and silence rule the water,motionless the ocean lies,and the sailor’s anxious gazefinds glassy flatness far and wide.Not a breath of air is stirring!Fearful, deathless stillness reigns!On the infinite expansenot a single wavelet moves.

PROSPEROUS VOYAGEThe mists are rent,the heavens shine,and Aeolus loosensrestraining ties.The winds now are whistling,the sailor bestirs himself.How swiftly; how swiftlythe waves part before us,the distance draws near;and now I see land!

Goethe watches as a young Felix Mendelssohn performs during a visit to the poet’s residence in Weimar.

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Claude DebussyBorn August 22, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France.Died March 25, 1918, Paris, France.

La mer (Three Symphonic Sketches)

Although Debussy’s parents once planned for him to become a sailor, La mer, subtitled Three Symphonic Sketches, proved to be his greatest seafaring adventure. Debussy’s childhood summers at Cannes left him with vivid memories

of the sea, “worth more than reality,” as he put it at the time he was composing La mer some thirty years later. As an adult, Debussy seldom got his feet wet, preferring the seascapes available in painting and literature; La mer was written in the mountains, where his “old friend the sea, always innumerable and beautiful,” was no closer than a memory.

Like the great British painter J.M.W. Turner, who stared at the sea for hours and then went inside to paint, Debussy worked from memory, occasionally turning for inspiration to a few other sources. Debussy first mentioned his new work in a letter dated September 12, 1903; the title he proposed for the first of the three symphonic sketches, “Calm Sea around the Sanguinary Islands,” was borrowed from a short story by Camille Mauclair published during the

1890s. When Debussy’s own score was printed, he insisted that the cover include a detail from The Hollow of the Wave off Kanagawa, the most celebrated print by the Japanese artist Hokusai, then enormously popular in France.

We also know that Debussy greatly admired Turner’s work. His richly atmospheric seascapes recorded the daily weather, the time of day, and even the most fleeting effects of wind and light in ways utterly new to painting, and they spoke directly to Debussy. (In 1902, when Debussy went to London, where he saw a number of Turner’s paintings, he enjoyed the trip but hated actually crossing the channel.) The name Debussy finally gave to the first section of La mer, From Dawn to Noon on the Sea, might easily be that of a Turner painting made sixty years earlier, for the two shared not only a love of subject but also of long, specific, evocative titles.

T here’s something in Debussy’s first symphonic sketch very like a Turner painting of the sun rising over the sea.

They both reveal, in their vastly different media, those magical moments when sunlight begins to glow in near darkness, when familiar objects emerge from the shadows. This was Turner’s favorite image—he even owned several houses

COMPOSED1903–March 1905

FIRST PERFORMANCEOctober 15, 1905; Paris, France

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESJanuary 29 & 30, 1909, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting

July 8, 1937, Ravinia Festival. Ernest Ansermet conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESAugust 7, 2012, Ravinia Festival. James Conlon conducting

September 25, 26, 27 & 30, 2014, Orchestra Hall. Riccardo Muti conducting


INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, three bas-soons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets and two cornets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, glockenspiel, bass drum, two harps, celesta, strings


CSO RECORDINGS1960. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA

1976. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London

1978. Erich Leinsdorf conducting. (From the Archives, vol. 5: Guests in the House)

1991. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London

2000. Daniel Barenboim conducting. Teldec

2001. Daniel Barenboim conducting. EuroArts (video)

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Alexander ScriabinBorn January 6, 1872 [December 25, 1871, old style], Moscow, Russia.Died April 27, 1915, Moscow, Russia.

Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 43 (The Divine Poem)

From his youth, when he interpreted the signifi-cance of his birth on Christmas Day as a sign that he should do great things, Scriabin believed he would play a decisive role in the history of music. But his early death at the age of forty-three

cut short his career just as he was venturing into pioneer territory. Like many composers of a less revolutionary bent, Scriabin started his musical

life as a pianist and his composing career writing only piano pieces. In 1884, he began to study piano with Nicolai Zverev, who already had accepted Sergei Rachmaninov as a pupil. The two students became good friends—Scriabin was older by just one year—though they were sometimes later portrayed as rivals once their musical ambitions ventured in different direc-tions. At the time they met, both Scriabin and Rachmaninov were beginning to compose piano pieces for themselves to play. In 1888, Scriabin entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he excelled equally as a pianist and composer. When

from which he could watch, with undying fasci-nation, the sun pierce the line separating sea and sky. Debussy’s achievement, though decades later than Turner’s, is no less radical, for it uses famil-iar language in truly fresh ways. From Dawn to Noon on the Sea can’t be heard as traditional program music, for it doesn’t tell a tale along a standard time line (although Debussy’s friend Eric Satie reported that he “particularly liked the bit at a quarter to eleven”). Nor can it be read as a piece of symphonic discourse, for it is organized without regard for conventional theme and development. Debussy’s audiences, like Turner’s before him, were baffled by work that takes as its subject matter color, texture, and nuance.

Debussy’s second sketch too is all suggestion and shimmering surface, fascinated with sound for its own sake. Melodic line, rhythmic regular-ity, and the use of standard harmonic progres-sions are all shattered, gently but decisively, by the fluid play of the waves. The final Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea (another title so like Turner’s) captures the violence of two elements, air and water, as they collide. At the end, the sun breaks through the clouds. La mer repeatedly resists traditional analysis. “We must agree,” Debussy writes, “that the beauty of a work of art will always remain a mystery, in other words, we can never be absolutely sure ‘how it’s made’.”

La mer was controversial even during rehears-als, when, as Debussy told Stravinsky, the

violinists tied handkerchiefs to the tips of their bows in protest. The response at the premiere was mixed, though largely unfriendly. It is hard now to separate the reaction to this novel and challenging music from the current Parisian view of the composer himself, for during the two years he worked on La mer, Debussy moved in with Emma Bardac, the wife of a local banker, leaving behind his wife Lily, who attempted suicide. Two weeks after the premiere of La mer, Bardac gave birth to Debussy’s child, Claude-Emma, later known as Chou-Chou. Debussy married Emma Bardac on January 20, 1908. The night before, he conducted an orchestra for the first time in public, in a program which included La mer. This time, it was a spectacular success, though many of his friends still wouldn’t speak to him.

The front cover of the first edition of La mer, for which Debussy chose Hokusai’s print The Hollow of the Wave off Kanagawa

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COMPOSED1902–1904

FIRST PERFORMANCEMay 29, 1905; Paris, France

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESJanuary 19 & 20, 1923, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting

July 7, 1938, Ravinia Festival. Artur Rodzinski conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJuly 18, 1940, Ravinia Festival. Artur Rodzinski conducting

June 6, 7, 8 & 11, 2013, Orchestra Hall. Riccardo Muti conducting


INSTRUMENTATIONthree flutes and piccolo, three oboes and english horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, eight horns, five trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, strings


he graduated in 1892, he was awarded the second gold medal in composition (Rachmaninov took first place, for his opera Aleko).

After Scriabin left the conservatory, he began a career as a concert pianist. While his recital programs often included music by Schumann and Liszt, two composers who also started out as pia-nists, Scriabin’s particular favorite was Chopin. That influence is reflected not only in his reper-toire, but in the titles and nature of the music he wrote at the time—sets of preludes, impromptus, etudes, and even Polish mazurkas. To study the first nineteen opus numbers in Scriabin’s catalog, all pieces for piano solo, one would never predict the important orchestral music that would quickly follow.

T he move away from writing solo piano music was a tough and decisive step for all the pianist-composers of the

nineteenth century. For Chopin, it came of necessity; the piano recital was not yet a common part of concert life in the 1820s, and Chopin needed concertos to play in his appearances with orchestras. For Schumann, it took the powerful influence of his wife Clara to encour-age him to start writing for the orchestra. Like Chopin, Liszt wrote piano concertos as a means of expanding his superstar solo career and box office appeal, and it was only after he retired from the concert stage in 1848 that he could devote time to writing for orchestra alone. More contemporary with Scriabin, Brahms struggled with leaving the comfort of the piano bench behind; he began writing for orches-tra in small, tentative steps, and then spent two decades perfecting his first symphony.

C hopin, Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms were already mature artists with indi-vidual and recognizable styles when

they moved beyond composing exclusively for the piano. But when Scriabin wrote a piano concerto in 1896—the first of his works to call for orchestra—he had not yet discovered the voice that would ultimately make his music unique. The Chopinesque concerto scarcely hints at the direction Scriabin’s career would take. Three years later, he began his first symphony.

The traditional form of the symphony would only briefly satisfy Scriabin’s musical ambitions. All three of the works he called symphony were composed within a five-year period, and already with the third—the one performed tonight—Scriabin felt the need for a descriptive subtitle, The Divine Poem, recognizing that his ideas were beginning to outgrow the symphonic model. The Divine Poem is the pivotal work in Scriabin’s output. He did not even bother to label the two grand orchestral pieces he wrote afterwards, The Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus, as symphonies. Both of those works are single-movement tone poems, if any conventional title can do justice to their extraordinary form and substance. The Divine Poem is a transitional work in another sense, for it marks Scriabin’s transformation from a promising composer to a true original. Around the time of its composition, in the first years of the twentieth century, Scriabin fell under the spell of philosophical and mystical ideas that dominated his thoughts for the rest of his life and completely changed the music he wrote. In addition, Rimsky-Korsakov introduced Scriabin to the idea of a correspondence between music and color as early as 1902, the year he began The Divine Poem. The two composers shared many opinions on the subject, including their dismay with Wagner’s Magic Fire Music from The Ring. “He uses the wrong tonality,” Scriabin said, “and repeats the music in different keys!” (They both thought it should be in G.) Scriabin eventually developed his own music-color wheel—he and

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Rimsky ultimately agreed only on the identity of yellow and D.

T he Divine Poem is the first of Scriabin’s works to address his new ideas through the suggestive yet imprecise language

of music. At the premiere in Paris in 1905, the following note, presumably dictated by Scriabin, was distributed: “The Divine Poem represents the evolution of the human spirit, which, freed from the legends and myster-ies of the past that it has surmounted and overthrown, passes through pantheism and achieves a joyful and exhilarating affirmation of its liberty and its unity with the universe.”

The Divine Poem is the longest work Scriabin wrote. It is scored for a very large orchestra, han-dled with the care and imagination—and a sheer delight in unrestrained symphonic sound—of a much more experienced orchestrator. It is also the first of his works to be called a poem, signal-ing the shift from abstract symphony to a new, unnameable kind of music, and to use French as the language of its abundant expressive markings (the opening theme of the Allegro, for example, is to be mystérieux, tragique).

There are three linked movements, preceded by a powerful short introduction. Throughout his Third Symphony, Scriabin is working towards a tight thematic integration of his material—the broad opening motif, for example, is incorporated into the first theme of the ensuing Allegro—and to motivic connections between the movements. He is already moving in the direction of the highly unified single movement as his ideal form, the one he would use for nearly all his last works. Scriabin’s evolving language is one of harmonic ambiguity and a fleeting, uncertain sense of rhythmic pulse (recalling his own highly rhap-sodic style of piano playing, which was known for its freedom and unpredictability).

The first movement, Luttes (Struggles), depicts the conflict, in Scriabin’s words, “between man as the slave of a personal God and man as God in himself.” The latter wins, but only after a closely argued, magnificent stretch of music as volatile, flexible, and many-faceted as anything written at the time.

Voluptés (Pleasures), the second movement, basks in the delights of the sensuous world. This is voluptuous, even erotic music. (For the New York performance in 1907, Scriabin authorized

a translation of the title as “ecstasies.”) We are immersed in the sounds of nature, long before Bartók’s night music or Messiaen’s birdsong. Scriabin’s ear for color is extraordinary (this was composed as he and Rimsky-Korsakov were beginning their investigation into the linking of color and sound). Scriabin later admitted that the hushed opening, for winds alone, was intended to evoke the sound of a far-off organ. The solo violin represents Man as “his personality loses itself in nature.”

In the final movement, Jeu divin (Divine play), “the spirit, freed from its submission to a supe-rior power and conscious of its unity with the universe, abandons itself to the supreme joy of a free existence.” This exhilarating music held a special place in Scriabin’s memory: “This was the first time I found light in music,” he later said. “The first time I knew intoxication, flight, the breathlessness of happiness.”

I n the ten years he had left after writing The Divine Poem, Scriabin ventured far-ther into the great unknown, where music

and color are closely linked, and where “art must unite with philosophy and religion in an indivisible whole to form a new gospel.” After his Fifth Piano Sonata, composed in 1907, he broke with tonality. A single dissonant chord, the so-called mystic chord, provided the foun-dation for all of his final compositions. He had, in effect, created a new system of tonal organization to replace traditional harmony.

After his death, no one truly followed his path (Prokofiev and Szymanowski briefly came under his spell), and, in the end, despite the urgency and fierce passion of his ideas, he did not—to use current parlance—make a difference. Stravinsky, who disliked both Scriabin and his music, once commented, “Although his death was tragic and premature, I have sometimes wondered at the kind of music such a man would have written had he survived into the 1920s.” Scriabin’s original language was, in its own way, as revolu-tionary as that of Mahler, Strauss, Schoenberg, or Debussy, all of whom were writing at the same time. It is difficult to know where Scriabin was headed, and how he might ultimately have changed the course of music.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

© 2015 Chicago Symphony Orchestra

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON … Muti Conductor ... copy of the score to Goethe, the poet recorded ... The mists are rent, the heavens shine, and Aeolus loosens

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