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PROGRAM
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director
Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Global Sponsor of the CSO
Tuesday, January 27, 2015, at 7:30
Riccardo Muti Conductor
Mendelssohn
Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Overture, Op. 27
Debussy
La mer
From Dawn to Noon on the Sea
Play of the Waves
Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea
INTERMISSION
Scriabin
Symphony 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.
COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher
Felix Mendelssohn
Born 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 indecipherable 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 throughout 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,
COMPOSED
1828, revised 1834
FIRST PERFORMANCE
December 1, 1832, Berlin. The
composer conducting
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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 convert 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 unconventional 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.
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
November 11 & 12, 1892,
Auditorium Theatre. Theodore
Thomas conducting
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
September 27, 2014, Orchestra Hall.
Riccardo Muti conducting
October 29, 2014, Grosser
Musikvereinsaal, Vienna, Austria.
Riccardo Muti conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
two flutes and piccolo, two oboes,
two clarinets, two bassoons and
contrabassoon, two horns, three
trumpets, timpani, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
13 minutes
Goethe watches as a young Felix Mendelssohn performs
during a visit to the poet’s residence in Weimar.
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.
MEERSTILLE
Tiefe Stille herrscht im Wasser,
ohne Regung ruht das Meer,
und bekümmert sieht der Schiffer
glatte Fläche ringsumher.
Keine Luft von keiner Seite!
Todesstille fürchterlich!
In der ungeheuren Weite
reget keine Welle sich.
CALM SEA
Calm and silence rule the water,
motionless the ocean lies,
and the sailor’s anxious gaze
finds glassy flatness far and wide.
Not a breath of air is stirring!
Fearful, deathless stillness reigns!
On the infinite expanse
not a single wavelet moves.
GLÜCKLICHE FAHRT
Die Nebel zerreißen,
der Himmel ist helle,
und Aeolus löset
das 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!
PROSPEROUS VOYAGE
The mists are rent,
the heavens shine,
and Aeolus loosens
restraining ties.
The winds now are whistling,
the sailor bestirs himself.
How swiftly; how swiftly
the waves part before us,
the distance draws near;
and now I see land!
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Claude Debussy
Born 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
COMPOSED
1903–March 1905
FIRST PERFORMANCE
October 15, 1905; Paris, France
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
January 29 & 30, 1909, Orchestra Hall.
Frederick Stock conducting
July 8, 1937, Ravinia Festival. Ernest
Ansermet conducting
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
August 7, 2012, Ravinia Festival. James
Conlon conducting
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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
September 25, 26, 27 & 30,
2014, Orchestra Hall. Riccardo
Muti conducting
October 29, 2014, Grosser
Musikvereinsaal, Vienna, Austria.
Riccardo Muti conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and
english horn, two clarinets, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns,
three trumpets and two cornets, three
trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals,
tam-tam, triangle, glockenspiel, bass
drum, two harps, celesta, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
26 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1960. 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)
from which he could watch, with undying fascination, 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 familiar 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 regularity, and the use of standard harmonic progressions 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 rehearsals, 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
The front cover of the first edition
challenging
of La mer, for which Debussy chose
music from
Hokusai’s print The Hollow of the
the current
Wave off Kanagawa
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. Alexander Scriabin
Born 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 significance 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 directions. 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
5
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 pianists, Scriabin’s particular favorite was Chopin.
That influence is reflected not only in his repertoire, 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 encourage 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 orchestra in small, tentative steps, and then spent
two decades perfecting his first symphony.
C hopin, Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms
were already mature artists with individual and recognizable styles when
COMPOSED
1902–1904
FIRST PERFORMANCE
May 29, 1905; Paris, France
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
January 19 & 20, 1923, Orchestra Hall.
Frederick Stock conducting
July 7, 1938, Ravinia Festival. Artur
Rodzinski conducting
6
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
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
July 18, 1940, Ravinia Festival. Artur
Rodzinski conducting
June 6, 7, 8 & 11, 2013, Orchestra Hall.
Riccardo Muti conducting
October 29, 2014, Grosser
Musikvereinsaal, Vienna, Austria.
Riccardo Muti conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
three 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
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
50 minutes
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 mysteries 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, handled 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, signaling 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 rhapsodic 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
© 2015 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
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 superior 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 farther 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 foundation 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 revolutionary 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.
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