PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SEVENTH SEASON

Chicago Symphony OrchestraRiccardo Muti Zell Music Director Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant

Saturday, September 23, 2017, at 8:00Tuesday, September 26, 2017, at 7:30

Riccardo Muti ConductorAnne-Sophie Mutter Violin

PendereckiThe Awakening of JacobFirst Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

TchaikovskyViolin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35Allegro moderatoCanzonetta: AndanteFinale: Allegro vivacissimo

ANNE-SOPHIE MUTTER

INTERMISSION

SchumannSymphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61Sostenuto assai—Allegro ma non troppoScherzo: Allegro vivaceAdagio espressivoAllegro molto vivace

These performances are generously sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. Dean L. Buntrock.

CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBBM Newsradio 780 and 105.9 FM for their generous support as media sponsors of the Tuesday series.

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Global Sponsor of the CSO

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COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher

Above: Penderecki, 1969

Krzysztof PendereckiBorn November 23, 1933; Dębica, Poland

The Awakening of Jacob

Penderecki’s entire career has been colored by his understanding and acceptance of the “new” in music. When he studied composition at the Kraków Academy of Music in the mid-1950s, Poland was awaking from a deep, paralyzing

cultural isolation. Penderecki didn’t even hear Stravinsky’s seminal The Rite of Spring of 1913 until sometime around 1956, when he was in his early twenties. That year, a group of composers founded the Warsaw Autumn Festival and programmed “new” music by the founding fathers of modernism, including Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Webern, as well as contempo-rary works by Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen. (Nono himself came to Poland, armed with scores of recent music.) Penderecki was suddenly exposed not only to twentieth- century classics, but also to the new serialism of Pierre Boulez and the chance music of John Cage.

Penderecki made headlines of his own in 1960 with his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, a ten-minute, densely layered work scored for fifty-two strings that boldly announced the arrival of a new pioneer. Throughout the 1960s, Penderecki was regarded as one of the most brilliant and adventuresome figures in music. But he quickly tired of the avant-garde, sensing that it was preventing him from writing the

music he really wanted to compose. In the 1970s, when he began a second career as a conduc-tor (Penderecki led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Schubert’s Fifth Symphony and his own Seven Gates of Jerusalem in March 2000), the experience of performing Bruckner, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky pointed the way out of this

COMPOSED1974

FIRST PERFORMANCEAugust 14, 1974; Monte Carlo, Monaco

INSTRUMENTATIONthree flutes and two piccolos, three oboes and english horn, three clarinets, three bassoons and contrabassoon, five horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, tam-tam, bass drum, strings, with all winds doubling on ocarina

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME8 minutes

These are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first performances.

William Blake (1757–1827), Jacob’s Ladder, pen and ink and watercolor, 1805. British Museum, London

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creative impasse and began to influence his own music in profound ways, provoking a gradual retreat toward more traditional tonal procedures, a full decade before so-called neo-romanticism became popular.

The Awakening of Jacob, which was composed in 1974, finds Penderecki on the cusp of this dra-matic change. It is recognizable today as the work of both the “old” and “new” Penderecki. Melody and harmony begin to make their first fleeting appearances in his music, even though it remains a landscape of sonic exploration. But color alone is no longer the primary driving force, even though it was the shock effect of Penderecki’s sound world that led Stanley Kubrick to use The Awakening of Jacob in the soundtrack to his 1980 film, The Shining. (Penderecki later recalled that Kubrick said the snarling brass chords that open the score offered precisely the kind of “non-direct” music he was looking for.) In The Awakening of Jacob, Penderecki’s use of sonic effects—tone clusters, sliding blocks of sound, shivering tremolos—is restrained, even economical, with simple, telling gestures in place of opulent display. The use of percussion is minimal, and the only exotic instrument Penderecki calls for

is the ocarina, the ancient vessel flute (all the woodwinds double on ocarina).

T he title of the piece refers to Jacob’s dream in the desert: a ladder to heaven, filled with angels, ascending and

descending. Although Penderecki always rejected strict programmatic readings of his orchestral music, he did admit a particular fascination with the peculiar beauty of this biblical scene. He prefaces the score with an epigram from Genesis: “Jacob woke from his sleep and said: Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.”

Michael Lukas Leopold Willmann (1630–1706), Landscape with the Dream of Jacob, 1691. State Museums of Berlin, Picture Gallery, Bode-Museum. Source/Photographer The Yorck Project: 10,000 Masterworks

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Pyotr TchaikovskyBorn May 7, 1840; Votkinsk, RussiaDied November 6, 1893; Saint Petersburg, Russia

Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35

COMPOSEDMarch–April 1878

FIRST PERFORMANCEDecember 4, 1881; Vienna, Austria

INSTRUMENTATIONsolo violin, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME34 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESDecember 8 and 9, 1899, Auditorium Theatre. Alexandre Petschnikoff as soloist, Theodore Thomas conducting

July 17, 1937, Ravinia Festival. Mischa Mischakoff as soloist, Hans Kindler conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESFebruary 10, 11, 12, and 15, 2011, Orchestra Hall. Vadim Repin as soloist, Sakari Oramo conducting

June 29, 2013, Morton Arboretum. Jennifer Koh as soloist, Carlos Miguel Prieto conducting

August 1, 2015, Ravinia Festival. Maxim Vengerov as soloist, James Conlon conducting

CSO RECORDINGS1940. Nathan Milstein as soloist, Frederick Stock conducting. RCA

1945. Erica Morini as soloist, Désiré Defauw conducting. RCA

1957. Jascha Heifetz as soloist, Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA

1963. Nathan Milstein as soloist, Walter Hendl conducting. VAI (video)

This violin concerto was the best thing to come of a very bad marriage. In May 1877, Tchaikovsky received a letter from Antonina Milyukova, a former student he couldn’t remember, who said she was madly in love

with him. Earlier that year, Tchaikovsky had entered into an extraordinary relationship, conducted entirely by correspondence, with Nadezhda von Meck, and he found this combi-nation of intellectual intimacy and physical distance ideal. In order to keep his homosexual-ity from the public, he impulsively seized on the convenient, though unpromising, idea of marriage to a woman he didn’t even know. On June 1, Tchaikovsky visited Antonina Milyukova for the first time; a day or two later he proposed.

The marriage lasted less than three months, but it must have seemed a lifetime. Tchaikovsky quickly learned to despise Antonina—he couldn’t even bring himself to introduce her as his wife—and he was shocked to learn that she knew not

one note of music. In September, he botched a pathetic suicide attempt (he waded into the freezing Moscow River hoping to contract a fatal chill) and then fled to Saint Petersburg. On October 13, Anatoly, one of the composer’s younger twin brothers, took Tchaikovsky on an extended trip to Europe. His thoughts quickly turned to composing, confirming what he wrote to Nadezhda von Meck during the very worst days: “My heart is full. It thirsts to pour itself out in music.” He returned to composition cau-tiously, beginning with the works that had been interrupted by the unfortunate encounter with Antonina: he completed the Fourth Symphony in January 1878 and finished Eugene Onegin the next month.

By March, he had recovered his old strength; he settled briefly in Clarens, Switzerland, and there, in the span of eleven days, he sketched a new work—a violin concerto in D major; he completed the scoring two weeks later. When he returned to Russia in late April, there were still lingering difficulties—Antonina alternately accepted and rejected the divorce papers, and even extracted the supreme revenge of moving into the apartment above his—but the worst year of his life was over.

Above: Tchaikovsky, ca. 1877, from a photograph included in The Life and Letters of Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky, written by his brother Modest

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The Violin Concerto was launched by a visit to Clarens from Tchaikovsky’s student and friend—and possible lover—the violinist Yosif Kotek, who arrived at Tchaikovsky’s door with a suitcase full of music. (Kotek had been a witness at Tchaikovsky’s wedding.) The next day they played through Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, and Tchaikovsky was immediately taken with the idea of writing a large work for violin and orches-tra. He liked the way that Lalo “does not strive after profundity, but carefully avoids routine, seeks out new forms, and thinks more about musical beauty than about observing established traditions, as do the Germans.” He plunged in at once, and found to his delight that music came to him easily. (Shortly after he arrived in Clarens, he had begun a piano sonata, but it didn’t go well and he quickly gave it up.) Each day, Kotek offered advice on violinistic matters, and he learned the score page by page as Tchaikovsky wrote it. On April 1, when the work was com-pletely sketched, they played through the con-certo for Anatoly’s twin brother, Modest. Both Yosif and Modest thought the slow movement was weak. Four days later, Tchaikovsky wrote a new one (the original Andante became the Meditation from Souvenir d’un lieu cher [Memory of a dear place]), immediately began scoring the work, and unveiled the finished product on April 11. Clearly he was back on track.

New problems awaited Tchaikovsky, however. Although the concerto was dedicated to the great violinist Leopold Auer and the premiere was already advertised for the following March 22, Auer stunned the composer by dismissing the piece as unplayable. Tchaikovsky was deeply wounded, and the premiere was postponed indefinitely. “Coming from such an authority,” Tchaikovsky said, Auer’s rejection “had the effect of casting this unfortunate child of my imagina-tion into the limbo of the hopelessly forgotten.”

Two years passed. Then one day, Tchaikovsky’s publisher informed him that Adolf Brodsky, a young violinist, had learned the concerto and persuaded Hans Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic to play it in concert. That per-formance, in December 1881, was no doubt horrible, as the orchestra, underrehearsed and reading from parts chock full of mistakes,

played pianissimo throughout to avert disaster. Reviewing the concerto, the often ill-tempered critic Eduard Hanslick wrote that, for the first time, he realized that there was music “whose stink one can hear.” Tchaikovsky never got over that review, and, for the rest of his life, it is said, he could quote it by heart. Although Hanslick stood by his opinion, Auer later admitted that the concerto was merely difficult, not unplay-able, and he taught it to his students, including Mischa Elman and Jascha Heifetz, who both played it in Chicago.

H anslick’s dislike is hard to understand, for this is hardly an inflated, preten-tious, and vulgar work, although those

are the words he used. In fact, Tchaikovsky’s lyric gift has seldom seemed so natural, flowing effortlessly through all three movements. If there is any deficiency here, it is one of form and construction, not content; even the most casual listener may find it disconcerting that—as with the popular opening tune in the B-flat piano concerto—the lovely theme with which Tchaikovsky begins vanishes into thin air after a few seconds, never to return.

Hanslick also took offense at the demanding, virtuosic solo part, writing in terms that crop up in reviews of new music to this day: “The violin is no longer played; it is pulled about, torn, beaten black and blue.” What Hanslick failed to notice is the way Tchaikovsky has taken care to cushion even the most challenging, exhibitionistic pas-sages in music of unforced lyricism and restraint. Even Hanslick admitted that the lovely slow movement made progress in winning him over. But the brilliant finale, with its driving, folklike melodies and very “Russian” second theme over the low bagpipe drone of open fifths, was too much for him, and he concluded sputtering about wretched Russian holidays and the smell of vodka. Even Auer had to admit that Hanslick’s comment “did credit neither to his good judg-ment nor to his reputation as a critic.” “The concerto has made its way in the world,” he wrote years later, after it had, in fact, become one of Tchaikovsky’s most beloved works, “and, after all, that is the most important thing. It is impossible to please everybody.”

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Robert SchumannBorn June 8, 1810; Zwickau, Saxony, GermanyDied July 29, 1856; Endenich, near Bonn, Germany

Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61

COMPOSED1845–46

FIRST PERFORMANCENovember 5, 1846; Leipzig, Germany

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings.

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME34 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESOctober 23 and 24, 1891, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting

July 2, 1942, Ravinia Festival. Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJuly 2, 2004, Ravinia Festival. Christoph von Dohnányi conducting

November 19, 20, 21, and 22, 2009, Orchestra Hall. Christoph von Dohnányi conducting

CSO RECORDINGS1957. Fritz Reiner conducting. CSO (From the Archives, vol. 1: The Reiner Era)

1977. Daniel Barenboim conducting. Deutsche Grammophon

In August 1844, Robert Schumann suffered a severe breakdown. Medical reports seldom shed much light on works of art, but in Schumann’s case, his creative process was regularly dictated by his physical condition. His fragile life was

marked by recurring melancholy and depression beginning as early as 1828. There were recur-rences in October 1830, throughout 1831, and in the autumn of 1833, when he attempted suicide by leaping from his fourth-floor apartment window—his diary that year records his fear of going mad. There were other breakdowns in 1837, 1838, and 1839, but with the happiness of marriage to Clara Wieck in 1840, and the abundant, joyous outpouring of songs that year, it seemed that he had put his demons behind him, and that better times lay ahead.

But in 1842, Schumann collapsed from exhaustion and overwork. The worst time of all came in 1844: he couldn’t even listen to music—“which cut into my nerves as if with knives”—and he complained of a constant, debilitating ringing in his ears. He also suffered from trembling and from unreasonable fears of sharp metal objects and heights (perhaps

the consequence of renting a fourth-floor apartment). When Robert and Clara went to Dresden that October, his nights were sleepless and sheer torture; Clara would awaken to find him “swimming in tears.” He wrote no music for a year—it took him weeks just to draft a letter. Eventually, he began to study Bach systematically, and to try his own hand at some compositional exercises.

This C major symphony is the first large-scale piece Schumann wrote after his breakdown. For a composer who cut his teeth on piano pieces and songs, moved naturally into chamber music, and had only recently tackled writing for orchestra, this was a bold effort, perhaps even a test of the strength of his recuperation. Although we know it as Schumann’s second symphony, it follows an abandoned effort from 1832—attempted long before his confidence and talent worked in tandem—and several works dating from 1841: the Spring Symphony published as his first, the D minor symphony later revised and published as no. 4, and the beginnings of another symphony in C minor. Schumann took to the new medium with great enthusiasm, if not comparable expe-rience: the Spring Symphony, for example, was sketched in four days and finished in less than a month.

The C major symphony didn’t go as quickly or as easily, partly because Schumann was feeling

Above: Schumann, lithograph by Joseph Kriehuber (1800–1876), Vienna, 1839

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his way back toward a full workload. Three years after finishing the music, he wrote to D.G. Otten, the music director in Hamburg:

I wrote my symphony in December 1845, and I sometimes fear my semi-invalid state can be divined from the music. I began to feel more myself when I wrote the last move-ment, and was certainly much better when I finished the whole work. All the same it reminds me of dark days.

Though Schumann did indeed write the symphony in a month, the orchestration took much longer. He began to score the first move-ment in February 1846 and didn’t finish it until early May. The work was completed the follow-ing October 19, just three weeks before Felix Mendelssohn conducted the first performance.

All of Schumann’s sympho-nies search for new light to shed on a familiar form. They are marked by innovation and experiment—and sometimes by a rather deliberate attempt to avoid comparison with the towering achievements of Beethoven. The D minor piece eventually published as his Symphony no. 4 is so daring and unconventional that Schumann thought of calling it a “symphonic fantasy,” side-stepping the issue altogether. All four published symphonies aim for unity by linking the movements through titles or thematic cross-reference.

T he C major symphony begins with a moody slow introduction,

the most obvious reminder of the composer’s dark days. More importantly, it provides the main theme and several subsidiary ideas for the ensuing Allegro ma non troppo as well as the brass fanfare that returns to crown the first three movements and to hover near the end of the symphony. Although the first movement itself is high in energy and emotion, Schumann chooses to follow it not with the accustomed

calm of a slow movement, but with a virtuosic scherzo. And he thwarts expectations by giving us two independent trios, the first genial in a rus-tic way, and the second, with its theme presented both upright and upside down, a reminder that it was Bach’s music that led Schumann back to his desk.

Like Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony, Schumann has kept us waiting for the slow movement, and he does not disappoint. This is music of great beauty, written in C minor (the other three movements are in C major) and revitalized midway through by the beginnings of a fugue—another tip of the hat to Bach. Despite Schumann’s claims of improved health, the finale has often troubled analysts; even the British critic Donald Tovey, normally rational though often outspoken, found it incoherent. It is mainly a question of proportion. It begins with great

authority and confidence, and includes as its second theme a brilliant transformation of the principal melody from the Andante. The development and recapitulation merge, ending in C minor. Then follows a coda so long (half the movement’s length) and remarkable that it nearly overshadows all that came before. It is based on a theme that is completely new to the symphony, though Schumann had used it before, in his piano fantasy, pointedly borrowing it from Beethoven’s song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant beloved), where it accompanies the words “Take, then, these songs of mine.” By 1845, Schumann had married his own beloved, offering her some 121 songs in the year of their marriage

alone, and so the reference is both loving and triumphant, a reminder that it was Clara who encouraged Robert to try writing for orchestra, wisely promising that “his imagination cannot find sufficient scope on the piano.”

Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987.

Lithograph of Robert and Clara Schumann by Eduard Kaiser (1820–1895), Vienna, 1847; inscribed to their Zwickau friend, composer and writer Emanuel Klitzsch (1812–1889)

© 2017 Chicago Symphony Orchestra