PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIXTH SEASON

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

Thursday, April 27, 2017, at 8:00Friday, April 28, 2017, at 8:00Saturday, April 29, 2017, at 8:00

Riccardo Muti ConductorRadu Lupu PianoWomen of the Chicago Symphony Chorus

Duain Wolfe Director

BeethovenPiano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 (Emperor)AllegroAdagio un poco mosso—Rondo: Allegro

RADU LUPU

INTERMISSION

LisztA Symphony to Dante’s Divine ComedyInferno: Lento—Allegro freneticoPurgatorio: Andante con moto quasi allegretto—Magnificat: L’istesso tempo

Alison Wahl, soprano

WOMEN OF THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY CHORUS

These performances are generously sponsored by the Zell Family Foundation.

The appearance of the Chicago Symphony Chorus is made possible by a generous gift from Jim and Kay Mabie.

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

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COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher

Ludwig van BeethovenBorn December 16, 1770; Bonn, GermanyDied March 26, 1827; Vienna, Austria

Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 (Emperor)

It’s hard for today’s audiences to appreciate the audacities of Beethoven’s final piano concerto, the one we call the Emperor. For those who are familiar not only with this great work, but also with any of the later concertos that took their

cues from Beethoven’s example, the grand piano flourishes with which the score begins have little shock value. Nor does the size and com-plexity of the first movement trouble those who not only have traveled its many paths before, but also have come to accept the vast landscapes of Mahler.

But to those who packed the Leipzig Gewandhaus in November 1811, this was new music, full of revelations and surprises. To begin with, Beethoven wasn’t at the keyboard—this was the only one of his five piano concertos that he didn’t personally introduce to the public. Although it wasn’t common knowledge at the

time, by 1811 his deafness was so advanced (he began to notice symptoms as early as 1796) that he may have turned this work over to other hands rather than admit the difficulties of playing for an audience. (In 1815, he abandoned work on sketches for a sixth concerto, in D, certain that his performing days were over.)

B eethoven begins with a single majes-tic E-flat major chord from the full orchestra—one of those sounds so

commanding and individual that today, without hearing another note, we know what is sure to follow. The 1811 audience, of course, didn’t know what to expect, and they surely wouldn’t have predicted the sudden, cadenza-like eruption from the soloist that Beethoven gives them. Hearing from the soloist so early in a concerto is bold and unconventional, but it’s not without prec-edent. Mozart tried it once, early in his career, and Beethoven himself had begun his previous concerto—the fourth, in G major—with the piano alone. But here Beethoven isn’t striving for novelty; he’s preparing us for what lies ahead—a

COMPOSED1809

FIRST PERFORMANCENovember 28, 1811; Leipzig, Germany

INSTRUMENTATIONpiano solo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME38 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESFebruary 10, 1900 (twice, in the afternoon and again that evening), Auditorium Theatre. Ignace Paderewski as soloist, Theodore Thomas conducting

July 1, 1939, Ravinia Festival. Josef Hofmann as soloist, Sir Adrian Boult conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJanuary 8, 9, and 10, 2015, Orchestra Hall. Paul Lewis as soloist, Vasily Petrenko conducting

August 2, 2016, Ravinia Festival. Garrick Ohlsson as soloist, Gustavo Gimeno conducting

CSO RECORDINGS1940. Josef Hofmann as soloist, Hans Lange conducting. CSO (Chicago Symphony Orchestra: The First 100 Years)

1942. Artur Schnabel as soloist, Frederick Stock conducting. RCA

1961. Van Cliburn as soloist, Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA

1966. Emil Gilels as soloist, Jean Martinon conducting. CSO (From the Archives, vol. 17: Beethoven)

1971. Vladimir Ashkenazy as soloist, Georg Solti conducting. London

1983. Alfred Brendel as soloist, James Levine conducting. Philips

Above: Beethoven. An engraving by Blasius Höfel after a painting by Louis René Letronne, 1814. Beethoven-Haus Bonn

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musical argument of unprecedented breadth and scale between two protagonists of equal stature.

Only after Beethoven commands our attention with three emphatic chords, each followed by long-winded outbursts from the piano, does he settle down to his first theme, a heroic tune in E-flat major. The piano falls silent and the orchestral exposition sweeps forward with great energy. This is an enormous movement, lasting some twenty minutes, and it’s longer than the fol-lowing two movements combined. But for all the time and space it occupies, it’s not hard to follow. Beethoven alone among composers of his genera-tion knew how to expand the classical structures he inherited without upsetting their delicate proportions or abandoning their inner logic.

The slow movement is in B major—a remote key, but one which is familiar from the earliest digressions of the opening Allegro. The strings begin with a noble theme, to which the piano responds with an eloquent cantilena. Midway through, the piano has a chain of trills that rises more than an octave by half steps, while the orchestra plays broken chords, as if stunned by this daring high-wire act. Finally, there is the

celebrated moment when the strings drop from B to B-flat and the piano begins to putter with the makings of a dazzling new theme, which it suddenly unleashes without pause to open the rondo finale. This robust and seemingly tireless music dashes headlong through a generous sampling of keys until it collapses just before the end, leaving only the piano and the timpani to reach the final bars.

Beethoven’s brilliance wasn’t lost on the Leipzig audience, who took it all in and applauded enthusiastically. The critic for the prestigious Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reported that this was “undoubtedly one of the most original, imaginative, effective—but also most difficult—of all existing concertos”—words that still hold true today. Beethoven withheld the important Vienna premiere until February 1812, perhaps still vainly hoping that he might be able to take his place at the keyboard. It was his student, the young Carl Czerny, however, who played that night. The response this time was poor, perhaps because this grand and noble work was tacked on to a charity event which consisted largely of Viennese society ladies in living tableaux of famous paintings.

Franz LisztBorn October 22, 1811; Raiding, HungaryDied July 31, 1886; Bayreuth, Germany

A Symphony to Dante’s Divine Comedy

Above: Portrait of Liszt by Wilhelm von Kaulbach, 1856. Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum, Budapest, Hungary

Francesca Gaetana Cosima Liszt was born on Christmas Eve, 1837, in Como, Italy. The parish record lists her as the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt, “a professor of music and landowner,” and a woman of noble birth, residing at the

Hotel dell’Angelo in Como, room 614. Even after she grew up and took the only surname that carried greater weight in musical circles than her father’s, she was best known simply as Cosima.

The summer after Cosima’s birth, Franz Liszt and the young Countess Marie d’Agoult rented

a villa on the shores of Lake Lugano, where they read together from Dante’s Divine Comedy, their two young daughters—Cosima was the second—safely in the care of a nurse. The next winter, Liszt noted in his diary that he would “attempt a symphonic composition based on Dante, then another on Faust—within three years’ time.” (It is a mark of Liszt’s ambition that he set out to write his two grandest orchestral works after two of the most celebrated classics of Western literature, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Goethe’s Faust.) Already he intended to sketch a “ fragment dantesque.” The Fragment nach Dante that Liszt played at one of his recitals on December 5, 1839, in Vienna is the first fruit of his plan. Liszt’s identification with Dante was so great and

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COMPOSED1847, 1855–57

FIRST PERFORMANCENovember 7, 1857; Dresden, Germany. The composer conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONsoprano solo, chorus of women’s voices, three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani,

cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, two harps, harmonium, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME52 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESDecember 5 and 6, 1902, Auditorium Theatre. Women of the Evanston Musical Club (Peter C. Lutkin, director), Theodore Thomas conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESMarch 19, 20, and 21, 1992, Orchestra Hall. Ann McMann as soloist, Women of the Chicago Symphony Chorus (Elizabeth Buccheri, guest director), Daniel Barenboim conducting

June 7, 1992, Grosses Festspielhaus, Salzburg, Austria. Anna Korondi as soloist, Women of the Arnold Schoenberg Chorus (Erwin Ortner, director), Daniel Barenboim conducting

consuming—people began to comment that his commanding profile even resembled the Italian poet’s—that the Dante fragment eventually grew into the magnificent Dante Sonata for piano (the final chapter of Liszt’s great Italian travelogue, the second volume of the Années de pèlerinage) before Liszt finally tackled a Dante Symphony.

For a while, it appeared that the intent to write a symphonic composition based on Dante had died along with Liszt’s love for his first reading partner, Marie d’Agoult. Then in 1847, Liszt sur-prised his new companion, the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, by playing at the piano some freshly drawn sketches for a Dante Symphony. The idea now set Liszt’s imagination ablaze, and he began to toy with using lantern slides and a wind machine to represent Dante’s Inferno; he had recently seen Bonaventura Genelli’s draw-ings for Dante’s poem, and wished to link sound and image—history’s first music video—by projecting Genelli’s imagery during the perfor-mance. But the project seemed too grand and unwieldy even for a consummate showman like Liszt; Dante was returned to the shelf.

We now jump ahead to 1855, though it is worth a brief detour to Paris in October 1853, on the historic evening Richard Wagner witnessed Liszt’s reunion with his three children from the liaison with Marie d’Agoult. Wagner’s first impression of Cosima, now sixteen years old and surprisingly tall (her sister called her “the Stork”), was one of extreme shyness, an attribute that cannot be said to characterize her later dealings with the great German composer. After dinner that night, Wagner read aloud the closing scene of the Nibelungenlied, Cosima quietly looking on; within a month Wagner had begun the music of The Ring of the Nibelung, writing to Liszt with the news: “A new world stands revealed before me.”

The two men shared many thoughts and letters over the next two years. In May 1855, Wagner mentioned that he was working his way through Dante—“I have passed through his Inferno, and now find myself at the gates of Purgatory.” Less than a month later he wrote to Liszt again: “So you are planning a Dante Symphony? And you hope to show it to me, already completed, this autumn?” Wagner continued, at what we now know as Wagnerian length, to question Liszt’s desire to use a chorus, and to advise him to abandon the plan to depict the third section of Dante’s Divine Comedy, since no human could adequately express the joys of paradise. Such was the power of Wagner’s persuasion that even a composer of Liszt’s international stature would defer at once. And so Liszt wrote music for Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio alone, eventually putting a setting of the opening of the Magnificat text in place of paradise.

A Symphony to Dante’s Divine Comedy was finished in all but the smallest of details the following July. That same month, Wagner wrote Liszt, praising the symphonic poems Liszt had recently sent him and inquiring about the arrival of the Dante Symphony—my Dante, as he already called it, knowing that it was to be dedi-cated to him. When the two were again reunited late that year in Zurich, Liszt played through the entire Dante Symphony on the piano while Wagner listened eagerly. They argued about Liszt’s two endings, one quiet, the other rousing, and again Wagner’s judgment prevailed: “Leave us the fine soft shimmer!” On November 23 Liszt and Wagner shared conducting duties at St. Gallen, Liszt offering his Les préludes and Orpheus, Wagner leading Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. These six weeks together in Zurich and St. Gallen marked the high point in their

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relationship, Liszt and Wagner enjoying one another’s company, and, above all, the chance to learn so much of each other’s music. Shortly after Liszt’s departure, Wagner wrote to his friend, “I think that I have discovered that you are the greatest musician of all time!’’—words he had no doubt planned to save for himself.

Soon the plot began to thicken. The following September the conductor Hans von Bülow and his young bride Cosima stayed with the Wagners on their honeymoon. We do not know if either Wagner or Cosima mentioned their first meeting in Paris many years before; certainly they did not yet understand the role they could play together ruling over the musical world. Nor did Cosima know that she would one day come between the two most important men in her life.

Cosima and Bülow attended the first perfor-mance of the Dante Symphony in Dresden in November 1857. The performance was a disaster, by all accounts, including that of the composer, who conducted. “Very unsuccessful from lack of rehearsal” was Liszt’s verdict. Bülow—who, in his new, protective role as son-in-law, had warned Liszt to substitute something easier—later wrote: “A fiasco which can only be com-pared with that of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in Paris.” By that historic night, in 1861, Liszt and Wagner were barely speaking.

In the meantime, Liszt had sent Wagner his dedicatory copy of the Dante Symphony, inscrib-ing on the title sheet:

As Virgil guided Dante, so have you guided me through the mysterious regions of the life-imbued worlds of tone. From the depths of his heart calls to you “Tu se’ lo mio mae-stro, e’il mio autore!” and dedicates this work to you in unchangeably faithful love,

YourF. Liszt

And with those words, “You are my master and my author”—the words that Dante uttered to Virgil, the ancient Roman poet who served as his guide through the realms of hell—Liszt touched the most sensitive nerve in his relation-ship with Wagner, the issue of what each owed the other artistically. Liszt’s openly admitting his indebtedness only heightened Wagner’s fear that

he too would be found out, and that others would discover how much he had learned, absorbed, and borrowed from Liszt. Finally, when Wagner took Liszt’s daughter as his mistress and then his wife, the relationship between these two great composers grew so complicated that they never could entirely sort it out. For some time, they did not speak; their correspondence, which during its heyday had numbered several hundred pages a year, stopped completely for eleven years. It was Wagner who broke the silence, writing in May 1872 to invite Liszt to the dedication of the cornerstone at Bayreuth. Liszt did not attend, but the reconciliation had begun, and Cosima was able, ultimately, to reunite her father and her husband.

Like many a student of great literature, Liszt lingered over certain important lines in reading Dante; they ultimately suggested the form and scope of his Symphony to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The most important of these passages are quite literally written into the music, with the words set directly under some of the themes. The opening phrases of the first movement, uttered by the trombones, tuba, and low strings, speak the rhythm of the passage beginning “Per me si va nella città dolente”:

Through me is the way to the city of woe,through me is the way to eternal sorrow,through me is the way among the lost . . .

and then, on ten fortissimo notes from the trumpets and horns, the famous line, “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate!” (Abandon all hope, you who enter here).

I n the main body of the Inferno movement (marked Allegro frenetico), there is a vivid descent through the swirling winds of hell—

Dante’s “strange tongues, horrible cries, words of pain, tones of anger” made palpable—to a place of deep calm. There we contemplate the tragic love of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini. (There is a parallel reverie in the Dante Sonata for solo piano.) The english horn, with harp accompani-ment, sings the line, “There is no greater sorrow than to recall a time of happiness in misery.” The violins introduce a haunting refrain, most gracefully set in an unlikely 7/4 meter. Then, in a passage Liszt intended as “a blasphemous

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mocking laughter,” we again encounter the sounds of the Inferno—music as grotesque and chaotic as anything written in the nineteenth century, and more daring and unconven-tional than much written since.

Liszt’s purgatory is a less interesting place, though in its transparent beauty one can envision Dante, emerging from hell into the light of the stars. The music gradually progresses upward as Dante watches dawn rise like the “sapphire of the orient.” We finally ascend not to paradise, but to some place very near, filled with ethereal and celestial sounds. A choir of women’s voices can be heard from the distance, singing the opening lines of the Canticle of Mary: Magnificat anima mea Dominum / Et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo (My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior). The music dies, on a single trumpet note; a solo voice repeats the words of the Magnificat. In an extraordinary sequence of modulating chords, suggesting Dante’s ascent towards the Empyrean, the choir sings “Hosanna, Hallejujah.” Liszt originally planned to end the symphony softly, but the more powerful, transcendent ending is the one that Princess Carolyne preferred, to Wagner’s dismay, and it is the one Riccardo Muti uses at these performances.

A postscript. While staying with Richard and Cosima Wagner in Venice in December 1882, Liszt was seized by a strange premonition and wrote two pieces entitled La lugubre gondola, inspired by the sight of funeral processions pass-ing along the canals. A few months after Liszt’s departure, Wagner’s own body was carried from his palazzo by gondola down the canals to the train station for the final trip to Bayreuth. On hearing the news, Liszt offered to join Cosima at once, but she declined. Cosima stopped

writing in her diary the day Wagner died, and retreated into total seclusion for some time, not even answering her own father’s inquiries. For more than three years, the two did not see each other. Liszt finally returned to Bayreuth in July 1886, in terrible health. He attended performances of Parsifal and Tristan and Isolde, sitting with his daughter in the Wagner family box. Within days, he had developed pneumonia; he died on July 31. The last word he uttered, by some accounts, was “Tristan.” He was buried in Bayreuth. Cosima Liszt von Bülow Wagner lived another forty-four years.

Cover to Theodore Thomas’s score to Liszt’s Dante Symphony, first performed by the Orchestra in December 1902

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

© 2017 Chicago Symphony Orchestra