Program

Thursday, March 7, 2013, at 8:00Saturday, March 9, 2013, at 8:00Tuesday, March 12, 2013, at 7:30

Cristian macelaru ConductorYefim Bronfman Piano

DebussyPrelude to The Afternoon of a Faun

BartókPiano Concerto No. 2AllegroAdagio—Presto—AdagioAllegro molto

YefiM BroNfMAN

IntermIssIon

BartókDivertimento for String orchestraAllegro non troppoMolto adagioAllegro assai

stravinskyThe Song of the Nightingale

oNe HuNDreD TweNTY-SeCoND SeASoN

Chicago symphony orchestrariccardo muti Music DirectorPierre Boulez Helen regenstein Conductor emeritusYo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

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.

Please note that Pierre Boulez has withdrawn from these concerts due to illness. the Cso welcomes Cristian macelaru, who has graciously agreed to conduct. Please note that Bartók’s Divertimento for string orchestra replaces messiaen’s Chronochromie.

Comments by PhilliP huscher

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Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun

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

The year Debussy returned to Paris from Rome—where

he unhappily served time as the upshot of winning the coveted Prix de Rome—he bought a copy of Stéphane Mallarmé’s The Afternoon of a Faun to give to his friend Paul Dukas, who didn’t get beyond the preliminary round of the competi-tion. Eventually Dukas would establish his credentials with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but by then Debussy was already famous for his Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun.

By 1887, Stéphane Mallarmé had begun hosting his famous gather-ings every Tuesday evening in his apartment, where his daughter Geneviève served the punch. Debussy sometimes dropped in at 89, rue de Rome (an unfortunate reminder of a city he had hap-pily left) to partake of the punch

and the lively exchange of ideas, and in time he and Mallarmé became friends. In 1898, he was among those first notified of the poet’s death.

Mallarmé’s poem, The Afternoon of a Faun, was published in 1876, in a slim, elegantly bound volume with a line drawing by Edouard Manet on the cover. We don’t know when Debussy first thought of interpreting Mallarmé’s faun and his dreams of conquering nymphs, nor to what degree he and Mallarmé discussed the prospect. As late as 1891, Mallarmé was still contemplating some kind of dramatized reading of his text, and perhaps Debussy was meant to fit into that scheme. Debussy began sketching his music in 1892. In 1893 and again in 1894, announcements promised “Prélude,

ComPoseD1892–october 23, 1894

FIrst PerFormanCeDecember 22, 1894; Paris, france

FIrst Cso PerFormanCeNovember 23, 1906, orchestra Hall. frederick Stock conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCefebruary 26, 2011, orchestra Hall. esa-Pekka Salonen conducting

InstrumentatIonthree flutes, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two harps, cymbals, strings

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme10 minutes

Cso reCorDIngs1976. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London

1990. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London

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interludes et paraphrase finale” for The Afternoon of a Faun, but the full orchestral score Debussy finished on October 23, 1894, contained only the prelude.

Mallarmé first heard this music in Debussy’s apartment, where the composer played his score at the piano. “I didn’t expect anything like this,” Mallarmé said. “This music prolongs the emotion of my poem, and sets its scene more vividly than color.” The first orchestral perfor-mance, on December 22, was an immediate success (despite poor horn playing), and an encore was demanded. Mallarmé was there; he later said that Debussy’s music “presents no dissonance with my text: rather, it goes further into the nostalgia and light with subtlety, malaise, and richness.”

Revolutionary works of art are seldom granted such instant, easy success. Inevitably, there was some question about the score’s program-matic intentions, to which Debussy responded at once: “It is a general impression of the poem, for if music were to follow more closely it would run out of breath, like a dray horse competing for the grand prize with a thoroughbred.”

The music itself seems to have ruffled few feathers, despite the way it quietly, yet systematically, over-turns tradition and opens new fron-tiers in musical language. Camille Saint-Saëns was one of the few

detractors, yet even his put down—“It’s as much a piece of music as the palette a painter has worked from is a painting”—suggests an understanding that Debussy was

constructing a piece of music in a radical way. (Saint-Saëns’s words recall Mallarmé’s own famous, often misunderstood mission “to paint not the thing but the effect it produces.”) Toward the end of his life, Maurice Ravel remembered that “it was [upon] hearing this work, so many years ago, that I first understood what real music was.” Pierre Boulez would later date the awakening of modern music from Debussy’s score.

Saint-Saëns might well have noted how the now-famous open-ing flute melody, all sinuous curves and slippery rhythms, resembles the most popular melody he would ever write, “Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix” (known in English as “My heart and thy sweet voice”) from Samson and Dalila. But where Dalila’s aria is rooted in D-flat major and

Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé by Manet

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common time, Debussy’s portrait of the faun eludes our attempts to tap our feet or to establish a key; its insistence on the interval from C-sharp to G-natural argues repeatedly against the E major key signature printed on the page.

The whole of the Prelude can be considered a series of variations on a single theme, and we can simply listen to the ways it changes, almost imperceptibly, and grows. There’s a more conventional middle sec-tion in D-flat, urgently lyrical and more fully scored, which raises the music to fortissimo for the only time in the piece and then sinks down again with the sounds of the flute melody.

Debussy uses the orchestra with extraordinary finesse, drawing such

rich and provocative sounds from his winds (including three flutes, an english horn, and four horns) that we scarcely notice the absence of trumpets, trombones, and timpani. The only percussion instruments necessary are two antique cym-bals, each allotted just five notes apiece—a triumph of artistry over cost-efficiency.

In 1912, Sergei Diaghilev, who would soon create a notorious scandal with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, produced a ballet from Debussy’s music. It was danced and choreographed by the celebrated Nijinsky, who claimed never to have read Mallarmé’s text, and who caused a sensation by foisting heavy-duty eroticism on Debussy’s delicate score.

5

Piano Concerto no. 2

In 1939, when the Chicago Symphony gave the United States

premiere of Béla Bartók’s new piano concerto, the composer was still living in his native Hungary. For several more months, he would agonize over whether to leave his homeland and move to the United States to escape the threat of fascism. Although Bartók had played his Second Piano Concerto some twenty times following its Frankfurt premiere in 1933, he had refused to give the Budapest premiere as a political protest, and now he let the United States pre-miere go to his student, Storm Bull. Americans weren’t quick to recog-nize Bartók’s importance. After he did move to this country in 1940,

he wasn’t considered a significant musical presence, his music wasn’t widely played, and when he toured the country as a pianist, he was hardly treated like one of the indis-pensable giants of modern music.

Bartók began his career as a pianist, and he was an uncommonly gifted one, capable of playing not only his own brilliant and chal-lenging scores, but—especially at first—the works of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms (the other Bs). Both his parents were pia-nists—his mother gave lessons to help feed her two children, and she was Béla’s first teacher. He made his first public appearance as a pianist at the age of eleven, playing Beethoven’s Waldstein

Béla BartókBorn March 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania

(now part of Romania).Died September 26, 1945, New York City.

ComPoseDoctober 1930–october 9, 1931

FIrst PerFormanCeJanuary 23, 1933, frankfurt-am-Mein. The composer as soloist

FIrst Cso PerFormanCeMarch 2, 1939 (u.S. premiere), orchestra Hall. Storm Bull, piano; frederick Stock conducting

Cso PerFormanCes wIth ComPoser as soloIstNovember 20 & 21, 1941, orchestra Hall. frederick Stock conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCeJanuary 11, 2005, orchestra Hall. Lang Lang, piano; Daniel Barenboim conducting

InstrumentatIonsolo piano, three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets

and bass clarinet, three bas-soons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, bass drum, triangle, military drum, cymbals, tam-tam, strings

Cso reCorDIng1977. Maurizio Pollini, piano; Claudio Abbado conducting. Deutsche Grammophon

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme28 minutes

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Sonata. During his student days at the Budapest Academy (he gradu-ated in June 1903), his friends and teachers predicted a bright future for him as a virtuoso pianist—his gifts as a composer didn’t yet merit comment.

It was the Budapest premiere of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra in 1902 that sparked Bartók’s determination to become a composer as well. Eventually these two passions merged in a series of uncompromising keyboard works, particularly the two concertos he wrote to play himself. (A third concerto, composed in the last year of his life, was written with the full realization that he would never perform it; it was intended as a birthday present for his wife Ditta, who was a fine, though less athletic pianist.)

Both the First and Second piano concertos are virtuosic pieces of a kind Bartók’s fellow students at the academy never envisioned—in the Second, the piano rests for a mere twenty-three measures in the first movement. This Allegro moves at such a rapid pace—this isn’t just a question of tempo, but of density of material as well—and the solo music is so compelling, demanding everything from racing octave scales to entire fistfuls of notes, that we scarcely notice that the strings have nothing at all to do. Bartók employs his own blend of sonata form, which involves a kind of mirror-recapitulation, with the opening material reprised

in the correct sequence, but with each theme turned upside-down and backwards.

Like many of Bartók’s works composed around this time (it falls between the Fourth and Fifth string quartets), the concerto is designed as a grand arch form: here two fast, related outer movements frame a central adagio. This middle movement, too, is a mirror form, with broad, slow music interrupted midway by a furious, driven presto. (In the same paragraph, Bartók gives us both slow movement and scherzo.) In the slow sections, the strings and the piano engage in a dialogue, like Orpheus and the Furies that Liszt heard in the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto (the solo timpani provides a high-profile running commentary). In the fast central section, the heart of the entire work, Bartók coaxes fantastic sounds from the piano, including tone clusters which can be played only by placing both hands flat over the keys to cover all the notes in the octave.

The last movement—inevitably, in any of the composer’s big sym-metrical structures—retreads the same ground as the first, although Bartók continually finds new things to say. (Only the first, incisive pounding theme is, in fact, entirely new.) This is recapitulation in the deepest sense, but Bartók never evokes outright dejá vu, only the innate, satisfying feeling of famil-iarity and homecoming.

7

Divertimento for string orchestra

After Bartók’s death in 1945, Paul Sacher wrote: “Whoever met

Bartók, thinking of the rhythmic strength of his work, was surprised by his slight, delicate figure.” Bartók was sickly from early childhood. By the time he began writing music at the age of nine, he had already suffered a number of ailments, including eczema, pneumonia, and curvature of the spine. When Paul Sacher met him in 1929, the power of Bartók’s music was widely recognized. Sacher would soon add to the composer’s catalog by commissioning two major works for his own Basle Chamber Orchestra. The young Swiss conductor and this delicate giant of twentieth-century music remained close friends until Bartók’s death.

The first of the works Sacher commissioned from Bartók is the landmark Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, written to celebrate the Basle orchestra’s tenth

anniversary in 1936. The second is this divertimento for strings, composed during the summer of 1939, when Bartók, at fifty-eight, was at the height of his powers and reputation, and Europe was at a terrible crossroads. For perhaps the last time in his life, Bartók was able to write music that didn’t reflect the world around him. Or perhaps this divertimento was literally meant as a diversion—an intentional escape from a political situation that would only get worse.

In November 1938, Sacher asked Bartók to write something for string orchestra, and the following summer he offered the composer his chalet at Saanen in the Swiss Alps so that he could work in peace, now more pre-cious than ever. Sacher even had a piano transported from Berne. “Somehow I feel like a musician of olden times—the invited guest of a patron of the arts,” Bartók wrote to

Béla Bartók

ComPoseDAugust 2–17, 1939

FIrst PerFormeDJune 11, 1940

FIrst Cso PerFormanCefebruary 21, 1957, orchestra Hall. fritz reiner conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCeNovember 22, 2009, orchestra Hall. Christoph von Dohnányi conducting

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme24 minutes

Cso reCorDIngs1990. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London

1993. Pierre Boulez conduct-ing. Deutsche Grammophon

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his twenty-eight-year-old son, Béla, Jr., back home in Hungary.

Alone in this rustic cottage, with not so much as a cloud or a news-paper to darken his days, Bartók worked at unusual speed: he began the divertimento on August 2 and finished it on August 17. The very next day, after taking time only to write his son a letter, he began his sixth string quartet; the piece was well under way when he left Saanen a week and a half later. In the meantime, world events continued at a frightening speed. Sacher went to Saanen to check up on the composer: “I found him completely without misgivings for the future, absorbed in his work. The news of the political events which were so cruelly to interfere in his life had not yet penetrated to him.” The day he finished the divertimento, Bartók saw a newspaper for the first time in two weeks. And with his return to Hungary, he found his life controlled by the events that made daily headlines and his work pushed aside by the pressing need for self-preservation.

Just before Christmas, Bartók’s mother died. He later wrote to a friend, “Last summer . . . I went to Saanen to be totally undisturbed, so that I could write two works as quickly as possible; I spent three and one-half weeks there, the works got done, wholly or in part, and those three and one-half weeks I took away from my mother. I can never make amends for this. I should not have done it.” So in the end, even

this divertimento, as untroubled as any work Bartók wrote, was clouded by regrets, guilt, and sadness.

The divertimento is one of Bartók’s lightest and most

accessible scores. It picks up the tradition of the eighteenth-century concerto grosso—with its alternating passages for a small group of solo instruments and full ensemble—and turns it into a series of games for soloists and orchestra. The two fast outer movements are dancelike, their easygoing manner disguising a wealth of ingenious motivic development. In between comes a powerful slow movement with dark harmonies and a tragic tone—an acknowledgement, per-haps, of the terrible events unfold-ing outside the cottage. At the end there is calm, but not peace.

Both outer movements toy with conventional forms. The first takes on sonata form, though the recapit-ulation is more development than restatement. The finale is a complex rondo, with a folk-tune theme that is convincingly transformed at each appearance; a thorny fugato section; a gypsy fiddler’s cadenza; and, near the end, a mock Viennese polka. This movement is joyful in a way we don’t expect from Bartók, though Paul Sacher remembered a man that photographs don’t cap-ture: when things were going well, Bartók “laughed in boyish glee,” and “when he was pleased with the successful solution of a problem, he actually beamed.”

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The Song of the Nightingale (symphonic Poem in three Parts)

The Song of the Nightingale opens with an alarming clatter that

later reminded Stravinsky of the “rude tintinnabulation” of the telephone in his Saint Petersburg apartment. He always remembered that the first telephone call he ever made was to Rimsky-Korsakov. (Their two families were among the city’s first to own this “nuisance.”) Ever since the death of his father in 1902, young Igor had thought of the great composer as a sub-stitute father as well as a teacher. Late in 1907, Stravinsky showed Rimsky-Korsakov the preliminary sketches for act 1 of his first opera, The Nightingale, based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale of a

Chinese emperor and the singing bird who saves him from death. His teacher liked what he saw.

During the winter of 1908, Rimsky-Korsakov suffered from severe asthma attacks. He died the following June and was buried near Stravinsky’s father. Stravinsky con-tinued to work on The Nightingale and completed the first act by the end of that summer. In the meantime, Stravinsky met Sergei Diaghilev, who would soon distract the composer with several proposals, beginning with The Firebird, which would make them both famous. When Stravinsky finally got back to The Nightingale four years later, his musical language had grown in

Igor stravinskyBorn June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia.Died April 6, 1971, New York City.

ComPoseD1907–1909, 1913–14 (the opera The Nightingale)

1916 (symphonic poem The Song of the Nightingale)

FIrst PerFormanCesopera: May 26, 1914; Paris, france

symphonic poem: December 6, 1919; Geneva, Switzerland

FIrst Cso PerFormanCefebruary 22, 1924, orchestra Hall. frederick Stock conducting

Cso PerFormanCes wIth the ComPoser ConDuCtIngfebruary 20 & 21, 1925, orchestra Hall

most reCent Cso PerFormanCeoctober 26, 2002, orchestra Hall. Andrey Boreyko conducting

InstrumentatIontwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and e-flat clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trom-bones and tuba, timpani,

triangle, tambourine, tenor drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, military drum, snare drum, celesta, piano, two harps, strings

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme20 minutes

Cso reCorDIng1956. fritz reiner conducting. rCA

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ways that had already altered the course of music, and he himself was a changed man. No longer Rimsky-Korsakov’s student, he was now the composer of The Rite of Spring and as famous as any musician alive.

Stravinsky returned to The Nightingale at the request of the Moscow Free Theatre. (When it went bankrupt, Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet agreed to produce the opera instead.) Stravinsky was concerned that his musical style had changed beyond recognition since he had finished act 1, but he proceeded with the second and third acts, and the work was completed in time for the scheduled premiere in May 1914. Two years later, when Diaghilev proposed staging The Nightingale as a ballet, Stravinsky offered to prepare a symphonic poem that Diaghilev could cho-reograph instead. He used music exclusively from acts 2 and 3 of the opera, as if to divorce himself from his pre-Firebird, Rimsky-Korsakov days for good. Stravinsky com-pleted The Song of the Nightingale in April 1917.

Along with its modernist tendencies—strong disso-

nances, fierce and jagged rhythms, and an abrupt, discontinuous style—The Song of the Nightingale is richly colored by oriental effects, with a particularly powerful use of the pentatonic “black-key” scale. Alexandre Benois, who designed sets and costumes for Stravinsky, recalled that he con-cocted highly eclectic visuals to reflect Stravinsky’s music, which oscillated between a “style of authenticity,” such as the Chinese march, and passages that “sounded rather ‘European.’ ” The Song of the Nightingale is a fusion of East and West, fact and fiction, old and new—and as such it perfectly suggests Europe’s complex and sometimes conflicted attitude toward the East in the early years of the twentieth century.

Although The Song of the Nightingale omits the music from the first act of the opera, it still follows the outline of Andersen’s tale about an emperor who forsakes a live nightingale for a mechanical one. The opening of the symphonic poem—with its clanging “tele-phone” bells—depicts the festive atmosphere at the palace in honor of the nightingale, who has been invited to sing for the emperor of China. The nightingale is brought in and placed on a perch (the flutes trill and sing). Announced by a solemn trombone, the emperor enters to a percussive, ceremonial Chinese march.

In the second section, the nightingale sings (beginning with a rhapsodic cadenza), to the

Sergei Diaghilev (left) and Igor Stravinsky, 1921

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emperor’s great pleasure. More festive music from the palace is interrupted by the ominous arrival of envoys from Japan, who come bearing a large mechanical nightingale. The wind-up bird sings tirelessly (the oboe, echoed by flute). In the meantime, the real nightingale flies away, offended by the emperor’s obvious delight in her rival’s brilliant display. (A lone trumpet, playing a simple fisher-man’s song, suggests that the nightingale has gone home to the seashore.)

In the third section, the ailing emperor now lies on his deathbed; the mechanical nightingale refuses to sing for him. The real nightingale returns and begins a poignant song, ulti-mately defeating death and saving the emperor. A lumbering funeral march announces the courtiers, who have come to view their dead ruler. But then—in a sudden, rabbit-out-of-the-hat moment—the emperor appears, the picture of health, and

greets his attendants. In the closing moments, the nightingale returns to her home by the sea.

One of Benois’s designs for Stravinsky’s The Nightingale

Alexandre Benois (left) and Igor Stravinsky

Phillip Huscher is the program annota-tor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. ©

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