PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIXTH SEASON

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

Tuesday, March 21, 2017, at 7:30

Riccardo Muti ConductorMitsuko Uchida Piano

RossiniOverture to La scala di seta

BeethovenPiano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 37Allegro con brioLargoRondo: Allegro

MITSUKO UCHIDA

INTERMISSION

S. Adamsmany words of loveWorld premiere. CSO commission

Commissioned in part for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by the Louise Durham Mead Fund

SchumannSymphony No. 4 in D Minor, Op. 120Fairly slow—Lively—Romance: Fairly slow—Scherzo: Lively—Slow—Lively

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 sponsor of the Tuesday series.

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

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COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher

Gioachino RossiniBorn February 29, 1792; Pesaro, ItalyDied November 13, 1868; Passy, a suburb of Paris, France

Overture to La scala di seta

Time has not been kind to Rossini. Today he is primarily identified with a handful of comic operas (often dismissed as implausible and frequently staged as sophomoric slapstick) and a dozen or so overtures, the most famous of which brings to

mind a television cowboy who rode high in the ratings from 1949 until 1965 instead of the heroic figure of William Tell. The opening sentence of Philip Gossett’s article in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the industry standard, offers a healthy corrective: “No com-poser in the first half of the nineteenth century enjoyed the measure of prestige, wealth, popular acclaim, or artistic influence that belonged to Rossini.”

Rossini was born less than three months after the death of Mozart (“He was the wonder of my youth,” Rossini later wrote, “the despair of my maturity, and he is the consolation of my old age”), was a professional contemporary of Beethoven and Schubert (as well as the young Mendelssohn and Berlioz), and lived into the era of Wagner and Brahms. But he retired in 1830, at the height of his career, leaving behind the world of opera, where he had reigned since 1812—the year his La pietra del paragone triumphed at La Scala, just four

months after the premiere of La scala di seta (The silken ladder) at the Teatro San Moisè in Venice. During the remaining four decades of his life, he didn’t write another opera (for a while he contemplated a treatment of Goethe’s Faust), choosing instead to preside over his celebrated salon (one of the most famous in all Europe) and to putter in the kitchen (tournédos Rossini are his most famous concoction). Only occasionally did he put pen to manuscript paper.

L a scala di seta was one of Rossini’s earliest successes. It is the immediate prelude to his great heyday, when he turned out a

rapid-fire string of delectable comic works for the stage that has rarely been matched, from The Italian Girl in Algiers in 1813 to The Barber of Seville in 1816 and Cenerentola the following year. Unlike those operas, La scala di seta is a one-act farsa comica—a light diversion based on a French farce of the same name about a secret marriage. (The silken ladder aids in private meetings between husband and wife.) Like the comic farce itself, Rossini’s overture is full of high spirits and mischievous play, with great attention to orches-tral detail. There is particularly delectable virtuo-sic writing for the winds, although their interplay with the strings is no less infectious. There is even an early version of what would soon be known as the Rossini crescendo, in which dynamics and instrumentation raise the music to a fever pitch.

COMPOSED1812

FIRST PERFORMANCEMay 9, 1812; Venice, Italy

INSTRUMENTATIONone flute and one piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, one bassoon, two horns, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME6 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESJuly 29, 1945, Ravinia Festival. Massimo Freccia conducting

December 20 and 21, 1945, Orchestra Hall. Désiré Defauw conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESDecember 5 and 6, 1978, Orchestra Hall. Sir Georg Solti conducting

July 11, 1998, Ravinia Festival. Christoph Eschenbach conducting

CSO RECORDINGS1958. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA

1978. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London (video)

Above: Portrait of Rossini by Vincenzo Camuccini, ca. 1815. Museo Teatrale, Teatro alla Scala; Milan, Italy

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

Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 37

COMPOSED1800

FIRST PERFORMANCEApril 5, 1803; Vienna, Austria. The composer as soloist

INSTRUMENTATIONsolo piano, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings

CADENZABeethoven

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME34 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESDecember 16 and 17, 1910, Orchestra Hall. Ernest Hutcheson as soloist, Frederick Stock conducting

July 2, 1937, Ravinia Festival. José Iturbi as soloist, Ernest MacMillan conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJuly 11, 2013, Ravinia Festival. Emanuel Ax as soloist, Christoph von Dohnányi conducting

May 1, 2, and 3, 2014, Orchestra Hall. Paul Lewis as soloist, Christoph von Dohnányi conducting

CSO RECORDINGS1959. Gary Graffman as soloist, Walter Hendl conducting. RCA

1971. Vladimir Ashkenazy as soloist, Georg Solti. London

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

We’re not certain that Beethoven and Mozart ever met. Their names were mentioned in the same breath as early as 1783, when Beethoven’s first composition teacher, Christian Gottlob Neefe, wrote these words in the earliest public notice

of his promising pupil: “This youthful genius is deserving of help to enable him to travel. He would surely become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were he to continue as he has begun.”

Neefe was suggesting that, with proper sponsorship, his young pupil could tour the music capitals and entertain kings with his dazzling keyboard talent—like most musicians, Neefe assumed that Mozart would make his reputation as a virtuoso performer, not as a com-poser. Neefe didn’t live long enough to under-stand how limited his view was, but he did see his prize student take the first steps to becoming not a second Mozart, but more importantly, the mature Beethoven.

It’s likely that these two great composers did meet early in 1787, when the sixteen-year-old

Beethoven made his first trip from his native Bonn to Vienna, to breathe the air of a sophisti-cated musical city. Beethoven stayed no more than two weeks, and he may even have taken a few lessons from Mozart before being suddenly called home by the news of his mother’s failing health. There is, however, no mention of Mozart in a letter Beethoven wrote at the time.

When, late in 1792, Beethoven returned to Vienna, where he would stay for the rest of his life, it was to study with Haydn, for Mozart lay in an unmarked grave. We can sense disappoint-ment in the famous words Count Waldstein inscribed in the album that served as a farewell gift from Beethoven’s friends:

You are going to Vienna in fulfillment of your long-frustrated wishes. The Genius of Mozart is still mourning and weeping over the death of her pupil. She found a refuge but no occupation with the inexhaustible Haydn; through him she wishes once more to form a union with another. With the help of assidu-ous labor you shall receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.

Beethoven arrived in Vienna in the second week of November 1792. He quickly realized

Above: Portrait of Beethoven by Joseph Mähler, 1804–05

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that Haydn had little to teach him and took comfort in the fact that he was welcome in the same homes where Mozart was once popular.

To Beethoven, Vienna was Mozart’s city. The first music he published there was a set of variations for violin and piano on “Se vuol ballare” from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. In March 1795, he played Mozart’s D minor piano concerto (K. 466) at a concert organized by the composer’s widow Constanze. (He later wrote cadenzas for it as well, the only concerto by Mozart he so honored.) And on April 2, 1800, at his historic first public concert, Beethoven included a symphony by Mozart on the program, which also was supposed to have introduced his brand new piano concerto (his third) in C minor. For reasons that we will never know, however, Beethoven played one of his earlier concer-tos instead.

This C minor piano concerto is one of a hand-ful of works in which the spirits of Mozart and Beethoven convene. To suggest, as some writers do, that Beethoven modeled his concerto after Mozart’s own C minor piano concerto (K. 491) is to confuse the deepest kind of artistic inheri-tance with plagiarism. The choice of key cer-tainly can’t be taken as a homage to Mozart, for Beethoven seemed unable to get C minor out of his system at the time. (Think of the Pathétique Sonata, or, a bit later, the funeral march from the Eroica Symphony, the Coriolan Overture, and, of course, the Fifth Symphony.)

Obviously, Beethoven remembered Mozart’s C minor concerto when he was writing his own—they share too many musical details for sheer coincidence. According to a popular anecdote, Beethoven and the pianist Johann Cramer were walking together when they heard the finale of Mozart’s concerto coming from a nearby house; Beethoven stopped and exclaimed: “Cramer, Cramer! We shall never be able to do anything like that!”

But in his own C minor concerto, Beethoven does something far more remarkable: he writes music that pays tribute to this great masterpiece and, at the same time, transcends the Mozartean model. It was conceived in a complimentary, rather than a competitive spirit. Mozart’s untimely death spared Beethoven a head-on rivalry with the one composer he worshiped, leaving him to make his own way in Vienna. (He hardly knew that Schubert existed, even though they lived in the same city for years; once, when asked to name the greatest living composer other than himself, he suggested Luigi Cherubini.)

E ven nineteenth-century listeners, who thought Mozart a lightweight and Beethoven a quarrelsome revolutionary,

heard the resemblance in this music—both in its details as well as its spirit and sensibility. Certainly the way the soloist continues to play after the first-movement cadenza right up to the final bar can be found only in K. 491 among all of Mozart’s piano concertos. Beethoven’s opening theme, too, tosses a glance at Mozart’s. But on the big issues—how the music moves forward, the way it approaches the turning points in its progress—there is less agreement. As the

A view of central Vienna along Kohlmarkt Strasse, ca. 1800, showing Beethoven’s publisher Artaria on the right

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critic Donald Tovey pointed out, Beethoven doesn’t yet seem to have figured out what Mozart always understood—that you shouldn’t give too much away before the soloist enters and the drama really begins. There are touches of pure Beethoven, like the unannounced entry of the timpani just after the cadenza—a complete surprise, even though it has been thoughtfully prepared by a main theme that imitates the beating of a drum every time it appears.

There’s nothing Mozartean about Beethoven’s choice of key for the central slow movement: E major, with its key signature of four sharps, is bold and unexpected in a concerto in C minor, with three flats. For a moment, the first E major chord, given to the piano alone, seems all wrong, as if the soloist’s hands have landed in the wrong place; at the same time, it’s fresh and irresistible. Where Mozart generally wrote andante or ada-gio, Beethoven dictates largo. Deliberately paced and magnificently expansive, this is the first great example of a new kind of slow movement. Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, composers would profit from remembering this music, although it’s arguable that no one after Beethoven ever thought of anything like the lovely, fully blossomed romanticism of the duet for flute and bassoon over plucked strings and piano arpeggios midway through.

The way Beethoven glances over the final dou-ble bar of this movement at the opening of the finale also is new. The two movements aren’t yet literally connected, as they will be in later music, but Beethoven uses all of his wit and wisdom to carry us from one to the next. He capitalizes on the fact that G-sharp is the same note on the keyboard as A-flat, and he uses that note to pivot from the remote world of E major back to C minor. Our ears easily make the connection, and the rondo finale races forward, full of pranks and good humor.

Having convinced his listeners (and himself, perhaps) that E major is no stranger to C minor, Beethoven returns to the key of his slow move-ment in the middle of the finale as if it were the most logical move of all. Beethoven recovers C minor again, but, after a brief cadenza, he tears off at a gallop into C major, where he has been headed all along.

It’s not clear why this concerto, evidently designed for Beethoven’s first Vienna concert

in April 1800, wasn’t performed that night. Perhaps it simply wasn’t ready. The manuscript suggests that last-minute changes were still being made before its premiere on April 5, 1803, when Beethoven also introduced his new Second Symphony and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives. Even then, the music was more firmly fixed in Beethoven’s mind than on the page. Ignaz von Seyfried, the new conductor at the Theater an der Wien, agreed to turn pages for Beethoven, only to discover that it was easier said than done:

I saw almost nothing but empty leaves, at most on one page or another a few Egyptian hieroglyphs wholly unintelligible to me and scribbled down to serve as clues for him. He played nearly all of the solo part from mem-ory since, as was so often the case, he had not had time to put it all down on paper. He gave me a secret glance whenever he was at the end of one of the invisible passages, and my scarcely concealable anxiety not to miss the decisive moment amused him greatly, and he heartily laughed at the jovial supper which we ate afterwards.

Nearly a year later, Beethoven finally got around to writing down the piano part for a per-formance given by his student Ferdinand Ries, who provided his own cadenza.

The first reviewer of the Third Concerto commented that the piece should succeed “even in places like Leipzig, where people were accus-tomed to hearing the best of Mozart’s concertos.” He continued, suggesting that this music would always require

a capable soloist who, in addition to every-thing one associates with virtuosity, has understanding in his head and a heart in his breast—otherwise, even with the most impressive preparation and technique, the best things in the work will be left behind.

Those are wise words, particularly from a man working in a field that to this day expects sound judgments on new music heard cold. What no critic could predict is that this concerto, rooted in the previous century and a pioneer in its own, would continue to speak as strongly and directly to the centuries that followed.

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Samuel AdamsBorn December 30, 1985; San Francisco, California

many words of love

COMPOSED2016

Commissioned in part for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by the Louise Durham Mead Fund

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two tenor trombones and bass trombone, percussion (vibraphones, almglocken, crotales, large bell plate laid on flat surface, brake drums, bass drum, resonating snare drums with iPad, nipple gong, sandpaper blocks), strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME20 minutes

These are the world premiere performances.

Although Samuel Adams is already known to Chicagoans by name as one of the Chicago Symphony’s Mead Composers-in-Residence, many words of love is his first work to be performed by the Orchestra. Adams’s music has been played

before in Orchestra Hall—the Civic Orchestra of Chicago performed Drift and Providence in December 2016—and in May his Light Readings, for twenty-five singers and eight instruments, was given its premiere on the MusicNOW concert series here that he curates along with his fellow Mead composer, Elizabeth Ogonek.

many words of love, which was commissioned by the Chicago Symphony, was written largely during two months of solid work last summer in an unfinished shed in North Berkeley that Adams found listed on Craigslist. It resembles Mahler’s picturesque mountainside composing huts only in the way that it provides uninter-rupted seclusion for the rigors of composing: “I have no view,” Adams says, “and there’s a constant din from the construction happening next door. But its simplicity certainly helps me to concentrate.” Adams says he was atypically stationary during that period, when he wrote what he calls “the piece’s bones.” He then began to orchestrate the score in August, at the same time that he was finishing the first movement of a string quartet for the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet (there are similarities between the two

pieces, Adams says, especially in the way that he handles the color of the strings). many words of love was completed in October, when it once again received his undivided attention.

T he title of Adams’s new orchestral piece is drawn from a line in Wilhelm Müller’s poem “Der Lindenbaum” (The

linden tree), the sixth song in Schubert’s great cycle of love and loss, Winterreise: “On its bark I carved so many words of love; I was drawn to it always in joy and sorrow.” The song is one of Schubert’s best known (Hans Castorp, the pro-tagonist of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, hums it as the novel comes to a close). Although Adams is deeply drawn to Schubert’s music in general, his new score does not invoke the song in any overt way. Adams’s own fascination with “Der Lindenbaum”—and particularly with the key phrase that hovers in the distant back-ground of this new work—originally came from listening to Carl Stone’s Shing Kee, a minimalist piece from 1986 that focuses on small repeating fragments of Schubert’s song. Today, Adams is more interested in the image of the linden tree as a symbol of the ailing earth, an idea that he points out wouldn’t have occurred to Schubert, Müller, or Mann—“artists working long before the environmental movement and the Anthropocene, our newly coined geological epoch.” The musical nature of many words of love grew out of Adams’s desire to “imagine what it might sound like to hear ‘many words of love’ carved into the bark of a tree—a gesture both violent and tender.”

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Adams had never heard the Chicago Symphony Orchestra perform live when he was named as one of its resident composers in 2015 (when he flew to Chicago to rectify that, his plane was late and he walked into Orchestra Hall just before the third movement of Debussy’s La mer). But he was keenly aware of the Orchestra’s recordings and its reputation, and he was humbled by the honor: “I am very young and still trying to figure out so many things about music,” he told Chicago magazine at the time. In high school in the Bay Area, where Adams grew up, he played jazz bass (he won a DownBeat Award for Outstanding Student Performance in 2005). He spent his undergraduate years at Stanford University, where he studied composition and electro-acoustic music along with computer science and Japanese. After he received a master’s degree in composition from Yale University, he moved to New York City in 2010, where he lived until 2014, when he returned to the Bay Area.

For a young composer with little more than a dozen pieces in his catalog, Adams has already worked with many important artists and ensem-bles. He has written for the St. Lawrence String Quartet, the San Francisco Symphony, and Emanuel Ax. Michael Tilson Thomas premiered Drift and Providence in Miami with the New World Symphony and later played it in Carnegie Hall with the San Francisco Symphony. Violinist Jennifer Koh picked Adams as one of the com-posers she commissioned for her project of short virtuosic violin works—a response to Paganini’s celebrated caprices. Adams is currently writing

music for a contemporary dance company in San Francisco, and “sketching the kernels” for a sixty- minute work for piano and live sound design to be premiered in 2019. He was recently awarded a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship in Umbria, Italy, where he will be an artist-in-residence during the sum-mer of 2017. Adams is in his second season as the Chicago Symphony’s resident composer.

A few parting words about the Adams family. Samuel Adams is the son of the celebrated composer John Adams, whose music has frequently been performed by the Chicago

Symphony in recent years (it figured prominently in both of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s programs here over the past two weeks). The seven-year-old Samuel was the dedicatee of his father’s Chamber Symphony (his sister Emily is the four-month old baby, nicknamed “Quackie,” who appears in the third movement of their father’s Harmonielehre). John Adams and Samuel Adams are not related to the identically named cousins who were among the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Samuel Adams on many words of love

A lthough I began sketching many words of love in the spring of 2016, the piece really is the culminating statement in

a three-year project exploring the intersection between naturally occurring acoustic resonance and digitally produced artificial resonance. Like with earlier works in this body, many words of love incorporates subtle “out of tune” digital resonance that, coupled with the sound of acoustic instru-ments, reveals beautifully elusive sonic artifacts.

The work is in three parts (fast—slow—fast). The music is dynamic and pushes certain physical thresholds. Pitches distort, gestures sink below audibility, and forms repeat and inflate to points of collapse.

The harmony is loosely based on “Der Lindenbaum” from Schubert’s mysterious and beautiful Winterreise (D. 911), with a particular focus on the unstable musical fragment found with the words “so manches liebe Wort.”

Adams, in a recent photo, seated outside his “composing shed” in Berkeley, California, where he wrote many words of love. Photo courtesy of the composer

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

Symphony No. 4 in D Minor, Op. 120

COMPOSEDMay 29–September 9, 1841; revised December 1851

FIRST PERFORMANCEDecember 6, 1841; Leipzig, Germany

December 30, 1852; Düsseldorf, Germany (revised)

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

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME28 minutes

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESFebruary 5 and 6, 1892, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting

July 19, 1936, Ravinia Festival. Willem van Hoogstraten conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJuly 14, 1996, Ravinia Festival. Christoph Eschenbach conducting

April 10, 11, and 12, 2003, Orchestra Hall. Roberto Abbado conducting

CSO RECORDINGS1941. Frederick Stock conducting. Columbia

1975. Daniel Barenboim conducting. Deutsche Grammophon

After the surprising success of his First Symphony, composed and premiered within the span of just two months early in 1841, Schumann wasted no time in pursuing his newfound enthusiasm, promising to make 1841 a year devoted

to orchestral music, just as 1840 had been his year of song. A sinfonietta (later published as the Overture, Scherzo, and Finale) and a fantasy for piano and orchestra (eventually serving as the first movement of the Piano Concerto) were sketched almost immediately, followed in May by this D minor symphony. “Sometimes I hear D minor strains resounding wildly from the distance,” Clara wrote in her diary that month of her husband’s exciting progress. The new symphony occupied Schumann throughout the summer, and it was ready to be introduced in early December, rounding out the most ambi-tious year of Schumann’s career—the one in which he staked out new territory and asserted himself as a member of the great symphonic tradition of Beethoven and Schubert.

But for Schumann, the excitement with which 1841 began was spoiled by the lukewarm reception given the D minor symphony on

December 6 in Leipzig. He quickly gave up on a new symphony in C minor that was already in progress, put the D minor symphony back on the shelf, and began the next year looking in a different direction. (By June he had a new preoccupation, and 1843 became a year of chamber music.) It was another two years before he returned to orchestral music, and his remaining two symphonies were published as his Second and Third, as if to deny the existence of the failed one in D minor. Finally, in 1851, Schumann returned to the D minor symphony, a full decade after its Leipzig premiere; revised its orchestration; reworked two significant transition passages; and introduced it for a second time, now as his Fourth Symphony. This time it was a success. (This is the version that is regularly performed today, although Brahms, who found it “over-dressed,” always preferred the simpler, less heavily orchestrated original.)

Of all the projects Schumann undertook in 1841, the D minor symphony is the most radical (which may explain why the public didn’t take to it immediately). It isn’t the quantity of Schumann’s orchestral writing that distinguishes his output in 1841—even though he boasted in July that “the main thing is production itself ”—but his courageous insistence on exploring this new medium from various angles. In just nine months, he composed a large-scale symphony

Above: Daguerreotype of Schumann, ca. 1850

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in the grand Beethoven tradition; a smaller sinfonietta; a concerto-like fantasy for piano and orchestra; and finally, in this D minor work, a symphony that moves beyond the classical model—a serious rethinking of the genre. When Schumann set out to revise the score ten years later, he couldn’t even decide whether to call it a symphony or a fantasy, and the title page bears the compromise “symphonic fantasy” that he settled on until the piece was published simply as his Fourth Symphony. (Years earlier he had warned that “nothing arouses disagreement and opposition so quickly as a new form bearing an old name.”)

The idea of writing a different kind of sym-phony was clearly on Schumann’s mind when he made his first sketches in 1841. Only days after he began, Clara’s diary mentions “a new symphony which will consist of one movement yet contain an adagio and finale.” (“I have heard none of it, but I see Robert’s enthusi-asm,” she noted.) Schumann had long admired the continuous, multi-chaptered structure of Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy for piano, and he was impressed with the way Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang Symphony linked its movements with transitional passages. But Schumann’s D minor symphony is the first important orchestral work to incorporate these ideas, not only connecting its movements, but also unifying the whole with recurring themes. Schumann’s symphony is a landmark both in structural cohesion and in thematic transformation.

A lthough Schumann had praised the way Berlioz’s “persistent, tormenting” idée fixe runs throughout the Symphonie

fantastique, he accomplishes something more impressive and subtle in his D minor symphony. He begins with a pensive, slowly unfolding theme that will develop and change, chameleon-like, depending on its surroundings. It first blossoms

into the lively melody that dominates the first movement. A related major-key version is the “second” theme, and in the development section it grows into a march. The process is one of evo-lution, organic and natural. Instead of Berlioz’s game of a single theme in various disguises, Schumann weaves a drama of transformation so complete that we can’t distinguish between old and new. At the moment when sonata form demands something reassuringly familiar (the return of the first theme), Schumann confounds us with a tender, radiant theme that is, in fact, new. (It fits nicely with the main theme, however, and in the original version Schumann played them together in counterpoint, as if to prove how tightly unified the score is.) The entire move-ment continually admits fresh air into a tradi-tion-bound form.

The two inner movements are character pieces. The first is a lovely romance—an old-fashioned serenade, really (and in the original version, it was accompanied by a guitar—sixty-some years before Mahler put a guitar in his Seventh Symphony). The symphony’s somber opening makes an appearance, decorated by a solo violin. Next comes a rather stern scherzo (the theme is a relative of the opening material, turned upside down), with a charming, relaxed trio. The tran-sition to the last movement grows imperceptibly out of the scherzo, reinventing the symphony’s opening in the process. Schumann’s finale takes up the march theme from the first movement and makes it the subject of an exuberant victory music. With the coda, which bumps up the tempo twice, Schumann’s most troubled sym-phony achieves an unequivocal happy ending.

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

© 2017 Chicago Symphony Orchestra