PROGRAM
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director
Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Global Sponsor of the CSO
Thursday, April 23, 2015, at 6:30 (Afterwork Masterworks)
Friday, April 24, 2015, at 1:30
Saturday, April 25, 2015, at 8:00
Sunday, April 26, 2015, at 3:00
Semyon Bychkov Conductor
Bruckner
Symphony No. 8 in C Minor
Allegro moderato
Scherzo: Allegro moderato
Adagio: Solemn and slow, but not dragging
Finale: Solemn, not fast
There will be no intermission.
Friday’s performance honors the memory of Elizabeth Hoffman and her generous endowment gift.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBBM Newsradio 780 and 105.9FM for its generous support as a
media sponsor of the Afterwork Masterworks series.
This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher
Anton Bruckner
Born September 4, 1824, Ansfelden, Upper Austria.
Died October 11, 1896, Vienna, Austria.
Symphony No. 8 in C Minor
When Bruckner’s Seventh
Symphony received a
tremendous ovation at its
Leipzig premiere in 1884,
it looked as if the tide had
turned at last. Bruckner,
now sixty, was enjoying
his first taste of success
after years of neglect,
rejection—the Vienna
Philharmonic refused outright to play his first
three symphonies—and repeated failure. With
this work, Bruckner found an important new
champion in conductor Hermann Levi, who led
the Munich premiere a few months later to great
acclaim. Even Vienna, Bruckner’s normally
unsympathetic hometown, was won over by the
new symphony: the composer was called to the
stage four or five times after each movement.
Success followed success as the symphony was
performed in major music centers over the next
several months. (The U.S. premiere was given in
Chicago by Theodore Thomas and his orchestra
on July 29, 1886.)
In October 1887—after more than three years
of work—Bruckner sent a brand new C minor
symphony off to Hermann Levi, certain that he
would agree that this was even more impressive
than the Seventh Symphony and that he would
be honored to conduct the first performance.
COMPOSED
1884–1887; revised in 1889 and 1890
The 1890 version is performed at
these concerts.
FIRST PERFORMANCE
December 18, 1892; Vienna, Austria
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
March 17 & 18, 1949, Orchestra Hall.
George Szell conducting
August 7, 2005, Ravinia Festival.
Christoph Eschenbach conducting
2
But Levi did not know what to make of a work
so vast and daring, and he sent word through
Bruckner’s student Josef Schalk that it needed to
be rewritten. Bruckner was devastated—Levi’s
rejection threw him completely off balance.
The joys and successes of the previous three
years were quickly forgotten, and the composer
plunged into a serious depression. Bruckner had
known crippling insecurity throughout his life,
but he was now consumed by a new wave of
doubt: unable to continue work on the projected
symphony that would posthumously become
his ninth, he began to rip apart the C minor
symphony instead, and he also revamped several
earlier works, including his first three symphonies. It can be argued that much of Bruckner’s
revision of his Eighth Symphony made for a
better piece of music, but there is no telling how
deeply he suffered in the process. Furthermore,
if he had left the Eighth alone, he might have
finished the Ninth.
Serious renovation of the Eighth Symphony
began in March 1889, starting with the Adagio,
and continued for the rest of the year. The
comments Bruckner added to the last page of the
score tell the tale: “First movement finally revised
from November 1889 to January 1890. Last note
written on January 29th.” And then, “Vienna,
February 10th, 1890, entirely finished.” And still
again, “March 10th, entirely finished.” And even
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
April 16, 17, 18 & 21, 2009, Orchestra
Hall. Bernard Haitink conducting
May 2, 2009, Carnegie Hall. Bernard
Haitink conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes, three oboes, three
clarinets, three bassoons and
contrabassoon, eight horns, four
Wagner tubas, three trumpets, three
trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle,
cymbals, harp, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
81 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1980. Daniel Barenboim conducting.
Deutsche Grammophon
1990. Sir Georg Solti conducting.
London
though the work actually was “entirely finished”
at that point, Bruckner probably still didn’t really
believe it.
The first performance was to take place
in Mannheim, under the baton of Felix
Weingartner, who began rehearsals in March
1891. Bruckner was apprehensive. “How does
it sound?” he wrote from Vienna. “I do recommend to you to shorten the finale severely as is
indicated. It would be much too long and is valid
only for later times and for a circle of friends and
connoisseurs . . . .” Weingartner got cold feet,
and the premiere
was canceled. The
Eighth Symphony
was finally performed
for the first time in
Vienna in December
1892, under Hans
Richter. The critic
Eduard Hanslick,
who seldom had a
good thing to say
about Bruckner,
wrote a predictable
Hans Richter
review, full of phrases
like “unrelieved
gloom,” but he also reported “tumultuous acclamations, waving handkerchiefs, innumerous calls,
laurel wreaths, and so forth. No doubt whatever,
for Bruckner the concert was a triumph.” Even
Vienna had become a “circle of friends and connoisseurs,” much to Bruckner’s surprise.
The Viennese had never known what to make
of Anton Bruckner, with his country manners,
severe Prussian haircut, and perilously baggy
suits. (Bruckner favored wide pant legs because
they made it easier to reach the organ pedals.)
Beethoven, once mistakenly arrested as a vagrant,
had already proved how little appearance has to
do with musical greatness. But Bruckner was
a more serious misfit in Viennese society. He
lacked the necessary skill for chitchat, and when
he spoke he often said the wrong thing. (When
his idol, Wagner, died in 1883, he could barely
string together two perfunctory sentences to send
off to the composer’s widow Cosima.) Music was
his real language. When, at sixty-seven, he was
named a doctor of philosophy at the University
of Vienna, he told the rector magnificus: “I cannot
find the words to thank you as I would wish, but
if there were an organ here, I could tell you.”
When Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony was played
in Vienna, the same people who had often snickered behind his back now listened as he spoke to
them with an almost inhuman eloquence, and
this time they did not laugh.
B ruckner’s Eighth is the largest of his
completed symphonies. It begins quietly, in the same rhythm that opens
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, although
Beethoven would never have dreamed of starting
so far from the symphony’s announced key of
C minor, nor would he have made the journey last so long. Getting used to the pace of a
Bruckner symphony was hard even in leisurely
nineteenth-century Vienna, where stopping
for afternoon coffee sometimes actually took
all afternoon. There are first movements by
Beethoven as long as this one, but they are so
full of energy and so tightly packed with events
that they pass like lightning. Bruckner writes
music that takes its time and demands that we
submit ours to it. He would not understand the
person who, finding himself in a great Gothic
cathedral, buys a postcard rather than take the
thirty-minute tour. (He never tired of standing in the great transept at Saint Florian, the
towering masterpiece of baroque architecture
just down the road from his birthplace.)
The first movement of Bruckner’s Eighth
Symphony suggests the architecture of sonata
form—three big themes are exhibited, developed
in a masterful way, and returned later somehow
fresher for the experience. At the beginning,
Bruckner approaches C minor from the odd
perspective of B-flat minor and then settles
into a series of holding patterns from which
C minor is visible but not yet accessible. There is
a powerful stillness at the center of Bruckner’s
music, something for which Beethoven and even
Wagner have not prepared us. The development
section, for example, begins from a point of
almost total silence and inertia, and Bruckner
generates momentum slowly. A number of big,
brassy climaxes merely collapse, as if from a loss
of nerve. After the last flare of chords, the music
stops, leaving a few desolate reminders of previous themes and the repeated beat of the timpani.
Bruckner called this the Totenuhr, the clock in a
room where someone is dying—a deathwatch.
Bruckner did not explain why he placed the
powerful, driven scherzo next, contrary to
3
custom, and one cannot guess his plan until he
lays out the extraordinary expanse of an adagio
just before the finale. The scherzo, in the meantime, is brilliant dance music of the most serious
kind, achieved by ingenious repetition and a
bold use of color. The trio, in contrast, is lyrical,
tender, reflective, and delicately scored (Bruckner
uses the harp here and in the following Adagio
for the only time in his career).
The Viennese who sat spellbound by this great,
noble Adagio surely never looked at Bruckner the
same way again. They must have been shocked
that this undistinguished man, utterly at a loss in
the world they so stylishly inhabited, understood
things which can not be put into words. Perhaps
this is the music Dr. Adolf Exner, the rector of
the University of Vienna, had in mind, when,
bestowing the honorary doctorate on Bruckner in
1891, he said:
Where science must come to a halt, where
its progress is barred by insurmountable
barriers, there begins the realm of
art, which knows how to express that
which will ever remain a closed book to
scientific knowledge.
The Adagio, the longest slow movement in
symphonic music at the time, is one of Bruckner’s
most remarkable creations, and it strides confidently into a world where music rarely ventures.
Bruckner had little to say about this eloquent
and expressive music, having said it all in the
notes on the page, but he did admit to occasional
echoes of the Siegfried leitmotif from Wagner’s
Ring of the Nibelung.
Bruckner shakes us firmly by the shoulders at
the start of the finale and then launches a fierce
and powerful theme for the brass. From there,
the finale moves steadily, but not without difficulty, toward the moment when C major slowly
emerges. A number of episodes and themes
intervene, including a warmly lyrical melody in
the strings and an eloquent chorale tune. The
music frequently comes to a total stop, not from
inertia, but to gather strength. As Bruckner himself once told conductor Artur Nikisch: “I must
take breath when I am about to say something
of importance.” Finally the horns, remembering
the opening notes of the scherzo, announce the
imminent arrival of C major. That moment is
crowned by the simultaneous reappearance of
the main themes of all four movements, which
blend together, united at last by the notes of the
C major scale.
A footnote on Bruckner’s music in Chicago.
The Chicago Symphony originally planned to
play Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony in January
1897—the first time Bruckner’s name appeared
on the Orchestra’s schedule—but, at the last
minute, switched to Symphony no. 4, “a work in
which his idiosyncrasies are not so pronounced
as to stand in the way of its ready appreciation,”
in the words of an official. It was another
fifty years before we got around to no. 8, the
last of the nine to find its place on Chicago
Symphony programs. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra.
A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE WAGNER TUBA
Wagner tubas were invented by
Richard Wagner for The Ring of the
Nibelung—but they are not tubas.
He designed them to bridge the gap
between horns and trombones; they
use the same mouthpiece as the horn
and are played by members of the
horn section. Wagner wrote for a quartet of these instruments—two tenor
and two bass tubas—an arrangement
that has become standard.
Wagner had already begun Das
Rheingold, the first work in the Ring
cycle, before he conceived the new
4
instrument. The sketches of 1853
give the famous Valhalla motif to
trombones, but the full score,
completed the following year,
specifies the new tubas that
have since borne his name.
Wagner’s original instruments,
made for Bayreuth, evidently no
longer exist, although they were
housed at the theater until at
least 1939.
Bruckner first used the
Wagner tubas in the slow
movement and the finale of his
Seventh Symphony, completed in
1883. He calls for them again in the
Adagio of the Eighth Symphony
and in the slow movement of his
final, unfinished Ninth Symphony.
The list of other major works
that incorporate the Wagner
tubas is brief: Elektra, Die Frau
ohne Schatten, and An Alpine
Symphony by Richard Strauss;
Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder; and
The Firebird and The Rite of
Spring by Stravinsky.
—P. H.
© 2015 Chicago Symphony Orchestra