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, March 19, 2015, at 8:00
Friday, March 20, 2015, at 8:00
Saturday, March 21, 2015, at 8:00
Charles Dutoit Conductor
Yo-Yo Ma Cello
Robert Chen Violin
Ravel
Valses nobles et sentimentales
Modéré
Assez lent
Modéré
Assez animée
Presque lent
Assez vif
Moins vif
Epilogue: Lent
Debussy
Symphonic Fragments from The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian
The Court of Lilies
Ecstatic Dance and Finale to Act 1
The Passion
The Good Shepherd
INTERMISSION
Saint-Saëns
La muse et le poète, Op. 132
ROBERT CHEN
YO-YO MA
First Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert performances
Lalo
Cello Concerto in D Minor
Prelude: Lento—Allegro maestoso
Intermezzo: Andantino con moto—Allegro presto
Andante—Allegro vivace
YO-YO MA
Thursday’s performance is sponsored by Robert J. Buford.
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 Huscher Daniel Jaffé
Maurice Ravel
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France.
Died December 28, 1937, Paris, France.
Valses nobles et sentimentales
Franz Schubert was the
first important composer
to write the word “waltz”
on a score. By then—the
early 1820s—waltzing
had lived down its
reputation as a scandalous
demonstration of excessive
speed and intimate
physical contact on the
dance floor. Schubert knew the waltz (from the
German walzen, to turn about) as a charming
social dance, more upbeat than the traditional
ländler—although he knew it only from the
safety of his piano stool, where he was spared
romantic encounter, the hazards of severe
nearsightedness (he kept his spectacles on even in
bed), and the embarrassment of standing less
than five feet tall in his dress shoes. From his seat
at the piano, Schubert observed the life that
eluded him. (He improvised waltzes throughout
the wedding festivities of his dear friend Leopold
Kupelweiser, letting no one else near the piano;
by a fortuitous stroke of fate, one of the tunes
remembered by the bride and passed down
through her family was sung to Richard Strauss,
who arranged it for piano in 1943.) In the last
years of his pitifully brief life, Schubert published
many of his waltzes, including the thirty-four
Valses sentimentales and twelve Valses nobles that
Maurice Ravel would play some seventy-five
years later.
COMPOSED
1911 for piano; orchestrated in 1912
FIRST PERFORMANCE
May 9, 1911, piano version
February 15, 1915, orchestral version
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
November 12 & 13, 1920, Orchestra
Hall. Frederick Stock conducting
July 24, 1938, Ravinia Festival. Eugene
Goossens conducting
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Ravel had little in common with Schubert,
aside from the slight stature that disqualified
both of them from military service. Ravel had the
social graces and the wardrobe to shine at parties,
as well as the money to enjoy the fine life and to
collect antiques, mechanical toys, and endless
bric-a-brac. This same sensibility encouraged a
passion for Viennese waltzes at an early age. In
1911, after Ravel discovered Schubert’s piano
waltzes, he decided to write his own set of noble
and sentimental waltzes, taking his cue from the
title and classic simplicity of his predecessor’s
pieces. He dedicated the score to the “delicious
and ageless pleasure of a useless occupation.”
The eight Valses nobles et sentimentales for piano
were first performed in May 1911, at a “Concert
sans noms d’auteurs,” a kind of concert quiz show
not unlike Name That Tune, where audience members were asked to guess the composer of each
piece on the program. Ravel’s Valses were variously
attributed to Kodály, Satie, Chopin, and Gounod,
among others, although apparently no one suggested Schubert. However, according to Ravel, “a
minute majority” correctly identified his music.
The following year, Ravel agreed to orchestrate
the waltzes as a ballet score for which he supplied
the title—Adelaide—and the scenario—a series
of fleeting romantic encounters during a party
in Adelaide’s Paris salon. Adelaide is no longer
staged, but Ravel’s music, newly attired in shimmering orchestral colors, quickly found a home in
concert halls. —Phillip Huscher
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
July 18, 1959, Ravinia Festival. Carlos
Chávez conducting
trombones, tuba, timpani, bass
drum, side drum, cymbals, triangle,
tambourine, glockenspiel, celesta, two
harps, strings
January 13, 14, 15 & 16,
2011, Orchestra Hall. Juanjo
Mena conducting
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
16 minutes
INSTRUMENTATION
two flutes, two oboes and english
horn, two clarinets, two bassoons,
four horns, two trumpets, three
CSO RECORDINGS
1957. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA
1963. Charles Munch conducting. VAI
(video)
Claude Debussy
Born August 22, 1862, Saint Germain-en-Laye, France.
Died March 25, 1918, Paris, France.
Symphonic Fragments from The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian
No one was more surprised by the failure of
The Martyrdom of Saint
Sebastian than Gabriel
Astruc, its producer at the
Théâtre du Châtelet: “I
have brought together the
greatest musician, the
greatest poet, the greatest
designer, the greatest
choreographer—and it’s bad!” The poet was
Gabriele d’Annunzio, the designer Léon Bakst,
the choreographer Michel Fokine, and the
composer Claude Debussy. A man of no apparent
talent himself, Astruc had hoped to take credit
for combining so much genius on one stage, even
though the idea was not his to begin with.
For many years, d’Annunzio had dreamed
of writing a work based on the story of Saint
Sebastian, who was martyred by Emperor
Diocletian’s archers. When d’Annunzio saw Ida
Rubinstein, the tall Russian ballerina of “mysteriously androgynous beauty,” in Sheherazade
at the Paris Opéra in 1910, he is said to have
exclaimed: “Here are the legs of Saint Sebastian
for which I have been searching for years!”
D’Annunzio, who had already created a sensation with his flamboyant poetry and the novel
The Flame of Life, which depicted his mistress,
the celebrated actress Eleonora Duse, now
COMPOSED
1911, as incidental music for Gabriele
d’Annunzio’s miracle play
FIRST PERFORMANCE
May 22, 1911, Théâtre du Châtelet
(complete)
January 4, 1914, Paris. Edgard
Varèse conducting (four symphonic
fragments arranged by André Caplet)
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
March 28 & 29, 1913, Orchestra Hall.
Frederick Stock conducting (Preludes
to acts 1 and 2)
envisioned a grand miracle play that combined
drama, dance, staging, and music.
Once Rubinstein agreed to dance the role
of Saint Sebastian, d’Annunzio began to pick
his other collaborators. Debussy was not even
his first choice—at Rubinstein’s suggestion, he
initially approached Jean Roger-Ducasse, who
declined. (Florent Schmitt also was under consideration.) D’Annunzio finally wrote to Debussy
on November 25, 1910, and the composer
promptly replied: “The mere thought of working
with you gives me a sort of anticipatory fever.”
But he told his wife that the proposal meant
nothing to him. Still, perhaps mainly because he
needed the money, Debussy joined d’Annunzio’s
dream team.
By the end of January 1911, Debussy had not
written a note of music (he told d’Annunzio that
he had “reached the point where all music seems
to me useless by comparison with the constantly
renewed splendors of your imagination”). By
mid-February, panic had set in. Realizing that he
could not comfortably finish composing nearly an
hour of music in time for the May premiere—just
two months to pull off “a score which would
normally have taken me a year,” as he put it—he
enlisted André Caplet, who had already been
engaged to conduct the work, to help with the
orchestration. (For many years Caplet also was
credited with composing a long stretch of the
August 6, 1950, Ravinia Festival. Pierre
Monteux conducting
March 29, 30 & 31, 1990, Orchestra
Hall. Erich Leinsdorf conducting
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
November 26 & 27, 2010, Orchestra
Hall. Pierre Boulez conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
four flutes and two piccolos, two
oboes and english horn, three clarinets
and bass clarinet, three bassoons
and contrabassoon, six horns, four
trumpets, three trombones, tuba,
timpani, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam,
celesta, three harps, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
24 minutes
CSO RECORDING
1995. Pierre Boulez conducting. CSO
(From the Archives, vol. 19: A Tribute to
Pierre Boulez)
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finale, although the manuscript is carefully
written in Debussy’s own hand.)
Work progressed quickly, but not smoothly.
Debussy was irritated by Rubinstein’s demands
and furious that he had to work around Fokine’s
other commitments.
Two weeks
before the
premiere, the
archbishop
of Paris
threatened
to excommunicate any
Catholic who
attended the
performances;
the spectacle,
he said, would
offend the
Christian
conscience.
(He was
particularly
disturbed
that Saint
Sebastian was
to be danced
by a woman,
Ida Rubinstein in The Martyrdom of
and a Jew
Saint Sebastian, 1911
at that.) In
response to
the archbishop’s ban, Debussy said, “I have written the music as though it were commissioned
for a church.” Trouble continued to overshadow
the production. On the morning of the dress
rehearsal, which had been marketed as a major
society event, the French minister of war was
killed in an airplane crash. (The rehearsal went
on, but the socialites were sent home.)
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Opening night did not go well either. The
performance lasted just over five hours, testing the patience of everyone save perhaps the
ever-hopeful Astruc. The music was sloppily
played, partly because Bakst had arranged the
chorus members onstage by the color of their
costumes rather than by voice part. (Assistant
conductors, disguised in hooded outfits, roamed
the stage, quietly giving cues and attempting to
restore order.) Few audience members paid serious
attention to Debussy’s music—as carefully colored
as ever, but now spare and as tough as steel. The
critics were baffled by the event, although both
Marcel Proust and the young Jean Cocteau, who
were present, were deeply moved. The failure of
Saint Sebastian secretly wounded Debussy, who
later wrote to his publisher that the whole experience had drained him more than he realized.
Rubinstein arranged a few subsequent productions of The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian,
including one at La Scala conducted by
Toscanini, and in 1914 Debussy and d’Annunzio
even talked about a film version. Although the
complete work has not been performed in recent
decades, Debussy’s incidental music is occasionally revived, most often in a narrated version
devised by Germaine Inghelbrecht, the wife of
the original chorus master, with the approval of
the composer and d’Annunzio. Debussy’s score
is best known, however, in the suite of four
symphonic fragments arranged by Caplet.
The first of the fragments, a slow, sustained,
and gentle piece with massed winds, is the
prelude to the complete work. The second excerpt
depicts Sebastian ecstatically dancing on live
coals. In the brooding music of The Passion,
Sebastian mimes the role of Christ. The Good
Shepherd, the luminous prelude to act 4 of
d’Annunzio’s play, finds Debussy reaching for a
new simplicity of expression. —Phillip Huscher
Camille Saint-Saëns
Born October 9, 1835, Paris, France.
Died December 16, 1921, Algiers, Algeria.
La muse et le poète, Op. 132
Saint-Saëns was hailed in
his youth by Berlioz as “a
fine musician nineteen
years old,” who, alongside
Gounod, represented
France’s brightest hope in
music. He began his
career as a staunch
supporter of “music of the
future,” championing the
works by Liszt, Schumann, and Wagner. By the
turn of the twentieth century, though, he
increasingly appeared a curmudgeonly old
reactionary who railed against the innovations of
Debussy and Ravel (though the latter claimed
artistic kinship with Saint-Saëns). Apparently
guarded and suspicious towards the world at
large, he refused to show indulgence or ordinary
acts of kindness to rising young composers until
they had measured up to his own stringent
standards. Those who knew him, though, or who
could penetrate his prickly exterior, soon discovered a man of warm sensibility whose friendship,
once earned, was steadfast.
Having made his reputation with such sensuous and voluptuous works as the Introduction and
rondo capriccioso for violin and orchestra and the
opera Samson et Dalila, as well as works of ostentatious grandeur such as the Organ Symphony
(the frivolity of Carnival of the Animals was not to
be generally known until after his death), in the
new century, Saint-Saëns increasingly resorted
to a more restrained “classical” style. This was
COMPOSED
1909
FIRST PERFORMANCE
June 7, 1910, London
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCE
June 25, 2000, Ravinia Festival.
Robert Chen and Yo-Yo Ma as soloists,
Christoph Eschenbach conducting
indebted first and foremost to his beloved
Mozart, though also owing a deal to Beethoven
and Mendelssohn—the same formative influences, it has to be said, behind his most characteristic piano concertos composed in the previous
century and which he himself performed to
unanimous praise. Saint-Saëns once revealingly
wrote: “The artist who does not feel thoroughly
satisfied with elegant lines, harmonious colors, or
a fine series of chords does not understand art.”
I t is this aesthetic—one, it may seem, of a
disappointed romantic—which informs his
touching and still little-known late masterpiece La muse et le poète, composed in 1909, the
very year when Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes held its
first season in Paris. Saint-Saëns’s work appears
as if from a previous epoch, yet such is the
limpid quality of its expression that it effectively
transcends any specific style or period (save,
perhaps, for the orchestra’s triumphal interlude
near its end), and speaks just as directly today as
it did when it was first performed in London on
June 7, 1910, with Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe
and Dutch cellist Josef Hollmann as the soloists.
Although Saint-Saëns never divulged a
program for this work, it was apparently inspired
by a series of four lyrics by the poet Alfred de
Musset, in which a poet, disappointed in love,
is consoled and inspired by a series of dialogues
with his muse. Therefore the title, though
imposed by Saint-Saëns’s publisher rather than
chosen by the composer himself, is apt, with the
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
July 8, 2010, Ravinia Festival. Pinchas
Zukerman and Amanda Forsyth as
soloists, James Conlon conducting
These are the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra’s first subscription concert performances.
INSTRUMENTATION
solo violin and solo cello, two
flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two
bassoons, two horns, two trumpets,
three trombones, timpani, harp, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
16 minutes
5
roles of Muse and Poet taken by a solo violinist
and a solo cellist, respectively. The work opens
in a mood
of gentle
melancholy—
wistful, as if
expressing
the poet’s
unfulfilled
love. First
to initiate
the conversation is
the violinist—note how the music appears to
brighten in its tonality with the soloist’s entry.
The cello replies, clearly in despondent mood.
There is no need to translate into words the
import of the subsequent dialogue between the
soloists—the music they play is eloquent enough,
reminding one of a famous saying by one of
Saint-Saëns’s favorite composers, Mendelssohn:
“What a piece of music that I love expresses to
me are not thoughts that are too vague to be
contained in words, but rather too precise.” —Daniel Jaffé
Alfred de Musset
Edouard Lalo
Born January 27, 1823, Lille, France.
Died April 22, 1892, Paris, France.
Cello Concerto in D Minor
Although the surname
Lalo is of Spanish origin,
Edouard Lalo came by his
French first name (not to
mention his middle
names, Victoire Antoine)
naturally. His family had
been settled in Flanders
and in northern France
since the sixteenth
century, and his father had fought for Napoleon.
Edouard was determined to study music early on,
but his father, a highly decorated military man,
balked at the idea of having his firstborn become
a professional musician. At the age of sixteen,
Edouard left home for Paris, where he took violin
and composition lessons. He decided to stay in
this great music capital, and for many years he
made his living there quietly teaching violin and
playing chamber music with the Armingaud
Quartet, which he put together to promote the
6
string quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven. (The quartet was sometimes joined
by high-profile pianists such as Clara Schumann
and Camille Saint-Saëns.)
Lalo didn’t attract attention as a composer
for some time, largely because he favored the
then-unfashionable forms of chamber music. For
a while he gave up on composition altogether.
In 1866 (he was now forty-three), he finally
broke his silence with the opera Fiesque, which
he entered in a competition sponsored by the
Théâtre-Lyrique. After his work failed to win,
Lalo was so incensed that he published the
score at his own expense; however, it was never
performed. Then, in the 1870s, Lalo’s fortunes
turned after he met the virtuoso Spanish violinist
Pablo de Sarasate and immediately set to work
on a series of concertolike pieces for Sarasate
and other leading performers of the day. In
1874, Sarasate premiered Lalo’s Violin Concerto
(now forgotten), followed by the still-popular
Symphonie
espagnole the
next year. (This
new surge of
inspiration also
produced a second
opera, Le roi d’Ys,
although this
work too was at
first considered
unstageworthy,
despite the
support of
Charles Gounod.)
Pablo de Sarasate
In 1877, Lalo
composed this
concerto for the Belgian cellist Adolphe Fischer.
Coming just five years after Saint-Saëns’s own
cello concerto, this work helped to draw attention
to Lalo as a composer of remarkable melodic and
orchestral gifts. Lalo’s cello concerto is more athletic and outgoing than Saint-Saëns’s, although
both works share the idea of a middle movement
that is part slow movement and part scherzo.
Throughout the concerto, Lalo gives his soloist
a nearly unending flow of sheer, sumptuous
COMPOSED
1877
FIRST PERFORMANCE
December 9, 1877; Paris, France
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
January 5 & 6, 1900, Auditorium
Theatre. Elsa Ruegger as soloist,
Theodore Thomas conducting
July 29, 1967, Ravinia Festival.
János Starker as soloist, Jean
Martinon conducting
© 2015 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
melody, both in moments of powerful and urgent
music or in displays of simple lyricism.
In the 1880s, after this string of virtuoso
concertos and the eventual triumph of Le roi d’Ys,
Lalo’s music was wildly popular, defying Paul
Dukas’s tongue-in-cheek prediction that Lalo
would never find easy success with the general
public because he “showed himself to be incurably, unpardonably a musician.” Lalo himself
always resisted defining his own musical style:
“While I do not know exactly what I am, I do
know what I am not. I am not a member of any
school, and I do not adhere to any system. I agree
with the poet Musset: ‘My glass is small, but I
drink from my glass.’ ” —Phillip Huscher
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra.
Daniel Jaffé is a regular contributor to BBC Music
Magazine and a specialist in English and Russian
music. He is author of a biography of Sergey Prokofiev
(Phaidon) and the Historical Dictionary of Russian Music
(Scarecrow Press).
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
September 15, 2000, Orchestra
Hall. Yo-Yo Ma as soloist, Daniel
Barenboim conducting
August 8, 2003, Ravinia Festival.
Claudio Bohórquez as soloist,
Christoph Eschenbach conducting
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
25 minutes
CSO RECORDING
1988. Matt Haimovitz as
soloist, James Levine conducting.
Deutsche Grammophon
INSTRUMENTATION
solo cello, two flutes, two oboes, two
clarinets, two bassoons, four horns,
two trumpets, three trombones,
timpani, strings
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