Program
One Hundred Twenty-Third Season
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Music Director
Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Thursday, February 20, 2014, at 8:00
Friday, February 21, 2014, at 1:30
Saturday, February 22, 2014, at 8:00
Tuesday, February 25, 2014, at 7:30
Cristian Măcelaru Conductor
Jennifer Zetlan Soprano
Sasha Cooke Mezzo-soprano
Debussy
Jeux
Ravel
Trois poèmes de Mallarmé
Soupir
Placet futile
Surgi de la croupe et du bond
Sasha Cooke
First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances
Stravinsky
Three Japanese Lyrics
Akahito
Mazatsumi
Tsaraiuki
Two Poems of Balmont
Nezabudochka
Golub’
Jennifer Zetlan
First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances
Intermission
Global Sponsor of the CSO
Stravinsky
Three Pieces for Clarinet Solo
John Bruce Yeh, clarinet
Stravinsky
Cat’s Cradle Songs
Spi, kot
Kot na pechi
Baj‑baj
U kota, kota
Sasha Cooke
First Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert performances
Stravinsky
Suite from Pulcinella
Sinfonia
Serenata
Scherzino—Allegro—Andantino
Tarantella—
Toccata
Gavotta con due variazioni
Vivo (Duetto)
Menuetto
Finale
Stravinsky
Suite No. 1 for Small Orchestra
Andante
Napolitana
Española
Balalaïka
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.
2
Comments by Phillip Huscher
The traditional function of the orchestra
is largely a thing of the past,” Pierre Boulez
wrote as long ago as 1970. “The orchestra as we
know it today,” he said, in words that ring just
as true in 2014—“still carries the imprint of the
nineteenth century, which was itself a legacy of
court tradition.” Over the past five decades, he
Symphony Orchestra this season—presented this
week and next—he has created models of the
kind of concert experience he has long advocated.
Reacting to the rigid framework of conventional
programming—which is further restricted by
the conservative design of concert halls and
the restraints of rehearsal schedules—Boulez
believes that we must find new ways of
looking at our musical heritage. Even
in the case of the most familiar works,
“we have to bypass our memories
and use our imaginations to discover
new potentialities.”
T his week’s program takes one
of the most fertile times in the
history of music—the second
decade of the twentieth century—and
examines it from new perspectives.
The result is a panoramic journey
through that time, highlighting connections between works by Debussy,
Ravel, and Stravinsky, and revealing
ties to two revolutionary compositions,
Pierre Boulez conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 2010
Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire
and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, that do
not appear on this program but whose
presences hover over it. This concert offers us
has continually fought to bring the orchestra
something like an airplane view of a specific plot
and its programs into our own time, and since
of music history, allowing us to see things not
Boulez began his annual visits to Chicago in
in the familiar linear sequence, but to observe
1991, he has not only become our guide to the
the entire landscape, with all its crisscrossing
modern masters and new adventurers, but also
paths, untraveled byways, and out-of-the-way
a pioneer in the traditional world of programming. As in all the aspects of
his extraordinary career—as
1911 Stravinsky composes Two Poems of Balmont
composer, conductor, musical
1912Debussy: Jeux
thinker—Boulez, now the
October 16: premiere of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, Berlin
Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s
1913 May 15: premiere of Debussy’s Jeux, Paris
Helen Regenstein Conductor
Emeritus, demonstrates an
May 29: premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Paris
uncanny foresight and clarity
Stravinsky: Three Japanese Lyrics
of vision; he has shaken up our
Ravel: Trois poèmes de Mallarmé
familiar ways of listening and
1916Stravinsky: Cat’s Cradle Songs
thinking about music; and time
and time again he has rejected
1917 Stravinsky: Five Easy Pieces (orchestrated as Suite No. 1)
the idea of doing business
1918Stravinsky: Three Pieces for Clarinet Solo
as usual.
Stravinsky: The Soldier’s Tale
In the two programs Boulez
1920Stravinsky: Pulcinella
has designed for the Chicago
3
allow a single program to tackle
many different repertoires—
solo, chamber music, orchestral.
It is anchored by large orchestral landmarks: Pulcinella,
Stravinsky’s most successful
redecorating project—it
refashions eighteenth-century
music into a work of brilliant
neoclassicism—and Debussy’s
Jeux, a revolutionary score
with which Boulez himself has
long been identified: he led the
then rarely played piece in his
professional debut conducting
a symphony orchestra in 1956,
made a famous recording of
it in 1966, and included it on
his Chicago Symphony debut
program three years later. And
it is fitted out with miniatures
to fill in, with novelistic detail,
the rest of the picture of this
stretch of time. Small works tell
us things about a composer that
the big pieces do not, just as,
in order to truly know a great
writer, we need to read the
short stories or essays as well as
the novels.
Pierre Boulez’s original sketch of programs for Chicago
destinations, as well as familiar landmarks.
The program does something concerts rarely
attempt: it tracks the intersecting lives of
contemporaries and places individual works of
art in a context of influences and shared ideas.
This week’s concert exemplifies what Boulez
once called “polymorphous groupings,” which
4
T here is really no one
way through a program
this rich in connections
and interrelationships. But
Boulez has devised a particular
itinerary that balances works
of radically different sizes,
flows naturally from piece to piece, juxtaposes
distinct sonorities, groups together works with
shared histories, and reveals often overlooked
connections. The journey Boulez originally
planned to lead here in Chicago he has now
turned over to Cristian Măcelaru, but Boulez is
still, in the truest sense of the word, our guide. Claude Debussy
Born August 22, 1862, Saint Germain-en-Laye, France.
Died March 25, 1918, Paris, France.
Jeux
In May 1913, Sergei
Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet
presented two premieres.
The first, on the fifteenth
of the month, met with
incomprehension and was
quickly overlooked; the
second, given two weeks
later, provoked a famous
scandal and made its
composer the darling of Paris.
Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is, of course, the
work that made history; Debussy’s Jeux is the
forgotten failure, and the immediate fate of these
two works nearly ruined the friendship between
the composers. Debussy was irritated that The
Rite of Spring was heralded everywhere as the
watershed score of the new century—“It’s primitive music with all the modern conveniences,”
he said. Although the two men continued to
exchange letters, they said nasty things behind
each other’s backs and saw very little of each
other after 1914.
Stravinsky and Debussy first met backstage
after the premiere of The Firebird in June 1910.
(Debussy spoke kindly of the music, though
he later told Stravinsky, “After all, you had to
begin somewhere.”) Shortly after the premiere
of Stravinsky’s next work, Petrushka, they met
for lunch, drank champagne, and had their
picture taken together. Debussy gave Stravinsky
a walking stick inscribed with their initials,
and a close friendship developed. One night in
1912, the two composers ran through The Rite
ComPoSeD
august–November 1912
fIrSt PerformanCe
May 15, 1913; Paris, France
fIrSt CSo PerformanCeS
November 29 & 30, 1962, orchestra
hall. hans rosbaud conducting
of Spring together at the piano—Debussy played
the lower part at sight, without difficulty—before
Stravinsky put the finishing touches on his
score. Around the same time, Debussy asked
Stravinsky’s advice about the orchestration of his
new ballet, Jeux.
T
he original idea for Jeux was hatched
over lunch in the grill room of the Savoy
Hotel in London in 1912. Debussy had
accepted an invitation to meet with Diaghilev
and the dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky,
who together had made a sensational, controversial ballet of Debussy’s Prelude to The
Afternoon of a Faun earlier in the year that the
composer had disliked. Now Debussy listened
while Nijinsky sketched on the tablecloth and
Diaghilev proposed a new ballet about a game
of tennis that is interrupted by the crash of an
airplane. According to the painter Jacques-Émile
Blanche, who also was present, the plan provided
for “no ensembles, no variations, no pas de deux,
only boys and girls in flannels, and rhythmic
movements.” Debussy rejected the subject point
blank until Diaghilev offered to double his fee.
The scenario was eventually rewritten—wisely,
the plane crash was eliminated—as a study of
jealousy and love between two girls and their
tennis partner—“a sort of L’après-midi d’un faune
in sports clothes,” as Pierre Boulez has written. It
was called Jeux. “This is the decorous title for the
‘horrors’ enacted between these three persons,”
Debussy wrote to Stravinsky. Here is the synopsis given to the first audience:
moSt reCent
CSo PerformanCeS
March 30, 31 & april 1, 1995, orchestra
hall. Pierre Boulez conducting
InStrumentatIon
two flutes and two piccolos, three
oboes and english horn, three
clarinets and bass clarinet, three
bassoons, sarrusophone (played by the
contrabassoon at these performances),
four horns, four trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, xylophone,
cymbals, tambourine, triangle, celesta,
two harps, strings
aPProXImate
PerformanCe tIme
17 minutes
5
The scene
is a garden
at dusk; a
tennis ball
has been
lost; a boy
and two girls
are searching
for it. The
artificial
light of the
large electric
lamps
shedding
fantastic rays
about them
suggests
the idea of
childish
Debussy and Stravinsky
games: they
play hide
and seek,
they try to catch one another, they quarrel,
they sulk without cause. The night is warm,
the sky is bathed in pale light; they embrace.
But the spell is broken by another tennis ball
thrown in mischievously by an unknown
hand. Surprised and alarmed, the boy and
girls disappear into the nocturnal depths of
the garden.
with some regularity, making possible a wider
appreciation of its individual sound world and
its originality.
Although the ballet was not a success—it was
dropped after only a few performances—and
Debussy was again displeased with Nijinsky’s
choreography, the music is one of his greatest
achievements. Jeux is Debussy’s last orchestral
score; it is both a work of summation—the
finest realization of ideas going back at least to
The Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun composed
twenty years earlier—and a work that looks far
into the future. Its innovations passed unnoticed
for many years; nearly half a century after the
premiere it became a new point of reference for
the avant-garde and enjoyed the status of a cult
classic. Since the 1960s, Jeux has been played
Jeux is a masterpiece of color and character—
Debussy writes dozens of precise indications:
passionate, sweet and expressive, violent,
nervous, ironic, joyous—and it packs a
surprisingly strong emotional punch. But it is a
quiet work (many pages do not rise above a piano
marking, the first mezzo forte in the score does
not appear until the sixty-seventh measure), and
although it is densely packed, Jeux often sounds
dreamy and ephemeral compared to other music.
When Stravinsky’s savage Rite of Spring hit
the same stage two weeks after the premiere of
this music, the gentle revolution of Jeux was all
but forgotten. 6
T he extraordinary formal freedom of Jeux,
in particular, anticipates music written
much later. Listeners in 1913, and for
many years thereafter, were puzzled by the way
Debussy’s music continually evolves—“instantly
renewing itself,” as Boulez has written—in a
fluid exchange of thematic ideas. A sense of
repetition is virtually absent from this score, and
when a musical idea does return, it is somehow
transformed—its color or rhythm subtly altered.
Jeux was denounced as formless—and dismissed
as the work of an aging, outdated composer—
rather than a brave new vision of form itself.
This is Debussy’s final and most sophisticated
essay in writing for orchestra. Boulez has commented how, in this score,
“orchestration-clothing,” that elementary idea, disappears in favor of
“orchestration-invention”; the imagination of
the composer is not limited by first composing the musical text and then decking it out
with marvels of instrumentation; the orchestration itself reflects not only the musical
ideas, but the kind of writing intended to
give account of it.
maurice ravel
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France.
Died December 28, 1937, Paris, France.
Trois poèmes de Mallarmé
In the spring of 1913,
Stravinsky and Ravel
spent two months together
in Clarens, Switzerland,
on the shore of Lake
Geneva, collaborating on
a new performing edition
of Khovanshchina, the
opera Mussorgsky left
unfinished at his death.
During that time, Ravel got a chance to look at
the score Stravinsky was finishing up in time for
its world premiere in May. “You must hear
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring,” he wrote to a friend
from his hotel in March: “I really believe that the
first night will be as important as that of
[Debussy’s] Pelleas and Melisande.”
But the work that tantalized Ravel even
more was Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, which
had been premiered in Berlin the previous fall.
Stravinsky had heard the piece in a subsequent
Berlin performance, had fallen under its spell,
and could not stop talking about it—in fact, he
had already composed his Three Japanese Lyrics
(performed next on this program) as a kind of
musical response to Pierrot. Ravel attempted to
schedule a performance of Pierrot lunaire in Paris
so he could hear for himself a kind of music so
new and unprecedented that no description, not
even Stravinsky’s detailed and insightful account,
could suggest the expressive power and novel
sounds of the score. When he was unable to do
so, he composed his own music, the Trois poèmes
de Mallarmé, under the influence of Schoenberg’s
work, just as Stravinsky had done with his Three
Japanese Lyrics. The difference, of course, is that
Stravinsky had heard Pierrot, while Ravel got his
idea of the piece second hand.
“With me, composition bears all the symptoms of a serious illness: fever, insomnia, loss of
appetite,” Ravel wrote to the wife of the Italian
composer Alfredo Casella from Clarens. “After
three days of that there emerged a song to words
by Mallarmé.” The song is “Soupir,” the first
of the three Mallarmé songs he would write in
the thrall of Schoenberg. In that same letter,
he dreamed of a concert that would pair Pierrot
lunaire with its musical offspring: Stravinsky’s
Japanese lyrics and the set of Mallarmé songs
that he had not yet even finished. That fantasy
concert never took place, but once Ravel completed his Trois poèmes de Mallarmé, they were
premiered together with the Stravinsky songs in
Paris, in January 1914. Ravel originally intended
to set only two Mallarmé poems to music. The
second song was composed in May, after he
returned to Paris. But then in August, Ravel
said he had finished another Mallarmé setting.
By coincidence—and prompted no doubt by the
publication in 1913 of a major new edition of
Mallarmé’s poetry—Debussy was writing his
own Mallarmé songs at the same time; curiously,
both composers chose two of the same poems.
The powerful example of Schoenberg’s Pierrot
lunaire inspired both Stravinsky and Ravel
to search for a new adventurousness in their
writing without diluting the individuality of
their own voices. “You should never be afraid
of imitating,” Ravel said many years later.
“I joined the Schoenberg school to write my
Poèmes de Mallarmé. . . . If it didn’t become quite
Schoenberg, it is because, in music, I am not so
wary of charm, which is something he avoids to
the point of asceticism, martyrdom even.” The
circle of influence continued: Stravinsky was so
taken with the opening of Ravel’s second song,
ComPoSeD
1913
fIrSt CSo PerformanCeS
These are the first CSo performances.
fIrSt PerformanCe
January 14, 1914; Paris, France
InStrumentatIon
voice, two flutes and piccolo, two
clarinets and bass clarinet, piano,
string quartet
aPProXImate
PerformanCe tIme
11 minutes
7
“Placet futile,” that he echoed the same effect in
the pastorale of his Soldier’s Tale in 1918.
A lthough Ravel had known and
admired the writings of the late
nineteenth-century symbolist poet
Stéphane Mallarmé for many years, he had
only set his words to music once before (the
song “Sainte,” composed in 1896, early in
his career). Now, nearly two decades later,
Ravel’s supple language was ideally suited
to Mallarmé’s art, “where all the elements
are so intimately bound up together that one
cannot analyze, but only sense, its effect,”
as the composer wrote. Mallarmé described
“Soupir,” the first poem Ravel chose to set, as
“an autumnal reverie.” Ravel dedicated the song
to Stravinsky. (This was a time of generous
musical reciprocity: Stravinsky had already
dedicated the third of his Three Japanese Lyrics
to Ravel.) Ravel’s second song is a setting
of a love poem that Mallarmé himself said
evokes a painting by Boucher or Watteau.
The last song, of complex and harmonically
bold design, carried Ravel to an extreme of
atonality to which he never returned. Trois poèmes de Mallarmé
Soupir
Mon âme vers ton front où rêve, ô calme soeur,
un automne jonché de taches de rousseur,
et vers le ciel errant de ton oeil angélique
monte, comme dans un jardin mélancolique,
fidèle, un blanc jet d’eau soupire vers l’Azur!
—Vers l’Azur attendri d’Octobre pâle et pur
qui mire aux grands bassins sa langueur infinie
et laisse, sur l’eau morte où la fauve agonie
des feuilles erre au vent et creuse un froid sillon,
se traîner le soleil jaune d’un long rayon.
8
SIGH
My soul rises toward your brow where,
O peaceful sister,
a dappled autumn dreams,
and toward the roving sky of your angelic eye,
as in a melancholy garden,
faithful, a white plume of water sighs toward
heaven’s blue!
—Toward the compassionate blue of pale and
pure October
that onto vast pools mirrors infinite indolence
and, over a swamp where the dark death of leaves
floats in the wind and digs a cold furrow
letting the yellow sun draw out into a long ray.
Placet futile
Princesse! à jalouser le destin d’une Hébé
qui poind sur cette tasse au baiser de vos lèvres;
j’use mes feux mais n’ai rang discret que d’abbé
et ne figurerai même nu sur le Sèvres.
FUTILE PETITION
Princess! envious of the youthful Hebe
rising up on this cup at the touch of your lips,
I spend my ardor, but have only the low rank
of abbot
and shall never appear even naked on the Sèvres.
Comme je ne suis pas ton bichon embarbé
ni la pastille, ni du rouge, ni jeux mièvres
et que sur moi je sais ton regard clos tombé,
blonde dont les coiffeurs divins sont des orfèvres!
Since I’m not your whiskered lap-dog,
nor candy, nor rouge, nor sentimental pose,
and since I know your glance on me is blind,
O blonde, whose divine hairdressers
are goldsmiths!
Nommez-nous—toi de qui tant de ris framboisés
appoint us—you in whose laughter so
many berries
join a flock of tame lambs
nibbling every vow and bleating with joy,
se joignent en troupeaux d’agneaux apprivoisés
chez tous broutant les voeux et bêlant aux délires,
Nommez-nous—pour qu’Amour ailé
d’un éventail
m’y peigne flûte aux doigts endormant ce bercail,
appoint us—so that Eros winged with a fan
Princesse, nommez-nous berger de vos sourires.
will paint me upon it, a flute in my fingers to lull
those sheep,
Princess, appoint us shepherd of your smiles.
Surgi de la croupe et du bond
Surgi de la croupe et du bond
d’une verrerie éphémère
sans fleurir la veillée amère
le col ignoré s’interrompt.
RISEN FROM HAUNCH AND SPURT
Risen from haunch and spurt
of ephemeral glassware
without causing the bitter eve to bloom,
the ignored neck is stopped.
Je crois bien que deux bouches n’ont bu,
ni son amant ni ma mère,
jamais à la même chimère,
moi, sylphe de ce froid plafond!
I, sylph of this cold ceiling,
do not believe that two mouths—
neither my mother’s nor her lover’s—
ever drank from the same mad fancy.
Le pur vase d’aucun breuvage
que l’inexhaustible veuvage
agonise mais ne consent,
naïf baiser des plus funèbres!
À rien expirer annonçant
une rose dans les ténèbres.
The pure vase empty of fluid
which tireless widowhood
slowly kills but does not consent to,
innocent but funereal kiss!
To expend anything announcing
a rose in the dark.
—Translations by Ned Rorem
9
Igor Stravinsky
Born June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia.
Died April 6, 1971, New York City.
Three Japanese Lyrics
Two Poems of Balmont
Arnold Schoenberg’s
Pierrot lunaire was first
performed in Berlin on
October 16, 1912.
Stravinsky arrived in
Berlin little more than a
month later, to join Sergei
Diaghilev for the winter
season of the Russian
Ballet. Fresh from the
triumph of The Firebird, Stravinsky was just
finishing a new ballet about the pagan rituals of
springtime that would soon send shock waves
throughout the music world. Later on, musicians
would marvel that these two epochal works, The
Rite of Spring and Pierrot lunaire, were conceived
almost simultaneously, each composer unaware
of the other’s achievement. In his suitcase,
Stravinsky carried brand new settings of two
poems by the Russian symbolist Konstantin
Balmont, which, with their repeating, kaleidoscopic patterns and edgy rhythms, echo The Rite
of Spring. They also continue the recent interest
in bitonality of Petrushka (neither song has a
key signature).
In Berlin, Stravinsky met Schoenberg for the
first time, and on December 8, he attended a performance of Pierrot lunaire, following the music
in a score the composer handed him. Stravinsky
was so stunned by this work that for years he
could not admit its full impact. Decades later,
after Schoenberg had died, he called the experience “the most prescient confrontation in my life”
and pronounced Pierrot lunaire the “solar plexus
as well as the mind of early twentieth-century
music.” That very month in Berlin, Stravinsky
orchestrated a little Japanese song he had written
for voice and piano before leaving Russia; back
at his temporary home in Clarens, Switzerland,
he composed two additional settings of
Japanese poems.
Stravinsky took his texts from an anthology
of Japanese poems translated into Russian.
“The impression which they made on me,” he
wrote, “was exactly like that made by Japanese
paintings and engravings. The graphic solution
of problems of perspective and space shown by
their art incited me to find something analogous
in music.” Stravinsky’s titles are the names of
the ancient poets. These Three Japanese Lyrics,
Three Japanese Lyrics
ComPoSeD
october 1912–January 1913
fIrSt CSo PerformanCeS
These are the first CSo performances.
fIrSt PerformanCe
January 14, 1914; Paris, France
InStrumentatIon
voice, two flutes and piccolo, two
clarinets and bass clarinet, piano,
string quartet
aPProXImate
PerformanCe tIme
4 minutes
Two Poems of Balmont
ComPoSeD
1911, for voice and piano
1954, orchestral version
fIrSt PerformanCe
date unknown
10
fIrSt CSo PerformanCeS
These are the first CSo performances.
InStrumentatIon
voice, two flutes, two clarinets, piano,
string quartet
aPProXImate
PerformanCe tIme
3 minutes
written during the final stages of The Rite of
Spring, are openly indebted to Pierrot lunaire in
their extraordinary scoring for an uncharacteristic (but very Schoenbergian) small ensemble of
flutes, clarinets, piano, and strings. The tonality
of these songs, like that of the Balmont settings,
is ambiguous (the first song, “Akahito,” has a key
signature of four flats; the other two have none
at all). Four decades later, in 1954, Stravinsky
orchestrated his two little Balmont settings for
the same Pierrot-flavored ensemble. Together,
these two groups of songs reflect the impact
of Schoenberg as much as they complement
Stravinsky’s own Rite of Spring. Three Japanese Lyrics
Akahito
I have flowers of white. Come and see
where they grow in my garden. But falls
the snow: I know not my flowers from
flakes of snow.
Ja belye tsvety v sadu
tebe khotela pokazat’.
No sneg poshol. Ne razobrat’,
gde sneg i gde tsvety!
Mazatsumi
Vesna prishla. Iz treshchin ledyanoj
kory zaprygali, igraya v rechke
pennye strui: oni khotyat byt’
pervym belym tsvetom radostnoj vesny.
The Spring has come! Through those chinks of
prisoning ice the white floes drift, foamy flakes
that sport and play in the stream. How glad they
pass, first flowers that tidings bear that
Spring is coming.
Tsaraiuki
Chto eto beloe vdali!
Povsyudu, slovno oblaka mezhdu kholmami.
To vishni raztsveli;
prishla zhelannaya vesna.
What shimmers so white faraway? Thou
wouldst say ’twas nought but cloudlet in
the midst of hills. Full blown are the cherries!
Thou art, come, beloved Springtime.
—Translations by Robert Burness
(Please turn the page quietly.)
11
Two Poems of Balmont
Nezabudochka
Nezabudochka – tsvetochek
Ochen’ laskovo tsvetyot,
Dlya tebya moj drug-druzhochek,
Nad voditseyu rastyot.
The Flower
The Forget-me-not is blooming,
all for you, my love, for you,
by a brook its petals growing
opening their tender blue.
Nad voditsej, nad krinitsej,
Nad vodoyu klyuchevoj,
Na zare s zvezdoj-zvezditsej
Govorit – ty budto moj.
Then at night when the starlight looks
down on you to shine,
when the dawn breaks night’s last star
fading seems to say: “Will you be mine?”
Nezabudochka – tsvetochek
Nezhno-sinen’kij glazok,
Vsyo zovyot tebya, druzhochek,
Slyshish’ tonkij golosok?
The Forget-me-not is blooming,
tender eyes so sweet and blue.
Do you hear me, lovely flower?
Listen to the flower’s voice!
Golub’
Golub’ k teremu pripal,
Kto tam, chto tam, podsmotrel.
Golub’ telom nezhno-bel,
Na okontse zh tsvetik al.
The Dove
On the window sill the rose
and there on the roof the dove,
do you see them now, oh look.
The dove flying to the rose?
Belyj golub’ vorkoval,
On tsvetochkom zavladel,
On yevo zacharoval,
Nasladilsya, uletel.
Red the flower, white the dove,
red and white together lie,
white and red together love,
but then the dove flies away.
Akh ty belyj golubok,
Pozabyl ty al tsvetok,
Akh ty belyj golubok,
Vorotis’ khot’ na chasok.
Oh my beautiful white dove,
you forget my sill above,
oh my beautiful white dove,
fly back to your waiting love.
—Translations by Robert Craft
12
Igor Stravinsky
three Pieces for Clarinet Solo
A mere five years separate
the great, epochal
orchestral roar of The Rite
of Spring and these tiny,
unaccompanied pieces.
But after The Rite, which
changed the history of
music, Stravinsky himself
was a changed man. He
began to focus on miniatures and on works scored for a mere handful of
musicians, as if he knew that he had taken
large-scale orchestral composition to its limit.
The culmination of this new fascination with
spartan musical textures was The Soldier’s Tale,
which calls for seven players. But the trend
reached its extreme in these three solo clarinet
pieces that serve as a footnote to that historic
score. Composed immediately afterwards, they
were written as a thank-you present for Werner
Reinhart, whose family fortune, made in coffee
and cotton, had financed the first production of
The Soldier’s Tale in September 1918. Reinhart
was an amateur clarinetist—he played in the
local orchestra in his hometown of Winterthur,
Switzerland—and a patron of the arts with
wide-ranging interests. (In 1922, he purchased
the Château de Muzot so that the poet Rainer
Maria Rilke could live there rent free in his
last years.)
These three short monologues are among
Stravinsky’s “biggest” little works. For them,
Stravinsky picked an instrument with an
ComPoSeD
october–November 1918
fIrSt PerformanCe
November 8, 1919; lausanne,
Switzerland
enormous range and an extremely wide dynamic
palette, from the nearly inaudible to fortissimo.
The first piece, which explores the clarinet’s low
register, began life as a song and was sketched as
early as 1916. The second is Stravinsky’s “imitation” of improvisation (he had recently heard live
jazz for the first time), written without bar lines.
The third revisits the tango and ragtime of The
Soldier’s Tale.
Werner Reinhart (left), with Australian violinist Alma
Moodie and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke
A footnote. Volkart Brothers, run by Werner’s
nephew Andreas Reinhart since 1985, now
oversees a foundation that supports social and
environmental issues as well as the arts.
fIrSt CSo PerformanCeS
November 4, 5 & 6, 2004, orchestra
hall. John Bruce yeh as soloist
aPProXImate
PerformanCe tIme
7 minutes
moSt reCent CSo PerformanCe
January 11, 2008, orchestra hall. John
Bruce yeh as soloist
13
Igor Stravinsky
Cat’s Cradle Songs
Living in Switzerland
during the early months
of World War I,
Stravinsky took refuge in
collections of folk poetry
and short stories that he
had brought with him
from Russia. He sometimes found comfort in
savoring the mere
patterns of syllables and sounds, “which produce
an effect on one’s sensibility very closely akin to
that of music.” Soon he began to write his own
Russian songs. But these are not exercises in
nostalgia. Having internalized the essence of his
Russian literary and musical roots, he was now
allowing it to come out in his own music.
The four short Cat’s Cradle Songs are among
the first pieces to reveal a new direction in
Stravinsky’s output. In each of these songs, the
vocal lines are simple, short, narrow in range, and
familiarly popular in style. Yet the melodies are
original, even though they do not sound it—an
ComPoSeD
1915–16
fIrSt PerformanCeS
November 20, 1918; Paris, France (with
piano accompaniment)
June 6, 1919; Vienna, austria (version
with three clarinets)
14
accomplishment Stravinsky was particularly
proud of. As he wrote in his Memoirs, “If any of
these pieces sound like aboriginal folk music, it
may be because my powers of fabrication were
able to tap some unconscious ‘folk’ memory.” The
spare, yet surprisingly rich, accompaniment is for
three clarinetists (including the higher-pitched
E-flat clarinet), and Stravinsky is particularly
resourceful at using all the registers and colors
of this versatile family of instruments. The texts
are traditional Russian lullabies Stravinsky found
in the pages of his own collections. The first
performance was given in Vienna, under the auspices of Arnold Schoenberg’s Society for Private
Performances. Afterwards, Anton Webern wrote
to Alban Berg: “The Stravinsky was wonderful.
These songs are marvelous, and this music moves
me wholly and beyond belief. I love it, and the
lullabies are indescribably touching. How these
clarinets sound!” Stravinsky’s fascination with
the animal kingdom continued. His next work,
Renard, was a burlesque about a fox, a rooster, a
cat, and a goat.
fIrSt CSo PerformanCe
July 23, 1967, ravinia Festival.
Cathy Berberian as soloist, luciano
Berio conducting
These are the first CSo subscription
concert performances.
InStrumentatIon
voice, three clarinets
aPProXImate
PerformanCe tIme
4 minutes
Cat’s Cradle Songs
Spi, kot
Spi, kot, na pechke, na vojlochke.
Lapki v golovkakh, lis’ya shubka na plechakh.
Sleep, Cat
Sleep, cat, on the stove, on the felt ledge,
your paws behind your head, a fox-fur coat on
your shoulders.
Kot na pechi
Kot na pechi sukhari tolchyot,
Koshka v lukoshke shirinku sh’yot,
Malen’ki kotyata v pechurkakh sidyat
Da na kotika glyadyat,
Chto na kotika glyadyat
I sukhari edyat.
Cat on the Stove
The cat on the stove crumbles the dry biscuits,
the kitty in the basket sews a little cloth,
the kittens sit on their little stoves
and watch the pussycat,
and while they watch the pussycat
they eat the dry biscuits.
Baj-baj
Bayushki-bayu, pribayukivayu
Kach’, kach’, privezyot otets kalach,
Materi sajku, synku, balalajku,
A bayu, bayu, pribayukivayu
Stanu ya kachati,
V balalaichku igrati,
A bayu, bayu, pribayukivati.
Lullaby
Hushabye baby, let me rock you.
Swing! Swing! Daddy will bring you a bread roll,
a pastry for mommy, a balalaika for sonny,
hushabye baby, let me rock you.
I will swing you
and play the balalaika.
Hushabye baby, let me rock you.
U kota, kota
U kota, kota
Kolybel’ka zolota
A u dityatki moevo
I poluchshe tovo.
The tomcat has
The tomcat has
a little golden cradle,
but my baby has
an even better one.
U kota, kota
I podushechka bela
A u dityatki moevo
I beleye tovo.
The tomcat has
a little white pillow,
but my baby has
an even whiter one.
U kota, kota
I postelyushka myagka
A u dityatki moevo
I pomyakhche tovo.
The tomcat has
a soft little bed
but my baby has
an even softer one.
U kota, kota
Odeyalechko teplo
A u dityatki moevo
I tepleye tovo.
The tomcat has
a warm little blanket
but my baby has
an even warmer one.
—Translations by Nicholas Winter
15
Igor Stravinsky
Suite from Pulcinella
How odd Stravinsky’s
Pulcinella must have
sounded in 1920—
charming, witty,
disarmingly simple
eighteenth-century music
from the man who had
shocked Paris only seven
years earlier with the
fierce modernism of The
Rite of Spring. But Pulcinella was also, in its own
way, radical: Stravinsky seemed to be saying that
the music of the future might well learn from the
lessons of the distant past. Pulcinella is usually
credited as the first music of neoclassicism. It
did, certainly, signal a shift in Stravinsky’s own
thinking that served him well for years to come.
“Pulcinella was my discovery of the past,” the
composer wrote—“the epiphany through which
the whole of my late work became possible.” “It
was a backward glance, of course,” he later said,
“but it was a look in the mirror, too.”
For all its importance to Stravinsky’s musical
development, the idea for Pulcinella was not his,
but that of the great Russian impresario Sergei
Diaghilev. By 1919, Diaghilev and the young
composer were no longer on the best of terms,
and Diaghilev was determined to patch up their
differences and revive the collaboration that
had produced The Firebird, Petrushka, and The
Rite of Spring. One spring afternoon, when he
ComPoSeD
Ballet: 1919–april 20, 1920
Suite: 1922
fIrSt PerformanCe
Ballet: May 15, 1920; Paris, France
Suite: december 22, 1922; Boston,
Massachusetts
fIrSt CSo PerformanCeS
January 14, 1935; Pabst Theatre in
Milwaukee, wisconsin. The composer
conducting (suite)
January 17 & 18, 1935, orchestra hall.
The composer conducting (suite)
16
and the composer were strolling in the Place
de la Concorde, he proposed that Stravinsky
take a look at some eighteenth-century scores
with the idea of orchestrating them for a ballet.
“When he said that the composer was Pergolesi,
I thought he must be deranged,” Stravinsky later
remembered, thinking unhappily of the Stabat
Mater and the opera La serva padrona. Finally,
Stravinsky promised to at least take a look.
“I looked, and I fell in love,” the composer
recalled. And so the two men began to plan.
Diaghilev showed Stravinsky a manuscript
dating from 1700 which he had found in Italy;
the subject of its many comic episodes was
Pulcinella, the traditional hero of the Neapolitan
commedia dell’arte, and a perfect focus for the
action of their own eighteenth-century ballet.
Meanwhile, Stravinsky had been sifting through
the pile of manuscripts that Diaghilev had thrust
in his hands, picking and choosing among trio
sonatas, assorted orchestral works, and operatic
selections (some of them not even by Pergolesi, as
we have since learned).
Then Stravinsky set to work in a fashion
entirely new to him. “I began by composing on
the Pergolesi manuscripts themselves, as though
I were correcting an old work of my own,” he
later wrote. “I knew that I could not produce a
‘forgery’ of Pergolesi because my motor habits
are so different; at best, I could repeat him in my
own accent.”
moSt reCent
CSo PerformanCeS
March 5, 6 & 8, 2009, orchestra hall.
roxana Constantinescu, Nicholas Phan,
and kyle ketelsen as soloists; Pierre
Boulez conducting (complete ballet)
InStrumentatIon
two flutes and piccolo, two oboes,
two bassoons, two horns, trumpet,
trombone, a quintet of solo strings
(two violins, viola, cello, and bass),
orchestral strings
March 9, 2009, Carnegie hall. roxana
Constantinescu, Nicholas Phan, and
kyle ketelsen as soloists; Pierre Boulez
conducting (complete ballet)
aPProXImate
PerformanCe tIme
20 minutes
CSo PerformanCe, the
ComPoSer ConDuCtIng
april 17, 1965, orchestra hall. irene
Jordan, Nicholas di Virgilio, and donald
Gramm as soloists (complete ballet)
CSo reCorDIng
2009. roxana Constantinescu,
Nicholas Phan, and kyle ketelsen as
soloists; Pierre Boulez conducting.
CSo resound
What Stravinsky created was, in fact, something entirely his own. He left Pergolesi’s
bass lines and melodies alone, but the inner
harmonies, the rhythms, and the sonorities all
bear Stravinsky’s stamp, in one measure after
another. “The remarkable thing about Pulcinella,”
Stravinsky later said, “is not how much but how
little has been added or changed.” His achievement, then, is all the more remarkable.
The music was misunderstood from the first
rehearsals. Diaghilev, expecting a harmless adaptation like Respighi’s recent tribute to Rossini,
La boutique fantasque, was shocked. “He went
about for a long time with a look that suggested
the Offended Eighteenth Century,” the composer
reported. Diaghilev was not even sure whether
to acknowledge Stravinsky as the composer of
Pulcinella or merely as its arranger. Stravinsky
had the last word:
I was . . . attacked for being a pasticheur,
chided for composing “simple” music,
blamed for deserting “modernism,” accused
of renouncing my “true Russian heritage.”
People who had never heard of, or cared
about, the originals cried “sacrilege”: “The
classics are ours. Leave the classics alone.”
To them all, my answer was and is the same:
You “respect,” but I love.
The ballet had its premiere at the Paris Opera
House in May 1920. The choreography was by
Léonide Massine, with scenery and costumes
by Picasso. (The collaboration of these two had
been part of Diaghilev’s lure.) Pulcinella was a
success, “one of those productions,” the composer
reported, “where everything harmonizes, where
all the elements—subject, music, dancing, and
artistic setting—form a coherent and homogeneous whole.” Yet only the music endures today.
I n 1922, Stravinsky compiled an orchestral
suite of eleven sections from the complete
ballet and scored for the same orchestra:
woodwinds without clarinets, brass, strings
divided into concertino and ripieno groups (the
solo and full orchestra divisions of the baroque
concerto grosso), with no percussion. The ballet’s
original vocal lines are taken by instruments.
The suite opens with a stirring sinfonia, the
ballet overture (and before that, one of Pergolesi’s
trio sonata
movements).
The Serenata,
with its
mournful
melody over
a rocking
accompaniment, began
life as an
opera aria for
tenor. Three
connected
movements
(Scherzino,
Allegro,
Andantino),
all borrowed
from trio
Sergei Diaghilev
sonatas,
are now
enlivened by
Stravinsky’s witty instrumentation, subtle use of
syncopation, and the steady pulse of the rhythmic ostinato. The ensuing Tarantella trips over
its own insistent rhythmic figures until it dashes
headlong into a toccata, drawn from one of
Pergolesi’s harpsichord sonatas and now revived
as a boisterous fanfare for full orchestra. The
winds take center stage in the Gavotta, with its
two increasingly elaborate variations. Stravinsky
fashioned an outrageous duet for double bass and
trombone from a sinfonia for cello and double
bass. The Menuetto (another opera aria) gradually builds momentum until it bursts in on the
syncopated flurry of the finale, the same music
which brings down the curtain on the full ballet.
The music ends with flourishes, repeated over
and over, as if the musicians were taking their
bows, heads bobbing up and down.
In his old age, Stravinsky remarked with
typical candor that Pulcinella was the only work
of Pergolesi’s that he really liked. 17
Igor Stravinsky
Suite no. 1 for Small orchestra
In the second decade of
the twentieth century,
Stravinsky began to
compose what he called
“easy” pieces. Small in
scale and relatively simple
to perform, they could be
dismissed as mere trifles,
except that the clarity of
their style and textures,
and the simplicity of their forms point to the
next stage in Stravinsky’s ever-changing,
chameleon-like career—the back-to-basics
sensibilities of The Soldier’s Tale and the great
neoclassic scores.
He later fashioned two short suites for small
orchestra that are collections of “easy” piano
pieces written between 1914 and 1917. The
earliest of them, published as Three Easy Pieces
for piano duet, are the March, Waltz, and Polka
that open the Second Suite that is performed
here next week. Stravinsky followed them up
with a new group of Five Easy Pieces for his
young children, Theodore and Mika, to play.
This set included national dances—a Napolitana,
suggested by his visit to Naples the following
year; Española, written after a trip to Spain
in 1916; and a Balalaïka, inspired no doubt by
homesickness for his native Russia. Together
with an introductory andante, those three dances
were orchestrated as his Suite no. 1.
ComPoSeD
1916–17, piano pieces
1917 to 1925, orchestral suite
fIrSt PerformanCe
March 2, 1926; haarlem,
the Netherlands. The composer conducting
fIrSt CSo PerformanCe
November 12, 1940, orchestra hall.
The composer conducting
© 2014 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
18
Stravinsky sent all eight of these easy pieces to
the writer André Gide, who tried them out with
a young student and was furious that Stravinsky
had neglected to include rehearsal numbers to
help keep the players together (“You find your
Igor Stravinsky (left) with André Gide, 1917
place just as you lose the child, or the child loses
his place . . .”). That’s when Stravinsky decided
not to entrust these little jewels to amateurs and
children any longer, but to dress them in sophisticated orchestral colors and publish them as
grown-up suites.
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra.
moSt reCent
CSo PerformanCeS
September 21 & 23, 2003, orchestra
hall. william eddins conducting
CSo PerformanCe, the
ComPoSer ConDuCtIng
July 13, 1963, ravinia Festival
InStrumentatIon
two flutes and piccolo, oboe, two
clarinets, two bassoons, horn, trumpet,
trombone and tuba, bass drum, tenor
drum, cymbals, piano, strings
aPProXImate
PerformanCe tIme
7 minutes