PROGRAM
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIXTH SEASON
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Thursday, April 27, 2017, at 8:00
Friday, April 28, 2017, at 8:00
Saturday, April 29, 2017, at 8:00
Riccardo Muti Conductor
Radu Lupu Piano
Women of the Chicago Symphony Chorus
Duain Wolfe Director
Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 (Emperor)
Allegro
Adagio un poco mosso—
Rondo: Allegro
RADU LUPU
INTERMISSION
Liszt
A Symphony to Dante’s Divine Comedy
Inferno: Lento—Allegro frenetico
Purgatorio: Andante con moto quasi allegretto—Magnificat: L’istesso tempo
Alison Wahl, soprano
WOMEN OF THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY CHORUS
These performances are generously sponsored by the Zell Family Foundation.
The appearance of the Chicago Symphony Chorus is made possible by a generous gift from
Jim and Kay Mabie.
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher
Ludwig van Beethoven
Born December 16, 1770; Bonn, Germany
Died March 26, 1827; Vienna, Austria
Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 (Emperor)
It’s hard for today’s
audiences to appreciate
the audacities of
Beethoven’s final piano
concerto, the one we call
the Emperor. For those
who are familiar not only
with this great work, but
also with any of the later
concertos that took their
cues from Beethoven’s example, the grand piano
flourishes with which the score begins have
little shock value. Nor does the size and complexity of the first movement trouble those
who not only have traveled its many paths
before, but also have come to accept the vast
landscapes of Mahler.
But to those who packed the Leipzig
Gewandhaus in November 1811, this was new
music, full of revelations and surprises. To begin
with, Beethoven wasn’t at the keyboard—this
was the only one of his five piano concertos that
he didn’t personally introduce to the public.
Although it wasn’t common knowledge at the
time, by 1811 his deafness was so advanced (he
began to notice symptoms as early as 1796) that
he may have turned this work over to other hands
rather than admit the difficulties of playing for
an audience. (In 1815, he abandoned work on
sketches for a sixth concerto, in D, certain that
his performing days were over.)
B eethoven begins with a single majestic E-flat major chord from the full
orchestra—one of those sounds so
commanding and individual that today, without
hearing another note, we know what is sure to
follow. The 1811 audience, of course, didn’t know
what to expect, and they surely wouldn’t have
predicted the sudden, cadenza-like eruption from
the soloist that Beethoven gives them. Hearing
from the soloist so early in a concerto is bold
and unconventional, but it’s not without precedent. Mozart tried it once, early in his career,
and Beethoven himself had begun his previous
concerto—the fourth, in G major—with the
piano alone. But here Beethoven isn’t striving for
novelty; he’s preparing us for what lies ahead—a
Above: Beethoven. An engraving by Blasius Höfel after a painting by Louis René Letronne, 1814.
Beethoven-Haus Bonn
COMPOSED
1809
FIRST PERFORMANCE
November 28, 1811; Leipzig, Germany
INSTRUMENTATION
piano solo, two flutes, two oboes, two
clarinets, two bassoons, two horns,
two trumpets, timpani, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
38 minutes
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
February 10, 1900 (twice, in
the afternoon and again that
evening), Auditorium Theatre. Ignace
Paderewski as soloist, Theodore
Thomas conducting
July 1, 1939, Ravinia Festival. Josef
Hofmann as soloist, Sir Adrian
Boult conducting
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
January 8, 9, and 10, 2015, Orchestra
Hall. Paul Lewis as soloist, Vasily
Petrenko conducting
August 2, 2016, Ravinia Festival.
Garrick Ohlsson as soloist, Gustavo
Gimeno conducting
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CSO RECORDINGS
1940. Josef Hofmann as soloist, Hans
Lange conducting. CSO (Chicago
Symphony Orchestra: The First
100 Years)
1942. Artur Schnabel as soloist,
Frederick Stock conducting. RCA
1961. Van Cliburn as soloist, Fritz
Reiner conducting. RCA
1966. Emil Gilels as soloist, Jean
Martinon conducting. CSO (From the
Archives, vol. 17: Beethoven)
1971. Vladimir Ashkenazy as soloist,
Georg Solti conducting. London
1983. Alfred Brendel as soloist, James
Levine conducting. Philips
musical argument of unprecedented breadth and
scale between two protagonists of equal stature.
Only after Beethoven commands our attention
with three emphatic chords, each followed by
long-winded outbursts from the piano, does
he settle down to his first theme, a heroic tune
in E-flat major. The piano falls silent and the
orchestral exposition sweeps forward with great
energy. This is an enormous movement, lasting
some twenty minutes, and it’s longer than the following two movements combined. But for all the
time and space it occupies, it’s not hard to follow.
Beethoven alone among composers of his generation knew how to expand the classical structures
he inherited without upsetting their delicate
proportions or abandoning their inner logic.
The slow movement is in B major—a remote
key, but one which is familiar from the earliest
digressions of the opening Allegro. The strings
begin with a noble theme, to which the piano
responds with an eloquent cantilena. Midway
through, the piano has a chain of trills that rises
more than an octave by half steps, while the
orchestra plays broken chords, as if stunned by
this daring high-wire act. Finally, there is the
celebrated moment when the strings drop from
B to B-flat and the piano begins to putter with
the makings of a dazzling new theme, which it
suddenly unleashes without pause to open the
rondo finale. This robust and seemingly tireless
music dashes headlong through a generous
sampling of keys until it collapses just before the
end, leaving only the piano and the timpani to
reach the final bars.
Beethoven’s brilliance wasn’t lost on the Leipzig
audience, who took it all in and applauded
enthusiastically. The critic for the prestigious
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reported that
this was “undoubtedly one of the most original,
imaginative, effective—but also most difficult—of
all existing concertos”—words that still hold true
today. Beethoven withheld the important Vienna
premiere until February 1812, perhaps still vainly
hoping that he might be able to take his place at
the keyboard. It was his student, the young Carl
Czerny, however, who played that night. The
response this time was poor, perhaps because this
grand and noble work was tacked on to a charity
event which consisted largely of Viennese society
ladies in living tableaux of famous paintings. Franz Liszt
Born October 22, 1811; Raiding, Hungary
Died July 31, 1886; Bayreuth, Germany
A Symphony to Dante’s Divine Comedy
Francesca Gaetana
Cosima Liszt was born on
Christmas Eve, 1837, in
Como, Italy. The parish
record lists her as the
illegitimate daughter of
Franz Liszt, “a professor
of music and landowner,”
and a woman of noble
birth, residing at the
Hotel dell’Angelo in Como, room 614. Even
after she grew up and took the only surname that
carried greater weight in musical circles than her
father’s, she was best known simply as Cosima.
The summer after Cosima’s birth, Franz Liszt
and the young Countess Marie d’Agoult rented
a villa on the shores of Lake Lugano, where they
read together from Dante’s Divine Comedy, their
two young daughters—Cosima was the second—
safely in the care of a nurse. The next winter,
Liszt noted in his diary that he would “attempt
a symphonic composition based on Dante, then
another on Faust—within three years’ time.”
(It is a mark of Liszt’s ambition that he set out
to write his two grandest orchestral works after
two of the most celebrated classics of Western
literature, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Goethe’s
Faust.) Already he intended to sketch a “ fragment
dantesque.” The Fragment nach Dante that Liszt
played at one of his recitals on December 5,
1839, in Vienna is the first fruit of his plan.
Liszt’s identification with Dante was so great and
Above: Portrait of Liszt by Wilhelm von Kaulbach, 1856. Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum, Budapest, Hungary
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consuming—people began to comment that his
commanding profile even resembled the Italian
poet’s—that the Dante fragment eventually grew
into the magnificent Dante Sonata for piano (the
final chapter of Liszt’s great Italian travelogue,
the second volume of the Années de pèlerinage)
before Liszt finally tackled a Dante Symphony.
For a while, it appeared that the intent to write
a symphonic composition based on Dante had
died along with Liszt’s love for his first reading
partner, Marie d’Agoult. Then in 1847, Liszt surprised his new companion, the Princess Carolyne
Sayn-Wittgenstein, by playing at the piano some
freshly drawn sketches for a Dante Symphony.
The idea now set Liszt’s imagination ablaze, and
he began to toy with using lantern slides and a
wind machine to represent Dante’s Inferno; he
had recently seen Bonaventura Genelli’s drawings for Dante’s poem, and wished to link sound
and image—history’s first music video—by
projecting Genelli’s imagery during the performance. But the project seemed too grand and
unwieldy even for a consummate showman like
Liszt; Dante was returned to the shelf.
We now jump ahead to 1855, though it is
worth a brief detour to Paris in October 1853, on
the historic evening Richard Wagner witnessed
Liszt’s reunion with his three children from
the liaison with Marie d’Agoult. Wagner’s first
impression of Cosima, now sixteen years old and
surprisingly tall (her sister called her “the Stork”),
was one of extreme shyness, an attribute that
cannot be said to characterize her later dealings
with the great German composer. After dinner
that night, Wagner read aloud the closing scene
of the Nibelungenlied, Cosima quietly looking on;
within a month Wagner had begun the music of
The Ring of the Nibelung, writing to Liszt with the
news: “A new world stands revealed before me.”
The two men shared many thoughts and letters
over the next two years. In May 1855, Wagner
mentioned that he was working his way through
Dante—“I have passed through his Inferno,
and now find myself at the gates of Purgatory.”
Less than a month later he wrote to Liszt again:
“So you are planning a Dante Symphony? And
you hope to show it to me, already completed,
this autumn?” Wagner continued, at what we
now know as Wagnerian length, to question
Liszt’s desire to use a chorus, and to advise him
to abandon the plan to depict the third section
of Dante’s Divine Comedy, since no human
could adequately express the joys of paradise.
Such was the power of Wagner’s persuasion
that even a composer of Liszt’s international
stature would defer at once. And so Liszt wrote
music for Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio alone,
eventually putting a setting of the opening of the
Magnificat text in place of paradise.
A Symphony to Dante’s Divine Comedy was
finished in all but the smallest of details the
following July. That same month, Wagner wrote
Liszt, praising the symphonic poems Liszt
had recently sent him and inquiring about the
arrival of the Dante Symphony—my Dante, as he
already called it, knowing that it was to be dedicated to him. When the two were again reunited
late that year in Zurich, Liszt played through
the entire Dante Symphony on the piano while
Wagner listened eagerly. They argued about
Liszt’s two endings, one quiet, the other rousing,
and again Wagner’s judgment prevailed: “Leave
us the fine soft shimmer!” On November 23
Liszt and Wagner shared conducting duties at
St. Gallen, Liszt offering his Les préludes and
Orpheus, Wagner leading Beethoven’s Eroica
Symphony. These six weeks together in Zurich
and St. Gallen marked the high point in their
COMPOSED
1847, 1855–57
cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, two
harps, harmonium, strings
FIRST PERFORMANCE
November 7, 1857; Dresden, Germany.
The composer conducting
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
52 minutes
INSTRUMENTATION
soprano solo, chorus of women’s
voices, three flutes and piccolo,
two oboes and english horn, two
clarinets and bass clarinet, two
bassoons, four horns, two trumpets,
three trombones and tuba, timpani,
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
December 5 and 6, 1902, Auditorium
Theatre. Women of the Evanston
Musical Club (Peter C. Lutkin, director),
Theodore Thomas conducting
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MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
March 19, 20, and 21, 1992, Orchestra
Hall. Ann McMann as soloist, Women
of the Chicago Symphony Chorus
(Elizabeth Buccheri, guest director),
Daniel Barenboim conducting
June 7, 1992, Grosses Festspielhaus,
Salzburg, Austria. Anna Korondi
as soloist, Women of the
Arnold Schoenberg Chorus
(Erwin Ortner, director), Daniel
Barenboim conducting
relationship, Liszt and Wagner enjoying one
another’s company, and, above all, the chance to
learn so much of each other’s music. Shortly after
Liszt’s departure, Wagner wrote to his friend,
“I think that I have discovered that you are the
greatest musician of all time!’’—words he had no
doubt planned to save for himself.
Soon the plot began to thicken. The following
September the conductor Hans von Bülow and
his young bride Cosima stayed with the Wagners
on their honeymoon. We do not know if either
Wagner or Cosima mentioned their first meeting
in Paris many years before; certainly they did not
yet understand the role they could play together
ruling over the musical world. Nor did Cosima
know that she would one day come between the
two most important men in her life.
Cosima and Bülow attended the first performance of the Dante Symphony in Dresden in
November 1857. The performance was a disaster,
by all accounts, including that of the composer,
who conducted. “Very unsuccessful from lack
of rehearsal” was Liszt’s verdict. Bülow—who,
in his new, protective role as son-in-law, had
warned Liszt to substitute something easier—
later wrote: “A fiasco which can only be compared with that of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in Paris.”
By that historic night, in 1861, Liszt and Wagner
were barely speaking.
In the meantime, Liszt had sent Wagner his
dedicatory copy of the Dante Symphony, inscribing on the title sheet:
As Virgil guided Dante, so have you guided
me through the mysterious regions of the
life-imbued worlds of tone. From the depths
of his heart calls to you “Tu se’ lo mio maestro, e’il mio autore!” and dedicates this work
to you in unchangeably faithful love,
Your
F. Liszt
And with those words, “You are my master
and my author”—the words that Dante uttered
to Virgil, the ancient Roman poet who served
as his guide through the realms of hell—Liszt
touched the most sensitive nerve in his relationship with Wagner, the issue of what each owed
the other artistically. Liszt’s openly admitting his
indebtedness only heightened Wagner’s fear that
he too would be found out, and that others would
discover how much he had learned, absorbed,
and borrowed from Liszt. Finally, when Wagner
took Liszt’s daughter as his mistress and then his
wife, the relationship between these two great
composers grew so complicated that they never
could entirely sort it out. For some time, they did
not speak; their correspondence, which during
its heyday had numbered several hundred pages
a year, stopped completely for eleven years. It
was Wagner who broke the silence, writing in
May 1872 to invite Liszt to the dedication of the
cornerstone at Bayreuth. Liszt did not attend,
but the reconciliation had begun, and Cosima
was able, ultimately, to reunite her father and
her husband.
Like many a student of great literature, Liszt
lingered over certain important lines in reading
Dante; they ultimately suggested the form and
scope of his Symphony to Dante’s Divine Comedy.
The most important of these passages are quite
literally written into the music, with the words
set directly under some of the themes. The
opening phrases of the first movement, uttered
by the trombones, tuba, and low strings, speak
the rhythm of the passage beginning “Per me si
va nella città dolente”:
Through me is the way to the city of woe,
through me is the way to eternal sorrow,
through me is the way among the lost . . .
and then, on ten fortissimo notes from the
trumpets and horns, the famous line, “Lasciate
ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate!” (Abandon all
hope, you who enter here).
I n the main body of the Inferno movement
(marked Allegro frenetico), there is a vivid
descent through the swirling winds of hell—
Dante’s “strange tongues, horrible cries, words of
pain, tones of anger” made palpable—to a place
of deep calm. There we contemplate the tragic
love of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini. (There
is a parallel reverie in the Dante Sonata for solo
piano.) The english horn, with harp accompaniment, sings the line, “There is no greater sorrow
than to recall a time of happiness in misery.”
The violins introduce a haunting refrain, most
gracefully set in an unlikely 7/4 meter. Then,
in a passage Liszt intended as “a blasphemous
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mocking laughter,” we again
encounter the sounds of the
Inferno—music as grotesque
and chaotic as anything written
in the nineteenth century, and
more daring and unconventional than much written since.
Liszt’s purgatory is a less
interesting place, though in
its transparent beauty one can
envision Dante, emerging from
hell into the light of the stars.
The music gradually progresses
upward as Dante watches dawn
rise like the “sapphire of the
orient.” We finally ascend not
to paradise, but to some place
very near, filled with ethereal
and celestial sounds. A choir
of women’s voices can be heard
from the distance, singing the
opening lines of the Canticle
of Mary: Magnificat anima
mea Dominum / Et exultavit
spiritus meus in Deo salutari
meo (My soul magnifies the
Lord, and my spirit rejoices
in God my savior). The music
dies, on a single trumpet
note; a solo voice repeats the
Cover to Theodore Thomas’s score to Liszt’s Dante Symphony, first
words of the Magnificat. In
performed by the Orchestra in December 1902
an extraordinary sequence of
modulating chords, suggesting
Dante’s ascent towards the Empyrean, the choir
writing in her diary the day Wagner died, and
sings “Hosanna, Hallejujah.” Liszt originally
retreated into total seclusion for some time,
planned to end the symphony softly, but the
not even answering her own father’s inquiries.
more powerful, transcendent ending is the one
For more than three years, the two did not see
that Princess Carolyne preferred, to Wagner’s
each other. Liszt finally returned to Bayreuth
dismay, and it is the one Riccardo Muti uses at
in July 1886, in terrible health. He attended
these performances.
performances of Parsifal and Tristan and Isolde,
A postscript. While staying with Richard and
sitting with his daughter in the Wagner family
Cosima Wagner in Venice in December 1882,
box. Within days, he had developed pneumonia;
Liszt was seized by a strange premonition and
he died on July 31. The last word he uttered, by
wrote two pieces entitled La lugubre gondola,
some accounts, was “Tristan.” He was buried in
inspired by the sight of funeral processions passBayreuth. Cosima Liszt von Bülow Wagner lived
ing along the canals. A few months after Liszt’s
another forty-four years. departure, Wagner’s own body was carried from
his palazzo by gondola down the canals to the
train station for the final trip to Bayreuth. On
hearing the news, Liszt offered to join Cosima
Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator for the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987.
at once, but she declined. Cosima stopped
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