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
Global Sponsor of the CSO
Thursday, May 22, 2014, at 8:00
Friday, May 23, 2014, at 8:00
Saturday, May 24, 2014, at 8:00
Jaap van Zweden Conductor
Britten
Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia from Peter Grimes,
Op. 33a and b
TRUTH TO
POWER
Dawn
Sunday Morning
Moonlight
Storm
Passacaglia
Intermission
Shostakovich
Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60 (Leningrad)
Allegretto
Moderato (Poco allegretto)
Adagio
Allegro non troppo
The Truth to Power Festival is made possible with a generous leadership gift from The Grainger Foundation.
Additional support is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Richard and Mary L. Gray; U.S. Equities
Realty, LLC and the Susan and Robert Wislow Charitable Foundation; Mr. & Mrs. Richard J. Franke;
and The Wayne Balmer Grantor Trust.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBEZ 91.5FM for its generous support as media sponsor of the
Truth to Power Festival.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to 93XRT, RedEye, and Metromix for their generous support as media
sponsors of the Classic Encounter 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
Benjamin Britten
Born November 22, 1913, Lowestoft, Sussex, England.
Died December 4, 1976, Aldeburgh, England.
Four sea Interludes and Passacaglia FROM Peter Grimes,
op. 33a and b
Britten set Peter Grimes,
his first major opera, in a
small fishing village that
could easily be the seaside
town of Aldeburgh in
Suffolk, which he helped
to make famous. Britten
was born some twenty
miles up the coast from
Aldeburgh, and he
eventually established his own music festival
there. [Our cover art work depicts Maggi
Hambling’s Scallop Shell on the Aldeburgh shore.
The sculpture, which celebrates Benjamin
Britten, is pierced with a line from Peter Grimes
(see “CSO cover art” on page 1).] The sea is a
powerful presence in Peter Grimes—it dominates
Britten’s characters, just as it has controlled life
in Aldeburgh (of the five streets that once ran
parallel to the coastline, two are now submerged). As the final curtain falls, even the
individual tragedy of Peter Grimes is washed
away by the great, ceaseless tide.
In the orchestral interludes which divide the
scenes of Peter Grimes, Britten has painted the
sea in all its “terrific splendour”—the phrase
of George Crabbe, the Aldeburgh poet whose
ComPoseD
1944–45
FIrst PerFormanCe
June 7, 1945; London, england
FIrst Cso PerFormanCes
Dawn
November 28 & 29, 1946, Orchestra
Hall. George Szell conducting
Sunday Morning and Storm
July 13, 1946, ravinia Festival. william
Steinberg conducting
November 28 & 29, 1946, Orchestra
Hall. George Szell conducting
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The Borough was the inspiration for Britten’s
opera. The interludes depict more than scenery;
in them we sense the plight of an outsider in
an unsympathetic society—“he lived from all
mankind apart,” Crabbe writes of Grimes—and
the painful alienation that lies at the heart of all
Britten’s work.
Here’s the synopsis of the opera Britten provided for the opening-night audience:
In the life of his Suffolk fishing-town Peter
Grimes fits uneasily. He lives alone—
visionary, ambitious, impetuous, poaching
and fishing without caution or care for
consequences, and with only one friend in
town—the widowed schoolmistress, Ellen
Orford. He is determined to make enough
money to ask her to marry him, though too
proud to ask her till he has lived down his
unpopularity and remedied his poverty.
He fishes with the aid of an apprentice,
bought, according to the custom of the time,
from the workhouse. In the prologue, he
is chief witness in an inquest on his first
apprentice and the verdict is accidental
death. In act 1 he is boycotted but obtains a
Moonlight
April 19 & 20, 1962, Orchestra Hall.
walter Hendl conducting
most reCent
Cso PerFormanCes
Four Sea Interludes
June 9, 10 & 11, 2005, Orchestra Hall.
Manfred Honeck conducting
July 17, 2013, ravinia Festival. James
Conlon conducting
InstrUmentatIon
two flutes and two piccolos, two
oboes, two clarinets and e-flat clarinet,
two bassoons and contrabassoon,
four horns, three trumpets, three
trombones, tuba, timpani, side
drum, cymbals, gong, tambourine,
xylophone, tubular bells, harp,
celesta, strings
aPProXImate
PerFormanCe tIme
23 minutes
Cso reCorDIng
1967. Jean Martinon conducting. (From
the Archives, vol. 12: A Tribute to Jean
Martinon) [Four Sea Interludes]
second apprentice, whom Ellen goes to fetch
for him and promises to care for. In act 2 she
discovers he has been using the boy cruelly.
Led by the rector, the men of the borough go
to investigate his
hut. Frightened,
Peter takes the
boy down the
scar of a recent
landslide under
which he moors
his boat, and the
boy falls down
the cliff. When it
is discovered that
the boy is dead, a
hue-and-cry from
George Crabbe, the
the borough sets
Aldeburgh poet whose The
out to find Peter,
Borough was the inspiration
who commits
for Britten’s opera
suicide by scuttling
his boat just out of sight of the town. This
is in the small hours of the morning. The
borough wakes up and goes on with its life
as usual.
B ritten’s interludes are distinct from the
rest of the opera (they are to be played
with the curtain down), yet they’re
indispensable to its meaning and impact—in
that sense, they’re like the prose poems with
which Virginia Woolf introduces each section
of her novel The Waves. After the triumphant
premiere of Peter Grimes on June 7, 1945, Britten
realized that the interludes could stand alone as
evocative sea pictures, and he selected four to be
played as a suite. The extensive passacaglia that
links the two scenes of act 2 is often added at the
end, as it is this week, as a powerful postlude.
The first interlude, Dawn, links the prologue
and the first scene of act 1, which opens on a
street by the sea. Britten’s music is both beautiful
and terrifying—it suggests the powerful paintings by J.M.W. Turner, the great English artist
of the nineteenth century who bought several
houses so that he could watch the sun rise over
the sea from different vantage points. The interlude opens with a clear, high theme—like the
fine line dividing the water and the sky at dawn.
Clarinet and harp arpeggios suggest the spray
of the waves, while quiet chords in the brass and
low strings hint of a terrible undercurrent, even
in the warming glow of dawn. This music returns
at the opera’s end, to start another day, oblivious
to Grimes’s suicide.
Aldeburgh is in Constable country, and, in
the second interlude, Sunday Morning, it’s easy
to picture a lone church steeple against the wide
sky. This is the music that opens act 2: villagers
hurry through town on their way to church; the
sea sparkles in the sun. Four horns in pairs sound
the ringing of the bells (they’re later joined by
actual bells). Soon the streets are empty—a cloud
seems to have covered the sun.
The final act of the opera opens in the calm of
night, with the moon shining over still waters.
Moonlight, the third interlude, depicts not only
the sea’s repose (and, in the harp and flutes, the
glimmer of the moon on the waves), but also its
underlying menace. The fourth interlude, Storm,
links the two scenes of act 1. Alone, watching
fierce clouds approach over the sea, Peter sings:
What harbor shelters peace,
Away from tidal waves, away from storms?
What harbor can embrace
Terrors and tragedies?
With her there’ll be no quarrels,
With her the mood will stay.
Her breast is harbor too,
Where night is turned to day.
The storm breaks and the music rises to a terrible climax. It finally subsides, in slow phrases
of eerie calm, but Grimes’s equilibrium is upset,
and he soon comes to realize that his dreams are
beyond his reach. The concluding passacaglia
weaves layer upon layer of ever-changing music
over a simple theme, introduced by pizzicato
low strings and then lingering at the end, after
a shattering outburst, suddenly eerily quiet
and alone. 3
Dmitri shostakovich
Born September 25, 1906, Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Russia.
Died August 9, 1975, Moscow, Russia.
symphony no. 7 in C major, op. 60 (Leningrad)
Shostakovich composed
most of his seventh
symphony in Leningrad,
his birthplace, during the
siege of the city that
ultimately took nearly a
million lives—roughly
one-third of its
inhabitants—as a result of
hunger, cold, and air
raids. Shostakovich, already a world-famous
composer, joined the war effort in late June 1941,
right after the Nazi invasion. His time was
divided between digging ditches throughout the
city and making arrangements of light music to
be played at the front. He began writing his new
symphony on July 15. By the end of the month,
he was reassigned to the fire-fighting brigade at
the Leningrad Conservatory, and he subsequently was photographed in his fireman’s outfit,
standing on the conservatory rooftop [see
page 14]. (He made the cover of Time magazine
that month wearing his fire helmet.) As
intended, the image of a great composer ready to
defend his city and his people did not go unnoticed. The American poet Carl Sandburg wrote:
“Sometimes as a fire warden you run to the
streets and help put out the fire set by Nazi
Luftwaffe bombs. Then you walk home and write
more music.” The music was the seventh symphony, soon to be known everywhere as the
ComPoseD
1941
FIrst PerFormanCe
March 5, 1942; Kuibyshev, russia
FIrst Cso PerFormanCes
August 22, 1942, ravinia Festival.
Frederick Stock conducting
October 27, 29 & 30, 1942, Orchestra
Hall. Hans Lange conducting
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Leningrad Symphony. As Sandburg suggested, it
was “music written with the heart’s blood.”
Although the members of Leningrad’s most
prestigious artistic institutions, including
the conservatory and the philharmonic, were
evacuated that summer, Shostakovich chose
to stay in Leningrad, racing with his family to
the air raid shelters and returning to his desk at
home to continue his symphony. “Even during
air raids he seldom stopped working,” his wife
Nina wrote. “If things began looking too hot, he
calmly finished the bar he was writing, waited
until the page dried, neatly arranged what he
had written, and took it down with him into the
bomb shelter.” The first movement was completed
on September 3. He originally had intended
it to stand alone as a symphonic poem, but he
now recognized that it was merely the opening
chapter of a long and deeply personal work. Two
more movements were written at great speed.
“Our art is threatened with great danger,” he said
on Leningrad radio that month. “We will defend
our music.” On October 1, having finished three
movements, Shostakovich was evacuated from
the city against his wishes. He later moved to
Kuibyshev, in the Volga region, where he finished
the finale in December.
Shostakovich’s eventual official statement, “I
dedicated my Seventh Symphony to our fight
against fascism, to our coming victory over the
enemy, and to my native city of Leningrad,” is
most reCent
Cso PerFormanCes
November 29, 30, December 1 &
4, 2007, Orchestra Hall. Semyon
Bychkov conducting
InstrUmentatIon
three flutes, alto flute and piccolo,
two oboes and english horn, three
clarinets, e-flat clarinet and bass
clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, eight horns, six trumpets,
six trombones, tuba, timpani, snare
drums, bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam,
tambourine, triangle, xylophone,
piano, two harps, strings
aPProXImate
PerFormanCe tIme
80 minutes
Cso reCorDIng
1988. Leonard Bernstein conducting.
Deutsche Grammophon
reproduced on the first page of the printed score
merely as “Dedicated to the city of Leningrad.”
Although Shostakovich originally gave titles to
the four movements—War, Remembrance, The
Wide Spaces of Our Land, and Victory—he later
discarded them and provided only a few hints
about the meaning of the music:
I.War breaks suddenly into our peaceful
life. . . . The recapitulation is a funeral
march, a deeply tragic episode, a
mass requiem.
II.A lyrical intermezzo . . . no program
and fewer “concrete facts” than in the
first movement.
III. A
pathetic adagio with drama in the
middle episode.
IV.Victory, a beautiful life in the future.
T he symphony was performed for the first
time on March 5, 1942, in Kuibyshev, by
the evacuated orchestra of the Bolshoi
Theatre. Three weeks later, it was played in
Moscow. Within a month, the score was microfilmed, placed in a tin can, and secretly sent to the
Shostakovich with his wife Nina in 1932, the year of
their marriage, with their close friend Ivan Sollertinsky
(Novosti)
United States, by plane and by car, in a circuitous
route through Teheran, Cairo, and South America
before ending up in New York City. On July 19,
Toscanini and his NBC Symphony introduced the
symphony to this country in a radio broadcast that
reached several million listeners—an unparalleled event for a piece of new music. (Toscanini
beat out both Koussevitzky and Stokowski
for the right to give the Western premiere.)
Seldom has a new work received so much
advance publicity and attracted so many listeners
or caused such a stir. A number of the leading
composers of the era who had immigrated to the
United States, including Schoenberg, Stravinsky,
Hindemith, and Rachmaninov, tuned in to the
July broadcast to hear what their colleague was
up to. Schoenberg complained that “with composing like this, one must be grateful that he has
not already gone up to Symphony no. 77,” and
Hindemith simply went to his desk to write a set
of fugues, the Ludus tonalis, as a way of clearing
the air. Béla Bartók listened to the broadcast
from his summer cottage in Saranac Lake, New
York, and was so outraged by the repetitious
first-movement march that he wrote a parody of
it in his Concerto for Orchestra, on which he was
then at work.
In August, Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony
came home to Leningrad. After the devastations
suffered during the city’s first winter under siege,
only the conductor and fourteen members of the
Leningrad Radio Orchestra—the only group of
musicians who, like Shostakovich, had resisted
evacuation—were still alive. Qualified musicians
were brought in from the front line to fill out the
orchestra, and somehow they managed to learn
Shostakovich’s demanding, emotionally draining
new score. Three of the players died of starvation
before the premiere. The Leningrad performance,
on August 9, was defiantly broadcast over loudspeakers to the German troops camped outside
the city.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra played the
work for the first time, under Frederick Stock,
later that month, on August 22, at a benefit concert for the Russian War Relief at Ravinia. Stock
died a week before he was scheduled to conduct
the symphony in Orchestra Hall that autumn;
those performances, in late October, were led by
the Orchestra’s associate conductor Hans Lange,
who unaccountably took an intermission between
the second and third movements.
5
Program book cover for the August 22, 1942, Ravinia Festival performance
6
S hostakovich had prepared a program for
this new symphony that was drawing
international attention. “This is the simple,
peaceful life lived before the war,” he wrote of the
first movement. The symphony opens confidently
with a grand, striding unison theme—the voice
of “people sure of themselves and their future.”
But, later on, in the development section,
war bursts into the peaceful life of these
people. I am not aiming for the naturalistic depiction of war, the depiction of the
clatter of arms, the explosions of shells and
so on. I am trying to convey the image of
war emotionally.
The first movement is dominated by this great
marching music—what Shostakovich himself
called the “invasion episode.” The theme itself
could hardly sound more innocuous at first,
but it’s based on an aria from Franz Lehár’s The
Merry Widow, a favorite of Hitler. Eventually the
invasion music becomes so menacing and forceful
that it overwhelms both the striding theme
which opens the symphony and the delicate,
almost Mahler-like lyrical section that follows.
Bartók was not alone in attacking the numbing
repetition (over the span of 350 measures) and
Boléro-like crescendo of the march, over a relentless snare-drum rhythm. (Bartók mocks the
theme in the fourth movement of his Concerto
for Orchestra, where it is greeted with squawks
of derision.) Shostakovich had anticipated a
violent response even before he finished the first
movement: “Let them accuse me, but that’s how
I hear war,” he told a friend.
There is irony and humor, of all things, in the
second movement—necessary relief after the
relentless opening Allegretto. There are hints
of military music midway through, launched by
the piercing song of the E-flat clarinet. Both the
opening and closing pages show Shostakovich’s
mastery of a solo melody over simple, repeated
accompaniment figures.
The slow movement begins with great resounding chords—wonderfully scored for full winds
and two harps—followed by an eloquent string
melody, strong and bracing in its naked simplicity (the lower strings occasionally offer a single
note or chord as support). The solo flute provides
a second theme, over plucked strings. Again, a
more vigorous middle section suggests that war is
not over. At the end, the strings take up the vast
wind chords with which the movement began.
“My idea of victory isn’t something brutal,”
Shostakovich said. “It’s better explained as the
victory of light over darkness, of humanity over
barbarism, of reason over reaction.” In the finale,
victory does not come at once. Shostakovich
begins with little more than the timpani roll
that concluded the slow movement, and gradually adds other voices. A broad climax quickly
unwinds; a single viola line is left hanging.
Finally the music slowly and deliberately moves
toward a grand conclusion, sprinkled with brass
fanfares and cymbal crashes, and forces its way
into C major—the traditional key of victory.
Even then, when the symphony’s opening theme
returns to crown the moment, it is chock-full of
notes that have no place in C major, and the final
chords in that most brilliant of keys have a bitter
ring to them. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra.
For more information on the CSO’s first performance of
Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, please visit our From
the Archives blog at cso.org/fromthearchives/Shost7.
© 2014 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
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