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, February 26, 2015, at 8:00
Friday, February 27, 2015, at 1:30
Saturday, February 28, 2015, at 8:00
Tuesday, March 3, 2015, at 7:30
Riccardo Muti Conductor
Scriabin
Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 29
Andante
Allegro
Andante
Tempestoso
Maestoso
INTERMISSION
Tchaikovsky
Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 74 (Pathétique)
Adagio—Allegro non troppo
Allegro con grazia
Allegro molto vivace
Finale: Adagio lamentoso
This concert series is made possible by the Juli Grainger Endowment.
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.
COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher
Alexander Scriabin
Born January 6, 1872 [December 25, 1871, old style], Moscow, Russia.
Died April 27, 1915, Moscow, Russia.
Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 29
From his youth, when he
interpreted the significance of his birth on
Christmas Day as a sign
that he should do great
things, Scriabin believed
he would play a decisive
role in the history of
music. But his early death
at the age of forty-three
cut short his career just as he was venturing into
pioneer territory. Like many composers of a less
revolutionary bent, Scriabin started his musical
life as a pianist and his composing career writing
only piano pieces. In 1884, he began to study
piano with Nicolai Zverev, who had already
accepted Sergei Rachmaninov as a pupil. The two
students became good friends—Scriabin was
older by just one year—though they were sometimes later portrayed as rivals once their musical
ambitions ventured in different directions. At the
time they met, both Scriabin and Rachmaninov
were beginning to compose piano pieces for
themselves to play. In 1888, Scriabin entered the
Moscow Conservatory, where he excelled equally
as a pianist and composer. When he graduated in
1892, he was awarded the second gold medal in
composition (Rachmaninov took first place, for
his opera Aleko).
After Scriabin left the conservatory, he began
a career as a concert pianist. While his recital
programs often included music by Schumann and
Liszt, two composers who also started out as pianists, Scriabin’s particular favorite was Chopin.
That influence is reflected not only in his repertoire, but in the titles and nature of the music he
wrote at the time—sets of preludes, impromptus,
COMPOSED
1901
FIRST PERFORMANCE
January 12, 1902; Saint Petersburg,
Russia
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etudes, and even Polish mazurkas. To study the
first nineteen opus numbers in Scriabin’s catalog,
all pieces for piano solo, one would never predict the important orchestral music that would
quickly follow.
T he move away from writing solo piano
music was a tough and decisive step for all
the pianist-composers of the nineteenth
century, but Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, and
Brahms were already mature artists with individual
and recognizable styles when they stopped composing exclusively for the piano. But when Scriabin
wrote a piano concerto in 1896—the first of his
works to call for orchestra—he had not yet discovered the voice that would ultimately make his
music unique. The Chopinesque concerto scarcely
hints at the direction Scriabin’s career would take.
Then, three years later, he began his first symphony
(performed by the CSO under Riccardo Muti last
month), and a new world of complex sounds and
philosophical ideas opened up before him. He
was now on the path to becoming, as the novelist
Boris Pasternak later said of him, “more than just
a composer.” Within a year after he completed
his first symphony, he eagerly began and quickly
finished a second—the work that is performed this
week—as if he had found his true calling at last.
But the traditional form of the symphony would
only briefly satisfy Scriabin’s musical ambitions.
All three of the works he called symphony were
composed within a five-year period, and already
with the third, Scriabin felt the need for a descriptive subtitle, The Divine Poem, recognizing that
his ideas were beginning to outgrow the symphonic model. He did not even bother to label the
two grand orchestral pieces he wrote afterward,
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
November 13, 14 & 15, 1969, Orchestra
Hall. Georg Semkow conducting
four horns, three trumpets, three
trombones, tuba, timpani,
percussion, strings
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes and piccolo, two oboes,
three clarinets, two bassoons,
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
48 minutes
The Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus, as symphonies. Both of those works are single-movement
tone poems, if any conventional title can do
justice to their extraordinary form and substance.
merely produced military parade music, despite
the grandeur of his ambitions, and considered
rewriting it, but by then he had given up on pure
symphonic form altogether.)
ike his First Symphony, Scriabin’s Second
is a score that shows the composer working
comfortably within the symphonic tradition, and yet, at the same time, yearning to break
free of its conventions and limitations. “What a
symphony, but what kind?” the composer Anatoly
Liadov scribbled on the margin of the manuscript
of Symphony no. 2 when he studied it for the first
time. Instead of the First Symphony’s unexpected
six movements, Scriabin now writes five—as close
as he would come to the standard four-movement
layout. Scriabin’s opening movement is really
a true introduction, for it introduces central
thematic ideas that will govern the music that
follows: a dynamic Allegro (in regulation sonata
form), an atmospheric and lyrical slow movement
colored by the sounds of birdcalls, a tempestuous
and driven scherzo, and a grand triumphant finale.
The Second Symphony is still grounded in the
spirit of the nineteenth-century masters Scriabin
revered—it reflects what Scriabin, a conservatory
professor at the time, spoke of as the difficulty of
teaching other people’s music while writing his
own. But it also is the work of a composer with
his own individual voice—to this day, no other
music sounds quite like Scriabin’s—and it marks
an advance over Scriabin’s own first symphony in
the sophistication of its thematic development,
the brilliant yet subtle coloring of its orchestration, and its success in unifying a large structure
through the recurrence of the main musical ideas.
The heart of the score is its sumptuously
colored central slow movement, which opens
and closes with the flute imitating the sounds
of birds, so unexpected in a symphony written
in the opening years of the twentieth century—
and some four decades ahead of the celebrated
birdsong in the music by Olivier Messiaen. (The
Chicago Symphony plays Messiaen’s masterwork,
the Turangalîla-symphonie, under Esa-Pekka
Salonen in May.) As in his first symphony,
Scriabin wanted to write a finale with universal
appeal—something so simple and captivating
that it would move all people. His solution here
is a straightforward triumphant march in 4/4
time and in C major. (Scriabin later feared he had
he Second Symphony, like Scriabin’s
First, fell flat at the premiere, given under
Liadov’s baton in Saint Petersburg, in
January 1902. There were boos and catcalls, and
the work was hardly better received in Moscow
a year later. Scriabin was devastated, but he had
already moved on to a third symphony, which he
would call The Divine Poem. Oddly, even after that
work and The Poem of Ecstasy were programmed
with some regularity—the CSO played The Divine
Poem almost annually in the 1920s and ’30s—and
Scriabin became a kind of cult favorite, his first
two symphonies have remained largely overlooked. When Riccardo Muti led Symphony no. 1
here (and in Carnegie Hall) earlier this year, the
Chicago Symphony was playing the piece for the
first time. The Orchestra has played Symphony
no. 2 just once before—nearly a half century ago.
L T I n the few years he had left after composing
his Second Symphony, Scriabin ventured
farther into the great unknown, where music
and color are closely linked, and where “art must
unite with philosophy and religion in an indivisible whole to form a new gospel.” After his Fifth
Piano Sonata, composed in 1907, he broke with
tonality. A single dissonant chord, the so-called
mystic chord, provided the foundation for all of
his final compositions. He had, in effect, created
a new system of tonal organization to replace
traditional harmony. After his death, no one truly
followed his path (Prokofiev and Szymanowski
briefly came under his spell), and, in the end,
despite the urgency and fierce passion of his ideas,
he did not—to use current parlance—make a
difference. Stravinsky, who disliked both Scriabin
and his music, once commented, “Although his
death was tragic and premature, I have sometimes
wondered at the kind of music such a man would
have written had he survived into the 1920s.”
Scriabin’s original language was, in its own
way, as revolutionary as that of Mahler, Strauss,
Schoenberg, or Debussy, all of whom were
writing at the same time. It is difficult to know
where Scriabin was headed, and how he might
ultimately have changed the course of music. 3
Piotr Tchaikovsky
Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk, Russia.
Died November 6, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 74 (Pathétique)
Five days after he conducted the premiere of this
symphony, Tchaikovsky
drank a glass of unboiled
water, a careless move that
year in Saint Petersburg,
where countless cases of
cholera had recently been
reported. He died four
days later. When the
symphony was performed for a second time the
following week, the hall was draped in black and a
bust modeled after the composer’s death mask was
prominently displayed. An eleven-year-old boy,
who would soon become Russia’s most celebrated
composer, attended that concert with his father,
the great baritone Fyodor Stravinsky. Little Igor,
whose own music would eventually refute much of
what Tchaikovsky’s glorified, understood, even at
the time, the magnitude of this loss—not just to
his family (his father was famous for his interpretations of several Tchaikovsky roles) but to the
larger music world as well.
At the time he died, Tchaikovsky was one of
the great figures in music: he was at the peak
of his creative powers, and he was both famous
and beloved far beyond his native Russia. His
death came as a shock (he was only fifty-three)
and the suspicious circumstances surrounding
his fatal illness, coupled with the tragic tone of
his last symphony—curiously titled Pathétique—
produced a mystique about the composer’s
COMPOSED
February–August 1893
FIRST PERFORMANCE
October 28, 1893. The composer conducting
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
April 27 & 28, 1894, Auditorium
Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting
July 29, 1937, Ravinia Festival. Vladimir
Golschmann conducting
4
last days that still persists today. In 1979, the
Russian émigré musicologist Alexandra Orlova
published a now-infamous article proposing
that Tchaikovsky had in fact committed suicide
by poison, on the orders of his fellow alumni
of the School of Jurisprudence, to cover up
his alleged affair with the nephew of Duke
Stenbock-Thurmor. For a time in the 1980s,
suicide and homosexuality replaced the quaint
old tale of cholera and drinking water, and,
as Tchaikovsky’s obituary was rewritten, the
Pathétique Symphony became the chief musical
victim in this tabloid tale. Even Tchaikovsky’s
biographer David Brown, writing in the sacrosanct Grove, accepted Orlova’s theory. But
in recent years, scholars have wisely backed
off—evidence is almost totally undocumented—
and a number of musicologists, including the
biographer Alexander Poznansky, have refuted
Orlova convincingly.
T he circumstances surrounding the
composition of the Pathétique Symphony
are dramatic and mysterious, if less
lurid than pulp fiction. In December 1892,
Tchaikovsky abruptly decided to abandon work
on a programmatic symphony in E-flat major
on which he had been struggling for some
time—“an irreversible decision,” he wrote, “and
it is wonderful that I made it.” (He eventually
turned portions of the abandoned symphony
into his third piano concerto, which the Chicago
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
July 31, 2011, Ravinia Festival. James
Conlon conducting
May 1, 2 & 3, 2014, Orchestra Hall.
Christoph von Dohnányi conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes and piccolo, two oboes,
two clarinets and bass clarinet, two
bassoons, four horns, two trumpets,
three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass
drum, cymbals, tam-tam, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
48 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1952. Rafael Kubelík conducting.
Mercury
1957. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA
1976. Sir Georg Solti conducting.
London
1984. James Levine conducting. RCA
1986. Claudio Abbado conducting. CBS
1998. Daniel Barenboim conducting.
Teldec
Symphony played for the first time this past
brother’s presence wrote on the first page the title
December.) But the failure of the new symphony
that “remained forever,” as Modest later recalled,
left Tchaikovsky despondent and directionless,
although the composer himself soon had second
and he began to fear that he was “played out,
thoughts. (Tchaikovsky’s publisher, who knew
dried up,” as he put it. (“I think and I think,
the marketing value of a good title, ignored
and I know not what to do,” he wrote to his
the composer’s urgent request that it simply be
nephew Bob Davydov, whose friendship and
printed as Symphony no. 6.)
encouragement would help see him through
Like the abandoned E-flat major symphony,
this crisis.) Although he felt that he should give
the new B minor score was programmatic, but, as
up writing “pure music, that
he wrote to Bob, “with such
is, symphonic or chamber
a program that will remain
music,” within two months
a mystery to everyone—let
he had begun the symphony
them guess.” Bob was only
that would prove to be his
the first to ponder, in vain,
greatest—and his last.
the meaning of this deeply
Renewed—and relieved—
personal work. (And even he,
by the old, familiar joy of
to whom Tchaikovsky would
composing, Tchaikovsky
ultimately dedicate the score,
wrote frantically. Within
couldn’t draw a satisfactory
four days, the first part of the
answer from the composer
symphony was complete and
except that it was “imbued
the remainder precisely outwith subjectivity.”)
lined in his head. “You cannot
Tchaikovsky carried his
imagine what bliss I feel,” he
program with him to the
wrote to Bob on February 11,
grave. Cryptic notes scribbled
1893, “assured that my time
among his sketches at the
has not yet passed and that I
time refer to a symphony
can still work.” The rest went
about life’s aspirations and
Tchaikovsky with his nephew,
smoothly and the symphony
disappointments—yet another
Bob Davydov, in 1892
was completed, without setmanifestation of the central
backs, by the end of August.
theme of both Swan Lake
Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere
and Eugene Onegin, and, in fact, the great theme
of his new symphony on October 28 in
of the composer’s life: the painful search for an
Saint Petersburg. The audience—“all Saint
ideal that is never satisfied.
Petersburg”—rose and cheered when the comAs scholars have learned more about
poser appeared on stage. But after the symphony, Tchaikovsky’s unfulfilled homoerotic passion
the applause was half-hearted; the crowd didn’t
for his nephew Bob—a mismatch of youth and
know what to make of this sober, gloomy
middle age, and a tangle of sexual persuasions in
music. Leaving the concert hall, Tchaikovsky
a society fiercely intolerant of homosexuality—
complained that neither the audience nor the
the temptation to read this symphony as the
orchestra seemed to like the piece, although two
composer’s heartbreaking confession of a painful,
days later he decided that “it is not that it wasn’t
repressed life has inevitably proved irresistible.
liked, but it has caused some bewilderment.”
In the inexhaustibly expressive, but sufficiently
The morning after the premiere, the composer
ambiguous language of music, Tchaikovsky
told his brother Modest that the symphony
could tell the story of his life—honestly and
needed a title. (Tchaikovsky had originally
unsparingly—without ever giving up its secrets.
thought of calling it the Program Symphony.)
The abstract nature of music has, arguably, never
Modest first suggested Tragic and then
been so fearlessly tested.
Pathétique, which in Russian carries a meaning
The temptation to read something tragic into
closer to passionate, full of emotion and sufthis score is as old as the music itself. Even
fering. Tchaikovsky agreed at once, and in his
the composer, who didn’t want to divulge his
5
meaning, admitted before the premiere that it
had something of the character of a requiem.
(The trombone incantations in the first movement actually quote a Russian Orthodox chant
for the dead.) And surely the first audience was
stunned—or bewildered, as Tchaikovsky noted—
by the unconventionally slow and mournful
finale, trailing off into silence at the end, with
just cellos and basses playing pppp. When
Tchaikovsky died so suddenly and violently on
the heels of the premiere, the symphony became
identified at once, perhaps inextricably, with its
composer’s death. By the memorial performance
on November 6, the Russian Musical Gazette
had already determined that the symphony was
“indeed a sort of swan song, a presentiment
of imminent death.” (More than a century
later, Orlova’s devotees were to make much
of the slowly fading final pages as a depiction
of suicide.)
T he score itself, though perhaps dulled
by familiarity, is one of Tchaikovsky’s
most inspired creations. All of its true
masterstrokes are purely musical, not programmatic. It begins uniquely, with the sound of
a very low bassoon solo over murky strings.
(This slow introduction is in the “wrong” key,
but eventually works its way into B minor.)
The entire first movement sustains the tone,
although not the tempo, of the somber opening. The soaring principal theme, to be played
© 2015 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
6
“tenderly, very songfully, and elastically,” is one
of Tchaikovsky’s greatest melodies. (Tchaikovsky
carefully directs the emotional development of
this rich and expansive tune all the way down
to a virtually unprecedented thread of sound,
marked pppppp.) The recapitulation reorders
and telescopes events so that the grand and
expressive melody, now magically rescored, steals
in suddenly and unexpectedly, to great effect.
The central movements are, by necessity,
more relaxed. The first is a wonderful, singing,
undanceable waltz, famously set in 5/4 time.
(There’s a real waltz, in 3/4, in Tchaikovsky’s
Fifth Symphony.) The second is a brilliant,
dazzlingly scored march, undercut throughout by
a streak of melancholy.
The finale begins with a cry of despair, and
although it eventually unveils a warm and
consoling theme begun by the violins against
the heartbeat of a horn ostinato, the mood only
continues to darken, ultimately becoming threatening in its intensity. In a symphony marked by
telling, uncommonly quiet gestures—and this
from a composer famous for bombast—a single
soft stroke of the tam-tam marks the point of no
return. From there it is all defeat and disintegration, over a fading, ultimately faltering pulse. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra.