PROGRAM
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIFTH SEASON
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Global Sponsor of the CSO
Thursday, May 5, 2016, at 8:00
Saturday, May 7, 2016, at 8:00
Tuesday, May 10, 2016, at 7:30
Donald Runnicles Conductor
Britten
Sinfonia da requiem, Op. 20
Lacrymosa—
Dies irae—
Requiem aeternam
Strauss
Death and Transfiguration, Op. 24
INTERMISSION
Elgar
Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma), Op. 36 Theme (Andante)
1.C.A.E. (Andante)
2.H.D.S.-P. (Allegro)
3.R.B.T. (Allegretto)
4.W.M.B. (Allegro di molto)
5.R.P.A. (Moderato)
6.Ysobel (Andantino)
7.Troyte (Presto)
8.W.N. (Allegretto)
9.Nimrod (Adagio)
10.Intermezzo (Dorabella). (Allegretto)
11.G.R.S. (Allegro di molto)
12. B.G.N. (Andante)
13.*** Romanza (Moderato)
14.Finale. E.D.U. (Allegro)
CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines.
This work is part of the CSO Premiere Retrospective, which is generously sponsored by the
Sargent Family Foundation.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to 93XRT, WBEZ 91.5 FM, and RedEye 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.
Sinfonia da requiem, Op. 20
Benjamin Britten and his
friend Peter Pears left
England for North
America in May 1939.
After spending several
days in Canada, they
crossed into this country
in June, stopping first in
Grand Rapids, Michigan,
then moving on to New
York City and the Catskills, where they visited
Aaron Copland. There Britten composed some
music “inspired by such sunshine as I’ve never
seen before.” He wrote home to his sister Beth: “I
am certain that N. America is the place of the
future . . . & though certainly one is worried by a
lack of culture, there is terrific energy & vitality
in the place.”
Copland later recalled that Britten was deeply
worried about the prospect of war at that time,
and he couldn’t decide whether to return to
England or not. After Britten left for New York
City, Copland wrote to him: “I think you absolutely owe it to England to stay here . . . . After
all anyone can shoot a gun—but how many can
write music like you?” Britain declared war on
September 3, and Britten settled in New York,
struggling with antiwar sentiments that would
eventually explode into courageous, controversial, and unequivocal pacifism.
COMPOSED
1940
FIRST PERFORMANCE
March 30, 1941, New York City
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCE
February 8, 1949, Orchestra Hall. Fritz
Busch conducting
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
May 31 & June 3, 2014, Orchestra Hall.
Jaap van Zweden conducting
2
That winter, Britten toured the Midwest;
he came back from Chicago in February with
a “vile cold & flu” that he couldn’t shake. He
was further troubled by homesickness, “war or
no war,” and by the growing European confl ict
viewed from afar. Around this time, Britten
was asked by the British Council to compose a
new work to celebrate “the reigning dynasty of
a foreign power.” He agreed to this enigmatic
commission as long as “no form of musical
jingoism” was required. By the time the details
had been worked out and Britten learned that
the score would honor the 2,600th anniversary
of the Japanese Imperial dynasty, there was little
time left to compose the music. On April 26,
1940, he wrote to his sister, “I now find myself
with the proposition of writing a symphony in
about three weeks!” Britten described the score
as “a short symphony—or symphonic poem,” and
he told a reporter for the New York Sun that he
would dedicate it to the memory of his parents
(his father died in 1934, his mother in 1937) as
an expression of his own antiwar conviction.
T
he Sinfonia da requiem was composed
in “a terrible hurry” and was completed
in early June. Britten wrote a draft for
piano duet so that he and Pears could try it out.
In November, however, the Japanese government
reviewed the score, with its three movement
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes, piccolo and alto flute,
two oboes and english horn, three
clarinets, E-flat clarinet and bass
clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, alto saxophone, six horns,
three trumpets, three trombones and
tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals,
two harps, xylophone, snare drum,
tambourine, whip, piano, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
18 minutes
CSO RECORDING
1983. Rafael Kubelík conducting. CSO
(From the Archives, vol. 16: A Tribute to
Rafael Kubelík II)
titles derived from
Christian liturgy,
and rejected it
outright as “purely
a religious music of
Christian nature”
that didn’t “express
felicitations” for that
country’s anniversary. The government
had already paid
Britten his fee, but
at the Tokyo concert the only music
performed was by
Britten with Aaron Copland
Richard Strauss and
(center) and Peter Pears, in
Jacques Ibert, the
upstate New York in 1939
two other composers
who submitted works for that occasion.
T he premiere of the Sinfonia da
requiem was given by the New York
Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall on
March 30, 1941. Britten provided a program
note that made no mention of the circumstances
of the composition or its antiwar theme. He
described the first movement as “a slow marching
lament.” The title Lacrymosa comes from the
closing section of the Dies irae, the medieval
sequence describing the Day of Judgment:
Full of tears and full of dread
Is that day that wakes the dead,
Calling all, with solemn blast,
To be judged for all their past.
The movement begins with fierce timpani
blows; a solemn funeral march builds, in a long
arch, against a steady drumbeat. A wavering
saxophone rises above the dark, inexorable music.
Britten described the Dies irae, the second
movement, as a kind of “Dance of Death, with
occasional moments of quiet marching rhythm.”
It symbolizes the full outbreak of war, in music
of undisguised anger and grim intensity. The
scene dissolves, leaving only a fragile melodic
thread of hope in the harp and bass clarinet. The
third movement, Requiem aeternam (Eternal
rest), builds slowly toward consolation and a
peace that, in 1940, was far from certain. Richard Strauss
Born June 11, 1864, Munich, Germany.
Died September 8, 1949, Garmisch, Germany.
Death and Transfiguration, Op. 24
Shortly before he died at
the age of eighty-five,
Richard Strauss told his
daughter-in-law that he
wasn’t afraid of death: it
was just as he had
composed it in Death and
Transfiguration. Only a
few months before,
Strauss had read Joseph
Eichendorff’s poem “Im Abendrot” (At sunset).
When he came to the lines “How tired we are of
wandering—could this perhaps be death?,” he
took his pencil and jotted down the magnificent
theme from Death and Transfiguration that he
had written nearly sixty years earlier. And then,
summing up his life’s work, he wove it into the
closing pages of his Eichendorff setting, now
known as the last of the Four Last Songs.
It’s the Marschallin, in Strauss’s Der
Rosenkavalier, who says, “To be afraid of time
is useless, for God, mindful of all his children,
in his own wisdom created it.” But like the
Marschallin, Strauss always heard the ticking of
the clock, and he couldn’t help thinking about
death. He claimed that from an early age he
had wanted to compose music that followed the
dying hours of a man who had reached toward
the “highest ideal goals,” and who, in dying, sees
his life passing before him.
In 1888, without a gray hair on his head and
with another sixty years of life and music ahead
3
of him, Strauss wrote knowingly of a man’s last
days on earth. It’s a young man’s view of death
and a romantic vision of old age, scarcely touched
by the chilling truths of infirmity and hopelessness, but it apparently still satisfied Strauss at the
end of his own life. The first edition of the score,
as well as the earliest printed programs, included
a poem by Alexander Ritter (a fervent Wagnerian
who had married Wagner’s niece Julie) that was
written after Strauss had finished the music and
was offered as a literary guide to the piece. At the
time, Strauss thought Ritter’s scenario indispensable to an understanding of the score, but the
best guide is really the one the composer himself
wrote in a letter to a friend in 1894:
It was about six years ago when the idea
occurred to me to represent the death of
a person who had striven for the highest
ideal goals, therefore possibly an artist, in a
tone poem. The sick man lies in bed asleep,
breathing heavily and irregularly; agreeable
dreams charm a smile on his features in spite
of his suffering; his sleep becomes lighter; he
wakens; once again he is racked by terrible
pain, his limbs shake with fever—as the
attack draws to a close and the pain subsides
he reflects on his past life, his childhood
passes before him, his youth with its striving, its passions, and then, while the pain
resumes, the fruit of his path through life
appears to him, the ideal, the ideal which
he has tried to realize, to represent in his
COMPOSED
1888–November 18, 1889
FIRST PERFORMANCE
June 24, 1890; Eisenach, Germany.
The composer conducting
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
February 22 & 23, 1895,
Auditorium Theatre. Theodore
Thomas conducting
July 29, 1938, Ravinia Festival. Eugene
Ormandy conducting
CSO PERFORMANCES,
THE COMPOSER CONDUCTING
April 1 and 2, 1904, Auditorium Theatre
December 18, 1921, Auditorium Theatre
4
art, but which he has been unable to perfect,
because it was not for any human being to
perfect it.
The hour of death approaches, and the soul
leaves the body, in order to find perfected in
the most glorious form in the eternal cosmos
that which he could not fulfill here on earth.
A born opera composer, Strauss begins with
a deathbed scene, dark and uncertain,
and filled only with the sounds of the
sick man’s faltering heartbeat. A sudden, convulsive passage, depicting the struggle with death,
ultimately gives way to the work’s central theme,
an impressive six-note motif characterized by an
octave leap, which represents the artist’s ideals.
The flood of memories begins pointedly with his
storybook-like infancy. (“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies,” wrote Edna St. Vincent
Millay, the once-popular poet who died the year
after Strauss.) Strauss then moves on through
youth, marvelously evoked by the self-confident
swagger of the horns, to romances of such passion
that their recollection brings on a spell of heart
palpitations (rendered by the low brass and
timpani). The hero revels in remembrance before
there is one final, defiant moment of struggle.
Death itself arrives accompanied by the solemn
striking of the tam-tam. The transfiguration is like
one of Strauss’s own great opera finales, weaving
the work’s main themes together, through a series
of moving climaxes, in music of radiant beauty. MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
July 3, 1996, Ravinia Festival. Hermann
Michael conducting
May 5, 6, 7 & 10, 2011, Orchestra Hall.
Riccardo Muti conducting
January 16, 2014; Philharmonie, Essen,
Germany. Riccardo Muti conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
three flutes, two oboes and english
horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet,
two bassoons and contrabassoon,
four horns, three trumpets, three
trombones and tuba, timpani,
tam-tam, two harps, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
24 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1947. Désiré Defauw conducting. CSO
(Chicago Symphony Orchestra: The First
100 Years)
1977. Sir Georg Solti conducting. CSO
(From the Archives, vol. 4: A Tribute
to Solti)
1977. Sir Georg Solti conducting.
London (video)
Composers in Chicago
On March 31, 1904, first music director Theodore
Thomas introduced his friend Richard Strauss to
the Chicago Orchestra at the Auditorium Theatre.
Strauss went straight to work, rehearsing his Also
sprach Zarathustra, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks,
and Death and Transfiguration. According to William
Lines Hubbard’s account in the Chicago Tribune,
halfway through the rehearsal he paused to say:
Gentlemen, it is my pleasure and my pride to
be able to direct today so faultless an orchestra
and to hear my music played in a manner so
completely in accordance with my every wish.
Your organization is a model in all ways, and I
feel proud to be associated with an orchestra
which has been brought to such perfection by
a man whom I have honored and wished to
know for full twenty years—Mr. Thomas.
Following the Friday matinee performance on
April 1, Hubbard wrote:
That master musician of modern music, that
wonderful combination of poet, painter,
and composer, the man to whom pictures
are audible and tones visible—Richard
Strauss—appeared at the Auditorium
yesterday afternoon, and for over two hours
some 3,700 persons sat beneath the spell his
great gifts weave and listened to the tonal
tales they enable him to tell. . . . The Orchestra
was on its mettle, and a more superb technical
presentment of the intensely difficult scores
than it gave could not be desired. Every wish of
the conductor was instantly responded to, and
Dr. Strauss’s pleasure in the work done by the
men was unmistakable.
Strauss’s wife Pauline also appeared on the
program as soprano soloist in several of his songs,
and for her first entrance, she was escorted both by
her husband and Thomas. Hubbard was kind in his
critique of her performance:
Her singing proved interesting and satisfactory
from an interpretive viewpoint. The voice
has lost its richness in the upper middle
register and in the high tones, but it is of no
inconsiderable beauty in the lower half, and it
is used throughout with so much of discretion
and understanding that it seems adequate
for all that is undertaken. The seven songs
heard yesterday were beautifully interpreted,
and the exquisite accompaniments played
as they were in finest style by the Orchestra,
made the performance of them in high
measure gratifying.
Strauss returned to Chicago to lead a special
concert at the Auditorium Theatre on December 18,
1921. He again conducted the Orchestra in his Also
sprach Zarathustra, Death and Transfiguration, and
the love scene from his opera Feuersnot, along with
several songs—“Morgen!,” “Wiegenlied,” “Freundliche Vision,” and “Ständchen”—with
soprano Claire Dux.
Theme from Death and Transfiguration in Strauss’s hand with
the inscription “to beloved friends Mr. and Mrs. Theodore
Thomas with constant gratitude and respect,” the April 3,
1904, entry from Rose Fay Thomas’s guest book (Theodore
Thomas Papers, The Newberry Library, Chicago)
Frank Villella is the director of the Rosenthal
Archives. For more information regarding the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s anniversary season,
please visit cso.org/125moments.
5
Edward Elgar
Born June 2, 1857, Broadheath, near Worcester, England.
Died February 23, 1934, Broadheath, England.
Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma), Op. 36
Performed as part of the CSO Premiere Retrospective
The temptation to
improvise at the piano
after a hard day’s work
surely never produced
greater results than on an
October evening in the
Worcestershire countryside in 1898. Tired out
from hours of teaching
violin and writing music
that would never make him famous, Edward
Elgar began to play a tune that caught his wife’s
ear. Alice asked what it was. “Nothing,” he
replied, “but something might be made of it.” And
then, to prove—or perhaps, test—his point, he
began to play with it. “Powell would have done
this, or Nevinson would have looked at it like
this,” he commented as he went, drawing on the
names of their friends. Alice said, “Surely you are
doing something that has never been done before!”
Alice wasn’t quite right, in terms of historical
fact—Schumann’s Carnaval, for example, depicts
a number of characters, real and imagined—but
she obviously sensed that her husband had hit
upon something important—not only to his
own faltering career, but for music itself. And
so what was begun “in a spirit of humor” was
COMPOSED
October 1898–February 19, 1899
FIRST PERFORMANCE
June 19, 1899; London, England. Hans
Richter conducting
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
January 3 & 4, 1902, Auditorium
Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting (U.S. premiere)
June 30, 1939, Ravinia Festival. Adrian
Boult conducting
CSO PERFORMANCES,
THE COMPOSER CONDUCTING
April 5 & 6, 1907, Orchestra Hall
6
soon “continued in deep seriousness,” as Elgar
later recalled of the music that would make
him famous, along with Powell, Nevinson, and
a number of the composer’s other friends. On
October 24 he wrote to August Jaeger, the closest
of all those friends,
. . . I have sketched a set of Variations
(“orkestra”) on an original theme: the
Variations have amused me because I’ve
labeled ’em with the nicknames of my
particular friends—you are Nimrod. That is
to say, I’ve written the variations each one to
represent the mood of the “party”—I’ve liked
to imagine the “party” writing the var: him
(or her) self and have written what I think
they wd. have written—if they were asses
enough to compose—it’s a quaint idea & the
result is amusing to those behind the scenes
& won’t affect the hearer who “nose nuffin.”
The work went well. On November 1, Elgar
played at least six variations for Dora Penny,
now known as Dorabella, or variation 10. On
January 5, Elgar wrote to Jaeger: “I say—those
variations—I like ’em.” By February 22 he told
Dorabella that the variations were done, “and
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
July 18, 1981, Ravinia Festival. Neville
Marriner conducting
March 17, 19 & 22, 2011, Orchestra Hall.
Charles Dutoit conducting
March 18 & 20, 2011, Orchestra Hall.
Charles Dutoit conducting (Beyond
the Score)
INSTRUMENTATION
two flutes and piccolo, two oboes,
two clarinets, two bassoons and
contrabassoon, four horns, three
trumpets, three trombones and tuba,
timpani, side drum, triangle, bass
drum, cymbals, organ, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
29 minutes
CSO RECORDINGS
1974. Sir Georg Solti conducting.
London
1986. Sir Georg Solti conducting. CSO
(From the Archives, vol. 21: Soloists of
the Orchestra III) (Nimrod)
yours is the most cheerful. . . . I
of the slightest texture;
have orchestrated you well.” The
further, through and over
orchestration of the piece took
the whole set another and
the two weeks from February 5
larger theme “goes,” but is
to 19, 1899. Elgar then sent
not played—so the principal
the score off to Hans Richter,
Theme never appears, even
the great German conductor
as in some late dramas—e.g.,
known for championing both
Maeterlinck’s L’intruse
Wagner and Brahms. Elgar
and Les sept princesses—the
waited a long, nervous month
chief character is never on
for a response, but Richter
the stage.
recognized the quality of this
music and agreed to give the
Those are words Elgar later
premiere in London. For Elgar,
came to regret, for the public’s
already in his forties and not
curiosity often overshadowed
yet a household name, even in
the music. Elgar himself
England, Richter’s advocacy
only made matters worse by
was decisive.
divulging that the “larger
Edward and Caroline Alice Elgar
The first performance was a
theme” fit in counterpoint with
just after their marriage
great success for both Elgar and
his original theme, by telling
for British music. The critics
Arthur Troyte Griffith (varirecognized the work as a landation 7) that the theme “is so
mark, and although one was aggravated that the
well known that it is extraordinary that no one
dedication “To my friends pictured within” didn’t has spotted it,” and by admonishing Dorabella
name names, he was at least honest enough to
that she, of all people, had not guessed it.
admit that the music stood handsomely on its
Several melodies have been favored over the
own. The friends have long ago been identified,
years, including “God Save the King,” “Rule,
but a greater question still remains. At the time
Britannia!,” and, most often, “Auld Lang Syne,”
of the premiere, Elgar wrote:
but to date the Enigma still maintains its place in
Elgar’s title. (Dorabella and her husband Richard
The enigma I will not explain—its “dark
Powell once asked Elgar outright about “Auld
saying” must be left unguessed, and I warn
Lang Syne” and he denied it, but by then he was
you that the apparent connection between
so tired of the whole mystery that many doubted
the Variations and the Theme is often
the sincerity of his answer.)
Hew David SteuartPowell, Variation 2
Richard Baxter
Townshend, Variation 3
William Meath Baker,
Variation 4
Richard Penrose Arnold,
Variation 5
7
F or full descriptions of the “friends pictured
within,” we are indebted to the invention of the piano roll; when the Aeolian
Company later issued the Enigma Variations in
this newfangled format, Elgar contributed his
own comments on this circle of men and women
in his life. Here, then, follows the portrait
gallery, with some of Elgar’s remarks.
Theme. This is an original melody, as Elgar’s
title boasts, born that October night in 1898 and
without connections to anyone in the composer’s
life. (It has been suggested that those important
first four notes perfectly set the composer’s own
name, but, as we shall see, Elgar saves himself
for last.) It’s worth remembering, however, that
when he wrote The Music Makers (an autobiographical, Ein Heldenleben–kind of work) in
1912, he recalled this theme to represent the
loneliness of the creative artist.
1. (C.A.E.) Caroline Alice Elgar was the
composer’s wife. “The variation,” Elgar writes, “is
really a prolongation of the theme with what I
wished to be romantic and delicate additions;
those who knew C.A.E. will understand this
reference to one whose life was a romantic and
delicate inspiration.” She was his muse; after
Alice died in 1920, Elgar never really worked
again. The little triplet figure in the oboe and the
bassoon at the very beginning mimics the whistle
with which Elgar signaled Alice whenever he
came home.
2. (H.D.S.-P.) Hew David Steuart-Powell
played chamber music with Elgar. “His characteristic diatonic run over the keys before
beginning to play is here humorously travestied
in the semiquaver [sixteenth note] passages; these
should suggest a toccata, but chromatic beyond
H.D.S.-P.’s liking.” (Their frequent partner was
Basil Nevinson, variation 12.)
3. (R.B.T.) Richard Baxter Townshend, who
regularly rode through the streets of Oxford
on his bicycle with the bell constantly ringing,
is here remembered for his “presentation of an
old man in some amateur theatricals—the low
voice flying off occasionally in ‘soprano’ timbre.”
(Dorabella also recognized the bicycle bell in the
pizzicato strings.)
4. (W.M.B.) William Meath Baker was “a
country squire, gentleman, and scholar. In
the days of horses and carriages, it was more
8
Isabel Fitton, Variation 6
Arthur Troyte Griffith,
Variation 7
Winifred Norbury,
Variation 8
Alfred Jaeger, Variation 9
difficult than in these days of petrol to arrange
the carriages for the day to suit a large number of
guests. This variation was written after the host
had, with a slip of paper in his hand, forcibly read
out the arrangements for the day and hurriedly
left the music room with an inadvertent bang of
the door.”
5. (R.P.A.) Richard Penrose Arnold was a
son of Matthew Arnold and “a great lover of
music which he played (on the pianoforte) in
a self-taught manner, evading difficulties but
suggesting in a mysterious way the real feeling.”
In the middle section we learn that “his serious
conversation was continually broken up by whimsical and witty remarks.”
6. (Ysobel) Isabel Fitton was an amateur
violist. “The opening bar, a phrase made use
of throughout the variation, is an ‘exercise’ for
crossing strings—a difficulty for beginners;
on this is built a pensive, and for a moment,
romantic movement.”
7. (Troyte) Arthur Troyte Griffith, an architect, was one of Elgar’s closest friends. “The
uncouth rhythm of the drums and lower strings
was really suggested by some maladroit essays
to play the pianoforte; later the strong rhythm
suggests the attempts of the instructor (E.E.)
to make something like order out of chaos, and
the final despairing ‘slam’ records that the effort
proved to be in vain.”
8. (W.N.) Winifred Norbury lived at
Sherridge, a country house, with her sister
Florence. The music was “really suggested by an
eighteenth-century house. The gracious personalities of the ladies are sedately shown”—especially
Winifred’s characteristic laugh.
9. (Nimrod) Nimrod is the “mighty hunter”
named in Genesis 10; Alfred Jaeger (“Jaeger”
is German for “hunter”) was Elgar’s greatest
and dearest friend. That is apparent from this
extraordinary music, which is about the strength
of ties and the depth of human feelings. These
forty-three bars of music have come to mean
a great deal to many people; they are, for that
reason, often played in memoriam, when
common words fail and virtually all other music
falls short. The variation records “a long summer
evening talk, when my friend discoursed eloquently on the slow movements of Beethoven.”
The music hints at the slow movement of the
Pathétique Sonata, though it reaches the more
rarefied heights of Beethoven’s last works.
Dorabella remembered that Jaeger also spoke
Dora Penny, Variation 10
Dr. George R. Sinclair and
his dog Dan, Variation 11
Basil G. Nevinson,
Variation 12
Lady Mary Lygon,
Variation 13
of the hardships Beethoven endured, and he
urged Elgar not to give up. Elgar later wrote to
him: “I have omitted your outside manner and
TRACKING DOWN THE ENIGMA
In 1953, the Saturday Review sponsored a contest for the best solution
to the identity of Elgar’s “enigma.”
The top prizes (the composer’s
daughter Carice Elgar Blake was
one of the judges) were awarded to
the Agnus Dei from Bach’s B minor
mass, the trio “Una bella serenata”
from Mozart’s Così fan tutte, the
slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s
Pathétique Symphony, and “God Save
the Queen.” None, however, seemed
particularly convincing, and the
search continued. In 1976, Theodore
Van Houten proposed “Rule,
Britannia!” which includes a phrase
that’s nearly identical to the opening
of the Enigma and should have been
obvious to Dora Penny, “of all people,”
as Elgar remarked, because the British
penny was engraved with the figure
of Britannia. In 1984, Derek Hudson
showed even more persuasively how a
phrase of “Auld Lang Syne” fits Elgar’s
theme and many of the variations.
In 1991, Joseph Cooper, a British
pianist, proposed a new solution.
He claimed he had stumbled upon
the answer thirty years earlier at
a performance of Mozart’s Prague
Symphony in Royal Festival Hall in
London, but chose to keep it a secret.
As he followed a score during that
long-ago concert, Mr. Cooper noticed,
midway through the slow movement,
echoes of the opening of Elgar’s
Enigma Variations. The two passages
aren’t identical rhythmically—
moreover, Mozart is in G major, Elgar
in G minor—but they are strikingly
similar. There are other connections:
two weeks before Elgar invented his
theme at the piano, he had heard the
Prague Symphony. Mozart’s symphony
also was the closing work on the
concert of June 19, 1899, when the
Enigma Variations were given their first
performance. Although Elgar authority
Jerrold Northrop Moore hailed
Cooper’s solution, other scholars,
Elgar lovers, and puzzle fanatics
remain unconvinced.
—P.H.
9
have only seen the good lovable honest SOUL in
the middle of you. The music’s not good enough:
nevertheless it was an attempt of your E.E.”
Jaeger died young, in 1909. Twenty years later
Elgar wrote: “His place has been occupied but
never filled.”
10. (Dorabella) Dora Penny, later Mrs.
Richard Powell, and to the Elgars, always
Dorabella, from Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Her
variation, titled Intermezzo, is shaded throughout by “a dancelike lightness,” and delicately
suggests the stammer with which she spoke in
her youth.
11. (G.R.S.) Dr. George R. Sinclair was the
organist of Herford Cathedral, though it’s his
beloved bulldog Dan who carries the music,
first falling down a steep bank into the River
Wye, then paddling up stream to a safe landing.
Anticipating the skeptics, Elgar writes “Dan”
in bar 5 of the manuscript, where Dr. Sinclair’s
dog barks reassuringly (low strings and winds,
fortissimo).
12. (B.G.N.) Basil G. Nevinson was a fine
cellist who regularly joined Elgar and Hew
David Steuart-Powell (variation 2) in chamber
music. The soaring cello melody is “a tribute to
a very dear friend whose scientific and artistic
attainments, and the whole-hearted way they
were put at the disposal of his friends, particularly endeared him to the writer.”
13. (***) The only enigma among the portraits:
just asterisks in place of initials, and “Romanza”
at the top of the page. The clarinet quoting from
Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage
midway through points to Lady Mary Lygon,
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who supposedly was crossing the sea to Australia
as Elgar wrote this music (she wasn’t). “The
drums suggest the distant throb of a liner,” Elgar
writes. Although Elgar eventually confirmed
the attribution, it has never entirely satisfied a
suspicious public. Dorabella claimed that in the
composer’s mind, the asterisks stood for “My
sweet Mary.”
14. (E.D.U.) Edu was Alice’s nickname for
her husband. This is his self-portrait, written “at
a time when friends were dubious and generally discouraging as to the composer’s musical
future.” Alice and Jaeger, two who never lost
their faith in him, make brief appearances. The
music is forceful, even bold. It’s delivered with
an unusual strength known best to late bloomers,
the defiance of an outsider intent on finding an
audience, and the confidence of a man who has
always wished to be more than another variation
on a theme.
A parting word about the title. The work
wasn’t at first called Enigma. Elgar used the word
for the first time in a letter to Jaeger written at
the end of May 1899, three months after the
score was finished. Enigma is written on the title
page of the autograph manuscript, but it’s written
in pencil and not by Elgar. When the Chicago
Symphony introduced this music to the United
States in 1902, the program page listed it only
as “Variations, op. 36.” Phillip Huscher has been the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra program annotator since 1987.
Composers in Chicago
On April 5 and 6, 1907, second music director Frederick Stock programmed a
concert of “compositions by living writers,” including music from five countries.
The first half opened with Vincent d’Indy’s Wallenstein’s Camp (France), Alexander
Glazunov’s Spring (Russia), Frederick Converse’s The Mystic Trumpeter (United
States), and the love scene from Richard Strauss’s opera Feuersnot (Germany).
The second half of the concert was dedicated to England, with Sir Edward Elgar
on the podium leading his overture In the South (Alassio),
Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma), and the first
Pomp and Circumstance March.
“The patrons of the Thomas Orchestra paid willing and
hearty tribute to Sir Edward Elgar yesterday afternoon in
Orchestra Hall,” wrote William Lines Hubbard in the Chicago
Daily Tribune.
The men of the Orchestra gave him their closest
attention and heartiest sympathy yesterday, and the
result was a performance of the three compositions
which was technically and tonally of highest worth.
Sir Edward himself seemed genuinely pleased and
his assertion after the concert that the “work of the
Orchestra surpassed all his fondest expectations”
evidently was the expression of his true feeling.
Advance program book notice of Sir Edward Elgar’s
April 1907 guest conducting appearance with the
Orchestra (above); and (below) the opening from his
Enigma Variations along with his entry in Rose Fay
Thomas’s guest book: “To Mrs. Theodore Thomas
with greatest esteem” (Theodore Thomas Papers,
The Newberry Library, Chicago)
Chicago audiences were well versed in Elgar’s catalog, as by
then the Orchestra had given the U.S. premieres of several
of his works: the Cockaigne Overture, Enigma Variations, the
first two Pomp and Circumstance marches, Incidental Music
and Funeral March from Grania and Diarmid, and In the
South under Theodore Thomas; the Froissart Overture and
Violin Concerto (with Albert Spalding) under Stock; and The
Dream of Gerontius under Harrison M. Wild, then director of
the Apollo Musical Club.
In 1911, England’s Sheffield Choir
embarked on a six-month world tour,
and Elgar joined them for several
performances in the United States
and Canada. Their tour included three
concerts in Chicago collaborating
with the Orchestra, the second of
which featured Elgar on the podium
leading The Dream of Gerontius.
Frank Villella is the director of
the Rosenthal Archives. For more
information regarding the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s
anniversary season, please visit
cso.org/125moments.
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