PROGRAM

Wednesday, May 1, 2013, at 6:30 (Afterwork Masterworks, performed with no intermission)

Pablo Heras-Casado ConductorMarina Heredia Flamenco Singer

Debussy La boîte à joujouxFalla El amor brujo

Thursday, May 2, 2013, at 8:00Friday, May 3, 2013, at 8:00Saturday, May 4, 2013, at 8:00

Pablo Heras-Casado ConductorMarina Heredia Flamenco Singer

RavelLe tombeau de CouperinPréludeForlaneMenuetRigaudon

DebussyLa boîte à joujouxPréludeLe magasin de jouetsLe champ de batailleLa bergerie à vendreAprès fortune faiteÉpilogueFirst Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

INTERMISSION

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SECOND SEASON

Chicago Symphony OrchestraRiccardo Muti Music DirectorPierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor EmeritusYo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

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RavelPavane pour une infante défunte

FallaEl amor brujoIntroduction and SceneIn the Gypsies’ Grotto: NightSong of Sorrowful LoveThe ApparitionDance of TerrorThe Magic Circle: The Fisherman’s TaleMidnight: The SorcerersRitual Fire Dance: To Drive Away Evil SpiritsSceneSong of the Will-o’-the-WispPantomimeDance of the Game of LoveFinale: The Bells of Dawn

MARINA HEREDIA

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBBM Newsradio 780 and 105.9 FM for its generous support as media sponsor of the Afterwork Masterworks 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

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Le tombeau de Couperin, Suite for Orchestra

Maurice RavelBorn March 7, 1875, Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées, France.Died December 28, 1937, Paris, France.

Considered too small and delicate for military service, Maurice

Ravel realized that he could serve his country by writing music. But when his brother Edouard enlisted at the start of World War I, Ravel didn’t want to sit on the sidelines. At the age of thirty-nine, he man-aged to get accepted as a nurse’s aide, leaving behind a number of unfinished scores and his seventy-four-year-old mother. Music was still on his mind, however. In October 1914, his first month on the job, he wrote to his former pupil, Roland-Manuel, about two new piano pieces he was planning, including a French suite—“No, it isn’t what you think: la Marseillaise

will not be in it, but it will have a forlane and a gigue; no tango, however.” �at was the beginning of Le tombeau de Couperin.

In March 1915, Ravel became a truck driver for the 13th Artillery Regiment. (He named the truck Adélaïde and signed his letters Chauffeur Ravel.) It was a dan-gerous, exhausting, and stressful assignment, and his health suffered. At least for a while, music took a back seat to the more pressing concerns of life and death. Early in 1917, his mother died; it was a ter-rible blow, which contributed even further to his physical and mental decline, and he was discharged from the army a few months later. While

COMPOSED1914–1917, for piano, in six movements

1919, orchestration of four movements

FIRST PERFORMANCEorchestral suite: February 28, 1920, Paris

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCEJanuary 20, 1928, Orchestra Hall. The composer conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCEJanuary 12, 2010, Orchestra Hall. Pierre Boulez conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, harp, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME16 minutes

CSO RECORDINGS1980. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London

A 1983 performance under Rafael Kubelík is included on From the Archives, vol. 16.

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recuperating at his godmother’s country house, Ravel returned to writing music, beginning with the French suite for piano.

Ravel had been tempered by his first-hand experience of war.

A frothy symphonic poem, Vien, which he abandoned during the war, now became the bitter La valse. And the benign piano suite he had long envisioned, perhaps as a genial bit of nationalism, now car-ried the horrible weight of tragedy: each movement was dedicated to a friend who had died at the front. Back in familiar surroundings, but still haunted by memories of the war, Ravel completed the suite he now called Le tombeau de Couperin. What had begun as a homage to a golden era of French music—the age of François Couperin and the eighteenth century in general—now paid gentle tribute to the victims of World War I. Ravel designed his own title page for the score, which included a draped funerary urn. �e piano suite contained six movements; as the composer promised, there was no hint of the Marseillaise. (Nor was there any tango, perhaps because that popular dance was then thought too scandalous for the concert hall.)

Before the war, Ravel’s own orchestrations of his piano pieces Mother Goose and the Valses nobles et sentimentales were wildly popular. In 1919, after the first performance of Le tombeau de Couperin, he began to orchestrate four of the six move-ments. As Roland-Manuel wrote, “�is metamorphosis of piano pieces into symphonic works was a

game for Ravel, a game played to perfection, so that the transcription outdid the charm of the original.” Le tombeau de Couperin is argu-ably Ravel’s greatest success in the sport. �e translation from piano to full orchestra is handled with an almost impossible finesse; Ravel carefully weighed every choice of instrument, showing impeccable concern for color, in all its subtle modulations, as well as for clarity and balance. �e orchestration is a work of both enormous care and extreme economy.

Le tombeau de Couperin is the most gentle of war memorials—

it’s about memory, not combat. It has neither the morbid sadness of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen nor the anger of Dmitri Shostakovich’s grand wartime symphonies. It evokes those it hon-ors, not the tragic circumstances of their deaths. Ravel borrows the forms of the baroque dance suite, beginning with a prelude that sets the presiding graceful tone. (�e piano version includes a fugue and a toccata that Ravel chose not to orchestrate.) �e second movement is a forlane, a Northern Italian dance; before composing a note of his own, Ravel transcribed a forlane by Couperin as a way of getting to know the style. Ravel’s Menuet (like the Prélude) gives the oboe a prominent role. �e rigaudon that concludes Ravel’s suite is an old dance from Provence that was sometimes used by Rameau and Bach, and much later by Grieg in his Holberg Suite, though seldom with such brilliance and panache.

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La boîte à joujoux (The Toy Box)

Claude-Emma Debussy, the composer’s only child, was

born on Monday, October 30, 1905. Although they were not yet married, the composer, a first-time father at the age of forty-three, and Emma Bardac, the woman for whom he had left his wife, gave their daughter both of their first names on her birth certificate, as if to certify their own relationship. Nevertheless, Claude-Emma would always be known by her pet name, Chouchou. She grew up to become a charming and attractive young girl, although Stravinsky, on the occasion of his often celebrated lunch with Debussy in 1912, later recalled looking at Chouchou and noticing, with his particular gift for the cutting remark, “that her teeth were exactly like her father’s, i.e. like tusks.”

�rough Chouchou, Debussy was able to revisit the world of child-hood, in life and in music. “To the

end,” the composer Alfredo Casella remarked, “he remained what the French call a grand enfant.” Even into his fifties, Debussy was a child at heart; Casella remembers how the great composer, even more than Chouchou, delighted in playing with the toys Emma brought home for their daughter. “�e toy is the child’s earliest initiation into art,” Charles Baudelaire wrote, and it certainly was for both Claude and Claude-Emma. �e first music Debussy wrote for Chouchou was the lighthearted Children’s Corner suite for piano that celebrates her dolls, her toy elephant Jimbo, and a kind of fantasy world which the composer reentered with ease. Chouchou had become a kind of muse—an inspiration, a partner, and a co-conspirator in this exploration of innocence. “One of his greatest pleasures,” his friend Pasteur Vallery-Radot later wrote, “was to hear his daughter

Claude DebussyBorn August 22, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France.Died March 25, 1918, Paris, France.

COMPOSED1913; orchestration completed by André Caplet, 1919

FIRST PERFORMANCEDecember 10, 1919, Paris

These are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first performances

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME35 minutes

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Chouchou speak, sing, or play the piano, or to see her dance to one of the rhythms he invented for her.”

In 1913, soon after the first perfor-mance of his last great orchestral

score, Jeux (a masterpiece that was completely overshadowed by the premiere of Stravinsky’s �e Rite of Spring in Paris two weeks later), Debussy switched gears and began writing music for a children’s ballet. It was based on La boîte à joujoux (�e toy box) by André Hallé, whose watercolor illustrations evi-dently brought to mind Debussy’s own memories of childhood. �e sight of Chouchou dancing to his music was probably both the generating image for Debussy and a frequent inspiration as well as he played through new pages of the ballet at the piano. Debussy even studied Chouchou’s doll collec-tion, saying that “the soul of a doll is more mysterious than even Maeterlinck [his Pelléas et Mélisande librettist] supposes; it does not readily put up with the claptrap that so many human souls tolerate.”

�e piano score was completed in October: four tableaux framed by a prelude and epilogue. In February, Debussy told a reporter that there was talk of putting La boîte on at the Opéra-Comique. He began to orchestrate the score that spring, but when the war delayed any further plans for staging the ballet, he stopped at measure 93 and put the music aside. Although he wrote to his publisher in November 1917 that La boîte was almost finished, in fact, he had done no further work. After his death in 1918, the

orchestral score was completed by Debussy’s close friend, the com-poser and conductor André Caplet, who had already orchestrated parts of Debussy’s �e Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian with the composer’s bless-ing (and conducted the premiere in 1911).

In Hellé’s story, a little girl receives a toy box as a present. When she

takes it home, the toys come to life and begin a series of adventures. �e plot, in Debussy’s own words, revolves around a love triangle:

A cardboard soldier falls in love with a doll; he seeks to prove this to her, but she betrays him with Polichinelle. �e soldier learns of her affair and terrible things begin to happen: a battle between wooden soldiers and pol-ichinelles. In brief, the lover of the beautiful doll is gravely wounded during the battle. �e doll nurses him and . . . they all live happily ever.

�e music, particularly com-pared to the intricate complexities of rhythm, texture, and themes in Jeux, is simplicity itself. For this reason, it has sometimes been misunderstood as a sudden falling off of inspiration, just as Mozart’s Magic Flute was once dismissed as mere child’s play. But, as with Mozart’s late-in-life work, it in fact reduces Debussy’s style and sensibilities to their very essence. Not a note is wasted. Like a clever child himself, Debussy delights in imitating, parodying,

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and even quoting other music, including Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition and the saucy Golliwog’s Cakewalk from his (and Chouchou’s) own Children’s Corner. “La boîte à joujoux is a pantomime to the kind of music that I have written in Christmas and New Year albums for children—a work to amuse children, nothing more,” he said while he was beginning the orchestration. Even then, without a premiere planned, he was wor-ried that the ballet would be nearly impossible to stage. “How do you put across in the theater the natural simplicity of it,” he wondered. “�e characters have to retain the angular movements and burlesque appearance of the cardboard origi-nals, without which the play would lose all its significance.”

As it turned out, La boîte à joujoux was never produced dur-ing Debussy’s life. It was finally brought to the stage, and danced, not by children, as Debussy envisioned, but by adults, in 1919. It remains a distinct rarity, even in the concert hall, where, like many of the finest ballet scores, it casts its own purely musical spell and loses none of its brilliance when divorced from the highly detailed stage directions of the original.

A prelude sets the scene in a toy store. In the first tableau, the dolls come to life, switch on a record player, and begin a series of fantasy dances. �e second scene, set on the battlefield, introduces the central romantic conflict, and the third, in a sheepfold, reunites the wounded soldier and the doll. �e last tableau takes place “twenty years later.” It

is a picture of suburban bliss. �e adversarial Polichinelle has become a village constable. �e soldier, now with a white beard, and his doll, slightly plump after years of easy living, are proud parents. �eir children dance a polka. �e ending brings us back to the beginning

music, and to the realization that, as Hellé said, toy boxes are “really just like towns in which toys live like people—or maybe towns are just toy boxes in which people live like toys.”

A postscript. Claude-Emma died of diphtheria at the age

of thirteen in 1919, just one year after her father. She was buried in Division 14 of the Passy cemetery in Paris, next to the grave of the composer. She is the subject of a French film released in 1995: Chouchou: Music of Love.

Claude Debussy and Chouchou at Moulleau near Arcachon, 1916

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Pavane pour une infante défunte

Maurice Ravel was born in the French Pyrenees, only a few

miles from the Spanish border, a

geographical boundary he often crossed in his music. Even though his family moved to Paris while he was still a baby, Ravel came by his fascination with Spain naturally, for his mother was Basque and

grew up in Madrid. (His Swiss father inspired in his son a love for things precise and mechanical

that carried over into his impeccable music, provoking Stravinsky to dismiss him as a “Swiss watchmaker.”)

One of Ravel’s earliest pieces—written just after he left the Paris Conservatory in 1895—was a habanera for two pianos, the first indica-tion that he would join that group of French composers, which includes Bizet, Lalo, and Chabrier, who have writ-

ten some of our best Spanish music. �e habanera was Ravel’s first music to be performed publicly, in March 1898, and, despite the two pianists’ inability to stay together, it made a strong impression on

Maurice Ravel

COMPOSED1899, for piano

1910, orchestration

FIRST PERFORMANCEFebruary 27, 1911; Manchester, England

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCEJanuary 11, 1938, Orchestra Hall (In memory of the composer). Hans Lange conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCEMarch 29, 2008, Orchestra Hall. Charles Dutoit conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes, oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, harp, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME6 minutes

CSO RECORDINGS1957. Fritz Reiner conduct-ing. RCA

1967. Jean Martinon conducting. RCA

1991. Daniel Barenboim conducting. Erato

Lake Oô in the French Pyrenees, between 1890 and 1905

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Claude Debussy, who was in the audience. (He hadn’t yet met the composer whose name would one day be linked with his own.) Debussy asked to borrow the score, and his La soirée dans Grenade (Night in Grenada), written five years later, suggests that he studied it carefully. (�e suspicious similar-ity of the two pieces contributed to the eventual falling-out between the composers.)

Like the Habanera, the Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a dead princess) was conceived as piano music and benefited greatly from the translation to a full orchestral score. �e piano piece

was an instant success. Ravel later realized that music of such apparent ease—a simple melody over broken chords—is doomed to a life at the hands of amateur pianists, and so, eleven years later, he rescued the Pavane and rescored it for the modern virtuoso orchestra. A pavane is a slow processional dance from Padua (Pava is a dialect name for Padua). According to an old Spanish tradition, however, it was performed in church as a stylish gesture of farewell to the dead. As to the identity of the dead princess, Ravel finally admitted he picked the title because he liked the sound of the words.

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El amor brujo (Love, the Magician)

Before Manuel de Falla, the most widely known Spanish music

was written by French and Russian composers. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when a fascination with Spain reached fever pitch, many musicians were attracted to the exoticism, the romance, and the local color of the Iberian peninsula. By the time Falla began to compose, in the first years of the twentieth century, works like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnole and Bizet’s Carmen defined the Spanish sensibility to the man on the street more than any other works of art—even though Bizet, for one, had never set foot in Spain.

When Manuel de Falla moved from his native Spain to Paris in

1907 to expand his musical hori-zons and to experience the avant-garde first-hand, he encountered a city intoxicated with music evoking his homeland. Debussy was at work on the largest “Spanish” work of his career, the great orchestral Ibéria. And Ravel was beginning both his own orchestral showpiece, the Rapsodie espagnole, and his one-act opera L’heure espagnole. Ravel came by his Spanish fascination naturally (his mother was Basque), and it was no doubt heightened by his early close friendship with the remarkable Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes, to whom Falla would eventually dedicate his Nights in the Gardens of Spain. (Ravel remained under the spell of Spain

Manuel de FallaBorn November 23, 1876, Cádiz, Spain.Died November 14, 1946, Alta Gracia, Argentina.

COMPOSEDNovember 1914–April 1915; revised as ballet with song in 1916

FIRST PERFORMANCEApril 2, 1915; Madrid, Spain

March 20, 1916; Madrid, Spain (revised version)

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESJuly 27, 1941, Ravinia Festival (selections). Carlos Chavez conducting

March 28, 1944, Orchestra Hall (selections). Hans Lange conducting

October 21, 1965, Orchestra Hall (complete). Jean Maderia, soloist; Jean Martinon conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCEMay 27, 1997, Medinah Temple (complete). Jennifer Larmore, soloist; Daniel Barenboim conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONfemale vocal soloist, two flutes and piccolo, oboe, two clarinets, bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, glockenspiel, piano, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME24 minutes

CSO RECORDINGS1963. Leontyne Price, solo-ist; Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA

A 1997 performance with Jennifer Larmore as soloist and Daniel Barenboim conducting is included on From the Archives, vol. 20.

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to his dying day—Boléro and the Don Quixote songs are among his last compositions.)

Falla’s search for a natural Spanish expression began just as composers from other countries had virtually exhausted their interest in Spain’s exotic atmosphere. During his years in Paris, Falla arrived at a new understanding of how to compose music that evoked the spirit of a place but, at the same time, conveyed a deeper message in a universal language. “Truth with-out authenticity” became Falla’s rallying cry, and ultimately that is what sets his music apart, not only from that of his Spanish predeces-sors and the many contemporary faux-Spanish composers, but also from most of the other nationalistic work popular at the time.

While Falla was doing “field” work, by harmonizing Seven

Popular Spanish Songs, he began to compose El amor brujo, for which he wrote original melodies that sounded like folk tunes. �e idea for the work came from Pastora Imperio, one of the great Andalusian gypsy dancers—the empress of all the Spanish dances, as she was later called. She origi-nally contacted the poet and chore-ographer Gregorio Martínez Sierra requesting a song and dance stage work to be performed by members of her family. Imperio and her mother, the well-known flamenco artist Rosario “la Mejorana,” sang songs and told stories to Martínez and Falla, who took careful notes and then created his own freely invented music. For three months

during the winter of 1914–15, Falla worked round the clock, in a room filled with cigarette smoke and fumes from the gas stove. He was never happier, he later said.

El amor brujo was poorly received when it was first performed by Pastora Imperio’s family in Madrid in 1915. Significantly, it was accused of lacking Spanish character, although Falla was delighted—and vindicated—by

the performers’ insistence that they were enthralled by the music and felt it to be truly their own. One night, Falla took the pianist Arthur Rubinstein to a performance, and Rubinstein was so overwhelmed by Pastora Imperio’s rendition of the Ritual Fire Dance in particular that he asked for the score so that he could arrange it for piano. Falla modestly said he doubted that the music would make much effect, but when Rubinstein played the dance as an encore at his next concert,

Andalusian gypsy dancer Pastora Imperio

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the audience went wild. (“I had to repeat it three times,” the pia-nist recalled.)

�e following year, Falla expanded the orchestration of El amor brujo—the original version called for just eight instruments—and cut out much of the vocal music, leaving only four songs. �e new version, a kind of orchestral suite with singing, proved ideal for the concert hall, where it has remained one of Falla’s most popu-lar scores, and where the Ritual Fire Dance has become one of the great “Spanish” numbers. María Martínez Sierra, the poet’s widow, summarized the action:

A love-stricken gypsy woman, whose feelings are not returned by the object of her attentions, resorts to magic arts—sorcery, witchcraft, and such—to soften the unresponsive man’s heart . . . and she succeeds. After a night of spells, con-jurations, mysterious charms, and more or less ritual dances, Aurora wakes at dawn along with Love, who had been sleeping soundly, and bells ring out the morning’s victory.

Phillip Huscher is the program annota-tor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

EL AMOR BRUJO

CANCIÓN DEL AMOR DOLIDO¡Ay! Yo no sé qué sientoNi sé qué me pasaCuando este mardito gitano me farta.Candela que ardesMás arde el infiernoQue toita mi sangre abrasá de celos.

¡Ay! Cuando el río suena¿Qué querrá decir?¡Ay! Por querer a otraSe orvía de mí ¡Ay!

Cuando el fuego abrasaCuando el río suenaY el agua no mata al fuegoA mí el penar me condenaA mí el querer me envenenaA mí las penas me matan ¡Ay!

LOVE, THE MAGICIAN

SONG OF SORROWFUL LOVEAy! I don’t know what I feelI don’t know what becomes of mewhen I miss this damn gypsy.O burning candle,hell burns with more ragethan all my blood burning

with jealousy.

Ay! When the river rumbleswhat does it mean?Ay! For the love of another womanhe forgets me. Ay!

When fire burnswhen the river rumblesand water does not kill fireI am condemned by griefI am poisoned by loveI am killed by sorrow. Ay!

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CANCIÓN DEL FUEGO FATUOLo mismo que er fuego fatuoLo mismito es er queréLo mismo que er fuego fatuoLo mismito es er queréLe juyes y te persigueLe yamas y echa a corré.Lo mismo que er fuego fatuoLo mismito es er queré.

¡Malhaya los negros ojosQue la alcanzaron a ver!¡Malhaya los negros ojosQue le alcanzaron a ver!¡Malhaya er corazón tristeQue en su llama quiso arder!

Lo mismo que er fuego fatuoSe desvanece er queré.

DANZA DEL JUEGO DE AMORTú eres aquel mal gitanoQue una gitana quería;El queré que ella te dabaTú no te lo merecías.¡Quién lo habría de decíQue con otra la vendías!

Soy la voz de tu destinoSoy er fuego en que te abrasasSoy er viento en que suspirasSoy la mar en que naufragasSoy la mar en que naufragas.

LAS CAMPANAS DEL AMANECERYa está despuntando el día¡Cantad, campanas, cantad,que vuelve la gloria mía!

SONG OF THE WILL-O’-THE-WISPJust like the will-o’-the-wisp,so is love.Just like the will-o’-the-wisp,so is love.You run away and it chases you;you beckon and it flees.Just like the will-o’-the-wisp,so is love.

Curse be on those black eyesthat set their sight on it!Curse be on those black eyesthat set their sight on it!Curse be on the suffering heartthat wished to burn in its flame!

Just like the will-o’-the-wisp,love disappears.

DANCE OF THE GAME OF LOVEYou are that evil gypsythat was loved by a gypsy girl.�e love that she gave youyou didn’t deserve.Who was to tellthat with another you betrayed her!

I am the voice of your fateI am the fire in which you burnI am the wind in which you sighI am the sea of your shipwreckI am the sea of your shipwreck.

THE BELLS OF DAWNMorning is breakingsing, O bells, sing.My glory is returned to me! ©

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