PROGRAM

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON

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

Thursday, March 19, 2015, at 8:00Friday, March 20, 2015, at 8:00Saturday, March 21, 2015, at 8:00

Charles Dutoit ConductorYo-Yo Ma CelloRobert Chen Violin

RavelValses nobles et sentimentalesModéréAssez lentModéréAssez animéePresque lentAssez vifMoins vifEpilogue: Lent

DebussySymphonic Fragments from The Martyrdom of Saint SebastianThe Court of LiliesEcstatic Dance and Finale to Act 1The PassionThe Good Shepherd

INTERMISSION

Saint-SaënsLa muse et le poète, Op. 132

ROBERT CHENYO-YO MA

First Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert performances

LaloCello Concerto in D MinorPrelude: Lento—Allegro maestosoIntermezzo: Andantino con moto—Allegro prestoAndante—Allegro vivace

YO-YO MA

Thursday’s performance is sponsored by Robert J. Buford.

This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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COMMENTS by Phillip HuscherCOMMENTS by Phillip Huscher Daniel Jaffé

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

Valses nobles et sentimentales

Franz Schubert was the first important composer to write the word “waltz” on a score. By then—the early 1820s—waltzing had lived down its reputation as a scandalous demonstration of excessive speed and intimate physical contact on the

dance floor. Schubert knew the waltz (from the German walzen, to turn about) as a charming social dance, more upbeat than the traditional ländler—although he knew it only from the safety of his piano stool, where he was spared romantic encounter, the hazards of severe nearsightedness (he kept his spectacles on even in bed), and the embarrassment of standing less than five feet tall in his dress shoes. From his seat at the piano, Schubert observed the life that eluded him. (He improvised waltzes throughout the wedding festivities of his dear friend Leopold Kupelweiser, letting no one else near the piano; by a fortuitous stroke of fate, one of the tunes remembered by the bride and passed down through her family was sung to Richard Strauss, who arranged it for piano in 1943.) In the last years of his pitifully brief life, Schubert published many of his waltzes, including the thirty-four Valses sentimentales and twelve Valses nobles that Maurice Ravel would play some seventy-five years later.

Ravel had little in common with Schubert, aside from the slight stature that disqualified both of them from military service. Ravel had the social graces and the wardrobe to shine at parties, as well as the money to enjoy the fine life and to collect antiques, mechanical toys, and endless bric-a-brac. This same sensibility encouraged a passion for Viennese waltzes at an early age. In 1911, after Ravel discovered Schubert’s piano waltzes, he decided to write his own set of noble and sentimental waltzes, taking his cue from the title and classic simplicity of his predecessor’s pieces. He dedicated the score to the “delicious and ageless pleasure of a useless occupation.”

The eight Valses nobles et sentimentales for piano were first performed in May 1911, at a “Concert sans noms d’auteurs,” a kind of concert quiz show not unlike Name That Tune, where audience mem-bers were asked to guess the composer of each piece on the program. Ravel’s Valses were variously attributed to Kodály, Satie, Chopin, and Gounod, among others, although apparently no one sug-gested Schubert. However, according to Ravel, “a minute majority” correctly identified his music.

The following year, Ravel agreed to orchestrate the waltzes as a ballet score for which he supplied the title—Adelaide—and the scenario—a series of fleeting romantic encounters during a party in Adelaide’s Paris salon. Adelaide is no longer staged, but Ravel’s music, newly attired in shim-mering orchestral colors, quickly found a home in concert halls.

—Phillip Huscher

COMPOSED1911 for piano; orchestrated in 1912

FIRST PERFORMANCEMay 9, 1911, piano versionFebruary 15, 1915, orchestral version

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESNovember 12 & 13, 1920, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting

July 24, 1938, Ravinia Festival. Eugene Goossens conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJuly 18, 1959, Ravinia Festival. Carlos Chávez conducting

January 13, 14, 15 & 16, 2011, Orchestra Hall. Juanjo Mena conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three

trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, side drum, cymbals, triangle, tambourine, glockenspiel, celesta, two harps, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME16 minutes

CSO RECORDINGS1957. Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA

1963. Charles Munch conducting. VAI (video)

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COMPOSED1911, as incidental music for Gabriele d’Annunzio’s miracle play

FIRST PERFORMANCEMay 22, 1911, Théâtre du Châtelet (complete)

January 4, 1914, Paris. Edgard Varèse conducting (four symphonic fragments arranged by André Caplet)

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESMarch 28 & 29, 1913, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting (Preludes to acts 1 and 2)

August 6, 1950, Ravinia Festival. Pierre Monteux conducting

March 29, 30 & 31, 1990, Orchestra Hall. Erich Leinsdorf conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESNovember 26 & 27, 2010, Orchestra Hall. Pierre Boulez conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONfour flutes and two piccolos, two oboes and english horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, six horns, four

trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, celesta, three harps, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME24 minutes

CSO RECORDING1995. Pierre Boulez conducting. CSO (From the Archives, vol. 19: A Tribute to Pierre Boulez)

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

Symphonic Fragments from The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian

No one was more sur-prised by the failure of The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian than Gabriel Astruc, its producer at the Théâtre du Châtelet: “I have brought together the greatest musician, the greatest poet, the greatest designer, the greatest

choreographer—and it’s bad!” The poet was Gabriele d’Annunzio, the designer Léon Bakst, the choreographer Michel Fokine, and the composer Claude Debussy. A man of no apparent talent himself, Astruc had hoped to take credit for combining so much genius on one stage, even though the idea was not his to begin with.

For many years, d’Annunzio had dreamed of writing a work based on the story of Saint Sebastian, who was martyred by Emperor Diocletian’s archers. When d’Annunzio saw Ida Rubinstein, the tall Russian ballerina of “mys-teriously androgynous beauty,” in Sheherazade at the Paris Opéra in 1910, he is said to have exclaimed: “Here are the legs of Saint Sebastian for which I have been searching for years!” D’Annunzio, who had already created a sensa-tion with his flamboyant poetry and the novel The Flame of Life, which depicted his mistress, the celebrated actress Eleonora Duse, now

envisioned a grand miracle play that combined drama, dance, staging, and music.

Once Rubinstein agreed to dance the role of Saint Sebastian, d’Annunzio began to pick his other collaborators. Debussy was not even his first choice—at Rubinstein’s suggestion, he initially approached Jean Roger-Ducasse, who declined. (Florent Schmitt also was under con-sideration.) D’Annunzio finally wrote to Debussy on November 25, 1910, and the composer promptly replied: “The mere thought of working with you gives me a sort of anticipatory fever.” But he told his wife that the proposal meant nothing to him. Still, perhaps mainly because he needed the money, Debussy joined d’Annunzio’s dream team.

By the end of January 1911, Debussy had not written a note of music (he told d’Annunzio that he had “reached the point where all music seems to me useless by comparison with the constantly renewed splendors of your imagination”). By mid-February, panic had set in. Realizing that he could not comfortably finish composing nearly an hour of music in time for the May premiere—just two months to pull off “a score which would normally have taken me a year,” as he put it—he enlisted André Caplet, who had already been engaged to conduct the work, to help with the orchestration. (For many years Caplet also was credited with composing a long stretch of the

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finale, although the manuscript is carefully written in Debussy’s own hand.)

Work progressed quickly, but not smoothly. Debussy was irritated by Rubinstein’s demands and furious that he had to work around Fokine’s

other com-mitments. Two weeks before the premiere, the archbishop of Paris threatened to excom-municate any Catholic who attended the performances; the spectacle, he said, would offend the Christian conscience. (He was particularly disturbed that Saint Sebastian was to be danced by a woman, and a Jew at that.) In response to

the archbishop’s ban, Debussy said, “I have writ-ten the music as though it were commissioned for a church.” Trouble continued to overshadow the production. On the morning of the dress rehearsal, which had been marketed as a major society event, the French minister of war was killed in an airplane crash. (The rehearsal went on, but the socialites were sent home.)

Opening night did not go well either. The performance lasted just over five hours, test-ing the patience of everyone save perhaps the ever-hopeful Astruc. The music was sloppily played, partly because Bakst had arranged the chorus members onstage by the color of their costumes rather than by voice part. (Assistant conductors, disguised in hooded outfits, roamed the stage, quietly giving cues and attempting to restore order.) Few audience members paid serious attention to Debussy’s music—as carefully colored as ever, but now spare and as tough as steel. The critics were baffled by the event, although both Marcel Proust and the young Jean Cocteau, who were present, were deeply moved. The failure of Saint Sebastian secretly wounded Debussy, who later wrote to his publisher that the whole experi-ence had drained him more than he realized.

Rubinstein arranged a few subsequent pro-ductions of The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, including one at La Scala conducted by Toscanini, and in 1914 Debussy and d’Annunzio even talked about a film version. Although the complete work has not been performed in recent decades, Debussy’s incidental music is occasion-ally revived, most often in a narrated version devised by Germaine Inghelbrecht, the wife of the original chorus master, with the approval of the composer and d’Annunzio. Debussy’s score is best known, however, in the suite of four symphonic fragments arranged by Caplet.

The first of the fragments, a slow, sustained, and gentle piece with massed winds, is the prelude to the complete work. The second excerpt depicts Sebastian ecstatically dancing on live coals. In the brooding music of The Passion, Sebastian mimes the role of Christ. The Good Shepherd, the luminous prelude to act 4 of d’Annunzio’s play, finds Debussy reaching for a new simplicity of expression.

—Phillip Huscher

Ida Rubinstein in The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, 1911

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COMPOSED1909

FIRST PERFORMANCEJune 7, 1910, London

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCEJune 25, 2000, Ravinia Festival. Robert Chen and Yo-Yo Ma as soloists, Christoph Eschenbach conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESJuly 8, 2010, Ravinia Festival. Pinchas Zukerman and Amanda Forsyth as soloists, James Conlon conducting

These are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription con-cert performances.

INSTRUMENTATIONsolo violin and solo cello, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, harp, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME16 minutes

Camille Saint-SaënsBorn October 9, 1835, Paris, France.Died December 16, 1921, Algiers, Algeria.

La muse et le poète, Op. 132

Saint-Saëns was hailed in his youth by Berlioz as “a fine musician nineteen years old,” who, alongside Gounod, represented France’s brightest hope in music. He began his career as a staunch supporter of “music of the future,” championing the

works by Liszt, Schumann, and Wagner. By the turn of the twentieth century, though, he increasingly appeared a curmudgeonly old reactionary who railed against the innovations of Debussy and Ravel (though the latter claimed artistic kinship with Saint-Saëns). Apparently guarded and suspicious towards the world at large, he refused to show indulgence or ordinary acts of kindness to rising young composers until they had measured up to his own stringent standards. Those who knew him, though, or who could penetrate his prickly exterior, soon discov-ered a man of warm sensibility whose friendship, once earned, was steadfast.

Having made his reputation with such sensu-ous and voluptuous works as the Introduction and rondo capriccioso for violin and orchestra and the opera Samson et Dalila, as well as works of osten-tatious grandeur such as the Organ Symphony (the frivolity of Carnival of the Animals was not to be generally known until after his death), in the new century, Saint-Saëns increasingly resorted to a more restrained “classical” style. This was

indebted first and foremost to his beloved Mozart, though also owing a deal to Beethoven and Mendelssohn—the same formative influ-ences, it has to be said, behind his most charac-teristic piano concertos composed in the previous century and which he himself performed to unanimous praise. Saint-Saëns once revealingly wrote: “The artist who does not feel thoroughly satisfied with elegant lines, harmonious colors, or a fine series of chords does not understand art.”

I t is this aesthetic—one, it may seem, of a disappointed romantic—which informs his touching and still little-known late master-

piece La muse et le poète, composed in 1909, the very year when Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes held its first season in Paris. Saint-Saëns’s work appears as if from a previous epoch, yet such is the limpid quality of its expression that it effectively transcends any specific style or period (save, perhaps, for the orchestra’s triumphal interlude near its end), and speaks just as directly today as it did when it was first performed in London on June 7, 1910, with Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe and Dutch cellist Josef Hollmann as the soloists.

Although Saint-Saëns never divulged a program for this work, it was apparently inspired by a series of four lyrics by the poet Alfred de Musset, in which a poet, disappointed in love, is consoled and inspired by a series of dialogues with his muse. Therefore the title, though imposed by Saint-Saëns’s publisher rather than chosen by the composer himself, is apt, with the

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roles of Muse and Poet taken by a solo violinist and a solo cellist, respectively. The work opens

in a mood of gentle melancholy—wistful, as if expressing the poet’s unfulfilled love. First to initiate the con-versation is

the violinist—note how the music appears to brighten in its tonality with the soloist’s entry. The cello replies, clearly in despondent mood. There is no need to translate into words the import of the subsequent dialogue between the soloists—the music they play is eloquent enough, reminding one of a famous saying by one of Saint-Saëns’s favorite composers, Mendelssohn: “What a piece of music that I love expresses to me are not thoughts that are too vague to be contained in words, but rather too precise.”

—Daniel Jaffé

Alfred de Musset

Edouard LaloBorn January 27, 1823, Lille, France.Died April 22, 1892, Paris, France.

Cello Concerto in D Minor

Although the surname Lalo is of Spanish origin, Edouard Lalo came by his French first name (not to mention his middle names, Victoire Antoine) naturally. His family had been settled in Flanders and in northern France since the sixteenth

century, and his father had fought for Napoleon. Edouard was determined to study music early on, but his father, a highly decorated military man, balked at the idea of having his firstborn become a professional musician. At the age of sixteen, Edouard left home for Paris, where he took violin and composition lessons. He decided to stay in this great music capital, and for many years he made his living there quietly teaching violin and playing chamber music with the Armingaud Quartet, which he put together to promote the

string quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. (The quartet was sometimes joined by high-profile pianists such as Clara Schumann and Camille Saint-Saëns.)

Lalo didn’t attract attention as a composer for some time, largely because he favored the then-unfashionable forms of chamber music. For a while he gave up on composition altogether. In 1866 (he was now forty-three), he finally broke his silence with the opera Fiesque, which he entered in a competition sponsored by the Théâtre-Lyrique. After his work failed to win, Lalo was so incensed that he published the score at his own expense; however, it was never performed. Then, in the 1870s, Lalo’s fortunes turned after he met the virtuoso Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate and immediately set to work on a series of concertolike pieces for Sarasate and other leading performers of the day. In 1874, Sarasate premiered Lalo’s Violin Concerto (now forgotten), followed by the still-popular

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COMPOSED1877

FIRST PERFORMANCEDecember 9, 1877; Paris, France

FIRST CSO PERFORMANCESJanuary 5 & 6, 1900, Auditorium Theatre. Elsa Ruegger as soloist, Theodore Thomas conducting

July 29, 1967, Ravinia Festival. János Starker as soloist, Jean Martinon conducting

MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCESSeptember 15, 2000, Orchestra Hall. Yo-Yo Ma as soloist, Daniel Barenboim conducting

August 8, 2003, Ravinia Festival. Claudio Bohórquez as soloist, Christoph Eschenbach conducting

INSTRUMENTATIONsolo cello, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME25 minutes

CSO RECORDING1988. Matt Haimovitz as soloist, James Levine conducting. Deutsche Grammophon

Symphonie espagnole the next year. (This new surge of inspiration also produced a second opera, Le roi d’Ys, although this work too was at first considered unstageworthy, despite the support of Charles Gounod.)

In 1877, Lalo composed this

concerto for the Belgian cellist Adolphe Fischer. Coming just five years after Saint-Saëns’s own cello concerto, this work helped to draw attention to Lalo as a composer of remarkable melodic and orchestral gifts. Lalo’s cello concerto is more ath-letic and outgoing than Saint-Saëns’s, although both works share the idea of a middle movement that is part slow movement and part scherzo. Throughout the concerto, Lalo gives his soloist a nearly unending flow of sheer, sumptuous

melody, both in moments of powerful and urgent music or in displays of simple lyricism.

In the 1880s, after this string of virtuoso concertos and the eventual triumph of Le roi d’Ys, Lalo’s music was wildly popular, defying Paul Dukas’s tongue-in-cheek prediction that Lalo would never find easy success with the general public because he “showed himself to be incur-ably, unpardonably a musician.” Lalo himself always resisted defining his own musical style: “While I do not know exactly what I am, I do know what I am not. I am not a member of any school, and I do not adhere to any system. I agree with the poet Musset: ‘My glass is small, but I drink from my glass.’ ”

—Phillip Huscher

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Daniel Jaffé is a regular contributor to BBC Music Magazine and a specialist in English and Russian music. He is author of a biography of Sergey Prokofiev (Phaidon) and the Historical Dictionary of Russian Music (Scarecrow Press).

Pablo de Sarasate

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