SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA DE WAART CONDUCTS MAHLER 4 A Jacobs Masterworks Concert Edo de Waart, conductor. March 1 and 2, 2019

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1 SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA DE WAART CONDUCTS MAHLER 4 A Jacobs Masterworks Concert Edo de Waart, conductor March 1 and 2, 2019 FREDERICK DELIUS The Walk to the Paradise Garden from A Village Romeo and Juliet SAMUEL BARBER Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Op. 24 Joélle Harvey, soprano INTERMISSION GUSTAV MAHLER Symphony No. 4 in G Major Bedächtig; nicht eilen In gemächlicher Bewegung; ohne Hast Ruhevoll Sehr behaglich Joélle Harvey, soprano

2 A SOPRANO, AN ORCHESTRA, INNOCENCE There are two choral works on this program. Both are scored for soprano and orchestra, both are some of the most beautiful music ever written, both offer the voice of the child, and both are about innocence. The child in Barber s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 sings from a moment of complete security a warm night when he is safely surrounded by a loving family. The child in Mahler s Fourth Symphony sings rapturously of the pleasures that await in heaven and names those simple pleasures with happy anticipation. Part of the beauty of both the Barber and the Mahler is that we know that this innocence will not last. The little boy in Knoxville will soon have his life ripped apart, the child in the Mahler has yet to taste what life will impose. But for a brief shining moment these two great pieces bring us the world of the child in all its shining hope and innocence. The Walk to the Paradise Garden from A Village Romeo and Juliet FREDERICK DELIUS Born January 29, 1862, Bradford, Yorkshire Died June 10, 1934, Grez-sur-Loing We think of Frederick Delius as an English composer, but the connection is very slim. Born in England to German parents (his birthname was Fritz Delius), the young man learned to play the piano and violin as a boy. His father wanted him to go into business, but at age 22 Delius talked his father into setting him up as the manager of orange groves in Florida. In Florida Delius had very little to do with oranges but did take music lessons and soaked up African-American folksongs and tales of magic and voodoo. After brief stints in Virginia and New York, Delius moved to Leipzig for formal training with Reinecke; in these years he became good friends with Edvard Grieg and lived briefly in Norway. In 1888 the 26-year-old Delius moved to the village of Grez-sur-Loing, about forty miles south of Paris, where he would spend the rest of his life. The rest of his life was not happy. Delius suffered from disease so debilitating that he eventually lost the use of his legs and became blind. He was assisted in his final years by Eric Fenby, an amanuensis to whom Delius dictated his music. Delius wished to be buried in the garden of his house in Grez-sur-Loing, but French law would not allow this, and after a year his

3 body was disinterred and buried in England. Delius music is generally unfamiliar to American audiences, but it has had passionate advocates, mostly prominently Sir Thomas Beecham. Delius composed six operas (one of them, Koanga, is set in Louisiana and tells the tragic tale of a voodoo prince), as well as orchestra and chamber music and a number of choral settings. One of his most famous works is Appalachia, a set of variations for orchestra based on a slave song he heard in America, but today Delius is best remembered for his short orchestral pieces, beautifully shaded and evocative of particular moments or places. In 1907 Delius opera A Village Romeo and Juliet was premiered in Berlin. An updated retelling of Shakespeare s play, it tells of the lovers Sali and Vrenchen, the children of rival farmers locked in a bitter dispute over the ownership of land. The dispute becomes violent, the lovers try to flee to peace, but when they discover that they cannot, they unmoor a hay barge, float out into the river, scuttle it and drown together. Rather than being in acts, the opera is in six scenes, and the musical interlude between the fifth and sixth scenes has become known as The Walk to the Paradise Garden. Paradise Garden is the name of an inn where the couple has been told they can be alone and dance all night, but once there, they discover this to be a false promise the inn is full of sketchy types and The Dark Fiddler, the mysterious spirit who hovers over the entire opera. But the walk itself is a moment of pure peace and love, and Delius captures this beautifully. Sali and Vrenchen walk through the warm evening, bound together in what will be (though they do not know it) the last moments of their lives. (The influence of Wagner s Tristan und Isolde is clear.) Delius drew themes from the previous five scenes of the opera and wove them together to create this gentle music. In the opera, Delius called for a huge orchestra (quadruple woodwind and six horns), but today The Walk to the Paradise Garden is always heard in an arrangement for smaller orchestra by Sir Thomas Beecham. Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Op. 24 SAMUEL BARBER Born March 9, 1910, West Chester, PA Died January 28, 1981, New York City James Agee ( ) was a writer of unusual gifts he was a poet, novelist, critic and screenwriter. Agee died suddenly at 46, and his reputation rests on two extraordinary works: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a study of Southern sharecropper families, and his novel A Death in the Family, left in manuscript at his death and published posthumously in 1957; it won

4 the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in The novel tells the story of the closely-knit family of Jay and Mary Follett and their children Rufus and Catherine; that family is shattered by the death of the father in an automobile accident. (Agee s middle name was Rufus, and he really did lose his father in this way at age six.) Much earlier, in 1938, Agee had written a sort of prose-poem, composed in one sudden burst of stream-of-consciousness, a piece he called Knoxville: Summer of Several pages long, it is a vision of childhood as recalled through the eyes of a child Agee had grown up in Knoxville, and he set out to recreate his memory of being five years old. When, after his death, his editors prepared A Death in the Family for publication, they used Knoxville: Summer of 1915 as a poetic prologue to that novel. Barber had come to know Knoxville when it was still a separate work, and in 1947 for soprano Eleanor Steber he made a setting for high voice and orchestra, using approximately the final third of Agee s text. This was first performed on April 9, 1948, by Steber with Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony. Knoxville: Summer of 1915 may be the single most beautiful creation in American music. Barber recognized that Agee s prose-poem captures a universal experience, and his music by turns nostalgic and bittersweet is worthy of that text. (Agee, by the way, heard and liked Barber s setting.) Musically, Knoxville is a sort of rondo: it is sectional in structure, and a few basic themes return in various forms throughout. It opens quietly as the boy sets the scene: a summer evening, quiet, with people watering their lawns or talking. A moment of agitation intrudes as a streetcar passes, clanging and sparking in the night, and then ( Now is the night one blue dew ) the mood changes, almost magically. The family takes quilts out into their back yard and lies looking up at the stars ( On the rough wet grass ). The boy recalls and enumerates with perfect childlike simplicity the members of his family around him in the dark and their boarders. It is a moment of security, warmth and wholeness, but as the reader of the novel knows a moment that will be shattered by subsequent events. Perhaps some of the profound impact of this child s vision is the inevitable knowledge that this warm summer night, loving and warm, cannot last. But for these few rapt moments, it does, and the boy blesses those around him and is put to bed, momentarily secure, but like all children adrift and alone in the world.

5 Symphony No. 4 in G Major GUSTAV MAHLER Born July 7, 1860, Kalischt, Bohemia Died May 18, 1911, Vienna In April 1897 Mahler was named director of the Vienna Court Opera, the most prestigious post in the world of music, and the grueling demands of this position brought his composing to a standstill: from the summer of 1896 until the summer of 1899 he composed no new music. Finally established in Vienna, he could return to creative work, and during the summer of 1899 he retreated to the resort town of Alt-Aussee in the Styrian Alps and began his Fourth Symphony. He composed the first two movements that summer and completed the symphony on August 5 of the following year at his new summer home at Maiernigg on the Wörthersee. Mahler led the successful first performance in Munich on November 25, That simple chronology belies the complex genealogy of the Fourth Symphony. In February 1892, when he was the chief conductor of the Hamburg Opera, Mahler had composed a song, Das himmlische Leben, on a text drawn from Das Knaben Wunderhorn portraying a child s vision of heaven. A few years later, Mahler planned to use this song as the seventh and final movement of his Third Symphony, but when that work grew too long he detached the song and made new plans to use it as the last movement of a projected six-movement Fourth Symphony. During his three-year composing hiatus, Mahler abandoned that plan, and when he returned to creative work in the summer of 1899, he conceived a Fourth Symphony that bore little resemblance to his original plan. The germ of the new symphony remained the song Das himmlische Leben, but now it became the finale of a four-movement symphony, and Mahler worked backward from this, creating a Fourth Symphony that used this song as its destination. The Fourth is Mahler s friendliest symphony even people who claim not to like Mahler take this music to their hearts. At just under an hour in length, it is the shortest of Mahler s ten symphonies and it is scored for an orchestra that is by his standards relatively modest: it lacks trombones and tuba. Mahler s claim that the Fourth never rises to a fortissimo is not literally true, but it is figuratively true, for even at its loudest this symphony is Mahler s most charming, his most approachable work. Much of the charm comes from the text sung by the soprano in the last movement, with its wide-eyed child s vision of heaven. In fact, several recordings use a boy soprano in place of a woman in the finale, because the sound of a child s voice is exactly right in this music. This sense of a child s vision full of wonder, innocence and radiance touches the entire Fourth Symphony. The symphony opens with the sound of sleighbells, and violins quickly sing the graceful

6 and rather long main subject; so pregnant with ideas is this theme that much of the thematic material of the entire symphony can be traced back to this genial opening idea. Mahler marks this first movement Bedächtig ( Deliberately ), and it is in a kind of sonata-form, but one remarkable for the profusion of its melodic material. Each new theme seems in turn to spin off a wealth of ideas: a jaunty tune for clarinets, a broad and noble melody for cellos, a broadly-lyric melody for cellos, a poised little duet for oboes and bassoons. We arrive at what seems to be the development, and scarcely has this begun when over murmuring strings an entirely new theme a radiant call for four unison flutes looks ahead to the celestial glories of the final movement. This movement proceeds melodically rather than dramatically there are no battles fought and won here and at the end the opening violin theme drives the movement to its ringing close on great G Major chords. The second movement In gemächlicher Bewegung ( Moving leisurely ) is again in a rather free form: it might be described as a scherzo with two trios. Mahler requires here that the concertmaster play two violins, one of them tuned up a whole step to give it a whining, piercing sound Mahler asks that it sound Wie eine Fiedel: like a fiddle. Mahler said that this movement was inspired by a self-portrait by the German painter Arnold Böcklin entitled Freund Hein spielt auf, in which a tiny devil plays a violin in the painter s ear. Despite all Mahler s suggestions of demonic influence, this music remains genial rather than nightmarish. In Donald Francis Tovey s wonderful phrase, the shadows cast here are those of the nursery candlelight. However attractive this may be, it finds its match in the third movement, Ruhevoll ( Peaceful ), which begins with some of the most beautiful music ever written: a long, glowing melody for cellos and its countertheme in the violins. This movement is in variation form, with the variations based on this opening theme and on a more somber second subject, sung first by the oboe. Both themes undergo a series of transformations: the rising-and-falling extension of the second theme (which is derived from the very beginning of the symphony) is among Mahler s most poignant and bittersweet music. Near the close, violins suddenly leap up and the gates of heaven swing open: brilliant brass fanfares and smashing timpani offer a glimpse of paradise including a premonition of the main theme of the finale but that finale must wait for this movement to reach its utterly peaceful close. Out of the silence, solo clarinet sings the main theme of this movement, marked Sehr behaglich ( Very comfortable ), and soon the soprano takes up her gentle song. Mahler said that he wished to create a portrait of heaven as clear blue sky, and this vision of heaven glows with a child s sense of wonder. It is a place full of apples, pears and grapes, a place where Saint

7 Martha does the cooking, Saint Peter the fishing, where there is music and dancing and joy. The sleighbells from the symphony s opening now return to separate the four stanzas, and at the end the soprano sings the key line: Kein musik ist ja nicht auf Erden ( There is no such music on earth ). For this truly is heavenly music, music of such innocence that it feels as if it must have come from another world, and at the end of this most peaceful of Mahler symphonies the harp and contrabasses draw the music to its barely-audible close. -Program notes by Eric Bromberger PERFORMANCE HISTORY by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, San Diego Symphony Archivist There is no record of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra ever playing any music of Frederick Delius. However, there is a partial exception. The San Diego Opera was organized by a local conductor, Walter Herbert, when the Civic Theatre was opened in Herbert favored opera in English, and later in January 1975 he produced and conducted Delius' masterpiece, A Village Romeo and Juliet, which needed no translation. In those days, the so-called Opera Orchestra was composed mainly of 50 to 60 contracted SDSO players. So, that pit orchestra performed this Delius opera, but the SDSO as such has never programmed this truly beautiful music until the present concert. Samuel Barber's beautiful, superbly colored vocal feature Knoxville, Summer of 1915, with expressions of both sadness and loss, and hope as well, has only been heard here once before, when Jung Ho Pak led a performance during the season. Patricia Prunty was the featured soprano on that occasion, and she also sang in Mahler s Fourth Symphony on that same program. (Soprano Joélle Harvey completes exactly the same feat this weekend.) In contrast to the Barber piece, that Mahler Fourth Symphony, also with a very expressive soprano solo, has always been a popular repertory piece here. Zoltan Rozsnyai led its first performance here during the season. Its most recent performance here, its sixth, was led by Jahja Ling during the season, with Jennifer Aylmer as soprano soloist.