SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT. November 21, 22 and 23, 2014

Transcription

1 SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT November 21, 22 and 23, 2014 PIOTR ILYCH TCHAIKOVSKY Variations on a Rococo Theme, Op. 33 Alban Gerhardt, cello INTERMISSION GUSTAV MAHLER Symphony No. 7 in E minor Langsam - Allegro Nachtmusik I Scherzo: Schattenhaft Nachtmusik II Rondo-Finale

2 PROGRAM NOTES Variations on a Rococo Theme, Op. 33 PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk Died November 6, 1893, St. Petersburg It is hard to believe that Tchaikovsky wrote this lovely, elegant, chaste music immediately after completing his overwrought Francesca da Rimini and immediately before his white-hot Fourth Symphony. That sequence alone should alert us to the fact that there were many sides to this often tormented composer. If we automatically identify Tchaikovsky with colorful and emotional music, we need to remember that he was also drawn to the formal clarity of 18 th century music and loved Mozart above all other composers. One of the finest examples of this attraction is his Variations on a Rococo Theme, composed in December 1876, shortly after Tchaikovsky returned to Moscow after attending the first performance of Wagner s Ring at Bayreuth. This was a very difficult time for Tchaikovsky. He was on the verge of entering into a disastrous marriage with one of his students. He hoped that such a union would cure him of his homosexuality, but secretly he must have known that that was hopeless. Writing this music may have offered him an escape from that personal turmoil into the clarity and order of another era. The immediate impulse to write it came in a commission from the cellist Wilhelm Fitzenhagen. Trained in Germany, Fitzenhagen had in 1870 become professor at the Imperial Conservatory in Moscow, where Tchaikovsky also taught, and the two men had become good friends. When Fitzenhagen asked Tchaikovsky to write a piece for cello and orchestra for him, the composer responded with a set of variations based on what he called a rococo theme and scored for what was essentially Mozart s orchestra (pairs of woodwinds and horns, plus strings). A briefly orchestral introduction (how light and clear this music sounds!) gives way to the entrance of the solo cello, which sings the rococo theme. That theme (Tchaikovsky s own) is marked espressivo on its first appearance, and it falls into two eight-bar phrases. Seven variations follow. These are nicely contrasted: some are lyric, some athletic. Some emphasize the cello, while others vigorously toss the theme between soloist and orchestra. Tchaikovsky varies key and meter throughout the set, and he ingeniously turns the final variation into an exciting coda. Yet the key word throughout is restraint, and this gentle score seems to come from a different planet altogether from the Fourth Symphony, which would shortly follow. A CURIOUS NOTE: Tchaikovsky worked closely with Fitzenhagen while composing the

3 Rococo Variations, and the writing for cello is graceful and idiomatic. But Fitzenhagen, a composer himself, apparently regarded Tchaikovsky s manuscript as only a starting point, and he drastically revised the score. He reduced Tchaikovsky s original eight variations to seven, altered the order of the variations and re-wrote some of the cello part. By the time of the premiere, which took place in Moscow on December 1877, Tchaikovsky had made the fateful marriage, abandoned his wife and fled to Switzerland to restore his mental balance. He had no idea that these changes had been made, and by the time he returned to Moscow in 1879, the music had been published in Fitzenhagen s revision. At this point it was virtually impossible for him to re-do these changes. The result is that the Rococo Variations are invariably performed today in Fitzenhagen s revised version rather than in the version Tchaikovsky actually wrote. Symphony No. 7 in E minor GUSTAV MAHLER Born July 7, 1860, Kalischt, Bohemia Died May 18, 1911, Vienna The Seventh has always been the neglected stepsister among Mahler s ten symphonies, and greater familiarity over the last several decades has not yet transformed it into Cinderella. The last of Mahler s three purely instrumental middle symphonies, the Seventh had the strangest creation of any of his symphonies. In the summer of 1904, Mahler brought his family to their summer retreat at Maiernigg, on the southern shore of the Wörthersee in central Austria. That summer, Mahler composed some of his darkest music, the finale of the Sixth Symphony, then pressed on to write two quite different movements. Both were relatively brief, both were relaxed and Mahler referred to them as Nachtmusik movements: night-music or serenades. But he had no idea how they might fit into a larger symphonic context. Mahler returned to Maiernigg in the summer of 1905, still with no idea how to proceed. A trip to the Dolomites and a walk around a favorite lake there brought no inspiration, and the dejected composer headed back to Maiernigg. At Klagenfurt, he got into a boat to be rowed across to Maiernigg, and As soon as the oar touched the water the theme (or rather the rhythm and the feeling) of the introduction to the first movement came to me and in four weeks the first, third, and fifth movements were ready and done with! In fact, Mahler wrote the third movement first, then the finale, and only then did he go back and compose the first movement. Mahler led the premiere of the Seventh Symphony on September 19, 1908 in Prague, where his wife Alma reported that it had only a success d estime. Mahler claimed to be wary of providing programs for his symphonies, yet he left a wealth

4 of hints as to what the Seventh is about. The Seventh, he said, is about the progress from night to day. A massive opening movement, which depicts what he called the power of darkness [night as a] violent, stubborn, brutal and tyrannical force, is followed by three briefer movements that offer different responses to night. The finale, which Mahler nicknamed Der Tag (Day), escapes the darkness and thrusts us into bright C Major sunlight. For some years, the Seventh even had the spurious nickname Song of the Night, a title that did not originate with the composer (and which in fact is legitimately the nickname of Karol Szymanowski s Third Symphony). Mahler s program seems a likely dramatic sequence, but for all its many strengths, the Seventh remains the least-familiar of Mahler s symphonies. About one thing, however, everyone agrees: the Seventh is an uneven work of art. The three inner movements the two Nachtmusik movements and the central scherzo have an instant charm, and in the days before Mahler s music became popular, they were sometimes performed by themselves. When in the 1950s Erich Leinsdorf led them with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he was taken to task the following day on the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times, which demanded to hear the outer movements. And it is these outer movements, particularly the finale, that have occasioned sharp debate. Mahler described the opening movement as tragic night and even went so far as to say that it is dominated by a tragic and elemental power, that of Death. It opens quietly with the pulsing rhythm inspired by the oars, and over this intrudes the strange sound of the tenorhorn. Mahler, who asks that this passage be played with großer Ton, referred to this beginning as the sound of nature roaring. Gradually the music eases ahead and becomes a march, and this in turn accelerates into the main body of the movement. A spectacular collection of night-sounds shrieks, whistles, trills accompanies the rush into the main theme, a mighty horn-call marked Allegro risoluto, ma non troppo. To the conductor Willem Mengelberg, Mahler described this theme as the force that would do battle against the forces of the night. The second subject is one of the most beautiful melodies Mahler ever wrote, a soaring theme for violins that he marks Mit großem Schwung: With great energy, swing. The development is long and episodic, and one of its interludes deserves particular mention. The music grows quiet and solemn, and a harp glissando sweeps us into a moment that can only be described as magic: Mahler stacks up all four of his main themes the opening oar rhythm, the march, the main horn theme and the violins soaring second subject and presents them simultaneously. It is a moment fully worthy of those other towering examples of symphonic counterpoint, the finales of Mozart s Jupiter and Bruckner s Eighth; the wonder is that instead of

5 sounding chaotic or forced, this episode sounds so luminous and beautiful. Mahler builds to a climax he marks Grandioso, and the march propels the movement to its firm close. Mahler may have believed this movement full of night and death, but it ends in a triumph that appears to have dispelled the forces of darkness. The three interior movements, all much shorter, offer less ominous faces of the night. Mahler said that the second movement was inspired by Rembrandt s painting The Night Watch and felt that this particular patrol was moving through what he called fantastic semi-darkness. Listeners should not search for a literal depiction of a patrol at night but instead for the sense of moving through darkness. The opening horn call and its distant answer create a sense of space, and Mahler heightens this with periodic use of quiet cowbells, heard from afar. Shortest of the movements, the central scherzo is full of things that go bump in the night. Mahler marks this movement Schattenhaft ( Shadowy ), and it rushes past like something flickering through the darkness. Much of the writing is in the depths of the orchestra (full of whirring, thumping, banging sounds from low strings, tuba, timpani), and the music keeps breaking into ghostly little waltzes that are more devilish than demonic this movement is fun rather than frightening. At the end, the waltz falls apart, and the movement ends with a wry joke. Mahler s marking for the fourth movement Andante amoroso reminds us that there is another side to night: it is also the time of love. This is a moonlit serenade, and Mahler underlines that character by including guitar and mandolin, instruments that traditionally accompany such music, and scoring much of it for another instrument associated with the music of love, the solo violin. Night here is warm and perfumed, and this sensual music is scored with unusual delicacy: Mahler gives the percussion and all brass except two horns this movement off. Celli and then violins sing luxuriously in the central episode, but the opening serenade returns to close out the movement on the guitar s softly-strummed chords. All this delicacy vanishes in the first instant of the finale, which opens with timpani salvos, wild horn trills and a trumpet solo that rips into the stratosphere. We have left behind night, in its many apparitions, and are now in the full light of day. This finale, brilliantly scored and written, overflows with incandescent energy. It is also full of quotations from other music, and if the main theme seems to take the shape of another piece of celebration music Wagner s Prelude to Die Meistersinger what are we to make of the other references? Some have heard a touch of Lehár s The Merry Widow here, others a bit of Mendelssohn there, and there is even a whiff of Rimsky-Korsakov s Russian Easter Overture along the way. More unsettling are the

6 movement s constant dislocations. This music hurtles through instantaneous changes of key, tempo, mood and even kinds of music, and while this has been described as a kaleidoscopic inclusiveness, sometimes it feels as if Mahler is shifting gears without benefit of clutch. Episodic and wildly varied as this music may be, Mahler provides a degree of balance by bringing back the main theme of the opening movement as he nears the conclusion, and it is a measure of the suddenness of his vision in the rowboat that the finale written first returns to the main theme of a movement written after it was complete. First we hear bits of that theme, and finally to the sound of wildly pealing bells the full theme is shouted out in all its glory, and the Symphony hurtles to its close. The finale of the Seventh Symphony has become a lightning rod for those who love Mahler s music, and there have been many efforts to explain it. Even such a devoted Mahlerian as Deryck Cooke was brutally frank about this movement, saying, there can be no question that the finale is largely a failure. But others have found much to praise here. Some have viewed the finale as a dizzy festival of all human activity, seen in the bright light of day, its confusions and dislocations simply a portrait of the chaotic human state. Others believe it satiric, a withering look back at the rotting world of Hapsburg Europe; this, they say, would explain the number of quotations. Still others see it as prophetic, Mahler looking ahead from 1905 to foresee World War I and the destruction of Europe, and their argument is that of course such music should leave us unsettled. The Seventh Symphony is the most fantastic music (in the literal sense of that adjective) that Mahler ever wrote. This long night s journey into day is a dazzling passage: the three middle movements have considerable charm, and there is much to love in that strange, dark first movement. But more than anything else it is the finale the destination point of that journey that has proven the thorniest part of the Seventh Symphony. Listeners come out of this finale (and so out of the entire Symphony) amazed, fascinated, dizzied and challenged to make full sense of this fantastic symphonic journey. -Program notes by Eric Bromberger WHY THIS PROGRAM? The Mahler Symphony No. 7, in its San Diego premiere at these concerts, is the only Mahler Symphony that Jahja Ling has not performed during his music directorship here until now with the enormous exception of the Eighth (the Symphony of a Thousand), which needs a much larger performance venue for the throngs required to perform it, as well as for the audience to see and hear it. It will come, eventually. The conductor described the Seventh as the most

7 complex and most difficult for both the orchestra and the conductor. That's why I waited until I had completed doing the rest here, except for the Eighth. This symphony presents Mahler's most contorted feelings and views of life. It is also challenging for the audiences, who will learn by listening to this music that they are also seeing into Mahler as well, a trait that will continue when listening to his other symphonies. Maestro Ling continues: The Variations on a Rococo Theme present an essentially romantic composer saluting the Classical Style. The variations themselves, however, are definitely not in the Classical Style. Tchaikovsky used the complete range of this most expressive of instruments. I asked our soloist Alban Gerhardt to play this in order to balance the program featuring the Mahler Symphony after the intermission. PERFORMANCE HISTORY Tchaikovsky's brilliant Variations on a Rococo Theme was played here initially by Leonard Rose, with Izler Solomon guest-conducting, during the season. Only two more presentations have been given here, most recently when Thomas Wilkins guest-conducted and Allison Eldridge was the soloist, during the season. As mentioned above, Mahler s Symphony No. 7 has never previously been performed by this Orchestra. -Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist