Program One Hundred Twenty-Second Season Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Music Director Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO Thursday, April 11, 2013, at 8:00 Friday, April 12, 2013, at 8:00 Saturday, April 13, 2013, at 8:00 Tuesday, April 16, 2013, at 7:30 Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Conductor Chicago Symphony Chorus Duain Wolfe Director Eleonora Buratto Soprano Anna Malavasi Mezzo-soprano Saimir Pirgu Tenor Adam Plachetka Bass-baritone Robert Chen Violin Mathieu Dufour Flute Yukie Ota Flute Eugene Izotov Oboe d amore Scott Hostetler Oboe d amore Daniel Gingrich Horn David McGill Bassoon Dennis Michel Bassoon Continuo: John Sharp Cello Alexander Hanna Bass David Schrader Organ Mark Shuldiner Harpsichord (continued)
J.S. Bach Mass in B Minor, BWV 232 Kyrie Chorus: Kyrie eleison Duet: Christe eleison (Eleonora Buratto, Anna Malavasi) Chorus: Kyrie eleison Gloria Chorus: Gloria in excelsis Chorus: et in terra pax Aria: laudamus te (Anna Malavasi) Chorus: Gratias agimus tibi Duet: Domine Deus (Eleonora Buratto, Saimir Pirgu) Chorus: Qui tollis peccata mundi Aria: Qui sedes ad dextram Patris (Anna Malavasi) Aria: Quoniam tu solus sanctus (Adam Plachetka) Chorus: Cum Sancto Spiritu Intermission Credo (Symbolum Nicenum) Chorus: Credo in unum Deum Chorus: Credo / Patrem omnipotentem Duet: et in unum Dominum (Eleonora Buratto, Anna Malavasi) Chorus: et incarnatus est Chorus: Crucifixus Chorus: et resurrexit Aria: et in Spiritum sanctum Dominum (Adam Plachetka) Chorus: Confiteor Chorus: et expecto resurrectionem Sanctus Chorus: Sanctus Chorus 1 & 2: Osanna in excelsis Aria: Benedictus (Saimir Pirgu) Chorus 1 & 2: Osanna in excelsis Agnus Dei Aria: Agnus Dei (Anna Malavasi) Chorus: Dona nobis pacem The CSO thanks Randy and Melvin Berlin for their generous support of these performances. This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts. 2
Comments by Phillip Huscher Johann Sebastian Bach Born March 21, 1685, Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany. Died July 28, 1750, Leipzig, Germany. We now believe that in his final days, Johann Sebastian Bach worked not on The Art of Fugue, which he left unfinished at his death, but on his great Mass in B minor. It was, in many respects, the summation of his life s work, although, at the time, Bach did not expect that it would ever even be performed, let alone revered. In the years immediately following Bach s death in 1750, public knowledge of his music was nil, even though other, more cosmopolitan composers, such as Handel, who died only nine years later, remained popular. It is true that Mozart came to know and admire several of Bach s works Mozart attended private concerts in the home of the Viennese aristocrat Baron van Seiten in the 1780s, where, he reported: Nothing is played but Handel and Bach. And Beethoven, at eleven or twelve, mastered The Well-Tempered Clavier, to the great delight of his piano teacher. But outside the world of professional musicians, Bach had become no more than a figure from the distant past. Bach himself drew a copy of his family tree in 1735, near the time Bach s portrait by E.G. Haussmann (1746) Mass in B Minor, BWV 232 of his fiftieth birthday. He made a place for himself, and for his many children, among the generations of Bachs whose name was already synonymous with music. Johann Sebastian could readily see that he was not the first, nor would he be the last his sons had already taken care of that in a line of composers unique in history. He did not make room for Veit Bach a baker by trade and the first Bach family member to show musical skill who died sometime before 1578; he has been rescued by modern musicology. It was still too early to expect that any of his own grandchildren would continue the tradition, although Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach, born nine years after his grandfather s death, would carry the family business well into the next century. Ultimately, there were more than eighty musicians named Bach who worked over the span of three centuries. Bach seemed unconcerned with leaving us any information about his life and career beyond the basic résumé of court and church positions. Since he never wrote down anything about his life, his son 3
Carl Philipp Emanuel said, the gaps are unavoidable. With dozens of students to teach, music to write on order day in and day out, and ten children to raise (another ten died in infancy), he appeared to be too busy to worry about posterity. Despite repeated requests, he neglected to submit anything for publication in a biographical dictionary of the important musicians of the day. Only one portrait of Bach was painted during his lifetime (see page 32), and, as a result, we have a solitary image of the composer a stern, stolid, rather unimaginative looking man quite at odds with the brilliant, dramatic, and often joyous music he wrote. It is easy to subscribe to the common view of Bach as the most unassuming of composers, satisfied to work far from the limelight, writing music to please himself, with no aspirations to the larger world or the fame and fortune that Handel, his exact contemporary, enjoyed. But the B minor mass was clearly conceived not for a church congregation, but for posterity. (Bach knew the mass would go unperformed during his lifetime, since it fit neither the Protestant nor the Catholic liturgy.) And although composers did not yet think that their music would be played long after their deaths they themselves seldom performed that of their predecessors Bach evidently wanted to leave something extraordinary and timeless behind. The Mass in B minor may well have been a late-in-life idea, but its genesis follows a long and twisted path, spanning decades and bringing together newly composed music, older mass movements, and still other music originally written for different purposes, but revised for use in the mass. (Throughout his career, Bach regularly resorted to the common parody technique fitting older music to a new text in this case, not to save time and trouble, but to incorporate the finest music he had yet composed into this comprehensive Composed 1714 1749; assembled 1747 1749 First performance complete: 1859, Leipzig First CSO subscription concert performance January 8, 1935, Orchestra Hall. Jeannette Vreeland, Kathryn Witwer, Rose Bampton, Dan Gridley, and Chase Baromeo as soloists; Apollo Music Club; Frederick Stock conducting Most recent CSO performance January 28, 1990, Orchestra Hall. Felicity Lott, Anne Sofie von Otter, Hans Peter Blochwitz, William Shimell, and Gwynne Howell as soloists; Chicago Symphony Chorus; Sir Georg Solti conducting Instrumentation two flutes, three oboes, two oboi d amore, two bassoons, horn, three trumpets, timpani, continuo, strings CSO recording 1990. Felicity Lott, Anne Sofie von Otter, Hans Peter Blochwitz, William Shimell, and Gwynne Howell as soloists; Chicago Symphony Chorus; Sir Georg Solti conducting. London 4
work.) When the mass finally was assembled, it represented music written over four decades. With this work, Bach found a seemingly perfect and harmonious balance between the old and the new. It is difficult to know when Bach first thought of preparing a monumental setting of the mass text. Most of the work appears to have been done during the last decade of his life; it occupied him nearly to his dying day. The first significant installment dates from 1733, when Bach wrote a missa (essentially the Kyrie and Gloria we now know) to honor the new elector of Saxony. The Credo (or Symbolum Nicenum) was probably composed in the early 1740s. Later in the decade, when Bach decided to complete the mass, he added the massive choral Sanctus he had written in 1724 and reworked a number of earlier pieces as the final Osanna, Benedictus, Agnus Dei, and Dona nobis pacem. It has not been difficult for musicology to track down Bach s working process, but it is harder to understand his thinking. This is, after all, the first important mass written for no apparent practical purpose. Christoph Wolff, the distinguished Bach scholar, suggests that the B minor mass was assembled in order to preserve the summation of Bach s art in vocal music, just as The Art of Fugue was compiled to demonstrate his unsurpassed ability in instrumental music. Both works show a mastery of counterpoint unmatched at the time what Wolff calls the ever-present Bachian intention of excelling beyond himself and others. All his life, Bach had assembled sets and cycles of music a liturgical calendar of organ chorales, for example, or the preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier in all the major and minor keys. In the last decade of his life, this fondness for unified sets became an obsession, inspiring the Musical Offering; the Goldberg Variations, a cycle of thirty variations generated by one musical subject; and The Art of Fugue, a compendium of fugal writing, with all the fugues based on a single theme. The B minor mass was Bach s final word on the art of writing sacred choral music the culmination of a career that had produced the great Passions and hundreds of cantatas. The complete mass was never performed during Bach s lifetime, and with his death in 1750, it easily slipped into oblivion, the temporary fate of virtually all his music. When C.P.E Bach led a performance of the Credo alone in 1784 in Hamburg, it was beyond dispute that this was music the audience had never heard before and would probably never hear again. Even during the early nineteenth century, when Bach s music came back to life he was the first great composer to emerge from years of neglect Bach was known primarily for The Well-Tempered Clavier or the organ music. The great Passions and the Mass in B minor were forgotten. Haydn, in his old age, acquired a manuscript copy of the mass. Beethoven apparently consulted its pages when writing 5
his own Missa solemnis. The real reappraisal of Bach s music came two years after Beethoven s death, in 1829, when Mendelssohn led the landmark performance of the Saint Matthew Passion in Berlin. Truncated versions of the B minor mass followed in several German music centers, some under Mendelssohn s direction. But it was only in Leipzig in 1859 more than a century after the composer s death that the first complete performance was given. Franz Liszt, one of the so-called musicians of the future, was in the audience. (By then, the score had been published at last. The Zurich publisher and collector Hans Georg Nägeli had purchased the autograph at auction in 1805, but although he quickly announced plans to publish the greatest musical artwork of all times and peoples, in the end that did not happen for another three decades, and then only piecemeal.) It is easy to view the mass as a kind of summing-up, for it represents an impressive diversity of material: the opening Kyrie is as elaborate a choral fugue as Bach ever wrote (and comparable in scale only to the opening chorus of the Saint Matthew Passion); the Gratias and the final Dona nobis pacem which shares the same music is an old-fashioned motet; the Confiteor is strictly canonic, over a roving bass line; Et incarnatus est is free and boldly expressive; the subsequent Crucifixus inches forward over a relentless passacaglia; the Credo and Confiteor both use plainchant melodies. The arias and duets, too, are richly diverse, with important instrumental countermelodies. Each of the Gloria s four solo movements calls forward a different obbligato instrument (each one representing a different family of Bach s orchestra strings, flutes, reeds, and brass) the violin paired with the female voice in Laudamus te ; the flute turning the Domine Deus duet into a trio; the oboe d amore imitating the singer in Qui sedes ; the horn playing against the bass solo lines in Quoniam. The B minor mass is no ad hoc compendium, however, but a work constructed to a master plan of carefully weighed proportions. The Kyrie and Gloria sections, for example, are conceived together as one large unit; the opening harmony of B minor does not resolve with the end of the Kyrie itself (which concludes in F-sharp minor) but only with the turn to D major (the relative major partner of B minor) at the end of the Gloria. The entire Credo is an architectural structure of perfect symmetry, with brilliant fugal choruses framing solo movements at either end, and, at the heart, that remarkable and powerful sequence of choruses beginning with the solemn Et incarnatus est and the Crucifixus, in which so few notes perfectly convey immeasurable grief, and then, from the depths of those final chords, the explosion of Et resurrexit. The sequence is a stroke of dramatic genius from a composer who never wrote a note of music for the theater. (This trio 6
of movements, so perfectly apt as the centerpiece of the Credo, unites the oldest and newest music in the score: the Crucifixus is based on a cantata chorus dating from 1714; Et incarnatus est, something of an afterthought and composed in 1749, is the last piece of choral music Bach wrote.) The Sanctus and the following movements, which date from 1748 and 1749, when the mass was being polished and completed, are all based on earlier works, yet even here Bach stretches the art of parody and revision to incorporate not only substantial changes, but newly composed music as well. The great Agnus Dei solo, a freely elaborated version of a cantata movement from 1725, is a perfect example of Bach s determination to surpass even his own finest work. These final sections of the B minor mass, along with the incomplete quadruple fugue from The Art of Fugue, are the last pages of music Bach composed, in the first weeks of 1750 at the latest. Already in December of 1749, his signature on a dictated letter looks labored and stiff, a sign of the rapidly deteriorating eyesight that would soon put an end to his composing days. An operation by a famous English oculist who was lecturing in Leipzig in the spring of 1750 was botched. After that, Bach could no longer use his eyes. In mid-july, he temporarily regained partial vision, but then suffered a stroke within a few hours. He died ten days later. Not surprisingly, for a man who was not a public figure, at least in the modern sense, we know very little about his funeral, not even what music was played. Every generation has learned from the Mass in B minor, and this timeless masterwork has survived the interpretative fashions of them all. Many of the questions we still ask today how many singers should take each part? Is the unidentified solo instrument in the Benedictus a flute, or perhaps a violin? are the same ones musicians have always asked. The answers keep changing: in the 1830s, Mendelssohn used a chorus of hundreds; in the 1980s, the American scholar Joshua Rifkin proposed that Bach intended the mass to be performed with just one singer to a part. Efforts to determine how best to present Bach s works date back to Mendelssohn s day, when so little was known about the way music was presented in the previous century that a Bach performance style had to be virtually reinvented at the time. Today s popular quest for historical authenticity in performances of this final testament to his art is merely our latest way of engaging with music that by its very nature, and by Bach s own design, is meant for all people and all times. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. 7
Mass in B Minor Kyrie 1. Chorus Kyrie eleison. Lord, have mercy. 2. Duet (Eleonora Buratto, Anna Malavasi) Christe eleison. Christ, have mercy. 3. Chorus Kyrie eleison. Lord, have mercy. Gloria 4. Chorus Gloria in excelsis Deo. Glory to God in the highest, 5. Chorus Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis. and on earth peace to people of good will. 6. Aria (Anna Malavasi; Robert Chen, violin) Laudamus te, benedicimus te, adoramus te, glorificamus te. We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, 7. Chorus Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam. we give you thanks for your great glory, 8
8. Duet (Eleonora Buratto, Saimir Pirgu; Mathieu Dufour, flute) Domine Deus, Rex coelestis, Deus Pater omnipotens, Domine Fili, unigenite, Jesu Christe altissime, Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris. Lord God, heavenly King, O God, almighty Father. Lord Jesus Christ, Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, most high, Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, 9. Chorus (Mathieu Dufour, Yukie Ota, flutes) Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. Qui tollis peccata mundi, suscipe deprecationem nostram. you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us; you take away the sins of the world, receive our prayer; 10. Aria (Anna Malavasi; Eugene Izotov, oboe d amore) Qui sedes ad dextram Patris, miserere nobis. you are seated at the right hand of the Father, have mercy on us. 11. Aria (Adam Plachetka; Daniel Gingrich, horn; David McGill, Dennis Michel, bassoons) Quoniam tu solus sanctus. Tu solus Dominus. Tu solus altissimus, Jesu Christe. For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ, 12. Chorus Cum Sancto Spiritu in gloria Dei Patris. Amen. with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father. Amen. (Please turn the page quietly.) 9
Credo (Symbolum Nicenum) 13. Chorus Credo in unum Deum. I believe in one God. 14. Chorus Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem coeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium. I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. 15. Duet (Eleonora Buratto, Anna Malavasi; Eugene Izotov, Scott Hostetler, oboi d amore; David McGill, bassoon) Et in unum Dominum Jesum Christum, Filium Dei unigenitum et ex Patre natum ante omnia saecula. Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero, genitum, non factum consubstantialem Patri, per quem omnia facta sunt. Qui propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem descendit de coelis. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, 16. Chorus Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria virgine, et homo factus est. and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man. 17. Chorus Crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato, passus et sepultus est. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, 10
18. Chorus Et resurrexit tertia die secundum scripturas. Et ascendit in coelum, sedet ad dextram Dei Patris. Et iterum venturus est cum gloria judicare vivos et mortuos, cujus regni non erit finis. and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end. 19. Aria (Adam Plachetka; Eugene Izotov and Scott Hostetler, oboi d amore; David McGill, bassoon) Et in Spiritum sanctum Dominum et vivificantem, qui ex Patre Filioque procedit; qui cum Patre et Filio simul adoratur et conglorificatur; qui locutus est per Prophetas. Et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. 20. Chorus Confiteor unum baptisma in remissionem peccatorum. I confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins 21. Chorus Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi. Amen. and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen. (Please turn the page quietly.) 11
Sanctus 22. Chorus Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth. Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria ejus. Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of your glory. 23. Chorus Osanna in excelsis. Hosanna in the highest. 24. Aria (Saimir Pirgu; Mathieu Dufour, flute) Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. 25. Chorus Osanna in excelsis. Hosanna in the highest. Agnus Dei 26. Aria (Anna Malavasi) Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. 27. Chorus Dona nobis pacem. Grant us peace. 2013 Chicago Symphony Orchestra 12