PROGRAM
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-THIRD 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, June 12, 2014, at 8:00
Friday, June 13, 2014, at 1:30
Saturday, June 14, 2014, at 8:00
Tuesday, June 17, 2014, at 7:30
Riccardo Muti Conductor
David McGill Bassoon
Schubert
Symphony No. 6 in C Major, D. 589
Adagio
Andante
Scherzo
Allegro moderato
Mozart
Bassoon Concerto in B-flat Major, K. 191
Allegro
Andante ma adagio
Rondo: Tempo di menuetto
DAVID McGILL
INTERMISSION
Schubert
Symphony No. 1 in D Major, D. 82
Adagio—Allegro vivace
Andante
Allegro
Allegro vivace
This series is made possible by the Juli Grainger Endowment.
Sponsorship of the music director and related programs is provided in part by a generous gift from the
Zell Family Foundation.
CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to 93XRT, RedEye, and Metromix for their generous support as media
sponsors of the Classic Encounter 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
Franz Schubert
Born January 31, 1797, Himmelpfortgrund, northwest of Vienna, Austria.
Died November 19, 1828, Vienna, Austria.
Symphony No. 6 in C Major, D. 589
Symphony No. 1 in D Major, D. 82
Schubert’s contemporaries—even the few who
understood the magnitude of his talent—did
not think of him as a
composer of symphonies.
Antonio Salieri, who was
one of his first teachers
and a man who knew the
Viennese music scene as
well as anyone in the early years of the nineteenth century, called Schubert a genius, and said
that “he can write anything: songs, masses, string
quartets . . . ,” but he failed even to mention
the symphony.
Not one of the eight symphonies by Schubert
that Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony
perform this season was publicly known during
the composer’s lifetime. Most of them weren’t
even published until the very end of the nineteenth century, more than fifty years after
Schubert’s death. In 1894, while Antonín Dvořák
was living in the United States, he wrote an article
for The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, considering the reasons Schubert “made his way so
slowly to popular appreciation,” and why the symphonies, in particular, did not gain the immediate
admiration of those by other composers. “He was
young, modest, and unknown,” Dvořák writes,
“and musicians did not hesitate to slight a symphony which they would have felt bound to study,
had it borne the name of Beethoven or Mozart.”
The comparison with Beethoven is both inevitable and misleading. Schubert and Beethoven
were composing symphonies at the same time in
Vienna during the first years of the nineteenth
century—never once meeting nor even crossing
paths until the very end of Beethoven’s life. Each
of Beethoven’s symphonies was premiered to
considerable fanfare in one of Vienna’s main public theaters within a year or so of its completion.
2
Schubert’s were privately performed in the
same city and quickly forgotten. All nine of
Beethoven’s symphonies were published during
his lifetime; not one piece of Schubert’s orchestral music appeared in print during his. And
yet, for all his apparent lack of public success
with the form, Schubert persisted. He started
more symphonies than Beethoven and finished
nearly as many—all in a shorter period of time.
(While Beethoven composed his nine over the
span of twenty-five years, Schubert completed
seven and left another six unfinished in just
seventeen years.) Schubert was working on his
newest one—the so-called Symphony no. 10—at
the time of his death. (In 1995, the Chicago
Symphony performed Luciano Berio’s haunting
and imaginative Rendering, which is based on
Schubert’s sketches for this symphony.)
For Dvořák, writing in 1894, Schubert’s first
six symphonies were recent discoveries, as they
were for all musicians in the late nineteenth
century. (They were published for the first time
in 1884 and 1885.) He had recently begun to
conduct the symphonies and he highly recommended them to others. “The more I study
them,” Dvořák concluded, “the more I marvel.”
Written in little more than four years—from
sometime in 1813 to February of 1818—they
are among the most impressive and substantial
of Schubert’s so-called early works (although, as
Donald Tovey pointed out long ago, “every work
Schubert left us is an early work”). They are so
refined and assured that it is difficult to remember that they are the works of a teenage boy.
Schubert’s early symphonies come from the
busiest time of his life. He was still a schoolmaster then, a prisoner of the classroom who
fi lled his free time writing the music that would
one day make him famous. Not all this music
is important or memorable; Schubert must
have been writing at breakneck speed and often
well into the night. But much of it is unusually
impressive regardless of the circumstances, and
some of the songs, in particular, are among his
finest works—they reveal a gift too strong and
an imagination too vivid to be stifled even by the
dull rigor of drilling reluctant boys.
Symphony No. 6 in C Major, D. 589
I n November of 1816, the Italian Opera
Company made its first visit to the great
music capital of Vienna, bringing with it
Rossini’s Tancredi and L’inganno felice. This was
Vienna’s first taste of Rossini’s operas, and soon
the city’s large musical public, including the
nineteen-year-old Franz Schubert, could not
get enough of this intoxicating music. Word
of Rossini’s recent extraordinary successes in
Italy had sent shock waves through the musical
establishment in Germany and Austria—he
had first drawn international attention in 1813
with the serious Tancredi and the comedy,
L’italiana in Algeri. In the home of the great
classical masters, his music had quickly been
condemned: “He could have become one of
the most outstanding vocal composers of our
time,” wrote the composer Ludwig Spohr, “if he
had been methodically instructed in Germany
and guided on the one true path through
means of Mozart’s classical masterworks.”
Schubert went to hear Tancredi and left the
theater enraptured. “You cannot deny that he
has extraordinary genius,” he wrote to his friend
Anselm Hüttenbrenner. “The orchestration is
highly original at times, and occasionally so is the
vocal writing . . . .” In the thrall of the new Rossini
rage sweeping Vienna, Schubert composed two
overtures “in the Italian style,” trying out a new
way of writing that immediately changed his own.
Schubert’s Sixth Symphony is the main
beneficiary of his discovery of Rossini’s
COMPOSED
October 1817–February 1818
FIRST PERFORMANCE
December 14, 1828; Vienna, Austria
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
February 7 & 8, 1957, Orchestra Hall.
Sir Thomas Beecham conducting
music. Yet, for all the ways the great Italian
composer’s music enlivened and enriched
Schubert’s orchestral writing, by 1817, with
several symphonies already completed, Schubert
had become an assured symphonic composer
with a voice of his own. One can still pinpoint
influences and cross-references—a Mozartean
introduction to open the score, the Haydn-like
touch of beginning the allegro with the winds
alone, the instrumental fireworks of Rossini
through the movement, a speeded-up coda that
echoes the effect of Rossini’s signature windup
crescendos. The third movement, the first
in Schubert’s output to be labeled a scherzo,
resembles Beethoven’s in its power and thrust.
But more revealing are gestures and ideas,
particularly in the finale, that are the seeds of
the other C major symphony to come—the
one that would eventually be called Great to
distinguish it from this somewhat slighter one in
the same key.
With the Sixth Symphony, we find Schubert
steeped in the conventions of the classical
symphony, but striving to break free and forge
his own path, as only the greatest of symphony
composers can. It is a work of consolidation,
but more importantly, one of anticipation. After
completing this score in February of 1818,
Schubert began and abandoned several symphonies, including the one we now know as the
Unfinished. But it would be another decade before
he would actually finish one last symphony.
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
January 26, 27 & 31, 1995, Orchestra
Hall. Zubin Mehta conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets,
two bassoons, two horns, two
trumpets, timpani, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
28 minutes
CSO RECORDING
1979. Sir Georg Solti conducting.
EuroArts (video)
3
Symphony No. 1 in D Major, D. 82
S chubert knew the orchestra from the
inside—he began playing in the student
ensemble of Vienna’s Imperial and Royal
City College at the age of twelve—and we might
well guess from listening to his Symphony no. 1
that closes this concert that, as an orchestral
musician, he regularly played symphonies by
Haydn and Mozart as well the first two by
Beethoven. Schubert
enjoyed the luxury of
hearing his own First
Symphony played by
this same ensemble—an
invaluable experience for
a young composer (he was
just sixteen at the time)
still getting accustomed
to matching the music in
his head with the reality
A sketch of Vienna
of how it sounded in
performance. Schubert never heard his First
Symphony again during his lifetime; decades
passed, in fact, before it was introduced to the
public. It was the last of Schubert’s symphonies to be played by the Chicago Symphony
in Orchestra Hall, in 1982, more than ninety
years after the CSO’s founding—and it has
not been played by our orchestra since.
Mozart and Haydn may have been his inheritance, and Beethoven an irresistible contemporary influence, but, from the start, Schubert was
eager to strike out on his own. The blueprint of
Schubert’s Symphony no. 1 in D major follows
the great classical model of Haydn’s last London
Symphonies in its scoring and broad outlines,
with a grand slow introduction to the opening
allegro and a light, almost breathless finale.
Schubert even “borrows” Beethoven’s Prometheus
theme in his first movement—a rare admission
of the other Viennese master’s influence. But, as
Dvořák pointed out, “Schubert’s musical individuality is unmistakable in the character of the
COMPOSED
Completed by October 1813
FIRST PERFORMANCE
date unknown
4
melody, the harmonic progressions, and in many
exquisite bits of orchestration.” In other words,
Schubert already sounded like Schubert, even in
a work as early as his First Symphony (it is only
number 82 in Otto Erich Deutsch’s comprehensive catalog of 998 compositions).
The teenage Schubert was unafraid to put his
own stamp on the symphonic design that Haydn
had perfected in his sixties. Against convention,
Schubert brings back his
Adagio introduction in the
body of the Allegro music
that follows (Schubert
does not slow the tempo,
but merely incorporates
the gist of his opening
material into the flow of
faster music). The entire
first movement has a kind
of coltish energy that carries to the rousing final
measures, with their uncommonly high trumpet
lines. Schubert apparently had second thoughts
about his extended adaptation of Beethoven’s
Prometheus tune, and he later cut an entire passage just before the development section. Clearly,
for all his early mastery of smaller forms such as
the song, he was already beginning to think in
large architectural terms, like a true symphonist.
Schubert’s slow movement, spacious and not
surprisingly songful, shares much, in spirit and
in detail, with the corresponding movement in
the Prague Symphony, Schubert’s favorite of the
Mozart symphonies. The third movement is an
old-school minuet and trio. Although Schubert
stays in D major throughout, he achieves a
surprising sense of variety in this most rigid of
forms by shifting orchestral colors even as the
music repeats. The finale is brisk and effective,
with subtle reference to thematic material in the
opening movement that cannot be explained
merely as natural family resemblance. FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
August 16, 1974, Ravinia Festival.
David Zinman conducting
January 7, 8 & 9, 1982, Orchestra Hall.
Dennis Russell Davies conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
one flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two
bassoons, two horns, two trumpets,
timpani, strings
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
29 minutes
SCHUBERT’S SYMPHONIES:
FROM THE SKETCHED AND UNFINISHED TO THE NUMBERED AND COMPLETE
F only in sketches and was left incomplete at the
rom sometime around 1811 until his death
seventeen years later, Franz Schubert began composer’s death, has been reconstructed by
other hands and published as no. 10. Here is the
at least thirteen symphonies. This season,
Riccardo Muti and the
CSO will play the eight
that have come down
to us in performable
condition, including
one famous symphony,
known as no. 8, that is
itself unfinished. The
numbering of Schubert’s
symphonies has long
presented quandaries.
Although Schubert
sketched Symphony
no. 7 in full, he never
orchestrated the score,
and it is therefore
unplayable (except as
orchestrated by others). As a result, some
scholars have proposed
Gustav Klimt. Schubert at the Piano, oil on canvas, 1899
renumbering symphonies nos. 8 and 9 and
as nos. 7 and 8, respectively. (The suggestion has
rundown of all of Schubert’s symphonic attempts
not caught on; the CSO sticks to the original
that survive, with the standard catalog numbers
numbering.) A final symphony, which exists
assigned by Otto Erich Deutsch in 1951. —P.H.
Symphony, D major. First movement only.
?1811
D. 2b
Symphony No. 1. D major
Completed by October 1813
D. 82
Symphony No. 2. B-flat major
December 1814–March 1815
D. 125
Symphony No. 3. D major
May–July 1815
D. 200
Symphony No. 4. C minor. (Tragic)
Completed by April 1816
D. 417
Symphony No. 5. B-flat major
September–October 1816
D. 485
Symphony No. 6. C major. [Sometimes known as the Little C major] October 1817–February 1818
D. 589
Symphony. D major. Two movements in piano sketch
May 1818
D. 615
Symphony. D major. Sketches
After 1820
D. 708a
Symphony No. 7. E major. Sketched in score; not orchestrated
August 1821
D. 729
Symphony No. 8. B minor. (Unfinished)
October 1822
D. 759
Symphony No. 9. C major. (Great)
1825–1828
D. 944
Symphony. D major. [Sometimes known as no. 10]. Sketches
mid-1828
D. 936a
5
Wolfgang Mozart
Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria.
Died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria.
Bassoon Concerto in B-flat Major, K. 191
Although Mozart may
have written as many as
five bassoon concertos,
this is the only one that
has survived. It is the
earliest of all Mozart’s
concertos for wind
instruments, and, despite
the fact that it is the work
of an adolescent, this is a
little masterpiece. The score is contemporary with
Mozart’s first piano concerto, in D major, and his
first violin concertos—all products of the mid1770s. These are works that show Mozart fully
engaged in putting his own stamp on traditional
forms and procedures; he is no longer an
apprentice—even one with the most astonishing
gifts—but a man establishing his own practice.
Mozart would never quit learning, borrowing,
and assimilating what he picked up in the musical
world at large, but the process of transforming
and personalizing had already begun.
Even though the bassoon was not a common
solo instrument at the time, the main thematic
material of this concerto was carefully designed
expressly for the instrument, showcasing its
unique qualities and disguising its limitations
in power and range. In this piece, Mozart has
already moved beyond mastering the general
demands of concerto form to deal, in very
COMPOSED
1774
FIRST PERFORMANCE
date unknown
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCE
November 10, 1956, Orchestra Hall.
Leonard Sharrow as soloist, Fritz
Reiner conducting
© 2014 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
6
specific and creative ways, with the individual
needs of his client. Mozart often wrote music
for performer-friends, but we cannot be certain
for whom this concerto was intended. There are
several possible candidates, including two bassoonists employed by the archbishop of Salzburg
at the time, as well as Thaddäus von Dürnitz, an
amateur bassoonist from Munich who apparently
had commissioned bassoon works from several
composers, including Mozart.
The first movement highlights the bassoon’s
many virtues, including its extraordinary
agility and the ability to trill, leap (nearly two
octaves in this case), repeat notes rapid-fire,
sing lyrically, and sit comfortably on prominent
low notes. The interaction with the orchestra
is lively and conversational, not that of a star
performer with its supporting cast. The second
movement is a dreamy aria, with an elaborately
embroidered melody over muted strings—an
early essay in the mood of the Countess’s “Porgi
amor” from The Marriage of Figaro. The finale is
a minuet—not music designed for the ballroom,
but based on the lilting rhythms of the standard
courtly dance.
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra.
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
December 1, 2 & 3, 2011, Orchestra
Hall. David McGill as soloist, Jaap van
Zweden conducting
INSTRUMENTATION
solo bassoon, two oboes, two
horns, strings
CADENZAS
David McGill
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
18 minutes
CSO RECORDING
1984. Willard Elliot as soloist,
Claudio Abbado conducting.
Deutsche Grammophon