Program

Thursday, February 23, 2012, at 8:00Friday, February 24, 2012, at 8:00

alain altinoglu Conductor

ChabrierEspaña

BizetSymphony in C MajorAllegro vivoAdagioAllegro vivaceAllegro vivace

IntermIssIon

schmittLa tragédie de Salomé, Symphonic Poem, Op. 50Prelude—Dance of the PearlsThe Enchantments of the Sea—Dance of Lightning—Dance of Terror

OnE HunDrED TwEnTy-FirST SEASOn

Chicago symphony orchestrariccardo muti Music DirectorPierre Boulez Helen regenstein Conductor EmeritusYo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant

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

Global Sponsor of the CSO

Comments by PHiLLiP HuSCHEr

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España

emmanuel ChabrierBorn January 18, 1841, Ambert, France.Died September 13, 1894, Paris, France.

España is the sole survivor of a once-prestigious career. The

only work by Emmanuel Chabrier that is still performed with any reg-ularity, it began as a simple souvenir of six months in Spain. Chabrier and his wife spent the latter half of 1882 traveling the country, stop-ping in Toledo, Seville, Granada, Malaga, Valencia, and Barcelona. Chabrier’s score is one of the high points in the late-nineteenth century’s fascination with the Iberian peninsula that also inspired Édouard Manet’s paintings of the 1860s, Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole in 1873, and Bizet’s Carmen the following year (joined in the next century by Debussy’s Iberia and Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole).

Chabrier’s close friendship with Manet—his neighbor from 1879 to 1883—may have first given him the

idea to compose a Spanish piece. Chabrier had once thought of being a painter himself. He followed the work of the groundbreaking French artists during his lifetime, regularly noting how closely their ideas paralleled his own. Chabrier posed for Manet on three occa-sions, the last time in 1881, only months before the Chabriers set off for Spain. When Manet died in 1883, Chabrier bought several of his canvases, including his last major work, the celebrated Bar aux Folies-Bergère, which he hung over his piano. (At the time of his death in 1894, Chabrier owned a small museum’s worth of significant art, including seven oils by Manet, six by Monet, three by Renoir, and one Cézanne.)

Although Chabrier dabbled in composition from childhood, and

ComPosed1883

FIrst PerFormanCenovember 4, 1883, Paris, France

FIrst Cso PerFormanCeJanuary 25, 1895, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCesDecember 9, 1986, Orchestra Hall. Erich Leinsdorf conducting

July 13, 1991, ravinia Festival. Gennady rozhdestvensky conducting

InstrumentatIontwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, four bassoons, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, triangle, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, two harps, strings

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme6 minutes

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became a pianist of impressive vir-tuosity, he first followed the family tradition and pursued law as his profession. He continued to write music on the side while working as a civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior in Paris, but, in a sense, Chabrier only came into his own as a composer after hearing Tristan and Isolde in Munich in 1880. He resigned from the ministry later that year, became a confirmed—if not obsessive—Wagnerian, and decided to devote the rest of his life to composition.

It was España, however, a very non-Wagnerian musical post-card, that made him an over-night sensation.

While touring Spain, Chabrier filled his notebooks with details about the rhythms of Spanish dance music (he concluded it was impos-sible to notate the actual rhythm of a malagueña), the cut of the danc-ers’ black felt hats, “the admirable Sevillan derrière, turning in every direction while the rest of the body stays immobile.” Near the end of the Spanish tour, Chabrier wrote home to his friend, the Wagnerian conductor Charles Lamoureux, that as soon as he returned to Paris he intended to compose an “extraordinary fantasia”—a remi-niscence of the music and dance that he had found so intoxicating in Spain. It would, he promised, incite the audience to a fever pitch of excitement. Chabrier began the piece as a work for piano duet—it was called Jota, after the lively Spanish dance—but soon realized

he would need the full range of orchestral colors to do justice to his vivid memories. España, as the piece was finally called, is not only full of memorable folklike tunes, but it also benefits from Chabrier’s keen attention to the rhythmic patterns of Spanish dance. As the composer predicted, España was a great success from the start—it was encored at the premiere, and was praised by composers as different as Manuel de Falla (who knew a thing or two about authenticity in Spanish music) and Gustav Mahler

(who conducted España on several occasions). Even Chabrier, however, cannot have imagined the popular-ity its main theme would achieve seventy-three years later as a Perry Como single on the Hit Parade.

Manet’s last portrait of Chabrier, 1881

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symphony in C major

This now-famous symphony by Georges Bizet, never performed

during the composer’s lifetime, waited eighty years for its premiere. Reynaldo Hahn, a close friend (and lover) of Marcel Proust and a composer of operettas and charm-ing, though slight songs, owned the manuscript for years, but didn’t consider it worthy of attention. It had been given to him, along with several other Bizet manuscripts, by the composer’s widow Geneviève, who evidently exceeded Hahn in her lack of appreciation for her husband’s music. In 1933, Hahn donated his Bizet scores to the Paris Conservatory, without offering the least hint that they included one of music’s little miracles—this delight-ful Symphony in C major composed by a precocious seventeen-year-old. Nearly eighty years later, it is Bizet’s symphony that has found a

secure place in the repertoire, while Hahn’s works are rarely performed.

Georges Bizet was a remarkable young talent. He was admitted to the Paris Conservatory two weeks before his tenth birthday and won the first of many prizes only six months later. (Over the years, he was given prizes—several of them first-place awards—in solfeggio, piano, organ, and fugue; his piano playing, in particular, won the praise of Liszt and Berlioz.) Bizet began to study counterpoint with Pierre Zimmerman, a distinguished teacher near retirement age, whose main contribution to his student’s development may have been his frequent absences from the class-room, when his substitute was Charles Gounod, then on the verge of international fame. (Gounod was married to Zimmerman’s daughter Anna.) Gounod quickly recognized

georges BizetBorn October 25, 1838, Paris, France.Died June 3, 1875, Bougival, near Paris, France.

ComPosedOctober–november 1855

FIrst PerFormanCeFebruary 26, 1935, basel, Switzerland

FIrst Cso PerFormanCeMarch 4, 1943, Orchestra Hall. Hans Lange conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCesMay 14, 2000, Orchestra Hall. bobby McFerrin conducting

July 23, 2000, ravinia Festival. itzhak Perlman conducting

InstrumentatIontwo flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme28 minutes

Cso reCordIng1968. Jean Martinon conducting. rCA

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Bizet’s exceptional gifts and asked him to assist with various musical projects, and, in 1855, to make a piano-duet version of his new First Symphony. It is surely no coin-cidence that later that year Bizet decided to write his own.

Bizet began his symphony on October 29, 1855, just four days after his seventeenth birthday. Perhaps because the model of Gounod’s score was still in his mind, Bizet worked with apparent ease and speed, finishing the work in less than a month. But despite the brilliance of this first effort, Bizet was not destined to be a sym-phonic composer. He began and abandoned a new symphony twice after winning the Prix de Rome in 1857. Another symphony, begun in 1860, occupied him on and off for eight years before he finally intro-duced it as an orchestral suite titled Roma. (It originally was planned as a symphonic tour of Italy, with separate movements for Rome, Venice, Florence, and Naples.)

But in the 1860s, Bizet found his true calling. The Pearl Fishers, which premiered in 1863, was not a success with the public or the critics (except for the invariably perceptive Berlioz), but it is the work of a born opera composer, overflowing with the promise that would ultimately be fulfilled in his final work, Carmen. Bizet didn’t live to see Carmen acclaimed as one of the true classics of music theater. He fell ill shortly after the premiere and died the night of the thirty-third performance. (That night the Carmen, Célestine Galli-Marié, is said to have been so overcome with

premonition in the scene where she reads death in the cards that she fainted while leaving the stage.) Although it wasn’t an immediate hit, Carmen soon found many admir-ers, including Brahms, who went to see the opera twenty times in 1876 alone, and Nietzsche, who thought it the ideal antidote to Wagner mania. (Wagner himself dismissed it as “much tastelessness,” according to his wife Cosima.) Eventually Carmen’s overwhelming popularity substantially elevated Bizet’s posthumous status, although he unfairly became known as a one-work composer in the process.

In 1933, Jean Chantevoine, a respected Beethoven scholar, inven-toried the Bizet holdings at the Paris Conservatory and uncovered the Symphony in C major. Initially, no one showed any interest in the work—a popular opera composer’s student symphony—until D. C. Parker, who had recently published the first English biography of Bizet, brought it to the attention of the influential conductor Felix Weingartner. Weingartner imme-diately grasped the significance of the discovery and arranged to give the premiere in Basel in 1935. The symphony quickly became an audi-ence favorite, and, in Balanchine’s

Bizet’s teacher, Charles Gounod

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brilliant 1947 choreography, one of the most performed of all ballet scores. (Balanchine introduced it as Le Palais de cristal, or the Crystal Palace, and later called it simply Symphony in C.)

Although Bizet may well have withheld his score because

of its obvious indebtedness to Gounod’s First Symphony, he apparently failed to recognize how superior it is to its model in every respect. Gounod’s own models were Haydn and early Beethoven sym-phonies, and Bizet’s score inevitably recalls the clarity and grace of high classicism. But there is nothing in any of these predecessors to match the youthful freshness and melodic charm of Bizet’s work. Each of the fast movements—a spirited opener in sonata form, a breezy third-movement scherzo, and the light-footed finale—spills over with original ideas, handled with

unassuming confidence and verve. The slow movement, with a fugal episode straight out of Gounod, contains a beautifully sinuous oboe solo that Carmen might well envy.

Even in the work of a seventeen-year-old, writing his first major orchestral score, we can detect the fine ear for color and rhyth-mic élan that later distinguishes virtually every page of Carmen. Tchaikovsky’s admiring verdict of that opera could as easily apply here: “The music has no pretensions to profundity, but it is so charming in its simplicity, so vigorous, not contrived but instead sincere . . . .” Bizet’s career cannot be compared to those of the other, more famous teenage composers—Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn, who also all died young. As the work of an exceptionally gifted young man, however, this first symphony has rarely been surpassed.

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La tragédie de Salomé, symphonic Poem, op. 50

Florent Schmitt still turns up in all the books about Stravinsky

as the man who stood up in the middle of The Rite of Spring at its chaotic premiere and shouted for all the ladies—he chose a less flattering term—of the six-teenth arrondissement to shut up. Schmitt’s music, once praised by Stravinsky himself, has all but dis-appeared—even his most celebrated work, The Tragedy of Salome that is performed this week, hasn’t been played by the Chicago Symphony in nearly seven decades.

When La tragédie de Salomé was published in 1911—two years before the Rite of Spring premiere—Schmitt dedicated the score to Stravinsky. A few months later, while Stravinsky was working on The Rite, he admitted that Schmitt’s Salome had given him “greater joy than any work I have heard in a long

time,” and he wrote to Schmitt that he considered the score “one of the greatest masterpieces of modern music.” “I am only playing French music,” Stravinsky told Schmitt at the time, “—yours, Debussy, Ravel.” When The Rite was introduced to the Parisian public in May 1913, many recognized what we today, lacking a familiarity with Schmitt’s music, can no longer hear—that the epochal score for The Rite of Spring owes a great deal to The Tragedy of Salome. Stravinsky and Schmitt were friends and admir-ing colleagues at the time. When Stravinsky fell ill with typhoid fever a few days after the legendary Rite premiere, Schmitt regularly visited his sickbed. Later that year, Stravinsky publicly praised an article Schmitt wrote about The Rite, and in 1914, he dedicated one of the Three Japanese Portraits to Schmitt.

Florent schmittBorn September 28, 1870, Blâmont, France.Died August 17, 1958, Paris, France.

ComPosed1907–1910

FIrst PerFormanCeballet: 1907, ParisSymphonic poem: January 8, 1911, Paris

FIrst Cso PerFormanCeFebruary 6, 1920, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting

most reCent Cso PerFormanCeOctober 19, 1945, Orchestra Hall. Désiré Defauw conducting

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme30 minutes

InstrumentatIontwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, snare drum, tri-angle, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, glockenspiel, two harps, strings

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The two composers had first met in Paris, where Schmitt moved in 1889 to attend the conservatory and to study with Jules Massenet and Gabriel Fauré. In Paris, Schmitt began a lifelong friendship with Ravel, who was also in Fauré’s class; met many of the big-name composers of the day, including Satie, Puccini, Debussy, and Falla; and joined a club of young art-ists—Ravel was a founding mem-ber—linked by their progressive mindset and their pride in being “avant-garde.” In 1909, Stravinsky began attending their meetings, which were held after concerts on Saturday nights at the painter Paul Sordes’s house on the rue Delong. They called themselves the Apaches—Parisian fascination with American Indians was running

high at the time, piqued in 1900 by a musical play titled Les indiens Sioux. Exoticism of all kinds was in the air, and stories about the Orient, in particular, were the rage. Schmitt’s own appetite for exotic subjects had been awakened by his

trips around the Mediterranean, from Morocco to Turkey, while he lived at the Villa Medici after win-ning the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1900.

The story of Salome had been a favorite subject of many artists since the last decades of the nineteenth century—in painting (Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon), literature (Stéphane Mallarmé, Gustave Flaubert, Oscar Wilde), and music (Massenet’s Hérodiade, based on Flaubert’s short story, and Richard Strauss’s one-act operatic setting of Wilde). Just three months after the huge success of Strauss’s Salome at the Châtelet in Paris in May 1907, Schmitt learned that Robert d’Humières, the new director of the elegant Théâtre des Arts, wanted him to write music for a mime-

drama on the Salome theme. The entire project was intended as a showcase for Loie Fuller, the pioneering American dancer who was born Marie Louise Fuller in the Chicago suburb that is now called Hinsdale. Schmitt accepted at once and wrote the score in two months. The Tragedy of Salome, an hour-long ballet in seven tableaux, was a great success on opening night later that

year and was performed some fifty times that season.

Two years later, Schmitt decided to refashion The Tragedy of Salome as a two-part symphonic poem for the concert hall, half as long as the original dance piece, but with

Portrait of Loie Fuller by Frederick Glasier, 1902

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a greatly expanded orchestration. (Schmitt had apparently felt that his musical ideas were severely compromised by the size of the Théâtre des Arts, which forced him to write for an orchestra of just twenty instruments.) It was this new version that Schmitt published in 1911, complete with its dedica-tion to Stravinsky.

Even in its concentrated form, this Salome unfolds as a series

of dances of varying character—a portrait of the legendary seductress painted exclusively by gesture and music. Schmitt sets the scene with a mysterious, harmonically ambiguous prelude. Salome then begins her first dance before Herod—the initially innocent Dance of the Pearls. The second part of the symphonic poem begins with the atmospheric and evoca-tive Enchantments of the Sea, in which underwater visions beckon Salome. The last two scenes—the Dance of Lightning and the Dance of Terror—move swiftly toward tragedy and violence, and capture something of the frenzy and excite-ment of the dancing that mesmer-ized Schmitt when he visited the Asiatic side of Istanbul. The Dance of Lightning, originally staged in complete darkness, illuminated only

by intermittent flashes of lightning and highlighted by a momentary glimpse of a nude Salome, con-cludes with Salome throwing the head of John the Baptist into the sea. In the final Dance of Terror, according to d’Humières’s original scenario, “the storm bursts. A furi-ous wind envelops her. . . . a hur-ricane rocks the sea. Waterspouts of sand are hurled from the desert solitude. . . . Everything is humbled and crestfallen on account of the dancer’s infernal delirium.” Those pages are filled with fierce percussive effects, bitonal chords, violent syncopations, and irregular rhythmic patterns—shockingly sav-age music that anticipates the most celebrated passages in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

A postscript. The friendship between Schmitt and Stravinsky

cooled in time. Stravinsky tried to distance himself from his praise of The Tragedy of Salome. In 1935, he lost to Schmitt in his attempt to fill Paul Dukas’s vacant seat in the Institut de France. By then, neither man had good things to say about the other.

Phillip Huscher is the program annota-tor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. ©

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