PROGRAM

EIGHTY-SIXTH SEASON

Symphony Center Presents

Sunday, April 9, 2017, at 3:00

Piano Series

PAUL LEWIS

BachPartita No. 1 in B-flat Major, BWV 825PraeludiumAllemandeCouranteSarabandeMenuets 1 and 2Gigue

BeethovenSonata in E-flat Major, Op. 7Allegro molto e con brioLargo con gran espressioneAllegroRondo: Poco allegretto e grazioso

INTERMISSION

ChopinWaltz in A Minor, Op. 34, No. 2

Waltz in F Minor, Op. 70, No. 2

Waltz in D-flat Major, Op. 64, No. 1 (Minute)

WeberSonata No. 2 in A-flat Major, Op. 39Allegro moderato, con spirito ed assai legatoAndante: Ben tenutoMenuetto capriccioso: Presto assaiRondo: Moderato e molto grazioso

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COMMENTS by Richard E. Rodda

Johann Sebastian BachBorn March 21, 1685; Eisenach, GermanyDied July 28, 1750; Leipzig, Germany

Partita No. 1 in B-flat Major, BWV 825

COMPOSED1726

With the condescend-ing statement, “Since the best man could not be obtained, medio-cre ones would have to be accepted,” City Councilor Abraham Platz

announced the appointment of Johann Sebastian Bach in 1723 as cantor for Leipzig’s churches. Platz’s “best man” was Georg Philipp Telemann, then the most highly regarded composer in all Germany, and the local disappointment at not being able to pry him away from his post as Hamburg’s music director was only one of the many difficulties that Bach faced during his first years on the job in Leipzig. Bach’s new duties centered on directing the music for the Sunday worship at Leipzig’s four churches, principally Saint Thomas, where the service usually stretched to four hours and required copious amounts of music, a sizable portion of which the new cantor was required to compose.

Bach was responsible to the city’s ecclesiastical consistory in fulfilling these duties, which he had to balance with his teaching at the church’s school, run by the town council. He also was charged with providing some of the music for Leipzig University’s chapel, administered by that institution’s board of governors. His volatile, sometimes even belligerent temper added to his difficulties, and his relations with his superiors were almost constantly strained. The most serious of these animosities erupted in a petition to the land’s highest authority, Augustus “The Strong,” elector of Saxony, asking him to adjudicate a dis-pute over his assignments and salary the univer-sity authorities, who were much concerned with Bach’s paucity of formal education. Bach lost.

Much of Bach’s early activity in Leipzig was carried out under the shadow of the memory

of his predecessor, Johann Kuhnau, a respected musician and scholar who had published masterly translations of Greek and Hebrew texts, practiced as a lawyer in the city, and won wide fame for his keyboard music. In 1726, probably the earliest date allowed by the enormous demands of his official position for new sacred vocal music, Bach began a series of keyboard suites that were appar-ently intended to compete with those of Kuhnau. In addition to helping establish his reputation in Leipzig, these pieces also would provide useful teaching material for the private students he was beginning to draw from among the university’s scholars, who were less hampered by bureaucratic exigencies than their superiors in recognizing Bach’s genius.

T he Partita no. 1 in B-flat major (BWV 825) issued in that year was the first of his compositions to be published,

with the exception of two cantatas that appeared during his short tenure in Mühlhausen years before. Bach funded the venture himself and even engraved the plates (to save money) with the help of his teenage son Carl Philipp Emanuel, who was then learning that exacting craft. Bach published an additional partita every year or so until 1731, when he gathered together the six works and issued them collectively in a volume entitled Clavier-Übung (Keyboard practice), a term he borrowed from the name of Kuhnau’s keyboard suites published in 1689 and 1692. The partitas of what became part 1 of the Clavier-Übung were well received. Johann Nikolaus Forkel, in the first full biography of Bach (1802), reported that

the works made in their time a great noise in the musical world. Such excellent compo-sitions for harpsichord had not been seen or heard before, so brilliant, agreeable, expres-sive, and original are they. Anyone who could play them well could make his fortune

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in the world thereby, and even in our times, a young artist could gain acknowledgement by doing so.

The term “partita” was originally applied to pieces in variations form in Italy during the sixteenth century, and the word survived in that context into Bach’s time. The keyboard partitas of the Clavier-Übung, however, are not varia-tions but suites of dances, a form that in France occasionally bore the title of partie, meaning either a movement in a larger work or a musical piece for entertainment. The French term was taken over into German practice in the late seventeenth century as parthie to indicate an instrumental suite. Bach’s “partita” seems to have been a corruption of this usage. Each of the six partitas of the first Clavier-Übung opens with a movement of different character: praeludium, sinfonia, fantasia, ouvertüre, praeambulum, and

toccata. The dances that follow these preludial movements differ from one work to the next, but satisfy the demand for stylistic variety and formal balance. Charles Sanford Terry wrote, “Bach’s keyboard suites contain not far short of two hundred movements. They exhibit extraordinary fertility of invention, vivid imaginative power, and complete technical mastery of the forms they employ.”

The Partita no. 1 begins with a Praeludium of tender lyricism and placid temperament. The first two of the work’s dance movements are dynamically energetic, the Allemande vigorous and marching, the Courante agile and mercurial. Elaborate ornamentation encrusts the melody of the introspective Sarabande. If the Divinity had a music box, it would play the pair of menuets that follow. The Gigue is a musical sleight of hand, with its staccato theme emerging from a curtain of ceaseless figuration.

Ludwig van BeethovenBorn December 16, 1770; Bonn, GermanyDied March 26, 1827; Vienna, Austria

Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 7

COMPOSED1797

In November 1792, Ludwig van Beethoven, then twenty-two and bursting with talent and promise, arrived in Vienna. Undeniable was the genius he had already

demonstrated in a sizable amount of piano music, many chamber works, and cantatas on the death of Emperor Joseph II and the acces- sion of Leopold II. For Maximilian Franz, the elector of Bonn, Beethoven also had written the score for a ballet; the commission underwrote Beethoven’s trip to Vienna, then the musical capital of Europe, to help further the young musician’s career (and his benefactor’s pres-tige). Despite the elector’s patronage, however, Beethoven’s professional ambitions quickly

consumed any thoughts of returning to the provincial city of his birth. When Beethoven’s alcoholic father died in December, he severed for good his ties with Bonn in favor of the stimulat-ing artistic atmosphere of Vienna.

During his first years in Vienna, Beethoven was busy on several fronts. Initial encourage- ment for the Viennese junket came from the venerable Joseph Haydn, who had heard one of Beethoven’s cantatas on a visit to Bonn earlier in the year and promised to take the young composer as a student if he came to see him. Beethoven, therefore, became a counterpoint pupil of Haydn immediately after his arrival late in 1792; however, the two had difficulty getting along—Haydn was too busy, Beethoven was too bullish—and their association soon broke off. Several other teachers followed in short order: Schenk, Albrechtsberger, Förster, Salieri. While Beethoven practiced fugal exercises and setting Italian texts for his tutors, he continued

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to compose, producing works for solo piano, chamber ensembles, and wind groups.

It was as a pianist, however, that he gained his first fame among the Viennese. The untamed, passionate, original quality of his playing and his personality first intrigued and then captivated those who heard him. When he defeated in competition Daniel Steibelt and Joseph Wölfl, two of the town’s noted keyboard luminaries, he became all the rage among the gentry, who exhibited him in performance at the soirées in their elegant city palaces. In catering to the aristocratic audience, Beethoven took on the air of a dandy for a while, dressing in smart clothes, learning to dance (badly), buying a horse, and even sporting a powdered wig. This phase of his life did not outlast the 1790s, but in his biog-raphy of the composer, Peter Latham described Beethoven at the time as “a young giant exulting in his strength and his success, and youthful confidence gave him a buoyancy that was both attractive and infectious.”

Ferdinand Ries, a close friend and sometime pupil of Beethoven, wrote that his mentor “was frequently in love [during his early years in Vienna], but generally only for a short period. Once he admitted that a pretty woman had held him in the strongest bonds for the longest time—that is, fully seven months.” One young lady who caught Beethoven’s attention at that time was Anna Louise Barbara Keglevich (nicknamed Babette), daughter of a noble Hungarian family living in Vienna, who was seventeen and regarded as a beauty when he started giving her piano lessons in 1797; he was twenty-seven. Beethoven, who had an apartment directly across the street from the Keglevichs, would sometimes appear on their doorstep “in morning gown, slippers, and tasseled cap to give her lessons,” according to a letter later written by Babette’s nephew.

It was to Babette that Beethoven dedicated the E-flat sonata, op. 7, which he composed that year. His student Carl Czerny recorded that the piece was written in an “impassioned” state of mind and may well reflect some feelings for his teenage student, though a young composer with-out rank or position would have had little hope of any deeper relationship with a woman of noble birth. Beethoven nevertheless also dedicated to Babette the First Piano Concerto in 1798, a set

of variations on “La stessa, la stessissima” from Salieri’s opera Falstaff (WoO 73) the following year; and even the Variations in F major (op. 34), a year after she had married Prince Innocenza d’Erba-Odescalchi in 1801.

Some residue of Beethoven’s sentiments may well have touched the E-flat major sonata, which was known for a time after its publication in October 1797 as Die Verliebte (The maiden in love), but the work has also been judged to be “the richest, most mature, and most original of the early sonatas” by the eminent German-American musicologist Hugo Leichtentritt. The opening movement embraces an almost Mozartean variety of motivic materials: a main theme group that includes sustained chords urged on by a repeated pitch in the left hand; ribbons of scales; and a passage in jaunty, gal-loping rhythms. A second theme consists of an upward-leaping figure and a few quiet phrases of simple, hymnlike chords; some brilliant right-hand figurations above long bell tones in the bass close the exposition. The development section is relatively brief and finds room only for motives from the main theme. All of the exposition’s thematic materials, appropriately adjusted as to key, return in the recapitulation before the movement ends with a substantial coda based on main theme ideas.

“The second movement is one of those sublime hymnlike monologues of a depth and power of expression such as no later composer has achieved,” wrote Leichtentritt of the eloquent Largo. “With its fear and sorrow, its defiant desire and ghostly visions, it is the deeply moving and uplifting confession of a great soul. . . . The devotional, serene first theme is the fixed point of this expressive fantasy. The music roams far afield from it and returns to it, and there at last finds peace and resignation.”

The third movement is musical evolution in the making, as the elegance and lyricism of the waning eighteenth-century minuet are infused with the quick tempo, dramatic contrasts, and muscular vigor of the romantic scherzo; the movement’s forward-looking quality is enhanced by its haunted, minor-mode central trio. The finale is a finely crafted rondo that perfectly balances the grace and fluidity of its recurring theme with the agitated expression and harmonic adventuresomeness of its intervening episodes.

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Frédéric ChopinBorn February 22, 1810; Zelazowa-Wola, PolandDied October 17, 1849; Paris, France

Waltz in A Minor, Op. 34, No. 2

Waltz in F Minor, Op. 70, No. 2

Waltz in D-flat Major, Op. 64, No. 1 (Minute)

COMPOSED1831, 1842, 1847

The waltz was descended from an Austrian peasant dance called a ländler, a heavy-handed (footed?) affair in moderate triple meter that gained great popularity during

Mozart’s last years in Vienna. The Viennese went mad over the new dance, and spent many nights literally dancing until dawn. Franz Schubert, the only one of the leading Viennese classical masters actually born in that city, wrote some delightful parlor-room specimens of the dance. It was really in the 1830s and ’40s, however, that the waltz established its form and style and became a European mania. Johann Strauss, Sr., led a crack orchestra in his own compositions, which were faster tempo and more lilting modernizations of the old ländler. So great was the popularity of this music during Strauss’s lifetime that, during at least one carnival season, the ballrooms of Vienna were made to accommodate 50,000 people in an evening—in a city with a population of 200,000! Frédéric Chopin knew and admired the waltzes of Strauss, and he set about creating his own version of the genre specially suited to his soirées in the sophisticated salons of Warsaw and Paris. Chopin’s fifteen waltzes, composed throughout his life, were not intended for danc-ing, but were meant to capture the sweep and joie de vivre of the popular dance for the concert platform. They were among the most popular of his works during his lifetime.

Each of the three waltzes of Chopin’s op. 34, published simultaneously in December 1838 by Breitkopf and Hartel in Leipzig and Schlesinger in Paris as Trois valses brillantes, was dedicated to a different wealthy society lady. The melancholy Waltz no. 2 in A minor, which Chopin claimed to be his own favorite among his waltzes, dates from 1831, the year he settled in Paris. The piece was dedicated to the Baroness d’Ivry, one of his earliest aristocratic students in the city.

The three waltzes of op. 70 were composed over a dozen years and only gathered together by the Berlin firm of Schlesinger and issued six years after Chopin’s death. Opus 70, no. 2, in F minor (1842), takes a wistful melody for its opening section and a widely arching theme for its second. (In some editions, these sections are repeated in order.)

Jim Samson, in his study of Chopin’s music, called the three op. 64 waltzes “the collective high points of Chopin’s contribution to the genre, presenting contrasting and complementary views of the dance, while at the same time reiterating and refining the gestures of earlier pieces.” They were written in 1846–47 to fulfill a publishing contract that Chopin had recently entered into with Breitkopf and Hartel. The first of the three op. 64 waltzes (popularly known as the Minute Waltz, though for its small scale rather than for its duration) was dedicated to the Countess Delphine Potocka, one of the grandes dames of the Parisian salons, and a lady of wealth and taste who also possessed a fine singing voice. She was one of Chopin’s earliest supporters after he arrived in the French capital in 1833, and the two may have been lovers for a brief time.

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Carl Maria von WeberBorn December 18, 1786; Eutin, GermanyDied June 5, 1826; London, England

Sonata No. 2 in A-flat Major, Op. 39

COMPOSED1814–16

Carl Maria von Weber earned his most conspic-uous place in musical history as the founder of German romantic opera. He also was a gifted composer across a range

of genres that rivaled those of Mozart’s all- encompassing genius, a pioneering orchestra and opera conductor, a respected essayist and critic, and a brilliant pianist who was praised not only by press and public for the expressiveness and fluidity of his playing on tours across northern Europe, but also even by the piano movers who transported his instrument for a private house concert in Giessen in 1810. The movers were so impressed that they refused remuneration because they said they had “already been repaid by the delight of hearing him perform.”

Weber began his Sonata no. 2 in A-flat major, intended for his own appearances as a piano virtuoso, in 1814, a year after he had been appointed music director at the opera house in Prague. Weber found rewards in the position— not least a passionate love for Caroline Brandt, one of the company’s sopranos—but also many difficulties (ceaseless grumbling over his exact-ing standards of performance, the failure of his cherished production of Fidelio, the strain of Prague’s winters on his always-frail health). So he resigned in September 1816, when Caroline was hired as a prima donna for an assignment in Berlin. Weber moved with her to Berlin and completed his A-flat piano sonata soon thereaf-ter. He and Caroline were married a year later, perhaps not coincidental facts, since his pupil Julius Benedict recorded that his teacher was “wrapped up in the love of his future partner for life” when he wrote it.

Some of Weber’s romantic feelings for his fiancée may well have filtered into the sonata’s opening movement, whose main theme gains a

certain pastoral quality from its unaffected, horn-call intervals and easily flowing motion. The transition to the subsidiary subject is animated by sweeping, quicksilver figurations that Weber calculated would impress his auditors. The second theme, built from short scale segments, is brief and quickly gives way to more showy passagework to close the exposition. The devel-opment section is long and dramatic, testament to both Weber’s keyboard skills and his powers of motivic and harmonic invention. The recapitu-lation is concerned mostly with the main theme, with the second subject recalled just before the movement’s emphatic closing gestures.

The Andante, a funeral march with free variations, may have been Weber’s tribute to Beethoven and the slow movement of his Eroica Symphony. (Both are in the key of C minor.) Weber initially had reservations about the powerful iconoclasms of Beethoven’s music, but he had changed that estimation by 1813, when he arrived in Prague, where the Eroica had entered the local orchestra’s repertory in 1807, three years after its premiere in Vienna. Weber produced Fidelio in Prague and Dresden, and met Beethoven in Vienna in early October 1823, when he expressed his admiration for his host, but was appalled by the disorder of his apart-ment. (It is one of the curiosities of music history that three of musical romanticism’s greatest pio-neers died in consecutive years: Weber in 1826, Beethoven in 1827, and Schubert in 1828.)

Weber titled the third movement Menuetto capriccioso, an ironically witty name invoking the staid old court dance, in view of the music’s breakneck virtuosity, whiplash dynamics, and central trio’s obsessive repetitions. The rondo finale returns some of the halcyon mood of the sonata’s opening, though it still allows for a sufficiency of fancy fingerwork.

©2017 Richard E. Rodda

Richard E. Rodda teaches at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.

© 2017 Chicago Symphony Orchestra