Program

May 14, 2014, at 6:30 (Afterworks Masterworks, performed with no intermission)

Vladimir Jurowski ConductorEugene Izotov Oboe

music by richard StraussSerenade in E-flat Major, Op. 7Oboe ConcertoMetamorphosenThe Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBBM Newsradio 780 and 105.9FM for its generous support of the Afterworks Masterworks series.

Thursday, May 15, 2014, at 8:00Friday, May 16, 2014, at 1:30Saturday, May 17, 2014, at 8:00

Vladimir Jurowski ConductorEugene Izotov OboeDorothea röschmann Soprano

music by richard Strauss

Serenade in E-flat Major, Op. 7

Metamorphosen

IntErmISSIon

Oboe ConcertoAllegro moderato—Andante—Vivace

EugEnE IzOTOV

Four Last SongsFrühlingSeptemberBein SchlafengehenIm Abendrot

DOrOThEA röSChMAnn

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OnE hunDrED TwEnTy-ThIrD SEASOn

Chicago Symphony orchestrariccardo muti Music Director Pierre Boulez helen regenstein Conductor EmeritusYo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce green Creative Consultant

These concerts are sponsored by Linda and Tom Heagy in memory of Ruth and Clarence Heagy. Additional support is provided by a generous anonymous donor.This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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CommEntS by Phillip huscher

R ichard Strauss’s life spanned nearly a century, from the age of Wagner to that of Boulez. As a boy, he heard Clara Schumann play the piano, yet he outlived both Bartók and Webern. Strauss

was born the year Abraham Lincoln was reelected president of the United States; the year he died, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb.

Strauss’s career could not keep pace with the staggering changes that took place in music. He first made his name as a leader of the avant-garde: his tone poems carried orchestral music to unforeseen heights of descriptive writing and instrumental opu-lence, his early operas Salome and Elektra brought modern music to the brink of ato-nality. But Strauss was uncomfortable in the role of revolutionary, and, shortly after 1910 he appeared to change direction. As early as 1916, when Stravinsky and Schoenberg were making news with their radical ideas, Strauss recognized that he no longer played a major role at the forefront of serious musical activity. “I’m the only composer nowadays,” he wrote that year, “with some real humor and a sense of fun and a marked gift for parody.” Strauss continued to write music in the German romantic tradition—music that still embraced melody and tonality—and he grew increasingly indifferent to even the most advanced trends. “Haven’t I the right, after all, to write what music I please?” he asked in 1924. “I cannot bear the tragedy of the present time. I want to create joy. I need it.”

Although his tone poems immediately became staples of the orchestral literature and his new operas were always eagerly awaited, in many quarters Strauss was written off as a nostalgic figure from a bygone era—a composer with a grand and distinctive voice who simply had nothing to say. But Strauss, in fact, had the last word. Near the end of his life he recaptured something of his old creative fire and energy, and he enjoyed one final, glorious Indian summer—the time in which he composed the three major works on this week’s program: Metamorphosen, the Oboe Concerto, and the Four Last Songs. But to open this concert, we begin with a flashback to the earliest work in his catalog that is still performed with any regularity, the Serenade for Winds—a quick glance back more than sixty years to the music with which one of the greatest careers in music began.

Richard Strauss, his son Franz, and his wife Pauline

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richard StraussBorn June 11, 1864, Munich, Germany.Died September 8, 1949, Garmisch, Germany.

Serenade in E-fl at major, op. 7

ComPoSED1881

FIrSt PErFormanCEnovember 27, 1882; Dresden, germany

FIrSt CSo PErFormanCESApril 20 & 21, 1900, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting

moSt rECEnt CSo PErFormanCESnovember 27, 29 & 30, 1985, Orchestra hall. Erich Leinsdorf conducting

July 22, 1988, ravinia Festival. Edo de waart conducting

InStrUmEntatIontwo fl utes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns

aPProXImatE PErFormanCE tImE11 minutes

“My mother tells of my earliest childhood that I used to react with a smile to the sound of the horn and with loud crying to the sound of a violin,” Richard Strauss wrote in his old age. Small wonder, for Richard’s father, the man who stayed home to

practice his music while other fathers went to the offi ce, was perhaps the most famous horn player in Europe. Franz Strauss was the principal horn of the Munich Court Orchestra—a post he held for forty-two years—and he encouraged and steered his son’s musical ambitions. Neither one ever lost respect for the other, though they once came to blows over the music of Richard Wagner.

Franz Strauss scrupulously orchestrated his son’s musical education. He asked his colleague August Tombo, the orchestra’s harpist, to give Richard piano lessons when he was barely four, and four years later he persuaded his cousin Benno Walter to teach him the violin. Franz raised his son on the classics. Th ey read Goethe together by the fi re, and they admired and played the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. (Schubert and Mendelssohn also were favor-ites.) Franz hated Wagner—both the man and his music. When the Munich Opera gave the fi rst performances of Tristan and Isolde and Die Meistersinger, he played the important horn solos

magnifi cently, though he detested every note. “Strauss is an unbearable fellow,” Wagner once said, “but when he plays his horn, one cannot be cross with him.” Th e last time the two men spoke, during rehearsals for Parsifal, there was some disagreement about a communal lunch for the orchestra, and they ended up arguing over sour gherkins.

Franz Strauss tried to protect his son from Wagner’s music, but one day he came home and heard Richard playing through a score of Tristan at the piano. Despite his father’s eff orts, Richard was infatuated with the Wagnerian music drama. Although that realization caused a serious family squabble, it helped Richard to fi nd his own voice as a composer. Years later, when Richard Strauss was nearly as famous as Wagner, Franz had to admit that he was now bewildered by his own son’s music; listening to Salome, he said, made him feel as if he had ants in his pants.

S trauss wrote his fi rst compositions when he was six—a Christmas carol and a little polka for piano—and from then on writing

music remained a favored pastime. “I was always fonder of composing than studying,” he recalled. (In later years, playing cards became his other passion.) Strauss’s earliest signifi cant works—a pedestrian string quartet and a cello sonata straightjacketed by textbook form, both com-posed in the early 1880s—reveal his father’s taste for classical forms. But with the more individual

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serenade for thirteen winds that opens this all-Strauss concert, we find the first stirrings of the composer who would soon conquer concert halls and opera houses around the world. Even so, Strauss later dismissed the serenade as “no more than the respect-able work of a music student.”

S trauss had just turned seventeen when he composed his serenade.

In it, Strauss stands at the crossroads, honoring the obvious models by Mozart

and Mendelssohn on the one hand, yet also prov-ing himself an ambitious original thinker. Strauss tips his hat to his father by borrowing the most

classical of structures, sonata form, for his single-movement design, and then, in the recapitulation, by giving the luscious main theme to the horns. But although the serenade is steeped in the past and colored by mem-ory, heritage, and tradition, it also opens the door to a new career as big and bold as any we have known.

Richard and Franz Strauss

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POWER AND DRAMA

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richard Strauss

Metamorphosen, Study for 23 Solo Strings

Arturo Toscanini said, “To Strauss the composer I take off my hat; to Strauss the man I put it on again.” Toscanini could never forget how easily Strauss stepped in to conduct the production of Wagner’s Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1933 from

which he himself had withdrawn to protest Hitler’s ban on Jewish artists. While many important conductors and performers fl ed their homelands rather than cooperate with the Nazi regime, Germany’s most famous living musician stayed put, absorbed in writing music while the world waged war around him. It was Strauss’s misfortune to live at a time that would pit his creative abilities against his understanding of the larger issues of the world—in a country where music and politics became inseparable at the height of World War II.

Shortly after the Parsifal episode, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, appointed Strauss president of the new state music bureau without even asking him. From that point on, Strauss could no longer lead the self-contained, private life he always had enjoyed. Even his work and his family no longer off ered refuge—his new librettist, Stefan Zweig, fl ed to Switzerland because he was Jewish, cutting short a promising collaboration, and the welfare of Strauss’s own daughter-in-law, also a Jew, was now in danger.

Despite the ways the war touched his own life and the lives of many people he knew, it was ultimately through music that Strauss came to terms with the devastation of Nazi power. When he learned of the destruction of the opera houses

in Weimar and Munich, he gave in to grief and outrage—his world had collapsed. Virtually every major opera house or concert hall in his land was now rubble. He wrote:

Th e burning of the Munich Court Th eater, where Tristan and Die Meistersinger received their fi rst performances, where I fi rst heard Freischütz seventy-three years ago, where my father sat at the fi rst horn desk for forty-nine years—it was the greatest catastrophe of my life; there is no possible consolation, and, at my age, no hope.

Strauss had led a charmed life. In a very real sense, these were the most shattering personal losses he ever experienced—the great master-pieces of German music were his childhood text-books and the halls and theaters themselves were familiar guideposts in the landscape he dearly loved. Shortly after the bombing of Dresden, the last German city to fall, Strauss began this work, a requiem of sorts for German civilization, for strings alone. It was fi nished in one month—a month during which Strauss fi nally confronted his past and once again became a great composer.

During this time, Strauss was reading the complete works of Goethe from cover to cover, and that’s probably where he found his title, Metamorphosen (Metamorphosis), for it was a word Goethe often used, as late as the titles of two of his last poems. Strauss never explained the choice; most listeners assume it refers to the way he develops his musical material. But in a work that’s as personal as anything Strauss ever wrote (including such autobiographical pieces as Ein Heldenleben and the Domestic Symphony), it’s inconceivable that his title doesn’t suggest a more profound kind of transformation.

ComPoSED1945

FIrSt PErFormanCEJanuary 25, 1946; zurich, Switzerland

FIrSt CSo PErFormanCESFebruary 10 & 11, 1949, Orchestra hall. Fritz Busch conducting

moSt rECEnt CSo PErFormanCESDecember 10, 11 & 12, 2009, Orchestra hall. nicholas Kraemer conducting

InStrUmEntatIonten violins, fi ve violas, fi ve cellos, three basses

aPProXImatE PErFormanCE tImE26 minutes

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After he had begun work on this score, Strauss recognized the similarity between one of his main musical ideas and the famous funeral march from

Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. Like a great novelist, he made the most of sheer coincidence and even allowed the cellos and basses to quote Beethoven’s theme in the final measures, where he wrote in his manuscript: “In Memoriam!” Another passage recalls a theme from King

Mark’s lament in act 2 of Tristan and Isolde and its appearance in this requiem for German musical culture is apt.

W ith its dense chromaticism, intri- cate counterpoint, and Wagnerian drive sweeping toward a great

climax, Strauss’s score is a memorial to a type of music that had been abandoned long before 1945. Metamorphosen might well have been composed thirty or forty years earlier, for Strauss had disdained all the more recent trends. After writing the early tone poems (brilliantly launched by Don Juan) and the spectacular operas Salome and Elektra, Strauss turned his back on the musical advances of the day. For the next three decades, his music seemed to stand still, locked in another time. Metamorphosen succeeds so brilliantly because Strauss at last found a way to address the present with the voice of the past.

Two days after Strauss finished Metamorphosen, the Americans took Nürnberg, where Wagner’s Meistersingers once triumphed; two weeks later, Hitler killed himself.

Stefan Zweig

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richard Strauss

oboe Concerto

ComPoSED1945, revised 1948

FIrSt PErFormanCEFebruary 26, 1946; zurich, Switzerland

FIrSt CSo PErFormanCEnovember 23, 1957, Orchestra hall. ray Still as soloist, Fritz reiner conducting

moSt rECEnt CSo PErFormanCESMay 23, 24, 25 & 28, 2002, Orchestra hall. Alex Klein as soloist, Iván Fischer conducting

InStrUmEntatIonsolo oboe, two fl utes, english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, strings

aPProXImatE PErFormanCE tImE26 minutes

CSo rECorDIng1998. Alex Klein as soloist, Daniel Barenboim conducting. Teldec

Richard Strauss spent much of World War II behind closed doors, taking refuge from the destruction of his beloved Germany and from the politics he didn’t completely under-stand. American soldiers arriving at the Garmisch villa which he had built

with the royalties from Salome were greeted with “I am the composer of Rosenkavalier; leave me alone.” But Strauss befriended some of the Americans, and one of those he invited back was John de Lancie, an oboist in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra before he joined the army. (He later was a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra; Strauss inexplicably referred to him as “an oboe player from Chicago.”) One evening, de Lancie asked Strauss if he had ever considered writing an oboe concerto. Strauss said that he had not. Case closed.

Characteristically, it was the devastation of musical landmarks—the bombing of the opera houses at Dresden, Weimar, and Munich—that made Strauss look up from his desk and acknowl-edge that the world was no longer the place he once knew. In the spring of 1945, he responded to the horror of war with Metamorphosen, and then in May, after the surrender of Germany, he began this oboe concerto for the American soldier. (Although Strauss downplayed his workload at the time, calling composition mere “wrist exer-cises,” a sketchbook discovered in 1980 reveals how much he struggled over this score, even completely rearranging the sequence of musical phrases before he was done.)

Th e preliminary score (the so-called short score which contains the notes, without details of orchestration) was the last music written at the Garmisch villa. It’s dated 14 September 1945—a

few days before the composer and his wife Pauline took refuge in Switzerland, where Strauss could continue his work in almost total isolation. Temporarily living in Baden, halfway between Basel and Zurich, Strauss fi nished the score in less than six weeks. Th e premiere was given in Zurich in February 1946.

L ike Metamorphosen and the Four Last Songs that follow, the Oboe Concerto is part of the composer’s fi nal creative

fl owering. Unlike Metamorphosen, it doesn’t refl ect on the diffi cult times, but off ers, instead, “shavings from an old man’s work-shop, unassuming and written primarily with a desire to entertain.” Still, like so much of Strauss’s music, it touches on deeper feelings.

Th e three movements are carefully woven together into one continuous fl ow of song. In the fi rst, the oboe revels in the kind of high-fl ying rhapsodic melody often found in his operas or in the Four Last Songs. At the very beginning, Strauss asks of his oboe what he would never expect of a singer: fi fty-six measures of seamless melody, bro-ken only once by a split-second rest. From there, the music proceeds, passing the time-honored signposts of sonata form, directly into a serene and thoughtful andante, which refl ects on material we have just heard. Not Ariadne, nor the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, nor the Countess in Capriccio has a more sublime aria. A cadenza, occasionally accompanied by recitative-like chords, leads us to the rondo fi nale, full of the high spirits and colora-tura that Zerbinetta sprinkles throughout Ariadne auf Naxos. Another cadenza and a lovely, lilting coda bring us back to where we started.

As it turned out, John de Lancie didn’t play the fi rst performance in Zurich, but he was given the exclusive rights to perform the work in America until the score was published.

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richard Strauss

Four Last Songs

ComPoSED1947–48

FIrSt PErFormanCEMay 22, 1950; London, England

FIrSt CSo PErFormanCESOctober 28 & 29, 1954, Orchestra hall. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as soloist, Fritz reiner conducting

moSt rECEnt CSo PErFormanCESDecember 13, 14 & 15, 2001, Orchestra hall. Jane Eaglen as soloist, Daniel Barenboim conducting

July 24, 2010, ravinia Festival. renée Fleming as soloist, Christoph Eschenbach conducting

InStrUmEntatIonsoprano, three fl utes and two piccolos, two oboes and english horn, two

clarinets and bass clarinet, three bas-soons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, harp, celesta, timpani, strings

aPProXImatE PErFormanCE tImE25 minutes

CSo rECorDIng1977. Lucia Popp as soloist, Sir georg Solti conducting. Decca (video)

Strauss didn’t live to hear these songs performed, although in a sense it didn’t matter, for the lovingly remembered, long since faded soprano of his wife Pauline was the only voice he would have wanted to hear singing this music.

Richard Strauss and Pauline de Ahna made an unusually powerful, if often volatile, match. Th ey met in 1887—she was twenty-fi ve, he twenty-three—before either of their careers had taken off , and once they married, seven years later, they became the music world’s most cele-brated couple, although his fame and success as a composer continued to soar while her days as a leading soprano would soon be over. Th e ups and downs of their long marriage were chronicled not only in the stories fondly recalled by friends and family, but also in Richard’s music itself, begin-ning with the full-length, not-always-fl attering portrait of Pauline played by the solo violin in Ein Heldenleben in 1899, and climaxing, in 1924, when Richard turned one of their habitual mari-tal spats into his new opera, Intermezzo.

In the autumn of 1947, their marriage stron-ger than ever (inexplicably to many who had witnessed its daily storms) after fi fty-three years in each other’s company, Strauss read a poem by Joseph Eichendorff that struck him like a thun-derbolt. Im Abendrot tells of a couple at the end of their long lifetime together—hand in hand, as

Eichendorff says—now facing death. Outwardly Strauss brushed aside all thoughts of his—and Pauline’s—mortality with his characteristic dry wit. (A reporter in London, where Strauss went that fall to attend a festival of his music, asked the eighty-three-year-old composer of his future plans. “Oh,” Strauss said, without missing a beat, “to die.”) But the setting of Im Abendrot he began that year suggests how deeply he felt about a subject he couldn’t bring himself to address except in music.

He and Pauline had been through so much together, from the dazzling early successes (the royalties from Salome alone built them the villa in Garmisch where they lived out their days) to the public failure of his recent music and the fear and anxiety of the Hitler years, when the life of his own Jewish daughter-in-law was in jeopardy. By 1947, Strauss knew that their best times were over, and that the world he had once known and loved and—perhaps more than any composer of the twentieth century—conquered, was now almost unrecognizable. But he had no way of putting all that into music until an admirer gave him a book of poetry by Hermann Hesse, the 1946 recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature. Strauss read Hesse’s poems not only with the thrill of discovery (Hesse wasn’t yet widely known, and far from the cult fi gure he would become), but also with the pain of recognition, for in these pages he saw himself and Pauline—hand in hand—facing their last days together. He immediately picked several poems to set to music. In the end he wrote just three songs that,

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together with Im Abendrot, extend his farewell to life and to love. He worked on virtually nothing else during the summer of 1948, and when these songs were done, he found that he had little energy left.

The following May, Strauss and Pauline moved back to the Garmisch villa they had been forced

to abandon at the height of the war. The night before his eighty-fifth birthday, he somehow found the strength to travel to Munich for the dress rehearsal of Der Rosenkavalier, which had provided one of the greatest triumphs of his career thirty-seven years before. Strauss asked to conduct

brief portions of the opera—a rather sad and dispiriting stunt that was captured on film, to the continuing detriment of his reputation as a great conductor.

In August, he had several mild heart attacks at his Garmisch home and began to fail quickly. Near the end, he is reported to have turned to

his daughter-in-law Alice and said, “Dying is just as I composed it in Death and Transfiguration.” But that was a young man’s idea of death as a great, transcendent experience—a spectacular ending provided for a blockbuster tone poem by its fearless and callow twenty-five-year-old

composer. Sixty years later, Strauss was bedridden; Pauline had been an invalid for some time. Despite his clever words, he couldn’t

dictate his own final chapter. But Strauss had always clung to his myths. At the end of Im Abendrot, when Eichendorff wonders “Could that be death?” Strauss changed das to dies, and, asking instead “Could this be death?” he quotes the quiet, rising theme from his Death and Transfiguration.

In September, Strauss died at home in his sleep. Pauline died the following May, just nine days before the premiere of her husband’s—and, in the deepest sense, her—four last songs. They were immediately acclaimed as among the very finest of Strauss’s achievements—music for which his entire career was preparation. Little in his output can match the beauty and depth of these songs—from the transparency of the orchestral writing, with its burnished horn solos and shim-mering birdsong, to the radiant soprano lines—rising on Lüften (skies), taking off in breathless flight at Vogelsang (birdsong), and—in one of the most unforgettable moments in music—soaring in phrases of pure rapture, to match the violin’s lofty melody, at Seele (soul).

A few last words. Since Strauss never dictated that these four songs were to be performed as a set, he indicated no

particular order. At the premiere, they were sung neither in chronological order nor in the sequence that is now customary. It was Ernst Roth, the composer’s friend and publisher, and the dedicatee of Im Abendrot, who later estab-lished the performance order and provided the not-quite accurate title that has stuck, Four Last Songs. In fact, we now know of a fifth song, written for voice and piano, Malven, that was composed later in 1948 for the soprano Maria Jeritza, who kept it hidden in her New York apartment until her death in 1986, when it was discovered among her papers. A few measures of sketches for yet another Hesse song were left unfinished on Strauss’s desk at his death.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Hermann Hesse

Joseph Eichendorff

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VIEr LEtZtE LIEDEr

FrühLIngIn dämmrigen Grüftenträumte ich langvon deinen Bäumen und blauen Lüften,von deinem Duft und Vogelsang.

Nun liegst du erschlossenin Gleiß und Zier,von Licht übergossenwie ein Wunder vor mir.

Du kennst mich wieder,du lockst mich zart.Es zittert durch all meine Gliederdeine selige Gegenwart.

Hermann Hesse

SEPtEmBErDer Garten trauert,kühl sinkt in die Blumen der Regen.Der Sommer schauertstill seinem Ende entgegen.

Golden tropft Blatt um Blattnieder vom hohen Akazienbaum,Sommer lächelt erstaunt und mattin den sterbenden Gartentraum.

Lange noch bei den Rosenbleibt er stehen, sehnt sich nach Ruh.Langsam tut er die [großen]müdgewordenen Augen zu.

Hermann Hesse

FoUr LaSt SongS

SPrIngIn somber shadowsI dreamed longof your trees, your blue skies,of your fragrance, and the song of birds.

Now you lie revealed,glistening, adorned,bathed in lightlike a miracle before me.

You recognize me,you beckon gently;my limbs tremblewith your blessed presence.

SEPtEmBErThe garden grieves,the cool rain sinks into the flowers.The summer shuddersand silently meets its end.

Leaf upon leaf drops goldenfrom the tall acacia tree.Wondering, faintly, summer smilesin the dying garden’s dream.

Long by the rosesshe lingers, yearning for peace.Slowly she closes her [wide]wearied eyes.

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BEIm SChLaFEngEhEnNun der Tag mich müd gemacht,soll mein sehnliches Verlangenfreundlich die gestirnte Nachtwie ein müdes Kind empfangen.

Hände, laßt von allem Tun,Stirn, vergiß du alles Denken;alle meine Sinne nunwollen sich in Schlummer senken.

Und die Seele, unbewacht,will in freien Flügeln schweben,um im Zauberkreis der Nachttief und tausendfach zu leben.

Hermann Hesse

Im aBEnDrotWir sind durch Not und Freudegegangen Hand in Hand,vom Wandern ruhen wir [beide]nun überm stillen Land.

Rings sich die Täler neigen,es dunkelt schon die Luft,zwei Lerchen nur noch steigennachträumend in den Duft.

Tritt her und laß sie schwirren,bald ist es Schlafenszeit,daß wir uns nicht verirrenin dieser Einsamkeit.

O weiter, stiller Friede,so tief im Abendrot!Wie sind wir wandermüde—ist dies etwa der Tod?

Joseph Eichendorff

Strauss omitted the words in brackets.

goIng to SLEEPNow made tired by the day,so my ardent desire shallwarmly greet the starry nightlike a tired child.

Hands, cease your doing,brow, forget all thought;all my senses nowwould sink into slumber.

And my soul, unguarded,would soar free in flight,to live life deep a thousandfoldin night’s magic circle.

at SUnSEtThrough sorrow and joywe have walked hand in hand;now we are at rest from our journeyabove the silent land.

The valleys descend all about us,the sky grows dark;only two larks yet soardreaming in the haze.

Draw close and let them flutter;soon it will be time to sleep;let us not lose our wayin this solitude!

O boundless, silent peace!So deep in the sunset!How weary we are of our journeying—can this be death?

© 2014 Chicago Symphony Orchestra