PROGRAM

NINETY-EIGHTH SEASON

Civic Orchestra of Chicago

Civic Orchestra of Chicago performances are sponsored in part by a generous grant from The Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation.

This performance is generously sponsored by the Nancy Lauter McDougal and Alfred L. McDougal Charitable Fund.

The appearance of Rossen Milanov is generously sponsored by Lisa and Paul Wiggin.

This program is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Monday, January 23, 2017, at 8:00

Rossen Milanov Conductor

RavelLe tombeau de CouperinPréludeForlaneMenuetRigaudon

DebussyLa merFrom Dawn to Noon on the SeaPlay of the WavesDialogue of the Wind and the Sea

INTERMISSION

BartókConcerto for OrchestraIntroduzione: Andante non troppo—Allegro vivaceGiuoco delle coppie: Allegretto scherzandoElegia: Andante non troppoIntermezzo interrotto: AllegrettoFinale: Presto

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COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher

Maurice RavelBorn March 7, 1875; Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées, FranceDied December 28, 1937; Paris, France

Le tombeau de Couperin, Suite for Orchestra

Considered too small and delicate for military service, Maurice Ravel realized that he could serve his country by writing music. But when his brother Edouard enlisted at the start of World War I, Ravel didn’t want to sit on the side-

lines. At the age of thirty-nine, he managed to get accepted as a nurse’s aide, leaving behind a number of unfinished scores and his seventy- four-year-old mother. Music was still on his mind, however. In October 1914, his first month on the job, he wrote to his former pupil, Roland-Manuel, about two new piano pieces he was planning, including a French suite—“No, it isn’t what you think: La Marseillaise will not be in it, but it will have a forlane and a gigue; no tango, however.” That was the beginning of Le tombeau de Couperin.

In March 1915, Ravel became a truck driver for the 13th Artillery Regiment. (He named the truck Adélaïde and signed his letters Chauffeur Ravel.) It was a dangerous, exhausting, and stressful assignment, and his health suffered. At least for a while, music took a back seat to the more pressing concerns of life and death. Early in 1917, his mother died; it was a terrible blow, which contributed even further to his physical and mental decline, and he was discharged from the army a few months later. While recuperating at his godmother’s country house, Ravel returned

to writing music, beginning with the French suite for piano.

R avel had been tempered by his first-hand experience of war. A frothy symphonic poem, Vien, which he abandoned during

the war, now became the bitter La valse. And the benign piano suite he had long envisioned, perhaps as a genial bit of nationalism, now carried the horrible weight of tragedy: each movement was dedicated to a friend who had died at the front. Back in familiar surroundings, but still haunted by memories of the war, Ravel completed the suite he now called Le tombeau de Couperin. What had begun as a homage to a golden era

of French music—the age of François Couperin and the eighteenth century in general—now paid gentle tribute to the victims of World War I. Ravel designed his own title page for the score, which included a draped funerary urn. The piano suite contained

COMPOSED1914–17, for piano, in six movements

1919, orchestration of four movements

FIRST PERFORMANCEFebruary 28, 1920; Paris, France (orchestral suite)

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, harp, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME16 minutes

The title page for the piano score of Le tombeau de Couperin designed by Ravel. Bibliothèque nationale de France

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six movements; as the composer promised, there was no hint of the Marseillaise. (Nor was there any tango, perhaps because that popular dance was then thought too scandalous for the concert hall.)

Before the war, Ravel’s own orchestrations of his piano pieces Mother Goose and the Valses nobles et sentimentales were wildly popular. In 1919, after the first performance of Le tombeau de Couperin, he began to orchestrate four of the six movements. As Roland-Manuel wrote, “This metamorphosis of piano pieces into symphonic works was a game for Ravel, a game played to perfection, so that the transcription outdid the charm of the original.” Le tombeau de Couperin is arguably Ravel’s greatest success in the sport. The translation from piano to full orchestra is handled with an almost impossi-ble finesse; Ravel carefully weighed every choice of instrument, showing impeccable concern for color, in all its subtle modulations, as well as for clarity and balance. The orchestration is a work of both enormous care and extreme economy.

L e tombeau de Couperin is the most gentle of war memorials—it’s about memory, not combat. It has neither the morbid sadness

of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen nor the anger of Dmitri Shostakovich’s grand wartime sym-phonies. It evokes those it honors, not the tragic circumstances of their deaths. Ravel borrows the forms of the baroque dance suite, beginning with a prelude that sets the presiding graceful tone. (The piano version includes a fugue and a toccata that Ravel chose not to orchestrate.) The second movement is a forlane, a northern Italian dance; before composing a note of his own, Ravel transcribed a forlane by Couperin as a way of getting to know the style. Ravel’s Menuet (like the Prélude) gives the oboe a prominent role. The rigaudon that concludes Ravel’s suite is an old dance from Provence that was sometimes used by Rameau and Bach, and much later by Grieg in his Holberg Suite, though seldom with such brilliance and panache.

Claude DebussyBorn August 22, 1862; Saint-Germain-en-Laye, FranceDied March 25, 1918; Paris, France

La mer (Three Symphonic Sketches)

COMPOSED1903–March 1905

FIRST PERFORMANCEOctober 15, 1905; Paris, France

INSTRUMENTATIONtwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, three bas-soons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets and two cornets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, glockenspiel, bass drum, two harps, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME26 minutes

Although Debussy’s parents once planned for him to become a sailor, La mer, subtitled Three Symphonic Sketches, proved to be his greatest seafaring adventure. Debussy’s childhood summers at Cannes left him with vivid memories

of the sea, “worth more than reality,” as he put it at the time he was composing La mer some thirty

years later. As an adult, Debussy seldom got his feet wet, preferring the seascapes available in painting and literature; La mer was written in the mountains, where his “old friend the sea, always innumerable and beautiful,” was no closer than a memory.

Like the great British painter J.M.W. Turner, who stared at the sea for hours and then went inside to paint, Debussy worked from memory, occasionally turning for inspiration to a few other sources. Debussy first mentioned his new work in a letter dated September 12, 1903;

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the title he proposed for the first of the three symphonic sketches, “Calm Sea around the Sanguinary Islands,” was borrowed from a short story by Camille Mauclair published during the 1890s. When Debussy’s own score was printed, he insisted that the cover include a detail from The Hollow of the Wave off Kanagawa, the most celebrated print by the Japanese artist Hokusai, then enormously popular in France.

We also know that Debussy greatly admired Turner’s work. His richly atmo-spheric seascapes recorded the daily weather, the time of day, and even the most fleet-ing effects of wind and light in ways utterly new to paint-ing, and they spoke directly

to Debussy. (In 1902, when Debussy went to London, where he saw a number of Turner’s paintings, he enjoyed the trip but hated actually crossing the channel.) The name Debussy finally gave to the first section of La mer, From Dawn to Noon on the Sea, might easily be that of a Turner painting made sixty years earlier, for the two shared not only a love of subject but also of long, specific, evocative titles.

T here’s something in Debussy’s first symphonic sketch very like a Turner painting of the sun rising over the sea.

They both reveal, in their vastly different media, those magical moments when sunlight begins to glow in near darkness, when familiar objects emerge from the shadows. This was Turner’s

favorite image—he even owned several houses from which he could watch, with undying fasci-nation, the sun pierce the line separating sea and sky. Debussy’s achievement, though decades later than Turner’s, is no less radical, for it uses famil-iar language in truly fresh ways. From Dawn to Noon on the Sea can’t be heard as traditional program music, for it doesn’t tell a tale along a standard time line (although Debussy’s friend Eric Satie reported that he “particularly liked the bit at a quarter to eleven”). Nor can it be read as a piece of symphonic discourse, for it is organized without regard for conventional theme and devel-opment. Debussy’s audiences, like Turner’s before him, were baffled by work that takes as its subject matter color, texture, and nuance.

Debussy’s second sketch too is all suggestion and shimmering surface, fascinated with sound for its own sake. Melodic line, rhythmic regular-ity, and the use of standard harmonic progres-sions are all shattered, gently but decisively, by the fluid play of the waves. The final Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea (another title so like Turner’s) captures the violence of two elements, air and water, as they collide. At the end, the sun breaks through the clouds. La mer repeatedly resists traditional analysis. “We must agree,” Debussy writes, “that the beauty of a work of art will always remain a mystery, in other words, we can never be absolutely sure ‘how it’s made’.”

La mer was controversial even during rehears-als, when, as Debussy told Stravinsky, the violinists tied handkerchiefs to the tips of their bows in protest. The response at the premiere was mixed, though largely unfriendly. It is hard now to separate the reaction to this novel and challenging music from the current Parisian view of the composer himself, for during the two years he worked on La mer, Debussy moved in with Emma Bardac, the wife of a local banker, leaving behind his wife Lily, who attempted suicide. Two weeks after the premiere of La mer, Bardac gave birth to Debussy’s child, Claude-Emma, later known as Chou-Chou. Debussy married Emma Bardac on January 20, 1908. The night before, he conducted an orchestra for the first time in public, in a program which included La mer. This time, it was a spectacular success, though many of his friends still wouldn’t speak to him.

The front cover of the first edition of La mer, for which Debussy chose Hokusai’s print The Hollow of the Wave off Kanagawa

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Béla BartókBorn March 25, 1881; Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania (now part of Romania)Died September 26, 1945; New York City

Concerto for Orchestra

COMPOSEDAugust 15–October 8, 1943

FIRST PERFORMANCEDecember 1, 1944

INSTRUMENTATIONthree flutes and piccolo, three oboes and english horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, side drum, bass drum, tam-tam, cymbals, triangle, two harps, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME35 minutes

For all the prestige his music commands today among American orches-tras, Béla Bartók was unhappy and largely ignored during the last four years of his life, which he spent in this country. The sad depar-ture from his native

Hungary in late 1940, to escape the Nazi invasion, was a nightmare itself for both Bartók and his wife Ditta, with a furtive night-train trip through Italy to Switzerland; passage by bus through France; a merciless customs inspection at the Spanish border; a night spent wandering through Lisbon in search of a place to sleep; and, finally, a rough crossing on an American cargo ship, with all luggage left behind. The first weeks in New York were little better—the English language was a minefield, and home was now a spartan hotel room. The Bartóks were perplexed by American ways, like eating cracked wheat for breakfast, and they were dumbfounded by a subway system so vast they once spent three hours wandering underground before they emerged, shamefaced, into the sunlight.

Bartók complained of “creative impotence,” and, in truth, he wrote nothing of substance during his first two years here. He played a few scattered concerts, including a duo-recital with his wife in Chicago that got very bad reviews—one “as bad as I never got in my life,” according to the composer, his mastery of our tongue still as uncertain as his verdict on life in America. In April 1942, Bartók’s health took a turn for

the worse; several medical examinations proved inconclusive. There were good days and bad, periods of high fever, occasional hospital stays. Pain in his joints made walking difficult. It was, truly, the beginning of the end.

And then, like the miracle great music always is, a masterpiece was born. In May 1943, Serge Koussevitzky, music director of the Boston Symphony, visited Bartók in his hospital room, prepared to write a check for $500, half payment for an orchestral piece he wished to commission in memory of his late wife Olga. Bartók was reluctant, fearing he wouldn’t be able to complete the work, but he finally accepted the offer—and Koussevitzky’s check. Had Bartók known the truth, he never would have agreed. The sugges-tion for the commission had not come directly from Koussevitzky (never a champion of Bartók before), but from Joseph Szigeti and Fritz Reiner, who greatly admired Bartók’s music and knew him well enough to know that he would refuse any effort he viewed as charity.

The Bartóks spent the summer at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. At first, Bartók busied himself prowling around the local library—he read an English translation of Don Quixote with no apparent difficulty. By mid-August, he was ready to put pen to paper, and found to his surprise that he was working “practically day and night” on the Koussevitzky commission. At least temporarily, his health improved, and when he returned to New York in October, he took the finished score with him. “Perhaps it is due to this improvement,” he had written to Szigeti “(or it may be the other way around) that I have been able to finish the work that Koussevitzky

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commissioned.” Koussevitzky, who conducted the first performance with the Boston Symphony in December 1944, called the Concerto for Orchestra “the best orchestral piece of the last twenty-five years,” an assessment few were to challenge.

A word about Bartók’s title—Concerto for Orchestra. Bartók’s work wasn’t the first, but only the most celebrated example

to bear this seemingly paradoxical title, which focuses the spotlight not on one solo instrument, but on the orchestra itself. Hindemith, Walter Piston, and Bartók’s fellow Hungarian—and dear friend—Zoltán Kodály had written con-certos for orchestra before him, just as Michael Tippett, Elliott Carter, and Shulamit Ran would after his great success. The concerto for orches-tra is a particularly twentieth-century idea—a reflection of the unprecedented virtuosity of the modern orchestra and of the desire to pour new wine into old bottles.

W ith no traditional form to follow, Bartók picked one he often favored: a symmetrical, mirror-like arrange-

ment of five movements, with a large, dark-hued andante at the center; light, quicker interludes on either side; and a powerful fast movement to anchor each end. The first sounds we hear are full of mystery and gloom, which don’t begin to sug-gest the sunlight, dancing, and outright humor that are right around the corner. The tone of both the opening movement and the central Elegia is stern, even tragic. The second and fourth movements will disrupt the mood, but only the life-asserting finale can dispel it.

The Giuoco delle coppie is one of Bartók’s most celebrated creations, in which pairs [coppie] of instruments take turns presenting an unprepos-sessing little tune launched by two bassoons at the interval of the sixth, and followed by oboes in thirds, clarinets in sevenths, flutes in fifths, and muted trumpets in major seconds. The Elegia for Olga Koussevitzky is, in Bartók’s words, a “lugu-brious death-song.” It’s also a prime example of

the composer’s “night music,” full of haunting, evocative sounds, and, ultimately, a deep calm.

The Intermezzo interrotto is exactly that—an interrupted intermezzo—the disruption being the march tune of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. Bartók first heard the symphony on the radio in Saranac Lake and thought the marching theme so banal he couldn’t resist say-ing so—in music that dissects the tune and then holds it up to the ridicule of the entire orchestra. It’s also worth remembering that Bartók had long questioned Koussevitzky’s championship of Shostakovich’s music at the neglect of his own. Bartók wasn’t a vindictive or mean-spirited man, but surely he enjoyed having the last laugh. The finale is dance music, brilliant and lively—especially in its perpetuum mobile sections—based on a straightforward, singable tune and con-structed with the contrapuntal dexterity of a master craftsman. It is, above all, a life-affirming statement from a man close to death.

B artók attended the triumphant premiere of the Concerto for Orchestra in December 1944, perhaps detecting the first signs

of a new wave of enthusiasm for his music. In the remaining months of his life, he completed all but the last few measures of the Third Piano Concerto. He left a viola concerto commissioned by William Primrose in a pile of sketches (later reconstructed by Tibor Serly). Bartók was unable to begin a seventh string quartet commissioned by Ralph Hawkes.

Bartók died in West Side Hospital, in New York City, in September 1945; he was buried, without ceremony or speeches, in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. His widow Ditta moved back to Budapest the following year and continued to play recitals of her husband’s music. She died in November 1982. In July 1988, the remains of Béla Bartók were returned to his native Hungary for a state burial.

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

© 2017 Chicago Symphony Orchestra