NINETY-FOURTH SEASON
Sunday, March 16, 2025, at 3:00
Piano Series
MAO FUJITA
CHOPIN Twenty-Four Preludes, Op. 28
No. 1 in C Major: Agitato
No. 2 in A Minor: Lento
No. 3 in G Major: Vivace
No. 4 in E Minor: Largo
No. 5 in D Major: Allegro molto
No. 6 in B Minor: Lento assai
No. 7 in A Major: Andantino
No. 8 in F-sharp Minor: Molto agitato
No. 9 in E Major: Largo
No. 10 in C-sharp Minor: Allegro molto
No. 11 in B Major: Vivace
No. 12 in G-sharp Minor: Presto
No. 13 in F-sharp Major: Lento
No. 14 in E-flat Minor: Allegro
No. 15 in D-flat Major: Sostenuto
No. 16 in B-flat Minor: Presto con fuoco
No. 17 in A-flat Major: Allegretto
No. 18 in F Minor: Allegro molto
No. 19 in E-flat Major: Vivace
No. 20 in C Minor: Largo
No. 21 in B-flat Major: Cantabile
No. 22 in G Minor: Molto agitato
No. 23 in F Major: Moderato
No. 24 in D Minor: Allegro appassionato
INTERMISSION
MOZART Twelve Variations on Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman, K. 265
BEETHOVEN Thirty-Two Variations on an Original Theme in C Minor, WoO 80
BEETHOVEN
Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57 (Appassionata)
Allegro assai
Andante con moto—
Allegro ma non troppo
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
COMMENTS by Richard E. Rodda
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
Born February 22, 1810; Żelazowa Wola (near Warsaw), Poland
Died October 17, 1849; Paris, France
Twenty-Four Preludes, Op. 28
COMPOSED 1836–38
By the summer of 1838, Chopin’s health was showing disturbing signs of decline, and George Sand, the flamboyantly iconoclastic novelist who was his muse and protectress, told him that they needed to leave Paris before damp winter set in. They settled on the distant Mediterranean island of Majorca, off the eastern coast of Spain, which friends (who had not been there) assured them was blessed with abundant sunshine and fresh air. Chopin sold the rights to his twenty-four preludes, which he had been planning (and perhaps sketching) since 1836, to the publisher Camille Pleyel to help finance the trip (500 francs in advance, 1,500 upon delivery of the manuscript), and he, Sand, and her son and daughter left Paris in October. Sand recorded that Chopin was “fresh as a rose and rosy as a turnip” when they embarked from Barcelona for Majorca on November 7 and that he had stocked up on manuscript paper in anticipation of a fruitful retreat away from Paris.
Their high spirits were little dampened when they had trouble finding a place to stay in Palma—they had to settle for noisy rooms above a cooper’s shop—and Chopin reported to his university friend Julius Fontana, “I am at Palma, among palms, cedars, cactuses, olive trees, oranges, figs, pomegranates, etc. The sky is turquoise, the sea like emeralds, the air as in heaven. A superb life! I am close to what is most beautiful. I feel better.”
The company moved to a sparsely furnished house at the edge of Palma a few days later, where the bad luck that was to mark their Majorca stay continued. While they were out for a long walk across the rugged country, a violent storm blew up, and Chopin contracted a severe case of bronchitis. The rains returned, the house became miserably dank, and Chopin got worse. The physician who Sand summoned diagnosed Chopin’s malady as consumption, the highly contagious scourge of the nineteenth century, and their landlord demanded that they leave his property before it became infected. The party transferred to the French embassy for a few days and then moved to converted cells in a deserted
monastery at Valldemosa, situated in a wild and romantic spot six miles from town. “He is recovering, and I hope he will soon be better than before,” wrote Sand on December 14, just before they installed themselves at Valldemosa. “His goodness and patience are angelic.”
Chopin was well enough by the end of December to write down two more of the preludes that he had promised to Pleyel, though his work was considerably hampered by a dilapidated old piano, the only one he could find for himself on the island. The storms continued, and his health varied from day to day, but he still found some joy in the time on Majorca—“Everything here breathes poetry, and the scenery is wonderfully colored,” he wrote to a friend. A good piano, sent from Paris two months before by Pleyel, finally arrived in mid-January, and it inspired him to complete the preludes and send them off to Pleyel in short order. But, by then, the spartan accommodations, the shabby treatment by the locals (whose antagonism had been aroused by the visitors’ unmarried state), the rambunctious children, the poor weather, and the continuing fragility of Chopin’s health had brought them to a state of loathing the island. Sand concluded that the Majorca venture had been “a complete disaster.” When they sailed for Barcelona on February 15, Chopin’s health was much worse than when they had arrived three months before. Their crossing, in a cargo boat laden with live pigs, was rough, and Chopin developed a serious hemorrhage of the lungs, from
which he lost much blood. A French doctor in Barcelona stabilized him well enough so that he could be taken to Marseille, and the company stayed there until leaving for Sand’s country villa at Nohant in May. Chopin’s strength revived with the coming of spring, and he, Sand, and the children, a year older, finally returned home to Paris in October. The preludes were published in France, England, and Germany later that year.
The very quintessence of the musical art—the ineffable balance of head and heart, of intellect and emotion—is embodied in Chopin’s preludes. Franz Liszt greatly admired their apparently unfettered romantic spontaneity, saying that these pieces “cradle the soul in golden dreams and elevate it to the regions of the ideal. . . . Everything seems fresh, elastic, created at the impulse of the moment, abounding with that freedom of expression that is characteristic of works of genius.” Robert Schumann (who had hailed Chopin in his review of the 1827 Variations on Mozart’s Là ci darem la mano with the encomium “Hats off, gentleman! A genius!”) wrote that they were “ruins, eagle wings, a wild motley of pieces . . . [with] a note of the morbid, the febrile, the repellent.” Yet undergirding—perhaps even making possible—the undeniably impetuous passion of the preludes is a precise, rigorous, almost coldly intellectual organization of both granular detail and overall architecture inspired by the twenty-four preludes and fugues comprising The
Well-Tempered Clavier of Johann Sebastian Bach, whom Chopin revered.
As in the WTC, each of Chopin’s movements concerns itself with just a single musical idea, presenting it, varying it, seeking its multiplicity of expressive shadings by turning it this way and that, as a jeweler would hold a precious stone to the light to see its many facets. The string on which these tiny, radiant musical gems is threaded is woven from the essence of the tonal system itself: in Bach, by alternating major and minor pieces arranged by ascending half steps (C major, C minor; C-sharp major; C-sharp minor; etc.); in Chopin, by alternating major and minor movements around the “Circle of fifths” (C major,
WOLFGANG MOZART
Born January 27, 1756; Salzburg, Austria
Died December 5, 1791; Vienna, Austria
A minor; G major, E minor [one sharp]; D major, B minor [two sharps]; etc.).
The wonder of Bach, of Chopin, indeed, of all good music, is the way in which the craftsmanlike calculation that is mandatory for the creation of a work of art (98% perspiration) becomes the invisible bearer of the expressive message (2% inspiration). The American philosopher Susanne Langer posited the concept that the artist’s principal job is “the search for significant form” in which to express emotion. There is no better example in all of music of the truth of Langer’s maxim than Chopin’s preludes—tiny, perfect sketches of the heart’s infinite moods realized through Olympian purity of thought.
Twelve Variations on Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman, K. 265
COMPOSED 1781
The tune for “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” one of childhood’s musical icons, first appeared in print in Les Amusements d’une heure (An Hour’s Amusements), published in Paris in 1761 by Jean-François Bouin under the title Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman (Ah! Let me tell you, Mama). The
traditional French text associated with the melody continues: Ah! Let me tell you, Mama, the cause of my torment. Papa wants me to reason like a grown-up. Me, I say that candy has greater value than reason. The source of the tune is unknown (the Neue Mozart Ausgabe calls it anonymous), but it is one of the family of melodies with similar elemental intervallic motion that probably date back to the Middle Ages; closely related variants of the “Twinkle” melody are found from Norway to China. The
familiar English text, titled “The Star,” was written by Jane Taylor, a British children’s poet, with her sister, Ann, and published (without music) in London in 1806 in Rhymes for the Nursery. Mozart probably became acquainted with Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman during his unsuccessful job-hunting trip to Paris in 1778, when he composed variations on two other French themes: Je suis Lindor, K. 354/299a (the hit tune from Antoine Laurent Baudron’s opera based on Beaumarchais’s Le barbier de Séville of 1775; Baudron’s Le mariage
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 16, 1770; Bonn, Germany
Died March 26, 1827; Vienna, Austria
de Figaro followed in 1784, two years before Mozart’s); and Lison dormait, K. 264/315d (from Nicolas Dezède’s Julie of 1772). The Twelve Variations on Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman, however, were not composed until after he had settled in Vienna in 1781. Though their style and progressively increasing technical demands indicate that they were probably written for his students, Mozart here used his matchless creative alchemy to conjure touching and timeless things from the music and memories of childhood.
Thirty-Two Variations on an Original Theme in C Minor, WoO 80
COMPOSED 1806
The thirty-two variations in C minor (which shares its impassioned key with the Fifth Symphony, Third Piano Concerto, Pathétique Sonata, Coriolan Overture, and some half-dozen of Beethoven’s chamber compositions) seem to have been
written to fulfill a publisher’s demand for such works—the score was issued by the Viennese firm of Kunst und Industrie-Comptoir in March 1807, just a few months after it was completed. Beethoven did not regard the composition highly enough to trouble with assigning it an opus number (it was designated WoO 80—“Werk ohne [without] Opuszahl [Opus Number]”—in the standard Kinsky-Halm catalog), and he later scoffed at having written it. When
opposite page: Wolfgang Mozart, portrait sketched and engraved by Edmé Quenedey (1756–1830). Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France | this page: Ludwig van Beethoven, portrait on ivory by Christian Horneman (1765–1844), 1803. Bodmer Collection, Beethoven-Haus Bonn, Germany | next page: Beethoven, engraving by Johann Joseph Neidl (1776–1832) after a portrait by Gandolph Ernst Stainhauser von Treuberg (1766–1805), 1801
he heard the daughter of the piano maker Andreas Streicher practicing the piece one day, he reportedly asked, “By whom is that?” “Why, by you,” came the reply. “Such nonsense by me?”
The composer seriously underestimated his work, which exhibits both a strong formal logic and the powerful, unsettled emotions associated in his music with the key of C minor. The compact theme is only eight measures long, but the German composer and music scholar Otto Klauwell observed that it is “very pregnant harmonically. In each of its measures, there is a definite change of harmony, and after the second and fourth measures, an implied modulation.” Because the individual variations on this aphoristic melody unfold almost without pause, the work takes on the character of a chaconne, the ancient baroque form built on a recurring harmonic pattern, which reached the pinnacle of its development
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
in Sebastian Bach’s awe-inspiring example in the D minor partita for unaccompanied violin (BWV 1004).
Klauwell concluded his analysis of the C minor variations by noting that Beethoven’s mutations of the theme were
so rich in relations and so meaningfully interconnected in their various parts that despite the absence of changes in modulation, key, and time signature, the hearer’s interest is captured undiminished, even increased, down to the very end. We see from this work how Beethoven always kept approaching the problem of the variations form from a new side and how his primary aim, in contrast to the stereotypes of an earlier period, was to give his sets of variations individuality and raise them to the level of his other works.
