N INET Y-THI R D SEASON Saturday, February 3, 2024, at 7:30
Chamber Music Series Emanuel Ax Piano Leonidas Kavakos Violin Yo-Yo Ma Cello MUSIC BY LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Piano Trio in D Major, Op. 70, No. 1 (Ghost) Allegro vivace con brio Largo assai ed espressivo Presto
Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21 (arr. Wosner) Adagio molto—Allegro con brio Andante cantabile con moto Menuetto: Allegro molto e vivace Adagio—Allegro molto e vivace
INTERMISSION
Piano Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 70, No. 2 Poco sostenuto—Allegro ma non troppo Allegretto Allegretto ma non troppo Finale: Allegro
This performance is generously sponsored by The Negaunee Foundation and Zell Family Foundation.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association thanks The Negaunee Foundation and Zell Family Foundation for generously sponsoring this performance.
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COMMENTS by Richard E. Rodda LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Born December 16, 1770; Bonn, Germany Died March 26, 1827; Vienna, Austria
Piano Trio in D Major, Op. 70, No. 1 (Ghost) COMPOSED
1808
Countess Anna Maria von Erdödy, born in 1779, was a daughter of the distinguished Hungarian family of Niczk, whose name was associated with the royal houses of both Russia and Austria during the decades surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century. She was wedded to Count Peter von Erdödy when she was seventeen and bore him two daughters and a son, but the marriage proved to be an unhappy one, and as divorce was then impossible for Catholics, she separated from her husband and lived in Vienna. The countess possessed a not inconsiderable talent as a pianist, and her apartment in the Krugerstrasse (where her neighbors included Prince Karl Lichnowsky, one of Beethoven’s most faithful patrons and the dedicatee of the Second Symphony and the ballet Prometheus) was the scene of some of Vienna’s most elegant and sophisticated musical soirées. She carried on her active life despite the fact that, according to Beethoven’s biographer Richard Specht,
She was exceptionally frail and of an almost incorporeal thinness. Though she was partly disabled by paralysis of the lower limbs, this noble lady overcame all physical ills by mental and moral strength and her indomitable will. She could hardly walk and was forced to drag herself from chair to chair, leaning on the furniture at every step, or had to be helped. She was not beautiful, but the expression of her soft, melancholy eyes gave her face a peculiar charm. Beethoven first met Anna Maria around 1804, perhaps through the cellist Joseph Linke, whom she kept on retainer to participate in her household music, or through Lichnowsky. In the fall of 1808, Beethoven, who shifted his residence some two dozen times during his years in Vienna, accepted the offer of rooms in her apartment and settled in with his manservant. Despite the appearance that this living situation presented, his relationship with the countess seems to have been friendly rather than intimate. He confided in her, calling her his Beichtvater (Father Confessor) and probably felt drawn to
a b o v e : Ludwig van Beethoven, portrait in oil by Joseph Willibrord Mähler (1778–1860), 1804. Archive for Art and History, Berlin, Germany
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her because each had to bear a physical affliction, deafness in his case, impaired mobility in hers. “It is reasonable to suppose that he and the countess were friends, good friends, two human beings, kindred in several characteristics and interests, but not lovers,” concluded George R. Marek. Beethoven talked frequently in 1808 of quitting Vienna for some other, more welcoming venue. The Viennese premiere of Fidelio had produced a hornet’s nest of troubles for him, his request to present a concert in the city for his own benefit in 1807 had been denied, and the Mass in C (op. 86) that he had written to curry favor with Prince Nikolaus Esterházy had not produced its desired effect. “They’re forcing me to it,” he told the organist Wilhelm Rust; to the poet Heinrich Collin, whose drama Coriolanus had inspired one of his greatest overtures a year before, he admitted, “The thought that I certainly shall have to leave Vienna haunts me persistently.” He was all but convinced to abandon the city in October when he received an attractive offer from King Jêrome Bonaparte of Westphalia to become his kapellmeister at the generous salary of
600 gold ducats. It was at that critical juncture that Countess Erdödy helped forge an alliance of Princes Lobkowitz and Kinsky and Archduke Rudolph that guaranteed Beethoven an annual stipend of 4,000 florins if he would pledge himself “to permanently make his domicile in Vienna.” A formal agreement was signed, and Beethoven remained a Viennese for the rest of his life, though his annuity was adversely affected by the devaluation of the Austrian currency in 1811, the subsequent bankruptcy of Lobkowitz, and the death of Kinsky. (A lawsuit Beethoven brought in 1815 to reclaim his overdue stipend was resolved almost entirely in his favor.) In appreciation for the part she played in securing that important agreement, Beethoven wrote two excellent piano trios (op. 70) for the countess during the autumn of 1808 and played them for her at Christmastime with Linke and violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh. Beethoven stayed on at Krugerstrasse until March 1809, when he picked a silly quarrel with his hostess. The countess, it seems, had been giving Beethoven’s servant extra payments to put up with the cantankerous composer’s tactless
a b o v e : Archduke Rudolph of Austria (1788–1831), student and patron of Beethoven and later archbishop of Olmütz (now Olomouc in the Czech Republic). Portrait in oil by Johann Baptist von Lampi the Elder (1751–1830). Vienna Museum Collection
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behavior and not flee to a more considerate master. Beethoven took umbrage at this situation and roared out of the apartment, taking so little care for his next lodgings that he ended up for a short time with a room in a local brothel. He was so heated about the matter that he asked Breitkopf and Härtel, who had accepted the op. 70 trios for publication, to change the dedication from Countess Erdödy to Archduke Rudolph (“He has become very fond of these trios,” Beethoven rationalized), but then patched things up with her and reneged, allowing the original dedication to remain. The countess’s troubles did not end with Beethoven’s departure, however. She was accused of various forms of wantonness over the next fifteen years, from squandering the Erdödy family fortune to plotting the murder of her own son, but it is impossible now to sort out how many of her difficulties were attributable to her own guilt and how many to official Austrian reaction to her avowed Hungarian sympathies. She remained friendly with Beethoven (he dedicated to her the two cello sonatas, op. 102, of 1815) and stayed in Vienna until 1823 when she moved to Munich, where she died in 1837 at the age of fifty-seven.
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he first of the two trios for Countess Erdödy (D major, op. 70, no. 1) is disposed in a symmetrical formal design of three large movements arranged fast–slow–fast.
Though the main theme of the opening Allegro begins with a bold motif of scalar motion broken by wide rising leaps, much of the first movement is lyrical in nature, a characteristic that also marks the two works that immediately precede this trio in Beethoven’s catalog—the Sixth Symphony (op. 68) and the Cello Sonata in A major (op. 69). The subsidiary subject consists of the superimposition of a flowing, waveform line in octaves (strings) and a few interrupted phrases in sweet harmonies (piano). The central development section contains some carefully hewn instrumental conversation extracted from the earlier subjects and rises to a climax to usher in the recapitulation. In its eerie mood and cautious tread, the Largo stands in strong contrast to the music of optimism and energy that surrounds it. The themes and setting for this movement (which occasioned the work’s sobriquet—Ghost) were derived from some sketches that Beethoven made for the witches’ scene in an aborted opera to a libretto by Heinrich Collin on the subject of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, one of a sizable number of theatrical projects (including Romeo and Juliet) that the composer tinkered with at that time but never brought to fruition. The sonata-form finale returns the bright spirits of the opening movement to bring this splendid product of Beethoven’s most fertile period to a joyful close.
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Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21 (Arranged by Shai Wosner) COMPOSED
1799–1800
He was short, about five feet, four inches, thickset and broad, with a massive head, a wildly luxuriant crop of hair, protruding teeth, a small rounded nose, and a habit of spitting whenever the notion took him. He was clumsy, and anything he touched was liable to be upset or broken. Badly coordinated, he could never learn to dance, and more often than not managed to cut himself while shaving. He was sullen and suspicious, touchy as a misanthropic cobra, believed that everybody was out to cheat him, had none of the social graces, was forgetful, and was prone to insensate rages. Thus the late New York Times critic Harold Schonberg, in his book about The Lives of the Great Composers, described Ludwig van Beethoven, the burly peasant with the unquenchable fire of genius who descended, aged twenty-two, upon Vienna in 1792. Beethoven had been charged by his benefactor in his hometown of Bonn, Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, to go to the Austrian capital and “receive
the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.” He did study for a short time with Haydn, then universally regarded as the greatest living composer, but young Ludwig proved to be a recalcitrant student, and the sessions soon ended, though the two maintained a respectful, if cool, relationship until Haydn’s death in 1809. Beethoven was not to make his first impression upon the Viennese as a composition student, however, but as a pianist—a pianist unlike any seen before. In a world still largely accustomed to the reserved, genteel musical style of prerevolutionary classicism, he burst on the scene like a fiery meteor. Rather than the elegant, fluent style of a Mozart (dead less than a year at the time of Beethoven’s arrival), he played with a seeming wild abandon, thrashing upon the keyboard, breaking strings, trying to draw forth orchestral sonorities from the light, wood-frame Viennese pianos that regularly suffered under his onslaught. He repeatedly entreated piano manufacturers to build bigger, louder, sturdier instruments. (By the 1820s, they had.) Like his style of performance, the music he composed reflected the impassioned, powerful
t h i s pa g e : Ludwig van Beethoven, oil portrait of the composer as a young man painted by Carl Traugott Riedel (1769–1832), 1801 | o p p o s i t e pa g e : Image of Vienna’s Michaelerplatz, showing the Burgtheater, far right, where Beethoven premiered his First Symphony in 1800. From left are St. Michael’s Church, the Imperial Riding School, and a wing of the Hofburg Palace. Sketch by Carl Schütz (1745–1800). Artaria and Company, Vienna, Austria
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emotions that drove him throughout his life. The Viennese aristocracy took this young lion to its bosom. Beethoven expected as much. Unlike his predecessors, he would not assume the servant’s position traditionally accorded to a musician, refusing, for example, not only to eat in the kitchen but also becoming outspokenly hostile if he was not seated next to the master of the house at table. The more enlightened nobility, to its credit, recognized the genius of this gruff Rhinelander and encouraged his work. Shortly after his arrival, for example, Prince Lichnowsky provided Beethoven with living quarters, treating him more like a son than a guest. Lichnowsky even instructed the servants to answer the musician’s call before his own, should both ring at the same time. In large part, such gestures provided for Beethoven’s support during his early Viennese years. For most of the first decade after he arrived, Beethoven made some effort to follow the prevailing fashion in the sophisticated city. But though he outfitted himself with good boots, a proper coat, and the necessary accoutrements and enjoyed the hospitality of Vienna’s best houses, there never ceased to roil within him the untamed energy of creativity. It was only a matter of time before the fancy clothes were discarded, as a bear would shred a paper bag.
The year of the First Symphony, 1800, was a crucial time in Beethoven’s development. By then, he had achieved a success good enough to write to his old friend Franz Wegeler in Bonn, My compositions bring me in a good deal, and may I say that I am offered more commissions than it is possible for me to carry out. Moreover, for every composition I can count on six or seven publishers and even more, if I want them. People no longer come to an arrangement with me. I state my price, and they pay. Behind him were many works, including the op. 18 quartets, the first two piano concertos, and the Pathétique Sonata, which bear his personal imprint. At the time of this gratifying recognition of his talents, however, the first signs of his fateful deafness appeared, and he began the titanic struggle that became one of the gravitational poles of his life. Within two years, driven CS O.O RG
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from the social contact on which he had flourished by the fear of discovery of his malady, he penned the Heiligenstadt Testament, his cri de coeur against this wicked trick of the gods. The C major symphony stands on the brink of that great crisis in Beethoven’s life.
THE JOURNEY BEGINS Shai Wosner on his arrangement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 1 in C major, op. 21
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eethoven’s First Symphony starts off with the wrong chord. Two chords, in fact: one long, one short, and both out of place—they sound like an ending, not a beginning. The movie opens with the “The End” slide. Then another pair of chords is introduced, but this time, the effect is very different, even a tad melancholy— not quite another false start, yet still followed by silence. (Beethoven is too good to tell the same joke twice). Two more chords after that finally open up the way forward, and the whole piece unfolds. We often think of Beethoven as an unrelenting idealist (which he was), but in this symphony, he isn’t necessarily out to change the world. More ambitious, more dramatic, more groundbreaking (and more famous) ones will
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follow, full of idealistic fervor. But don’t mistake this one for anything less than original or forward-looking. In fact, those chords in the introduction encapsulate both where he comes from as an artist and where he is going. The faux-ending bit comes from his teacher Haydn, of course, the greatest master of subversive wit, who liked to break the fourth wall, musically speaking, by defying “proper” beginnings and endings. But it’s the subsequent series of chords that reveals the essence of Beethoven’s art, a prime example of how his source material lies not in ornate melodies or grandiose effects but rather in the most basic components of music—in this case, just unadorned chords—which dissolve into one another like in some miraculous chain reaction between elements in nature. Indeed, the main theme that drives the whole first movement is not a catchy tune (there will be plenty of those later on in the symphony) but chords that stretch and pull as if by some mysterious, magnetic force from which Beethoven extracts exhilarating energy. Chiseling ideas out of music at its most elemental, out of its very building blocks, will remain a defining principle of his creative genius for years, a thread that runs through the symphonies, from the youthful vigor of the very first to the explosively powerful statements yet to come.
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Piano Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 70, No. 2 COMPOSED
1808
The Trio in E-flat major, op. 70, no. 2, is lyrical and amiable throughout, largely eschewing the musical drama that Beethoven’s music so often generates and replacing the emotionally charged traditional adagio with a more genial second movement in the nature of an intermezzo. The work’s essential nature is established by the slow introduction, which is based on a reserved, stepwise motif shared by the three participants. The main body of the first movement is built from a cheerful main theme in lilting rhythms and a smooth subsidiary subject spun from the introduction’s scale motif. A compact development section using the main theme and a recapitulation of the exposition’s material carry the
movement to its coda, which recalls the introduction’s flowing motif and the dapper main theme. The second movement is a dual set of variations on alternating themes: one graceful and delicate, the other gruff and forceful. The reserve and elegance of the third movement suggest the old-fashioned minuet; a trio, with democratic phrase-trading between strings and piano, intervenes twice: minuet–trio– minuet–trio–minuet. The buoyant finale, a thematically rich sonata form, closes what Harry Halbreich characterized as “a most beautifully equipoised piece of music, which shows Beethoven at his felicitous lyrical best.”
Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.
a b o v e : Ludwig van Beethoven, portrait on ivory by Christian Horneman (1765–1844), 1803. Hans Conrad Bodmer Collection, Beethovenhaus-Bonn, Germany
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PROFILES Emanuel Ax Piano Born to Polish parents in what is today Lviv, Ukraine, Emanuel Ax moved to Winnipeg, Canada, with his family when he was a young boy. Ax made his New York debut in the Young Concert Artists Series and in 1974 won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. In 1975 he won the Michaels Award of Young Concert Artists, followed four years later by the Avery Fisher Prize. The 2023–24 season focuses on the world premiere of Anders Hillborg’s Piano Concerto, commissioned for Ax by the San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen, with subsequent performances in Stockholm and New York. Ax tours with partners Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma in continuation of the Beethoven for Three touring and recording project. In recital, he can be heard throughout the United States, culminating at Carnegie Hall in April. An extensive European tour includes concerts in the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, France, and the Czech Republic. Emanuel Ax has been a Sony Classical exclusive recording artist since 1987. Following the success of Brahms: The Piano Trios with Kavakos and Ma, the three artists launched Beethoven for Three—an ambitious, multi-year project to record all of Beethoven’s trios and symphonies arranged for trio. The first two discs of the project were released in
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2022. He has received Grammy awards for the second and third volumes of his cycle of Haydn’s piano sonatas. He has also made a series of Grammy-winning recordings with Yo-Yo Ma of sonatas for cello and piano by Beethoven and Brahms. In the 2004–05 season, Ax contributed to an International Emmy Award–winning BBC documentary commemorating the Holocaust that aired on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In 2013 Ax’s recording Variations received the ECHO Klassik Award for Solo Recording of the Year (Nineteenth Century Music/Piano). Emanuel Ax is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary doctorates of music from Skidmore College, New England Conservatory of Music, Yale University, and Columbia University. emanuelax.com
Leonidas Kavakos Violin Leonidas Kavakos is recognized across the world as a violinist and artist of rare quality, acclaimed for his matchless technique, his captivating artistry and superb musicianship, and the integrity of his playing. He regularly works with the world’s greatest orchestras and conductors and appears as recitalist in the world’s premier venues and festivals. P H OTO S © BY N I G E L PA R R Y
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Kavakos has developed close relationships with such major orchestras as the Vienna Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. He works closely with the major U.S. orchestras and the Dresden Staatskapelle, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, and Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala in Milan. In recent years, Kavakos has succeeded in building a strong profile as a conductor, having led the New York Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, Vienna Symphony, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Filarmonica della Scala, and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. Most recently, he conducted the Israel Philharmonic. In the 2023–24 season, Kavakos performed at the opening gala of Carnegie Hall with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Riccardo Muti. Later, he joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Hannu Lintu and the San Francisco Symphony under EsaPekka Salonen. He performs throughout Europe with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and returns to Staatskapelle Berlin, NDR Hamburg, Bergen Symphony, and Vienna Symphony. He conducts the Orchestre Philharmonique
de Radio France and, for the first time, the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. This season, Kavakos tours with regular recital partners Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma across the United States and Europe and returns to China for a series of recitals and performances with the China Philharmonic and Shanghai Symphony. He also performs Bach’s partitas and sonatas across Europe and Asia following the release of his critically acclaimed album Bach: Sei Solo. Kavakos is an exclusive recording artist with Sony Classics. Releases include Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, which he play-conducted with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the rerelease of his 2007 recording of sonatas by Beethoven for violin and piano with Enrico Pace, for which he was named ECHO Klassik Instrumentalist of the Year. In 2022 Kavakos released Beethoven for Three: Symphony No. 6 (Pastorale) and Op. 1, No. 3, arranged for trio, with Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma. Future albums from this series will contain arrangements of symphonies by Beethoven and will be released in the coming years. Born and brought up in a musical family in Athens, Greece, Kavakos curates an annual violin and chamber music master class in Athens, which attracts violinists and ensembles from all over the world. He plays the “Willemotte” Stradivarius violin of 1734. leonidaskavakos.com facebook.com/leonidas.kavakos.violin
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Yo-Yo Ma Cello Yo-Yo Ma’s multifaceted career is testament to his belief in culture’s power to generate trust and understanding. Whether performing new or familiar works for cello, bringing communities together to explore culture’s role in society, or engaging unexpected musical forms, Yo-Yo Ma strives to foster connections that stimulate the imagination and reinforce our humanity. Most recently, Yo-Yo Ma began Our Common Nature, a cultural journey to celebrate the ways nature can reunite us in pursuit of a shared future. Our Common Nature follows the Bach Project, a thirty-six-community, six-continent tour of J.S. Bach’s cello suites paired with local cultural programming. Both endeavors reflect Ma’s lifelong commitment to stretching the boundaries of genre and tradition to understand how music helps us imagine and build a stronger society. Ma advocates for a future guided by humanity, trust, and understanding. Among his many roles, he is a United Nations Messenger of Peace, the first artist ever appointed to the World Economic Forum’s board of trustees, a member of the board of Nia Tero, the U.S.-based nonprofit working in solidarity with Indigenous peoples and movements worldwide, and the founder of the global music collective Silkroad. Yo-Yo Ma’s discography of more than 120 albums (including nineteen P H OTO © BY N I G E L PA R R Y
Grammy Award winners) ranges from iconic renditions of the Western classical canon to recordings that defy categorization, such as Hush with Bobby McFerrin and the Goat Rodeo Sessions with Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile. Ma’s recent releases include Six Evolutions, his third recording of Bach’s cello suites, and Songs of Comfort and Hope, created and recorded with pianist Kathryn Stott in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. His latest album, Beethoven for Three: Symphony No. 6 (Pastorale) and Op. 1, No. 3, is the second in a new series of works by Beethoven with pianist Emanuel Ax and violinist Leonidas Kavakos. Yo-Yo Ma was born in 1955 to Chinese parents living in Paris. He began studying the cello with his father at age four, and three years later moved with his family to New York City, where he continued his cello studies at the Juilliard School before pursuing a liberal arts education at Harvard. He has received numerous awards, including the Avery Fisher Prize (1978), the National Medal of the Arts (2001), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2010), Kennedy Center Honors (2011), the Polar Music Prize (2012), and the Birgit Nilsson Prize (2022). He has performed for nine American presidents, most recently on the occasion of President Biden’s inauguration. Yo-Yo Ma and his wife have two children. He plays three instruments: a 2003 cello made by Moes & Moes, a 1733 Montagnana cello from Venice, and the 1712 “Davidoff” Stradivarius. yo-yoma.com