NINETY-THIRD SEASON
Sunday, April 14, 2024, at 3:00
Piano Series
YEFIM BRONFMAN
BEETHOVEN
Sonata No. 7 in D Major, Op. 10, No. 3 Presto
Largo e mesto
Menuetto: Allegro
Rondo: Allegro
SCHUBERT Sonata in A Minor, D. 784
Allegro giusto Andante
Allegro vivace
INTERMISSION
SCHUMANN Arabeske, Op. 18
SALONEN Sisar
SCHUMANN Carnival Scenes from Vienna, Op. 26
Allegro
Romanze: Somewhat slow
Scherzino
Intermezzo: With greatest energy
Finale: Most lively
This performance is made possible with the generous sponsorship of Josef and Margot Lakonishok.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
This performance is made possible with the generous sponsorship of Josef and Margot Lakonishok.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 16, 1770; Bonn, Germany
Died March 26, 1827; Vienna, Austria
Piano Sonata No. 7 in D Major, Op. 10, No. 3
COMPOSED 1798
In November 1792, the twenty-twoyear-old Ludwig van Beethoven, bursting with talent and promise, arrived in Vienna. So undeniable was the genius he had already demonstrated that Maximilian Franz, the elector of Bonn, underwrote the trip to the Habsburg Imperial City, then the musical capital of Europe, to help further the young musician’s career (and the elector’s prestige). Despite the elector’s patronage, however, Beethoven’s professional ambitions quickly consumed any thoughts of returning to the provincial city of his birth, and when his alcoholic father died in December, he severed for good his ties with Bonn in favor of the stimulating artistic atmosphere of Vienna.
During his first years in Vienna, Beethoven was busy on several fronts. Initial encouragement for the Viennese junket had come from the venerable Joseph Haydn, who 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, but the two had difficulty getting along—Haydn was too busy, Beethoven was too bullish—and their association soon broke off. Several other teachers
from top: Ludwig van Beethoven, oil portrait of the composer as a young man painted by Carl Traugott Riedel (1769–1832), 1801 | A View of Vienna from the Josefstadt by Carl Schütz and Johann Ziegler, engraving by Joseph and Peter Schaffer, Artaria & Co. (ca. 1799–1840s)
followed in short order—Schenk, Albrechtsberger, Förster, Salieri.
While he was busy completing fugal exercises and practicing setting Italian texts for his tutors, he continued 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 bested 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 biography 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.”
Among the nobles who served as Beethoven’s patrons after his arrival in Vienna was Count Johann Georg von Browne-Camus, a descendent of an old Irish family who was at that time fulfilling some ill-defined function in the Habsburg Imperial City on behalf of Empress Catherine II of Russia. Little is known of Browne. His tutor, Johannes Büel, later an acquaintance of Beethoven, described him as “full of excellent talents and beautiful qualities of heart and spirit on the one hand, and on the other full of weakness and depravity.” He is said to have squandered his fortune and ended his days in a public institution. In the mid-1790s, Beethoven received enough generous support from Browne, however, that he dedicated several of his works to him and his wife, Anne Margarete, including the Variations on “Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen” from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte for Cello and Piano (WoO 46), three op. 10 piano sonatas, B-flat piano sonata (op. 22), and three string trios of op. 9. In appreciation of these dedications, Browne presented Beethoven with a horse, which the preoccupied composer promptly forgot, thereby allowing his
servant to rent out the beast and pocket the profits.
The three sonatas of op. 10 were begun during the summer of 1796 and completed by July 1798, when the Viennese publisher Joseph Eder issued them as a set. The largest in scale and the most prophetic in expression is the D major sonata, op. 10, no. 3, which the eminent British musicologist Sir Donald Tovey saw as one of the early documents of Beethovenian romanticism: “In the D major sonata, Beethoven’s power appears with an intensity that must have come more as a shock than as a revelation to his contemporaries. It is doubtful whether any part of it except the exquisite minuet would have been acceptable to orthodox musicians in 1798.” The sonata-form first movement opens with a pregnant
unison gesture forged from equal parts mystery, promise, and forceful energy barely contained. Explosive dynamic eruptions are balanced by a quiet, pathetic melody in a minor key. A dainty second theme is proposed for formal contrast, but the complex emotional state of the opening resumes before the end of the exposition. The development section expounds upon the mutability of the main theme’s materials before a full recapitulation rounds out the movement. The lamenting second movement, Largo e mesto (slow and sad), is one of Beethoven’s most profound statements from his early years, “his first essay in tragedy,” according to Tovey. The menuetto, “a riot of blossoming tunefulness,” wrote Eric Blom, provides a sunny foil to the preceding movement. The jolly rondo-finale is based on a theme of offbeat motifs and bemused silences.
FRANZ SCHUBERT
Born January 31, 1797; Vienna, Austria
Died November 19, 1828; Vienna, Austria
Sonata in A Minor, D. 784
COMPOSED 1823
Schubert’s health nearly collapsed for good early in 1823. He was suffering from anemia, fever, headaches, an ugly rash, and a nervous disorder as the result of syphilis and its treatment (mercury in the early nineteenth century!—his hair fell out, and he had to wear a wig for almost a year until it grew back), and his symptoms became so acute that he was admitted to the Vienna General Hospital in May. Schubert was also constantly broke, living largely on the generosity of his devoted companions, with only an occasional pittance from some performance or publication. He poured out his troubles in a letter to Leopold Kupelwieser, a close friend who had recently moved to Rome:
In a word, I feel myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again and whose sheer despair over this makes things constantly worse
instead of better. . . . I ask you, is he not a miserable, unhappy being?
Schubert then quoted some forlorn lines from Goethe’s poem “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel), which he had set in 1814: “‘My peace is gone, my heart is sore, I shall find it never, nevermore’ [are words that] I may well sing every day now, for each night on retiring to bed, I hope I may not wake again, and each morning but recalls yesterday’s grief.” Such anguish, however, did not seem to thwart Schubert’s creative muse—the Unfinished Symphony and Wanderer Fantasy were composed during the last three months of 1822; the song cycle Die schöne Müllerin, many dances for piano and three theatrical ventures (the singspiel The Conspirators, incidental music to Rosamunde, and the three-act opera Fierrabras) were all completed before the end of 1823, as was the work in which he seems to have vented most fully his torment: the Piano Sonata in A minor, D. 784.
The A minor sonata of 1823 (published a dozen years after Schubert’s death as op. 143 by Diabelli in Vienna) was composed
quickly in February, when Schubert’s health was in a miserable state, and bears the quality of a painful confessional—it is one of his bleakest and most somber creations. The sonata’s mood is established immediately at the outset by the main theme, a string of enervated, hollow-interval, shortwinded phrases given in barren octaves comforted only by the leanest harmonies. Violent outbursts in the transition try to rouse the music from its lethargy, and the second theme, with its brighter tonality, simple texture, and hymn-like character, seems to hint of renewal, but it soon breaks into pieces and shouted protests. The exposition ends with sighs and silences, a grim look into the void. The development section makes much use of a powerful dotted-rhythm figure from the transition, first in angry transformations and then as an obbligato to a ghost of the hymnal second theme, but this too vanishes into silence. The recapitulation follows closely the events of the exposition, the themes restated with just enough additional urgency to heighten their pathos. Two further outbursts and two relapses are heard in the coda before the movement expires with a stabbing note in hollow octaves and the wan, hopeless half-smile of
an A major chord, pitched low on the keyboard.
The Andante is music of unsettled, and unsettling, character, rather like a troubling dream that plays in the mind at the moment of waking. A quiet, smooth, arching strain, perhaps a glimpse of some peaceable kingdom, appears at the outset, but a viper slithers from the shadows in the form of a twisting, chromatic motif. Pounding triplet figures are invoked to exorcise the vision, but fail, and the twisting motif insinuates itself again with such effect as to take over the music completely. Only a fading memory of the peaceable strain of the opening is left to finish the movement.
The finale, restless and feverish, offers little comfort. Frenzied passages reminiscent of the old Italian tarantella, the furious dance whose exertions were said to rid the body of the poison of the tarantula spider’s deadly bite, lead to violent climaxes that are suddenly broken off, as though gasping for breath. Lyrical moments provide respite, but they are always overwhelmed by the frenzied music. The sonata ends with flying, demonic scales and four hammered chords.
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Born June 8, 1810; Zwickau, Germany
Died July 29, 1856; Endenich, near Bonn, Germany
Arabeske, Op. 18
COMPOSED 1839
By the middle of 1838, Robert Schumann’s parallel passions for music, writing, and Clara Wieck had brought the twenty-eight-year-old composer to a crucial point in his life. Denied by the adamant intervention of Clara’s father from having her hand in marriage, resigned to never becoming the piano virtuoso he had dreamed since childhood, and seeking a more vibrant musical milieu than Leipzig as the base for the journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal for Music), which he had edited since its inception in 1833, Schumann decided that a move to Vienna might improve his fortunes. On August 5, 1838, he wrote to his friend Joseph Fischhof, then living in Vienna, “Don’t be frightened if in two months somebody knocks at your door—my ghost, my very self; still more, if he tells you that he shall probably settle in Vienna next year and forever.” Hoping both to reestablish the Zeitschrift and to achieve sufficient financial and artistic success to force Papa Wieck into consenting to his marriage to Clara,
Schumann arrived in Vienna at the end of September. “I have been received with great kindness, even by the minister of police, who gave me an audience the day before yesterday,” he reported to his brother Eduard in Zwickau, the family’s hometown.
He said that there was no objection to my living here and that I might set to work as soon as an Austrian publisher could be found. If I could not find one, however, I might meet with great difficulties, being a foreigner, & etc. . . . You would hardly believe how many petty factions and coteries there are here: to get a firm foothold, one must have a great deal of the snake about him, which I don’t think I have.
He found rooms with a family named Cavalcabo, whose daughter Julia was taking lessons from Franz Xaver Mozart, Wolfgang’s son, and demonstrating some talent as a composer for piano and voice. Schumann became friendly with Franz Xaver and was warmly greeted by a number of other prominent local musicians and artists, but he remained cautious about Vienna. “I shouldn’t like to live here long and alone,” he confided
to Eduard. “Serious men and Saxons are seldom wanted or understood here.”
By Christmas, it had become clear to Schumann that his Viennese venture would fail—he could find no significant way in which to advance his career, there was no promising situation for the Zeitschrift, and he missed Clara terribly, all the more since the Viennese adored her playing and continually interrogated him to learn more about her. He lingered in the imperial city until March 30, 1839, when news that Eduard had become seriously ill took him posthaste to Zwickau; he arrived just after his brother had died. Saddened by his loss and by the disappointment in Vienna, Schumann returned to Leipzig, where after six more months of waiting to outlast Papa Wieck’s intransigence and legal obstacles, he finally married his beloved Clara on September 12, the eve of her twenty-first birthday.
Though Schumann did not realize his most immediate goals during his Viennese incursion, the enterprise was not without value. He brought home with him two important souvenirs—a steel pen that he found on the grave of Beethoven, with which he wrote his First Symphony in 1841, and the manuscript for the late Franz Schubert’s never-performed Ninth Symphony, unearthed from the piles of manuscripts preserved by that composer’s brother, Ferdinand, and heard for the first time, at Schumann’s insistence, at Felix Mendelssohn’s Leipzig
Gewandhaus concert of December 12, 1839. In addition, Schumann composed several piano works in Vienna, including the finale of the G minor sonata (op. 22), Arabeske (op. 18), Blumenstück (op. 19), Humoreske (op. 20), Nachtstücke (op. 23), the opening sections of the Faschingsschwank aus Wien (Carnival Scenes from Vienna, op. 26), and a number of smaller pieces.
The word arabesque has been used in the West since the Middle Ages to describe any ornamentation consisting of flowing traceries of sinuous, undulating or geometrical designs. The term was inspired by the Arab tradition, which forbid the representation of living creatures and so instead developed intricate artwork around elaborate geometrical and botanical patterns that carefully interlaced scrolls and curves and spirals with dazzling virtuosity. Schumann borrowed the word as the title for one of his most ingratiating short piano pieces, composed in Vienna early in 1839. The work is arranged in a rondo form, in which the elegant, whispering principal theme is twice interrupted by wistful minor episodes. Added as a coda is a thoughtful paragraph in slow tempo, “a final message for the listener to turn over in his mind,” according to the British critic Kathleen Dale, that reflects the dreamy and romantic side of Schumann’s personality. A tiny wisp of the principal theme rises from the closing measure.
ESA-PEKKA SALONEN
Born June 30, 1958; Helsinki, Finland
Sisar
COMPOSED 2012
Conducting is tough, composing perhaps even harder, but some of the most brilliant musicians— Busoni, Mahler, Bernstein, Boulez, Previn—have pursued parallel careers in both fields that enriched all facets of their creative personalities. To this select company must be added the Finnish composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. Salonen majored in horn at the Sibelius Conservatory, where he founded a collective called Ears Open to promote and perform new music with Jouni Kaipainen, Magnus Lindberg, and Kaija Saariaho, all major musical figures in Finland. After graduating in 1977, Salonen studied composition privately with Einojuhani Rautavaara and conducting with Jorma Panula and attended conducting courses in Siena and Darmstadt; he also studied composition with Niccolò Castiglioni and Franco Donatoni in Italy.
In 2022 Esa-Pekka Salonen became music director of the San Francisco Symphony following an extensive international conducting career that began in 1979 with his professional debut with
the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and subsequent engagements as a guest conductor across Scandinavia. Successful appearances conducting Wozzeck at the Swedish Royal Opera and Mahler’s Symphony no. 3 with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London led to his appointment as conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1985, a post he held until 1995. He was principal guest conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic from 1984 to 1989 and of the London Philharmonia from 1985 to 1994; he has also held positions with the New Stockholm Chamber Orchestra, Avanti! Chamber Orchestra, Helsinki Festival, Finnish National Opera and Ballet, and London Sinfonietta. Salonen made his American debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1984 and was that orchestra’s music director from 1992 until 2009; he was named the ensemble’s conductor laureate in April 2009. He is also on the faculty of LA’s Colburn School, where he develops, leads, and directs the preprofessional Negaunee Conducting Program.
In addition to achieving international recognition as a conductor, Salonen is also a gifted composer. (“I actually think of myself more as a composer than a conductor,” he said in 1998.) His early compositions are rooted in the
avant-garde enthusiasms of his student days, but since his LA Variations of 1996, written for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, his work has been more immediate and easily approachable. Salonen was the first-ever creative chair of the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich in 2014–15, after which he was appointed the Marie-Josée Kravis Composerin-Residence with the New York Philharmonic for a four-year term.
As both composer and conductor, Salonen has received many major awards, including the Grawemeyer Award (for the 2009 Violin Concerto, written for Leila Josefowicz), Nemmers Prize in Musical Composition from Northwestern University, Siena Prize from the Accademia Chigiana (the first conductor ever to receive that distinction), Royal Philharmonic Society’s Opera Award and Conductor Award, Pro Finlandia Medal, Helsinki Medal, and seven honorary doctorates in four countries. In 1998 he was awarded the rank of Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. Musical America named him its 2006 Musician of the Year, and in 2020, he was appointed an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth for his services to music and UK-Finland relations.
Esa-Pekka Salonen on Sisar
Sisar is the fifth and last piece in a series of short preludes for piano I had begun almost ten years before. Most of the pieces share material with larger projects, sometimes as testing ground for new ideas, sometimes as an afterthought, alternative reality.
Sisar belongs to the latter category. Its title has (at least) a double meaning: in Finnish sisar means “sister,” and in Spanish “to steal or filch.” Both make sense: Sisar is the little sister of my orchestra piece Nyx (a mysterious and obscure goddess figure in Greek mythology), and it steals some of its material from its bigger relative.
The character of Sisar is capricious and dream-like, with sudden bursts of kinetic energy interlaced with more static, calmer music. Sometimes, characters and gestures mutate gradually into something new, and sometimes, a new identity is introduced suddenly, like a montage or an edit in a film. I have long been interested in juxtaposing the musical metaphors of organisms and mechanisms in my music, and the six-minute Sisar plays with these ideas in a very concentrated form.
Sisar is dedicated to Yefim Bronfman.
