CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Boston Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

Boston Symphony Orchestra
James Levine, Music Director and Conductor
Barbara Frittoli, Soprano

MOZART Bella mia fiamma … Resta, o cara, K. 528
MOZART "O smania! O Furie! ... D'Oreste, d'Ajace!" from Idomeneo
GUNTHER SCHULLER Where the Word Ends (NY Premiere)
BRAHMS Symphony No. 2

Sponsored by Ernst & Young LLP

Program Notes:

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)
“Bella mia fiamma, addio … Resta, o cara,” Concert aria, K. 528;
“Oh smania! oh furie … D’Oreste, d’Aiace,” from Act III of Idomeneo, K. 366

“Bella mia fiamma, addio … Resta, o cara”:

Mozart’s concert aria “Bella mia fiamma, addio” received its Carnegie Hall premiere on March 16, 1941, with Dusolina Giannini, soprano, and the New Friends of Music conducted by Fritz Stiedry.

“Oh smania! oh furie … D’Oreste, d’Aiace”:

“Oh smania! Oh furie…D’Oreste, d’Aiace” received its Carnegie Hall premiere on October 1, 1947, with Helene De Reszke, soprano, and the New York Chamber Orchestra conducted by Charles Adler.


Mozart’s extraordinary gifts as a composer of arias are manifest not only in those he wrote for the operatic stage, but also in a large number of stand-alone arias—including “Bella mia fiamma” on this program—composed for a variety of singers, occasions, and reasons. From a 21st-century perspective—especially given our primary emphasis on Mozart’s symphonies, concertos, operas, and chamber music—it is not only interesting but important to note, too, that such arias were not necessarily minor or casual by-products to Mozart’s output. In fact, they would sometimes have reached a larger audience than might hear his purely instrumental compositions.

Though we have no details of the first performance, the autograph score of “Bella mia fiamma” is dated November 3, 1787. That fall, Mozart was in Prague for performances of Le nozze di Figaro and the first performance anywhere, that October 29, of Don Giovanni. He spent part of his time in Prague with his friends, the Duscheks, at their nearby country cottage—where, in fact, he put the finishing touches on his new opera. Franz Duschek was a composer, teacher, and pianist; his wife, Josepha, was a concert and oratorio singer with whom, Alfred Einstein speculates, Mozart was “perhaps a little in love.” It was as a gift to his hosts that Mozart composed “Bella mia fiamma”; a famous story relates that Josepha locked him in the pavilion of her garden with a supply of writing materials, refusing to release him until the aria was done. Mozart, in turn, threatened to destroy the piece unless Josepha could sing it perfectly at sight. Though the text was for a long while believed to be by Lorenzo Da Ponte (Mozart’s collaborator on Figaro, Giovanni, and Così), who was with him in Prague, we now know it to be from D. M. Sarcone’s Cerere placata (set as an opera by Niccolò Jommelli and produced in Naples in 1772), based on the myth of Proserpina and her mother Ceres. Ceres has separated Proserpina (the “bella fiamma” in question) from her mortal lover Titano, whom Ceres has decreed will die, and who here expresses his anguish.

Sometimes, for a later production of an opera that had already been premiered (whether his own or someone else’s), Mozart would write a so-called “substitute aria” geared to the specific strengths or needs of a particular singer taking a role in that later production. (Two well-known examples that subsequently remained in the opera for which Mozart wrote them are in Don Giovanni—Donna Elvira’s “Mi tradì” and Don Ottavio’s “Dalla sua pace,” both composed for the 1789 Vienna production of Giovanni two years after the Prague premiere.) In the case of Elettra’s extraordinary “rage aria,” “D’Oreste, d’Aiace,” we have an aria that Mozart actually eliminated from the premiere of Idomeneo, rè di Creta (Idomeneus, King of Crete)—the great opera seria that established his maturity as an opera composer upon its premiere in Munich on January 29, 1781—because the production was running too long and required considerable tightening. To avoid compromising dramatic efficacy, Mozart expanded the aria’s brief, introductory recitative to an intensely dramatic, three-times-longer recitative (15 vs. the original 5 lines) that could work on its own. Nowadays, whether in concert or full productions, it is not unusual to have the expanded recitative introduce the aria, as will be heard here. These final moments for Elettra come near the very end of the opera: Idomeneo’s son Idamante, with whom Elettra is in love, is betrothed instead to the Trojan princess Ilia. The desperate Elettra (daughter of Agamemnon) resolves to join her brother Orestes in hell, there to remain “in everlasting woe, in eternal weeping.”

—Marc Mandel

Marc Mandel is Director of Program Publications of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.


GUNTHER SCHULLER (b.1925)
Where the Word Ends

Tonight’s performance marks the New York premiere of Where the Word Ends, a BSO 125th anniversary commission. James Levine conducted the BSO in the world premiere performances last week, on February 5, 6, and 7, 2009, in Symphony Hall, Boston. The work was written on commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, James Levine, Music Director, through the generous support of the New Works Fund, established by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.


Where the Word Ends: music expresses what words can’t, it’s that simple. So says Gunther Schuller of his new orchestral work, written as a 125th anniversary commission for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its music director James Levine. Schuller was one of a short list of composers Levine hoped to have the BSO commission for a new orchestral work when he became the orchestra’s music director in the 2004–2005 season. The commission was eventually proffered and the new piece scheduled for the 2006–2007 season. Schuller, who works very quickly, began work in late 2006 and, with interruptions, finished the piece in a matter of weeks, completing it in early 2007. When Levine had a look at the score, it was clear to him that it would be better served in a different program. Schuller agreed, and the premiere was rescheduled so Levine could devise a new context that set the piece off in complete contrast; hence the Brahms and Mozart music on this concert. (The original program featured Ravel’s flashy, spotlight-stealing Daphnis et Chloë in addition to a Mozart symphony and concerto.)

Schuller’s ties to the BSO began at Tanglewood, where he joined Aaron Copland as head of the composition program during Erich Leinsdorf’s tenure as BSO music director. He went on to become artistic director of Tanglewood from 1970 until 1984. Meanwhile he was also president of Boston’s New England Conservatory, which under his guidance became the first such school to add a jazz program to its curriculum, leading nearly every other major music education institution to follow suit. Schuller’s jazz activities are well documented—in his early years he was performing both under Toscanini and heading uptown to play with Miles Davis and Gil Evans. He also arranged and composed for jazz groups. It was Schuller who coined the now-common phrase “Third Stream” to denote a style of music blending new classical and jazz sensibilities. His immediate cohorts in this fruitful experience were John Lewis and the Modern Saxophone Quartet. In his “free time” he has written several books. The first volume of his memoirs is due for publication by the University of Rochester Press, hopefully later this year. On top of all this, he ran his own publishing company (transferred to the G. Schirmer catalog in recent years) and the recordings label GM Recordings, highlighting great underserved repertoire, mostly new and mostly American.

As a composer, Schuller was essentially self-taught—or rather, like the composers of the past, he learned through taking part in the performances of the great works and by studying scores. Although he is not an exclusively orchestral composer, he leans strongly toward that medium. Among his nearly 200 works of all kinds, more than two-thirds have been orchestral, including three dozen concertos for all kinds of instruments. As he has said, he was “born in an orchestra”: his father was a New York Philharmonic violinist, and Gunther himself was performing professionally in orchestras already in his mid-teens. Beginning with the Cincinnati Symphony (where he was soloist in his own Horn Concerto at 18), he later became a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra at 19 and also played with the New York Philharmonic. Since he turned from horn playing more to conducting in the late 1950s, he has conducted dozens of orchestras from student-level to the world’s elite, not only in his own works and other recent pieces but also the standard repertoire.

Schuller’s explicit influences center on the Rite of Spring / post-neoclassical Stravinsky and on Schoenberg, with particular notice for the latter’s Erwartung and his Variations for Orchestra. His interests are otherwise remarkably catholic, his personal canon containing such early moderns as Debussy, Ravel, Delius (!), Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Szymanowski, and Reger—surprising only if one hasn’t paid attention to Schuller’s lush chromaticism and verdant orchestration. He has written commissioned works for nearly every major American ensemble, and won the Pulitzer Prize for his Of Reminiscences and Reflections (1993), composed for the Louisville Orchestra.

Where the Word Ends is the third work by Schuller to be premiered by the BSO, after Museum Piece (1970, written for the centennial of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston) and Deaï for three orchestras, a BSO commission premiered in 1979 during the orchestra’s tour to Japan. James Levine has previously conducted his Spectra and Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee with the orchestra.

Apart from several symphonic-poem-like pieces such as the Klee Studies and the early Vertige d’Eros that take visual arts as a starting point, many, if not most, of Schuller’s orchestral works are symphonic in conception. (Only one of his pieces, from 1965, is actually called “Symphony.”) Where the Word Ends is a symphony-like, one-movement work in four sections, played without pause. Its span is readily heard as four continuous movements, but with the second-movement Adagio interrupted by the Scherzo (complete with Trio): Lento—Adagio—Scherzo; Trio—Adagio—Allegro vivace. The Lento serves as both introduction and fully fledged opening movement, establishing the harmonic and textural world of the piece. It begins with strings alone, and gradually the orchestra fills out as it expands toward the “grand convulsion” (as it’s marked in the score) and climax that precedes the Adagio. Although some of the figural elements, particularly fast scale passages, of the Lento return in the Adagio, the rhythmic procession of this part is more straightforward, supporting sustained melodic writing until another big crescendo introduces the Scherzo. Cellos and basses chug away to keep the quick regular pulse of this primarily 6/8 movement, while insistent figures appear throughout the different orchestral sections, a mosaic of timbres. The forward motion continues lively in the Trio. The Scherzo’s return is verbatim, but truncated, and there follows a clear return to the Adagio, with its heartbeat-like oscillations in the second violins. When this fades away, a quietly wonderful little episode of repeated pitches, beginning in the flutes and working its way through the winds, prepares the sudden arrival of the final section, Allegro vivace. That repeateD-note figure reappears judiciously in a relaxation toward the end of this exuberant movement, which ebbs and flows in density and is punctuated liberally with big chords, an orchestra reveling in rich, sonorous life.

—Robert Kirzinger

Composer Robert Kirzinger is Publications Associate of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.


JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897)
Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73

Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 received its Carnegie Hall premiere on February 3, 1893, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.


Perhaps the most regularly misread of Brahms’s major works is his Second Symphony. From the beginning, critics hailed it as a sunny and halcyon vacation from the turbulent First Symphony. The Second, everybody said, is Brahms’s counterpart to Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, and looks back further to Haydn and Mozart at their most congenial. But if the Second paints an idyll, it is a lost idyll. Brahms himself hinted at its tangled import. To friend and critic Eduard Hanslick he wrote, “It’ll sound so cheerful and lovely that you will think I wrote it specially for you or even your young lady.” He cited the benevolent influence of his composing spot on the Wörthersee: “[there are] so many melodies flying around that you have to be careful not to step on them.” Meanwhile, having just finished the First Symphony after some 15 years of wrestling with it, Brahms completed the Second—and several smaller works—during one delightful four-month working vacation in the summer of 1877.

To Clara Schumann, however, Brahms described the symphony as “elegiac.” To his publisher he wrote, “The new symphony is so melancholy that you won’t be able to stand it. I’ve never written anything so sad … The score must appear with a black border.” There the presumable joke is that the symphony usually strikes listeners as suave and enchanting. After all, every movement is in a major key. The deeper irony hidden in Brahms’s words is that the elegiac black border is as much a part of the symphony as its more explicit cheeriness. Brahms’s Second is like a vision of nature and youth troubled by shadows that come and go like dark clouds in a summer sky. In his book on the Second Symphony, Late Idyll, Harvard scholar Reinhold Brinkmann calls this supposed hymn to nature and serenity a “questioning of the pastoral world, a firm denial of the possibility of pure serenity.” Brahms’s testament to the past is haunted by a skepticism and foreboding that seem prophetic: Modern.

The questioning begins within the gentle opening. We hear a little three-note turn in the basses (D-C#-D), a melodic shape that will pervade the symphony. The basses are answered by an elegant wind phrase that at once suggests a Strauss waltz (Brahms admired the Waltz King) and the hunting horns of a Haydn symphony or divertimento. But all this gracious simplicity is deceptive. Anyone trying to waltz to this opening will fall on his face: The phrasing of the basses and the answering winds are offset by one measure, with neither predominating. At times the movement falls into tumultuous stretches where the meter is dismantled. The breezy and beautiful first theme is followed by a fervent second theme that, in itself, is in A major but harmonized in F-sharp minor. Throughout the symphony, the brightness of major keys will be touched by darker minor-key tints.

The more salient voices disturbing the placid surface are the trombones and tuba. After the balmy opening, the music seems to stop in its tracks; there is a rumble of timpani like distant thunder, and the trombones and tuba whisper a shadowy chorale, in cryptic harmonies. That shadow touches the whole symphony. Later, the development section is intensified by braying brasses—startling for Brahms, more startling in this halcyon work.

The second movement begins with a sighing high-Brahmsian cello theme. While the tone throughout is passionate and Romantic, the movement’s languid beauties are unsettled by rhythmic and harmonic ambiguity. It ends with a chromatic haze like an expansion of the first movement’s trombone chorale—and underneath, the relentless strokes of timpani that for Brahms were an image of fate, and the thought of fate always ominous.

If the keynote of the first two movements is tranquility compromised, in the last two movements gaiety and frivolity break out. Brahms was generally influenced by the vacation spots where he composed, for example the cliffs and crashing seas of Rügen that helped complete the stormy First Symphony. This time the pleasures of the Wörthersee have the last word. The third movement unfolds as a charming and jocular scherzo marked by sudden shifts of rhythm and meter: an elegant Allegretto grazioso leaping into a skittering Presto. The finale is a romp, with one droll and delicious theme after another, ending unforgettably with a triumphant D major blaze of trombones. Here Brahms does something he was not supposed to know how to do—make an instrument the bearer of meaning. The trombones as harbingers of fate have become the heralds of joy.

In its pensive irony as in its masterful craftsmanship, in its dark moments as in its jubilation, the Second is essentially Brahms. He was a composer who looked back to the giants of the past as an unreachable summit, and who looked to the future of music and civilization with increasing alarm. He was a man who felt spurned by his beloved hometown of Hamburg, who called himself a vagabond in the wilderness of the world. So midway through his journey as a symphonist, Brahms wrote a serenely beautiful masterpiece whose secret message is that you can’t go home again.

—Jan Swafford

Currently at work on a biography of Beethoven, the award-winning composer-author Jan Swafford is the author of biographies of Johannes Brahms and Charles Ives and of The Vintage Guide to Classical Music.

Program notes © 2009 Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc.