CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The Cleveland Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

The Cleveland Orchestra
Franz Welser-Möst, Music Director and Conductor
Measha Brueggergosman, Soprano

LIGETI Atmosphères
WAGNER Wesendonck Lieder, Op. 91 (orch. Mottl/Wagner)
·· Der Engel
·· Stehe still!
·· Im Treibhaus
·· Schmerzen
·· Träume

R. STRAUSS Eine Alpensinfonie

Program Notes:

GYÖRGY LIGETI (1923–2006)
Atmosphères

On a number of occasions, György Ligeti spoke about the isolation in which he spent his early years as a composer. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, he was first a student and then a professor at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary. He was composing under the influence of Bartók, Stravinsky, and Berg, but grew increasingly dissatisfied with the musical idioms available to him. He knew there was no point in continuing to compose in the manner of his elders; however, information about the most recent musical developments in the West was virtually impossible to obtain. The only chance to hear new works—by Messiaen, Boulez, and others—was late at night on West German radio stations, but these were routinely jammed by the Hungarian authorities. All you could hear, Ligeti noted in an interview years later, were the upper notes.

Ligeti was imagining entirely new sounds and musical techniques as early as 1950. He heard them clearly in his head, but was unable to realize them with the traditional compositional means at his disposal. But the ideas were essentially ready, which explains Ligeti’s meteoric rise to the forefront of new composition once he left Hungary in the wake of the 1956 revolution and established himself in the West.

In 1957–1958, Ligeti worked in the electronic music studio of the West German Radio in Cologne, one of the most important new music workshops at the time. Within a few years, he not only caught up with what he had missed in Hungary, but became one of the leaders of his generation, along with Stockhausen, Boulez, and Nono. His breakthrough as a composer came in 1960 with his orchestra piece Apparitions. Atmosphères, which followed a year later, became one of those epoch-making works by which we remember the early 1960s today.

One of the central ideas in Atmosphères, the realization of complete stasis through extensive inner motion, germinated during Ligeti’s Hungarian years. The composer later noted that he had been preceded in the writing of “static” music by Wagner (Prelude to Das Rheingold and the Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin), Bartók (opening of The Wooden Prince), and Schoenberg (“Farben,” the third in Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16). But neither Bartók nor Wagner or Schoenberg ever achieved stasis through its exact opposite, as Ligeti did in Atmosphères. Large portions of the piece consist of extremely dense counterpoint, with up to 56 voices (each string instrument has his or her own individual part to play). But the imitative entrances are so close to one another that it is impossible to perceive them separately, with apparent immobility as the result. One association repeatedly evoked by the piece is spider webs; another is the slow shifting of clouds made up by swarms of small insects whirring around with great speed. Despite the many rapid internal movements, the cloud itself seems entirely motionless, though it does move slowly and gradually as the music proceeds from one type of timbre to another.
—Peter Laki


RICHARD WAGNER (1813–1883)
Wesendonck Songs

The years that Richard Wagner lived in Zurich represented a watershed in the composer’s life. Banished from Germany for his active role in the revolution of 1848–1849, he had fled to Switzerland, where he remained until 1860, cut off from the theatrical activities that had filled his life for the six years he was the Kapellmeister for the King of Saxony. The composer turned his attention to theoretical work. His theatrical concept, set forth in a book-length essay titled Opera and Drama (1850–1851), had evolved far beyond even his own early Romantic operas such as Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. Soon he began to put these new ideas into practice within the largest project of his life, the four-opera Ring of the Nibelung saga, on which he labored for more than two decades.

On a personal level, these were not happy years for Wagner. Having lost his job, he had to rely on the generosity of two wealthy admirers, Julie Ritter and Jessie Laussot. His marriage to Minna Planer was on the rocks. Professionally, he wasn’t sure whether he would ever be able to realize his ambitious operatic plans. In this precarious situation, the friendship of Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck was a real godsend. Otto, a retired silk merchant, supported Wagner financially for years and placed a house adjacent to his own home at the composer’s disposal. Mathilde Wesendonck was an aspiring poet who later wrote several dramas and other works. She and Wagner were inevitably attracted to one another. Their love affair was evidently one of the reasons that Wagner temporarily put aside The Ring of the Nibelung and began work on Tristan and Isolde, an opera in which the famous medieval romance took on an entirely new emotional and philosophical dimension.

Wagner and Mathilde spent many hours together reading the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher who was a major influence on the composer’s Tristan. Concurrently with his work on the opera, Wagner composed five songs to texts written by Mathilde—the only songs he ever wrote in his mature years. He marked two of the songs, “Im Treibhaus” and “Träume,” as “studies for Tristan and Isolde,” where their musical material soon appeared almost note for note.

The relationship between Richard Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck ended abruptly when Wagner’s wife Minna intercepted one of her husband’s letters to Mathilde. Wagner had to leave “Asyl,” as he called his house next to the Wesendonck home, and beat a hasty retreat to Venice. But the five Wesendonck songs remain an eloquent testimony to the passionate liaison that inspired Tristan and Isolde, a work that, through its stretching and bending of traditional harmonic structures, forever changed the course of Western music history.


RICHARD STRAUSS (1864–1949)
An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64

The idea for a piece of music about a hike in the Alps dates to Strauss’s childhood. After taking part in a particularly adventurous day out hiking, getting lost and drenched in rain, the aspiring composer even banged out some thoughts for it on the piano. So far as we know, none of that early work survives in what the far more experienced composer wrote in An Alpine Symphony four decades later—except for the sense of adventure and some very precise details of how the day went.

In today’s world, when hundreds of tourists climb Mt. Everest each year, and some trails in the Rocky Mountains see daily summer traffic more like an interstate highway at rush hour, it is important to remember the excitement that the idea of mountain climbing had for a boy of Strauss’s era. Indeed, mountain climbing was a relatively new sport in the 19th century. The Matterhorn and several other famous Alpine peaks were only first climbed in the decade surrounding Strauss’s birth in 1864. These were often accomplished with great rivalry between national expeditions and with enormous international press coverage of each success (and of each gruesome or tragic failure). In the Bavarian Alps just south of Strauss’s hometown of Munich, some peaks remained without known ascents, easily fueling and shaping a boy’s imagination with vivid ideas for later recall.

An Alpine Symphony turned out to be Strauss’s final orchestral tone poem, the genre in which he had experienced his first great successes as a composer. Although Franz Liszt had evolved the idea into its own genre, it was Strauss who raised the idea to high symphonic art. He created half a dozen masterpieces, each of which can be held up as a definitive example of the tone poem genre, including Death and Transfiguration (1889), Till Eulenspiegel (1895), Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), Ein Heldenleben (1898), and Alpine Symphony (1915). In each, his exceptional abilities as an orchestrator allowed him to masterfully color, depict, and portray an astonishingly wide range of topics, ideas, and dramatic action.

Strauss labeled An Alpine Symphony as a symphony, in part because it grew out of a four-movement idea he sketched in 1900. At that time, the mountain hike idea was merely the first movement, with more philosophical views of nature filling out the other three. In time, however, the expedition to the summit and back grew to be the entire work—and more likely for Strauss came to represent not just one day’s hike, but a metaphoric lifetime of successive work, achievement, and adventure.

An Alpine Symphony is written for an enormous orchestra, the largest that Strauss ever specified. It is one continuous piece of music, divided into 21 parts, but without breaks between sections. As such, it is even more straightforward than his earlier tone poems, and the succession of scenes in An Alpine Symphony was clearly influenced by Strauss’s work writing operas during the previous decade and by his interest in the brand new art of cinematography and storytelling in motion pictures.

The tone poem begins and ends with night, starting in the darkness of pre-dawn, waiting in bed for the expedition to begin, and ending back home, ready for quiet rest from the day’s excursion. If concert lighting permits, it is well worth trying to follow along and identify the various sections depicted in Strauss’s daylong adventure, the better to enjoy Strauss’s ability to clearly portray so many details as well as to hear his deft execution of the transitions between sections: the brightening as night turns to day to sunrise, the clattering of distant cowbells, the thunderstorm’s approach, etc., all the way back into introspective night.
© 2009 Eric Sellen