CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Valery Gergiev, Conductor
Yefim Bronfman, Piano

DEBUSSY Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
PROKOFIEV Piano Concerto No. 2
TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 6, "Pathétique"

Encore:
D. SCARLATTI Sonata in C Minor, K. 11
TCHAIKOVSKY Panorama from Suite from Sleeping Beauty

Perspectives: Yefim Bronfman

Perspectives: Valery Gergiev

This concert is made possible, in part, by the Audrey Love Charitable Foundation.

Perspectives concerts are made possible, in part, by a generous grant from The Alice Tully Foundation.

Program Notes:

By Bernard Jacobson

Fri, Feb 29, 2008

HECTOR BERLIOZ Excerpts from Roméo et Juliette, Op. 17
Born December 11, 1803, in La Côte-Saint-André, Isère, France; died March 8, 1869, in Paris.

Composed in 1838–39, Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette was first performed on March 8, 1869, at the Paris Conservatory, with the composer conducting. The Carnegie Hall premiere of Roméo et Juliette in its entirety took place on October 7, 1942, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Arturo Toscanini.

Scoring: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes (II doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, 4 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 cornets, 3 trombones, ophicleide, timpani (2 players), percussion (bass drum, cymbals, 2 triangles, 2 tambourines, small antique cymbals in B-flat and F), 2 harps, and strings.

The story of the “pair of star-cross’d lovers” driven to destruction by the strife between their parents’ families was told many times in many forms during the two centuries before Shakespeare brought it to the boards in the 1590s, but his version quickly became the version of Romeo and Juliet. No other Shakespeare play has inspired so many composers. In addition to the famous Berlioz work from which we hear orchestral excerpts this evening, at least two other symphonies have been based on it. Tchaikovsky’s is one of more than half a dozen overtures or symphonic poems on the subject. In making a ballet out of it, Prokofiev was preceded a decade earlier by Constant Lambert. And of operatic and quasi-operatic Romeo and Juliets, there have been at least 21; their composers range in eminence from Bellini and Gounod to Ivry and Mercadal, and in date from Benda and Schwanberg to Sutermeister, Malipiero, Blacher, and—with his epoch-making West Side Story—Leonard Bernstein.

The reasons for this spate of musical interpretation are not hard to find. Love is, truistically, among the most popular topics of musical inspiration, and without any rival the most popular operatic one. Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s purest love story. By contrast with the intricate psychological motivations of Othello, which demand a more complex treatment, or with the panoramic background of Antony and Cleopatra, which requires broader strokes, the lyrical concentration of Romeo and Juliet lends itself far more readily to musical treatment. It is quintessential romance, shorn of all external considerations. The hero and heroine are young and beautiful. They meet—they fall in love. One simple circumstance, the parental feud, suffices to determine “the fearful passage of their death-mark’d love.” Within the terms of their depiction, Romeo and Juliet would surely live happily ever after, if it were not for the exaggerated Hatfield-and-McCoy rivalry of which they are the hapless victims. No psychological quirks, no calls of higher duty dictate their doom—only the stupidity of other people and sheer bad luck. The whole depth and poignancy of the drama reside in the intensity with which young love is portrayed and in the magical poetry in which it is clothed, and such intensity and poetry are natural marks for composers to aim at.

Berlioz is the supreme Shakespearean composer, though in their very different ways Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev—not to mention Verdi—rank as close rivals. In 1827 an English company presented a season of Shakespeare plays in Paris. At 23, Berlioz did not yet understand English, and he had hitherto known the playwright’s work only in a French version. Now he saw Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. “The power of the acting,” he observed, “especially that of Juliet herself, the rapid flow of the scenes, the play of expression and voice and gesture, possessed me with the ideas and passions of the original as the words of my pale and garbled translation could never have done.” Shakespeare became, and remained, the dominating literary obsession of his life, just as the Irish actress Harriet Smithson (who played Ophelia and Juliet) was the transitory amorous one. In her own person, the actress occasioned the composition of the Symphonie fantastique, which was completed and revised by 1831. In the person of Juliet, her influence took a deeper and more permanent hold, and Roméo et Juliette appeared in 1839.

Probably Berlioz’s greatest achievement apart from the opera Les troyens (which he himself described as “Vergil Shakespeareanised”), Roméo et Juliette is a hybrid work. It is neither opera nor, in the usual sense, symphony, but a “dramatic symphony, with choruses, vocal solos, and prologue in choral recitative.” The vocal sections, with words based on Shakespeare by Emile Deschamps, are most skillfully and purposefully integrated into the whole by the composer. But it is the orchestral aspect of the work that has won it its widest audience, and the movements grouped together for this program make a moving and brilliantly effective suite.

As Berlioz himself remarked in the preface to the score: “If, in the celebrated garden and cemetery scenes, the conversation of the two lovers, Juliet’s asides, and Romeo’s passionate outbursts are not sung—if, in short, the duets of love and despair are entrusted to the orchestra—the reasons are many and obvious. Firstly (and this reason alone would have given the composer sufficient justification), we are dealing with a symphony and not an opera. Secondly, since duets of this kind have been treated vocally a thousand times, and by the greatest masters, it was prudent as well as interesting to attempt a different mode of expression. And since the very sublimity of this love made its depiction so dangerous for the composer, he was obliged to allow his imagination a freedom that the specific meanings of sung words would not have permitted, and to have recourse to the language of instruments, a language richer, more varied, less restricted, and, by its very indefiniteness, incomparably more effective in such a context.”


RICHARD WAGNER Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde
Born May 22, 1813, in Leipzig; died February 13, 1883, in Venice.

Wagner wrote the text and music of Tristan und Isolde between 1856 and 1859. Hans von Bülow conducted the first performance of the Prelude (with his own concert ending) in Prague on March 12 of the latter year, and the first performance of the complete music-drama in Munich on June 10, 1865. The Prelude and Liebestod received their Carnegie Hall premieres on May 7, 1891, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch, as part of Carnegie Hall’s Opening Week Festival.

Scoring: 3 flutes (one doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (one doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (one doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, and strings.

Going back to Celtic legendary sources in the 12th century or earlier, the story of Tristan und Isolde is the well-known one of the knight, sent as proxy wooer by his king, whose honor is subverted by the agency of a love potion secretly administered to him and the prospective bride by her well-meaning servant. The two are swept up in consequence by irresistible passion, and die happily for love.

Wagner indeed emphasizes, not just a link between love and death, but what he conceives in a very German-metaphysical-mystical manner as their ultimate identity. In 21st-century America such fateful workings of destiny, such willing embrace of extinction as a corollary of life lived to the full, sounds alien (though the crucial effect of a love potion is hardly foreign to today’s drug culture). But a pairing of the Prelude with a purely orchestral version of Isolde’s song of death leaves the music free to make its own overwhelming emotional effect, suggesting rather than particularizing, and speaking to something in us that exists beyond the reach of words.


CLAUDE DEBUSSY La mer
Born August 22, 1862, in St. Germain-en-Laye; died March 25, 1918, in Paris.

Composed between 1903 and 1905, La mer was first performed on October 15, 1905, in Paris, by the Lamoureux Orchestra conducted by Camille Chevillard. It received its New York and Carnegie Hall premiere on March 21, 1907, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Karl Muck.

Scoring: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets in A, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 cornets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, glockenspiel, bass drum), 2 harps, and strings.

“Debussy out-Strausses Strauss,” the New York Sun declared after the first local performance of La mer. To 21st-century ears, few musical languages sound further removed from the hectic brilliance of Strauss’s orchestral style than the cool objectivity of these “three symphonic sketches.” But as a critic Debussy certainly had a healthy respect for his younger contemporary. “It is not possible,” he observed, “to withstand [Strauss’s] irresistible domination,” which renders the hearer “no longer master of his emotions.”

That last phrase offers perhaps the clearest clue to the diametric opposition of the two composers’ artistic aims. A flinging open of the emotional floodgates was the very last thing Debussy, as a good logical Frenchman, was after. In the titles of the three pieces—From Dawn to Midday at Sea, Play of Waves, and Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea—and for that matter in the music itself, you will find no trace of human reference. This is a veritable seascape without figures. Nor, in the absence of human activity and emotion, was Debussy concerned to represent the sea as a medium of some immanent godhead. He was intent only on representing it with supreme unromanticism in, of, and for itself. It is this that justifies in Debussy’s case the use of that dangerously overworked word “objectivity,” and that has led also to the rash labeling of his work as “impressionist”—a term he rejected. “What he sought,” James Goodfriend (a New York critic of recent times more perceptive than his predecessors) pointed out, “was not the representation of a momentary and fleeting impression (which was what impressionism meant to him), but of the lasting eternal essence of a thing. The Platonic ‘idea’ transferred to a non-verbal communicative art? Perhaps.”

None of this should be taken to imply that La mer lacks drama. Its drama is, however, again in the most literal sense of an often misused term, elemental. The focus moreover shifts in the course of the three pieces. From Dawn to Midday at Sea is concerned with, and seems in the most astonishing manner actually to embody, flashing images of the effect of sunlight on water. In Play of Waves, which fulfills the function of a symphonic scherzo, attention is narrowed down to concentrate on water itself, but water in ceaseless motion. And Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, which creates the sense of a powerful opening-out of vision, brings water into its age-old confrontation with wind, and thereby effects a conclusion far more forceful and indeed frightening than you might think possible from some of the wispier, more airy-fairy descriptions of Debussy’s style.

While the music thus seeks out the “essence” of the sea, there is not, nor could there very well be with such a scenario, any attempt at detailed narration on the Straussian model. True, the composer Erik Satie is supposed to have remarked of the Dawn to Midday movement, “I liked the bit around 10:45 best.” But then, Satie was irrepressibly addicted to drollery. The work’s first audiences—or at least some of its first critics—found it incomprehensible. But the perspective of more than a hundred years enables us now to see that La mer is no mere assemblage of musical or pictorial bits and pieces, and that Debussy was being strictly accurate when he called these sketches “symphonic.”


Sat, Mar 1, 2008

CLAUDE DEBUSSY Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Born August 22, 1862, in St. Germain-en-Laye; died March 25, 1918, in Paris.

Composed in 1891–94, Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune was first performed on December 22, 1894, under the direction of Gustave Doret at a Société Nationale. It received its New York and Carnegie Hall premiere on November 12, 1905, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.

Scoring: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 harps, antique cymbals, and strings.

What Debussy is concerned with here is not to construct an abstract musical form but to mirror the intricate twists of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem L’après-midi d’un faune, a seminal work in the development of the Symbolist movement in French literature. Along with Verlaine and Rimbaud, Mallarmé believed that the true role of poetry was to evoke and suggest rather than to offer objective representation. Such a purpose found a natural musical counterpart in Debussy’s gift for pregnant understatement, just as it found a visual one in the delicately atmospheric paintings of Mallarmé’s friend Odilon Redon. Redon’s remark, “To designate my drawings by giving them a title is sometimes too much, so to speak,” could almost serve as a motto for the Symbolist theory.

The Viennese music critic Ernst Decsey summarized the content of Mallarmé’s poem succinctly:

It is the faun–half man, half beast, with horns and hoofs–who sleeps on Etna in the sultry afternoon sunshine, and dreams lascivious dreams behind closed eyelids. Obsessed by sweet fantasies, he sees the beautiful nymphs with an incarnadine glow. He thinks that he is about to grasp their beauty, but they vanish; all remains dreams.

Debussy’s original intention was to compose a “Prelude, interludes, and final paraphrase for L’Après-midi d’un faune.” In the end, the Prelude sufficed to express his response to the poem. For an 1895 performance, he either prepared or at least approved the following brief note:

The music of this Prelude is a very free illustration of the beautiful poem of Mallarmé. By no means does it claim to be a synthesis of the latter. Rather there is a succession of scenes through which pass the desires and dreams of the faun in the heat of this afternoon. Then, tired of pursuing the timorous flight of the nymphs and the naiads, he succumbs to intoxicating sleep, in which he can finally realize his dreams of possession in universal Nature.

Mallarmé’s own reaction to the first performance must have been especially gratifying to the composer. The music, he wrote,

set up no dissonance with my text, except indeed to explore further the nostalgia and the atmosphere of the light, delicately, disturbingly, deeply.

In the end, we may perhaps count it a good thing that performances of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune have ceased to be quite the everyday occurrence they once were. Central to the piece is a rarefied quality that calls for a certain respect, a certain distance, if it is to be appreciated at its true worth. Mallarmé was an elitist of the mind. “Speech,” he observed, “is no more than a commercial approach to reality. In literature, allusion is sufficient: essences are distilled and then embodied in idea.” Like Mallarmé’s, Debussy’s faun is a secret creation, esoteric, fragrant, elusive. He arouses our dreaming selves. He needs to be responded to in secrecy by each individual in an audience. Can you imagine a standing ovation after a performance of this work?

SERGEI PROKOFIEV Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 16
Born April 23, 1891, in Sontsovka, Ukraine; died 5 March, 1953, in Moscow.

Composed in 1912–13, the Piano Concerto No. 2 was first performed on September 5, 1913, in Pavlovsk, with the composer at the piano. It received its New York and Carnegie Hall premiere on February 7, 1930, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sergey Koussevitzky and the composer at the piano.

Scoring: solo piano; 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 trumpets, 4 horns, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (tambourine, snare drum, cymbals, suspended cymbal, bass drum), and strings.

Times have changed, and then changed again. According to press reports of this work’s 1913 premiere, the listeners in Pavlovsk were left “frozen with fright, hair standing on end,” and there was a frenzied exodus from the hall.

Not unnaturally, the young composer-pianist refrained for a while from risking another performance. Over the next few years he concentrated instead on sketching out materials for his Third Concerto, completed in 1921 and performed that year in Chicago. In the meantime came the Revolution. In May 1918 Prokofiev left for the US–he was not to revisit his homeland for nearly 10 years–and in the course of these general and personal vicissitudes, the score of the Second Piano Concerto was lost.

What we hear today under that title is the reconstruction Prokofiev made from memory in 1923, when he had returned to Europe and based himself first in Paris and then in Ettal, a village near Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps. The composer was again the soloist in the premiere of the new version, which was given at a Koussevitzky concert in Paris on May 8, 1924. By now, a decade later and in a very different, self-consciously avant-garde milieu, the same work that had been rejected in Pavlovsk for its “futuristic” qualities was derided instead as old hat. Nor has it ever rivaled the popularity of the Third Concerto, though in recent years the advocacy of celebrated pianists such as this evening’s soloist has begun to establish No. 2 in its rightful place in the repertoire.

To what degree, it may be asked, is this post-Third-Concerto reincarnation “the same work” as the 1913 version of the Second Piano Concerto? In the absence of the original score, we cannot know. But it is reasonable to assume that a 32-year-old composer of worldwide experience would not, even if the limitations of memory permitted it, recreate the work of a 22-year-old conservatory student without some fairly drastic rethinking. And when we consider the actual fabric of the Second Concerto, the music’s sheer concentration of thought and cohesion of expressive stance show a striking advance over the Third Concerto, if not in charm, then certainly in organizing power and felicity of taste. Each of the work’s four movements fulfils its dramatic aim with notable sureness, the aims themselves are more ambitious and serious than in No. 3, and nowhere is the concerto flawed by a lapse into sentimentality such as undermines the integrity of the C-Major’s finale. There is a kind of Classical purity in the language of the Second Concerto that in no way diminishes but rather reinforces its dark eloquence and the effect of its extraordinary virtuoso writing.

The first movement stands as one of Prokofiev’s subtlest and most satisfying structures, and its scale and complexity meet the ideal foil in the shape of the fast, furious, and essentially simple Scherzo that follows–a dazzling moto perpetuo, which makes its point with rare single-mindedness and then just stops. Simple again, though richer in emotional shadings, is the quintessentially Prokofievian (and Russian-sounding) Intermezzo. A dynamic yet intermittently brooding finale then cogently draws together the varied atmospheres of the first three movements, reconciling the dark lyricism of the Andantino with the hell-for-leather quality of the Scherzo and the Russian-ness of the Intermezzo. Here, as in the rest of the work, the thematic cross-references are not often literally explicit, but they carry the stamp of emotional relevance, a more important unifying factor than any mere correspondence of melodic shapes.

PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 74, “Pathétique”
Born May 7, 1840, in Kamsko-Votkinsk, Russia; died November 6, 1893, in St. Petersburg.

Composed between February and August 1893, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 was first performed on October 28 of that year in St. Petersburg, with the composer conducting. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on March 16, 1894, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.

Scoring: 3 flutes (III doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam), and strings.

Barely a week after conducting the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, Tchaikovsky was dead, probably of arsenic poisoning, and possibly by his own hand. Whether or not the lurid story helped, the work rapidly established itself as a favorite with audiences, and it has remained one ever since.

George Bernard Shaw, reviewing the symphony in London a few months after its premiere and praising its “impressive and entertaining” episodes and its “abundant passages of romance and revelry,” was perhaps a shade unfair when he spoke of Tchaikovsky’s “thoroughly Byronic power of being tragic, momentous, romantic about nothing at all.” For in this case, Tchaikovsky was being those things about a great deal. The draft program he roughed out on a piece of manuscript paper presents the following “plot”:

The ultimate essence of the plan of the symphony is LIFE. First part—all impulsive, confidence, thirst for activity. Must be short. (Finale DEATH—result of collapse.) Second part love; third disappointments; fourth ends dying away (also short).

Whatever modifications the plan sustained in the course of composition, it is surely clear from the dramatic impact of the “Pathétique” Symphony that Tchaikovsky here rose very successfully to his somewhat apocalyptic subject. This is not a work you can be indifferent to. And even those fastidious persons disturbed by its sensational aspects should not allow themselves to be blinded thereby to the work’s equally real musical strengths.

The quiet close was not unprecedented. There are parallels in Brahms and even in Haydn. Yet as a response to the promptings of the fundamental plan Tchaikovsky’s die-away conclusion is a masterly stroke, and altogether the concentration of the emotional argument almost exclusively in the outer movements, leaving the modified waltz of the second movement and the brilliantly extrovert march of the third to function in some measure as a central divertissement, works to perfection.

More striking still is the unification of most of the symphony by one basic thematic shape. Starting with the embryonic figure of the solo bassoon in the opening bars, all the principal themes and several subordinate ones in the first, second, and last movements grow out of an ascending or descending scale of at least three, and sometimes as many as eight, notes, and the third movement has several important transitional figures with the same contour. The most astonishing realization of all is that in 1880 Tchaikovsky used the same method on the same material in his genial Serenade for Strings. There could scarcely be stronger testimony to the power of musical development, as distinct from original melodic invention, than that two such vastly different works could grow from an identical thematic source.


Sun, Mar 2, 2008

GIUSEPPE VERDI Overture to La forza del destinoBorn October 9, 1813, in Roncole, Italy; died January 27, 1901, in Milan.

Composed in 1861–62, Verdi’s La forza del destino was first performed on November 10, 1862, at the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg. He revised the work in 1869, and the overture, though based on the original prelude, belongs to that revised version, which had its premiere at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan on February 27, 1969. The Overture received its Carnegie Hall premiere on October 19, 1913, with the Italian Orchestral Society conducted by Cesare Sodero, in a program celebrating the centennial of Verdi’s birth.

Scoring: 2 flutes (one doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, and strings.

The popular image of opera centers on the love-duet—on the kind of piece in which, as George Bernard Shaw dryly put it, the tenor and the soprano “repeatedly call attention to the fact that at last they meet again.” But most of the great opera composers have preferred stories that, while they don’t ignore what makes the world go round, place private passion against a broader background.

This is especially true of Verdi, who was himself a strongly committed patriot and political man in the emergent Italy of the mid-19th-century, and who often chose opera plots that had a political context. Planning his new opera for St. Petersburg, his second choice of subject—the first, Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas, was vetoed by the censor—was Don Alvaro, or The Force of Destiny, by the Spanish playwright Angel Pèrez de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas, and with the help of his old librettist Piave, Verdi turned it into one of his most compellingly dramatic operas.

Next to Ruy Blas, La forza del destino seems like an old-fashioned romantic melodrama, yet it is rich in social and political overtones, without which it would hardly have appealed to Verdi in the first place. In the words of the Verdi scholar Julian Budden, the play, “written by a liberal aristocrat of the 19th century, who had distinguished himself in the Peninsular War, and set in the Age of Enlightenment, Don Alvaro could serve as a Marxist tract for the present day.” Verdi himself underscored the seriousness of the opera when he refused a request to present it at the San Carlo Theater in Naples, responding:

You should know that there are operas of ideas (bad ideas if you like) and operas of cavatinas, duets, etc., etc. for which some of your celebrities might be good, since your public likes them, but as for me, God preserve me from having them, above all in La forza del destino.

Indeed, it was to reduce the melodramatic element in the work that Verdi and a new collaborator, Antonio Ghislanzoni, drastically revised it in 1869. Constructed from the principal melodies of the opera itself, the overture composed for that revision brilliantly evokes the atmosphere of personal honor and passionate love thwarted by implacable fate. It is at once the most substantial and the most popular of Verdi’s operatic overtures.


FRANZ LISZT Les preludes, Symphonic Poem No. 3Born October 22, 1811, in Raiding, Hungary; died July 31, 1886, in Bayreuth, Germany.

Liszt composed Les préludes in 1848, revised it over the succeeding years, and conducted the first performance in Weimar on February 28, 1854. The work received its Carnegie Hall premiere on February 25, 1894, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.
Scoring: 3 flutes (III doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 tenor trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (snare drum, cymbals, bass drum), harp, strings.

Among Liszt’s 13 symphonic poems, two—Battle of the Huns and From the Cradle to the Grave—took their subject matter from pictures. But more usually the composer’s sources of inspiration were literary, the poets he celebrated ranging from Goethe and Schiller to Byron and Hugo. More than once, he found inspiration in the writings of the French poet and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), which supplied the subject for his most popular symphonic poem, Les préludes.

Les préludes in its finished form presents a realization, and a remarkably colorful one, of Lamartine’s Poetic Meditations (actually a kind of prose ode) on life, love, and death. A short extract prefaces the score, and is reproduced here in translation for the guidance of listeners:

Is our life anything but a series of Preludes to that unknown song whose first and solemn note is intoned by death?—Love is the enchanted dawn of all existence; but where is the fate for which the first delights of happiness are never interrupted by some storm, whose mortal breath dissipates its beautiful illusions, whose fatal lightning blast destroys its altar? And where is the cruelly wounded soul that, emerging from one of these tempests, does not seek to find peace in recollecting the sweet serenity of country life? Yet man hardly contents himself for long with the enjoyment of the beneficent warmth that at first charmed him in Nature’s bosom, and when “the trumpet has sounded the alarm” he runs to the post of peril, whatever the war may be that calls him to the ranks, in order to recover in battle full self-awareness and the possession of all his powers.

It is instructive to discover that the score in fact grew out of a quite different piece: it was conceived as the introduction to a choral setting of a poem-cycle titled The Four Elements by Joseph Autran, which Liszt left uncompleted. But like some of those painters who title a canvas only after it is finished, Liszt chose well in attaching Lamartine’s words to his score, for it is hard to imagine how the scenes of rapture and strife depicted in the passage quoted, down to the clarion call of the trumpet, could be more brilliantly or evocatively realized in music.

PYOTR IL’YICH TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64
Born May 7, 1840, in Kamsko-Votkinsk, Russia; died November 6, 1893, in St. Petersburg.

Composed between May and August 1888, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony was first performed in on November 17 of that year in St. Petersburg. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on March 4, 1892, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.

Scoring: 3 flutes (III doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, strings.

The critical response, when Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony was introduced to American audiences soon after its premiere in St. Petersburg, offers one among many proofs of the difficulty that works now seen as unproblematical posed when they were new. “One vainly sought for coherency and homogeneousness,” the Musical Courier remarked after the first New York performance in March 1889. Three years later the Boston Evening Transcript asserted, “Nowhere else have we found Tchaikovsky so thoroughly imbued with the true spirit of symphonic writing as in the first movement,” but the rest of the review is much less complimentary, finding the slow movement “tiresome” and Tchaikovsky in the finale “up to his old tricks again.”

At least with regard to coherency and the true spirit of symphonic writing, it is perhaps over-optimistic to claim that modern critics no longer have problems with the Tchaikovsky symphonies. There is still a tendency to praise them in terms that suggest they are slightly jumped-up ballet music rather than “real” symphonies; and the cause of this critical impulse can probably be found in the puritanical notion that anything so colorful and uninhibited can’t really be intellectually respectable. The music’s continuing popularity proves that this notion is not shared by concertgoers at large, whose aims as a rule include pleasure.

The idea that Tchaikovsky’s symphonies are unsymphonic can hardly survive an examination of the music itself, particularly in the last and finest three of them. We need go no further than the first movement adroitly singled out by the Boston reviewer to find how surely, yet unobtrusively, the composer underpins his glittering surface with organically unifying touches. Between the little oscillating figure heard on flute and second clarinet in the main Allegro’s first theme, and the similar motif used as a counterpoint in the development section, stretches a complex web of more or less direct allusions. And the gradual addition of significance to a phrase that seemed at first quite unimportant makes its return in its original form at the recapitulation a singularly breath-catching event.

Much has been made by commentators of the other principal element in Tchaikovsky’s form-building here—the use of a motto theme to draw the argument together over all four movements of the symphony. But this technique, like the much-vaunted Leitmotif structure of Wagner’s Ring, may be less crucial in the long run than subtler devices such as the one just described. There is a certain trend in both Wagner and Tchaikovsky for the obvious unifying motifs to stand out like scaffolding on an inanimate structure, whereas the more local thematic relationships attain rather to the function of a skeleton within a living organism. Nevertheless, the motto theme of the Fifth Symphony, heard at the very outset on low clarinets, does its job effectively enough, returning with fine dramatic force toward the end of the slow movement, and again, much more stealthily, in the third-movement waltz.

This movement, by the way, was another part of the work that defeated even the sympathetic Boston critic, who complained that it “shows nothing in its intrinsic character nor workmanship to make good its claim to a place in a symphony.” Here, surely, is a case of preconceived ideas obstructing a genuine response to the nature of the music: the waltz is a frivolous dance-measure, and so it must be inappropriate to the solemn plane of symphonic thought. Perhaps the reviewer was so far seduced by the music’s charm, which is lazy enough to border on impudence, that he failed to observe the wonderful subtlety of its rhythmic organization. The opening group of phrases, 11 bars long, is no “mere” dance but a real symphonic period, and the central section on spiccato strings and woodwinds makes havoc of the usual constraints of bar lines.

The symphony’s concluding scene of celebration is set up, at the opening of the introduction to the finale, by the motto theme. Here, with an exciting sense of drama, its triumphal propensities are demonstrated for the first time. It is thus satisfying but not surprising when, after a movement full of stormy thematic interplay, the motto emerges resplendent in a jubilant coda, marked “Moderato assai e molto maestoso” (“extremely moderate and very majestic”). But Tchaikovsky has one more surprise up his sleeve: the last word is given, “Molto meno mosso” (“much less fast”), not to the motto, but to the main theme of the first movement, no longer nervous now but panoplied proudly forth on trumpets and oboes. And so victory is complete.


Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Bernard Jacobson writes frequently about classical music and is the author of A Polish Renaissance, part of the 20th-Century Composers series published by Phaidon Press.

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Valery Gergiev, Conductor
Over the course of its more than 160-year history, the Vienna Philharmonic has played an integral role in the development of music history, crossing paths with extraordinarily
talented composers and interpreters from multiple generations. Richard Wagner described the
orchestra as being one of the most outstanding in the world; Anton Bruckner called it “the most superior musical association”; Johannes Brahms counted himself a “friend and admirer”; Gustav Mahler claimed to be joined together through “the bonds of musical art”; and Richard Strauss summarized these sentiments by saying, “All praise of the Vienna Philharmonic reveals itself as understatement.”

Among the many notable qualities that set the Vienna Philharmonic apart from other major world orchestras is the fact that it is governed exclusively by its members, and all decisions are made democratically. In addition, a unique relationship exists between the Vienna State Opera Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic; only a member of the Vienna State Opera Orchestra is eligible to become a member of the Philharmonic. Being in the Vienna State Opera Orchestra provides the musicians of the Vienna Philharmonic a financial stability that would be impossible to attain without relinquishing the Philharmonic’s autonomy to private or corporate sponsors.

Originally called the “Philharmonic Academy,” the orchestra from its inception embodied all the principles of the “Philharmonic idea” that are still valid today. Founded in 1842 by Otto Nicolai, the Vienna Philharmonic has at its heart a mission to communicate a humanitarian message through its music, as well as through its extended deeds, into the daily lives and consciousness of its listeners. Its musicians strive to implement the motto that Ludwig van Beethoven, whose symphonic works served as a catalyst for the orchestra’s creation, chose to preface his Missa solemnis: “From the heart, to the heart.”

Since 1933, the orchestra has adopted a guest-conductor system enlisting the talents of the outstanding conductors of the day—Furtwängler, Giulini, Erich Kleiber, Klemperer, Knappertsbusch, Krauss, Mitropoulos, Ormandy, Schuricht, Solti, Szell, Walter; and from the next generation— Claudio Abbado, Boulez, Haitink, Harnoncourt, Jansons, Carlos Kleiber, Levine, Maazel, Mehta, Muti, Ozawa, Prêtre, Previn, Rattle, and Thielemann. A special place of honor in the orchestra’s post-1945 history is devoted to the collaboration with Laureate Conductors Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan, and with Laureate Associate Leonard Bernstein.

Today the Vienna Philharmonic fully meets every demand of today’s multimedia music industry, as manifested by its vast number of recordings and films for Decca, DGG, BMG, EMI, and Philips, as well as for Austrian TV; world concert tours; and participation at the most notable festivals. At the same time, it maintains its own matchless individuality, as exemplified by the New Year’s Concert and by its dominating role at the Salzburg Festival.

The Vienna Philharmonic is much more than Austria’s most coveted “Cultural Export.” The Vienna Philharmonic has received numerous prizes for its cultural achievements, including gold and platinum record-awards, national decorations, and honorary membership in many cultural institutions. In May of 2005, the World Health Organization named the Vienna Philharmonic its Goodwill Ambassadors. In November 2006, the Vienna Philharmonic became ambassadors for “Hear the World,” a hearing awareness campaign initiative by Phonak.

Yefim Bronfman, Piano