CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Boston Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 8:00 PM

Boston Symphony Orchestra
James Levine, Music Director and Conductor
Renée Fleming, Soprano

BERLIOZ Excerpts from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 17
HENRI DUTILLEUX Le Temps l’Horloge for Soprano and Orchestra (NY Premiere)

DUPARC "L'invitation au voyage"
DUPARC "Extase"
DUPARC "Le manoir de Rosemonde"
DUPARC "Phidylé"
DEBUSSY La mer

Sponsored by Continental Airlines, the Official Airline of Carnegie Hall

Program Notes:

HECTOR BERLIOZ Orchestral excerpts from Roméo et Juliette, Dramatic Symphony, Op. 17
Born December 11, 1803, in La Côte-St-André, Isère, France; died March 8, 1869, in Paris.

Composed between March and September 1839 with a text by Emile Deschamps after Shakespeare, the “dramatic symphony” Roméo et Juliette received its first performance on November 24 of that year at the Paris Conservatoire, with Berlioz conducting. The first performance at Carnegie Hall of an excerpt of Roméo et Juliette took place on January 15, 1892, when the New York Symphony Orchestra, Walter Damrosch, conductor, performed the orchestral movements Love Scene, Queen Mab Scherzo, and Romeo Alone—Grand Festivity at the Capulets. The first complete Carnegie Hall performance of Roméo et Juliette took place on October 7, 1942, with mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel, tenor Jacques Gerard, bass Nicola Moscona, the Westminster Choir, and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Arturo Toscanini.

Scoring (excluding the vocal soloists and chorus called for in the complete symphony): 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets, 4 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 cornets-à-piston, 3 trombones, ophicleide (usually replaced in modern performances by a tuba), 4 timpani (two players), bass drum, cymbals, antique cymbals in F and B-flat, two tambourines, a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 10 harps, and strings.

Berlioz’s first symphony was the Symphonie fantastique (1830), an autobiographical drama, taking Beethoven’s concept of the symphony far into the realm of passion and personal confession. His second symphony, Harold en Italie (1834), was also personal, part reminiscence of Berlioz’s own travels in Italy, part exploration of the Byronic spleen from which the whole Romantic generation loved to suffer. For his third symphony, Roméo et Juliette (1839), he turned to his greatest literary passion, Shakespeare, drawing once again on his own most fervent experiences.

His discovery of Shakespeare in 1827 had been overwhelming not only for the dramatic force of the poetry and drama (instinctively grasped even though Berlioz knew no English), but also because the leading actress of the company, Harriet Smithson, immediately won his heart (and, by remaining initially oblivious to him, unknowingly inspired his Symphonie fantastique). She became for Berlioz the personification of Ophelia and Juliet; and although he never mentioned writing any music as a response to the “thunderbolt” (as he called the doubly forceful experience), it is very probable that his immediate response was to set certain scenes from Romeo and Juliet, perhaps as instrumental music without voices. Ultimately the plan stayed in the back of his mind, waiting for an opportunity to compose such a work and a binding idea that would give it external form. The opportunity came with Paganini’s famous gift of 20,000 francs at the end of 1838, and the formal shape came, indirectly, from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Like the Ninth, Berlioz’s new symphony was also to be a choral symphony, using a double chorus to represent the two warring families and solo voices as secondary characters (Mercutio, Friar Laurence, and a contralto soloist as commentator). The lovers themselves were to be represented purely by the orchestra. The symphony does not enact the drama in detail and many episodes are omitted, but the resources of voices and orchestra allowed Berlioz to combine the dramatic immediacy of sung words with the infinite expressive power of instrumental music, without voices. In particular Berlioz felt it was necessary to explain in his Preface why he did not set the famous balcony scene as a love duet, perhaps for soprano and tenor soloists. His reasons were threefold: first, this is a symphony and not an opera; second, love duets already exist in profusion while programmatic symphonic movements were new; and third, words are too precise to express the very sublimity of this love, so only music can attempt to paint its true intensity.

Three purely orchestral movements from Roméo et Juliette find their way onto concert programs with some regularity, as here: “Romeo Alone—Festivities at the Capulets,” an Allegro with a slow introduction, representing Romeo’s solitary thoughts before the ball and then the festivities themselves, during which the lovers meet for the first time; then the long and glorious “Love Scene”; and the Queen Mab Scherzo suggested by Mercutio’s speech “O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.”

The symphony was given its first three performances at the Paris Conservatoire at the end of 1839, with Berlioz conducting. It was a pinnacle of French Romanticism and a brilliant example of Berlioz’s orchestral mastery, as many then present were aware. One of those listeners was Wagner, who had recently arrived in Paris for the first time and who was deeply impressed by it. Berlioz was never able to present the full symphony again in Paris; the only other complete performances in his lifetime were given abroad: in Vienna and Prague in 1846, in St. Petersburg in 1847, and in Weimar in 1852. But he often extracted the purely instrumental movements for his concerts in Paris and abroad, a practice that still allows those movements to be more frequently heard.

—Hugh Macdonald


HENRI DUTILLEUX Le Temps l’Horloge, for soprano and orchestra
Born January 22, 1916, in Angers, France; currently living in Paris.

Le Temps l’Horloge was co-commissioned by the Saito Kinen Festival, Radio France, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (as one of the BSO’s 125th Anniversary Commissions). The commission by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, James Levine, Music Director, was made possible through the generous support of Catherine and Paul Buttenwieser. The performance of Le Temps l’Horloge by the Boston Symphony Orchestra is made possible by a grant from the French-American Fund for Contemporary Music. Dutilleux composed the three songs in this cycle between 2006 and 2007, writing them specifically for soprano Renée Fleming. He plans to round out the cycle with a fourth song (to a well-known text of Baudelaire). Seiji Ozawa led Fleming and the Saito Kinen Orchestra in the world premiere on September 6, 2007, at the Saito Kinen Festival in Matsumoto, Japan. The Boston Symphony Orchestra gave the American premiere performances in Boston last week, on November 29 and 30 and December 1, 2007. Tonight’s performance marks the work’s New York premiere.

Scoring: solo soprano, piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes; 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, and bass clarinet; 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 3 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timbales, 2 percussionists (playing crotales, acute and medium suspended cymbals, two tam tams, woodblock, and bass drum), vibraphone, marimbaphone, harp, celesta, harpsichord, accordion, and strings.

While Henri Dutilleux’s father fought in the First World War, his family remained in temporary exile from its home in the northern French Flanders town of Douai. Dutilleux studied at the Paris Conservatoire and eventually won the Prix de Rome, but the outbreak of the Second World War intervened, and the young artist had to return abruptly from Italy to Paris. He worked as a chorus master at the Opéra and as an arranger for nightclubs (one can detect the occasional influence of jazz in his music), later being hired by Radio France to write incidental music for radio plays. In the realm of “absolute” instrumental music, Dutilleux eventually found his authentic voice beginning with his Piano Sonata (1948)—written for his pianist wife Geneviève Joy—and his Symphony No. 1 (1951). His reputation began to spread in the 1960s, largely a result of commissions from American (rather than French) orchestras. The Boston Symphony Orchestra in particular has played a vital role, commissioning such pivotal works as the Symphony No. 2 and, more recently, The Shadows of Time (1997).

A unique voice in French music, Dutilleux is mostly identified with highly abstract, coloristic orchestral scores, but he frequently taps into the visual arts and literature to enrich his inspiration. A number of his major compositions involve deeply personal relationships with texts or paintings; his most frequently performed work, the cello concerto “Tout un monde lointain…,” is saturated with a love of Baudelaire. An unmistakable preoccupation for Dutilleux is the interplay of memory and time passing. Time and space, presence and absence, shadows and reflections—these form a network of imagery that recurs throughout Dutilleux’s oeuvre.

After a long absence of the human voice from his scores, in the past decade Dutilleux introduced children’s voices in The Shadows of Time (1997), another Baudelaire-inspired work. The work preceding the present one is the song cycle Correspondances (2003), written for Dawn Upshaw. Le Temps l’Horloge, written for Renée Fleming, not only recapitulates poetic ideas that have long fascinated the composer, but also distills the essence of his musical personality in potent concentrations (the first and third songs last only two minutes each). Dutilleux seems to revel in the combination of the voice, in all its lyrical freedom, with the pointillist textures of his orchestration. The cycle, incidentally, has not yet reached its final version. Dutilleux intends to complete the cycle (currently three songs on texts of two 20th-century poets) by setting Baudelaire’s prose-poem, “Enivrez-Vous” (“Get Drunk!”).

The current triptych’s two poems by Jean Tardieu (1903–95) strike dramatically contrasting attitudes. Tardieu, like Dutilleux, worked at Radio France. His poetry reflects a Mallarmé-inspired lyricism; as a playwright, he was aligned with the postwar theater of the absurd of Ionesco, Beckett, and others. “Le Temps l’Horloge” (from which Dutilleux’s song cycle takes its title) plays off the irony of mechanically measured time versus the tricks and feints of psychological time—which more accurately reflects the human soul? Dutilleux responds with a gentle, melancholy humor: as if to counter the triple-meter flow (speeded up in the winds and harpsichord), the song nearly comes to a standstill in the middle as the clarinet erupts in a brief, meter-defying solo. The soprano’s rising and falling lines meanwhile hint at time’s recurrent patterns.

“Le Masque” (the longest of the three songs) presents us with quite another atmosphere: a chimerical confrontation between the narrator and a sphinx-like mask whose mystery is left unexplained. The vocal line’s wide-ranging intervals seem palpably to trace the object. Here Dutilleux brings his mastery of coloristic textures—both elegant and dramatic—into supreme focus with music that alternately brightens and scurries into the shadows. Echoes of Bartók’s nocturnal moods deepen the poem’s sense of mysterious spaces, while muted brass bring in the briefest tinge of nightclub jazz. At the song’s climax, even the voice resorts to a wordless melisma.

Robert Desnos (1900–45) was a surrealist poet who experimented with automatic writing and was hailed (though later condemned) by the surrealist guru André Breton. Desnos worked as an active member of the Resistance until the Gestapo arrested him in 1944 and deported him to a series of death camps. The poet survived the liberation of Térézin, but he died only a month after the war ended from illnesses he had incurred in the camps. He is the sole poet commemorated on the walls of the Monument to the Martyrs of the Deportation in Paris, where the text of “Le Dernier Poème” is inscribed. The text, a deeply moving lyric of loss, draws from Dutilleux a setting of profound sparseness.

—Thomas May


HENRI DUPARC Four Songs with orchestra
Born January 21, 1848, in Paris, France; died February 12, 1933, in Mont-de-Marsan, France.

Duparc composed these songs originally with piano accompaniment in Paris between 1870 and 1882. His orchestral versions of “L’invitation au voyage” and “Phidylé” were first performed in Paris in 1897, and that of “Le manoir de Rosemonde” in 1912. The orchestral version of “Extase” is by Arthur Luck.

The songs on tonight’s program received their Carnegie Hall premieres as follows: “L’invitation au voyage” and “Extase” on November 16, 1911, with Maggie Teyte, soprano, and Robert Rubeling, piano; “Le manoir de Rosemonde” on November 1, 1917, with Alice Gentle, mezzo-soprano, and Mildred Turner-Bianco, piano; and “Phidylé” on November 15, 1910, with Jeanne Jomelli, soprano, and Charles Wark, piano.

Scoring: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, bass drum, harp, celesta, and strings.

Duparc lived many years but wrote little music. As a young man he studied law at a Jesuit school in Paris while attending composition lessons with César Franck, and his first set of six songs was published when he was 20. In 1869 he and the 18-year-old Vincent d’Indy (both living in the same building in Paris and both studying with Franck) traveled to Munich to hear Das Rheingold and Tristan und Isolde. During the siege of Paris in 1870, Duparc served in the infantry, during which difficult time he composed “L’invitation au voyage.” His fine orchestral tone poem Lénore was performed in 1875.

Yet ten years later, in his mid-30s, his career fell apart. He abandoned composition after producing an exquisite series of songs and a handful of other works. Many neuro-psychological explanations for this sad history have been offered, but it amounts to a major case of composer’s block, with its attendant revulsion against his own works, some of which he destroyed. He remained in Paris until 1906 and then spent his later years far from Paris editing and orchestrating some of his songs, painting in various media, and devoted to religion, especially after a visit to Lourdes.

The 16 songs that survive form a treasure to be compared in quality and sensitivity to the song legacy of Gabriel Fauré, his contemporary, who also lived many years, but who never ceased to compose. Debussy and Ravel both admired Duparc’s work and drew inspiration from it.

He shared his teacher Franck’s taste for richly textured harmony not unaffected by Wagner. He responded warmly to contemporary French poetry, as we can hear in “L’invitation au voyage,” from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. The poet was inviting his beloved to join him in the land of canals, Holland, where all is “ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté,” an image of quiet bliss captured superbly by Duparc in the rich chords that support these words. One would scarcely guess that the original version was for piano, not orchestra, so evocative and rich are the colors that support the singer’s dream.

The poet of “Extase” was Henri Cazalis, who wrote under the name Jean Lahor. From this tiny poem Duparc extracts a wealth of feeling, especially on the word “mort” at the end, and the dark, shifting harmony suggests an almost morbid obsession with death. The orchestration of this song is not by Duparc, but by Arthur Luck

Duparc dedicated “Le Manoir de Rosemonde” to the poem’s author, Robert de Bonnières. The “blue manor of Rosamonde” is the cryptic goal of a wild quest, entwined with images of dogs and hunting. Perhaps Bonnières was alluding to Henry II’s mistress Fair Rosamonde, poisoned by Queen Eleanor in 1177. More probably the poem’s evocation of a blood-soaked trail and a desperate, halting pursuit appealed to Duparc for the opportunity to build the music on strong rhythmic motives with a powerful climax and a suggestive, quiet close. Duparc orchestrated this song for Jeanne Raunay, who gave the first performance in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1913 under the baton of Ernest Ansermet.

“Phidylé” offers a total contrast, a picture of nature in its quiet beauty, where bees, birds, and the rustle of leaves and streams sing a lullaby to the adorable Phidylé, a farm servant to whom Horace dedicated one of his Odes. Leconte de Lisle’s poem allows Duparc an expansive treatment, modulating freely from key to key, with colorful orchestration and a marvelous ending as the music winds down to a full, rich, contented close.

—Hugh Macdonald


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

Debussy began work on La mer during the summer of 1903 and completed the score in March 1905, though he continued to make revisions for many years. Camille Chevillard conducted the Lamoureux Orchestra in the first performance on October 15, 1905, in Paris; the work received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on March 21, 1907, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Karl Muck.

Scoring: 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets, 3 bassoons and contrabassoon (the latter in the third movement only), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 cornets à piston (third movement only), 3 trombones, bass tuba, timpani, cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, glockenspiel, bass drum, 2 harps, and strings.

Debussy had very little real experience of the sea; yet among the few views of his childhood that the unusually private composer vouchsafed to the world was the occasional affectionate reference to summer vacations at Cannes. His parents even made plans that he should become a sailor (a life that could hardly have suited him for long), but they were scotched when a certain Mme. Mauté, who was giving the nine-year-old boy piano lessons, discovered his musical talent, and within a year he was studying piano and theory at the Paris Conservatoire.

Still, when he came to write La mer 30 years later, Debussy commented that he was able to draw upon “innumerable memories” and that these were “worth more than reality, which generally weighs down one’s thoughts too heavily.” In the meantime, his memories were charged with images drawn from literature and art, and art was probably the most direct inspiration for La Mer. Debussy had admired the sea paintings of Turner, with their misty impalpability, shortly before he began composing La Mer. Still more influential were the Japanese artists Hokusai and Hiroshige, whose work became enormously popular in France by the end of the 19th century. When the score of La Mer was published, Debussy requested that the cover design include a detail of Hokusai’s most famous print, “The Hollow of the Wave off Kanagawa,” the part showing the giant wave towering above and starting to curve over in its downward fall, its foaming billows frozen in a stylized pattern that almost resembles leaves on a tree.

Debussy came to La Mer soon after the great success of his one completed opera Pelléas et Mélisande, performed to great acclaim in April 1902. In the following years, he showed a new confidence in his art, prolifically turning out the second set of Fêtes galantes, the first set of Images for piano, and the brilliant piano solo L’îsle joyeuse, as well as La mer. And for all of Debussy’s modesty in calling it simply “three symphonic sketches,” La mer is nothing less than a full-fledged symphony, with interrelationships between the movements and an artful balance of tension and repose, climax and release. It has been called the greatest symphony ever written by a French composer.

The first movement’s title, “From Dawn to Noon on the Sea,” is not intended to prescribe a particular program but merely to indicate a progression from near darkness, in which objects are indistinct, to brightness, in which they are clearly perceptible. Debussy’s pictorialism is wonderfully evocative in its suggestion of indistinct outlines that gradually appear to view, the light evidently breaking forth in the undulating tremolos of the strings just at the moment that the principal key, D-flat major, is established. The second movement, “Play of the Waves,” is a lighter scherzo, scored with extreme delicacy—an interlude between the stormy and emphatic passions of the first and last movements. “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea” begins with an evident pictorial image: the waves softly surging up in the low strings, answered by the winds—the woodwinds, in fact—blowing high up in chromatic shrieks. The struggle of wind and waves is developed at length, turning to material drawn from the opening movement, all building to a brilliant sunlit conclusion.

—Steven Ledbetter

Program notes copyright © 2007 Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc. All rights reserved.

Boston Symphony Orchestra
James Levine, Music Director and Conductor
Now in his fourth season as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, James Levine is the BSO’s 14th music director since the orchestra’s founding in 1881 and the first American-born conductor to hold that position. Highlights of Maestro Levine’s 2007–08 BSO programs (three of which again go to Carnegie Hall) include an Opening Night all-Ravel program; premieres of new works by Elliott Carter, John Harbison, William Bolcom, and Henri Dutilleux; Mahler’s First and Ninth symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde; Smetana’s complete Má Vlast; the two Brahms piano concertos with Evgeny Kissin, and season-ending concert performances of Berlioz’s Les Troyens. He also appears in Boston as pianist, performing Schubert’s Winterreise with Thomas Quasthoff. Mr. Levine’s 2007 Tanglewood season included seven programs with the BSO, a concert performance with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra of Verdi’s Don Carlo, and a staged TMC production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, as well as classes devoted to orchestral repertoire, Lieder, and opera with the TMC’s Instrumental, Vocal, and Conducting Fellows. Following Tanglewood, he and the Boston Symphony Orchestra made their first European tour together, performing in the Lucerne Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Festival (in Hamburg), Essen, Düsseldorf, the Berlin Festival, Paris, and the BBC Proms in London. James Levine is also Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera, where, in the 36 years since his Met debut, he has developed a relationship with that company unparalleled in its history and unique in the musical world today. His 2007–08 season with the Metropolitan Opera—where he has led more than 2,000 performances of 80 different operas—includes new productions of Lucia di Lammermoor and Macbeth; revivals of Tristan und Isolde and Manon Lescaut, and concerts at Carnegie Hall with the MET Orchestra (with soloists Alfred Brendel, Deborah Voigt, and Jonathan Biss) and MET Chamber Ensemble (joined by, among others, John Harbison, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Yefim Bronfman, Gil Shaham, and Anja Silja). Also this season, in February, he conducts the Juilliard Orchestra in Carter’s Symphonia: Sum fluxae praetium spei (a New York premiere) and Cello Concerto to close the Juilliard School’s Carter Festival.

Renée Fleming, Soprano
In 2007–08 Renée Fleming, one of the world’s most beloved and recognizable artists, sings Violetta in La traviata and Desdemona in Otello with the Metropolitan Opera, La traviata with Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Strauss’s Capriccio at Vienna State Opera. Other highlights include season-opening concerts with the National Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and Los Angeles Philharmonic; a solo concert celebrating Dallas Opera’s 50th anniversary; the world premiere of Dutilleux’s song cycle Le Temps l’Horloge, which she performs with Seiji Ozawa at Japan’s Saito Kinen Festival and repeats with James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Boston and New York; and Strauss’s Four Last Songs, to be performed and recorded with the Munich Philharmonic under Christian Thielemann. Her most recent releases include a DVD of Los Angeles Opera’s La traviata and a CD entitled Homage–The Age of the Diva. In recent years her recordings have ranged from Strauss’s Daphne to the jazz recording Haunted Heart to the movie soundtrack of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Renée Fleming’s artistry has been an inspiration to such prominent artists as Chuck Close, Robert Wilson, and Francesco Clemente, all of whom have created portraits of her. An advocate for literacy, she has been featured in promotional campaigns for the Association of American Publishers and the Magazine Publishers of America. Her book, The Inner Voice, is an intimate account of her career and creative process. Since 2001 she has represented Rolex timepieces in print advertising, and she was named to Mr. Blackwell’s 2001 “best-dressed” list. Her gown tonight is by John Galliano for Dior. Renée Fleming, who was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Rochester, New York, studied at The Juilliard School, holds degrees from the State University of New York at Potsdam and the Eastman School of Music, and was a Fulbright Scholar for study in Germany. Early awards included the Metropolitan Opera National Auditions, the Richard Tucker Award, and the George London Prize. She is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Hall Corporation and of the Advisory Board of the White Nights Foundation of America.