CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Zubin Mehta, Conductor

SCHOENBERG Verklärte Nacht
BRUCKNER Symphony No. 9

Sponsored by KPMG LLP

Program Notes:

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874–1951)
Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4

An evocation of new love transcending the burden of old sin, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) is a scene set under a night sky and dominated by the cold light of the moon. Taking Richard Dehmel’s poem as its point of departure, Schoenberg wrote the work over three weeks in September 1899, a time when most composers, influenced by Wagner, were writing on a much grander scale.

With Gurrelieder, Schoenberg contributed his share of grandiosity, but Verklärte Nacht is a very different piece. The two works share a somewhat Wagnerian cast of harmony, but while Wagner essentially conceived his music in terms of chords, Schoenberg was much more preoccupied with line, evident in the delicate instrumental thought of Verklärte Nacht.

In its spacious single-movement design, Verklärte Nacht represents a direction the composer was to follow in both his First String Quartet (1904–1905) and his E-Major Chamber Symphony (1906). These two works are radical attempts to come to terms with the formal problems posed at the turn-of-the-century, mainly the eclipse of tonality as an organizing principle. Schoenberg’s harmonic language moved further away from traditional idioms, but he relied on conventional formal structures in order to remain accessible to the listener while also assimilating the music’s harmonic novelty.

By contrast, in its spacious single-movement design, Verklärte Nacht combines a daringly free and original formal scheme with retaining more common harmonic language. At this stage in his career, Schoenberg’s style was not at all intimidating. The situation depicted in the Dehmel poem has its somber side, but its atmosphere is ecstatically sensual—an emotion vividly caught in the music.

In its original form, as a string sextet, Verklärte Nacht was first performed in 1903. Fourteen years later, perhaps recognizing that a symphonic poem for chamber forces was something of an anomaly, Schoenberg decided to arrange the work for string orchestra—a version that has greatly contributed to its popularity both in the concert hall and as a vehicle for ballet.
As a guide to listeners, the text of Dehmel’s poem follows, together with an English translation.


ANTON BRUCKNER (1824–1896)
Symphony No. 9 in D Minor

With Parsifal, Wagner brought church into the theater. This transplantation has offended some sincere believers: Stravinsky profoundly outraged by it. But we may question whether there is anything more irreligious about the piece than there was in, say, Mozart’s bringing the theater into the church with the florid vocal style of some of his Masses.

Wagner’s humble admirer Anton Bruckner paralleled Parsifal in his own fashion: throughout his nine symphonies, Bruckner brought the church into the concert hall. Bruckner did not go so far as to incorporate religious texts (or any other kind, for that matter) into his symphonies, but they are unequivocally religious works— celebrations of nature and life, and of Bruckner’s relationship with his creator. Whereas Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms is “composed to the glory of God and dedicated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra,” Bruckner, with rare simplicity and unselfconsciousness, inscribed his Ninth Symphony “to my dear God.”

Like its predecessors in Bruckner’s symphonic canon, the Ninth Symphony celebrates life; but much more directly than any of them, it confronts death—and death cut Bruckner short while he was still composing the piece. When Bruckner realized the possibility that he might not be able to complete the symphony, he suggested that his Te Deum be used as a choral finale (further evidence for his equation of religious and symphonic music).

Writers on Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony seems to be consumed with the idea that the existing three movements form by themselves an ideal whole. Such a notion would have astonished Bruckner, who would never have planned to end in E major a symphony that began in the drastically differing key of D Minor, and whose determination to finish the work kept him going for the last nine years of his life in spite of steadily failing health.

In the last movement, as we know from the more than 200 pages of sketches that survive, Bruckner planned a mighty synthesis of themes that should sum up his life’s work in one great peak. Bruckner mirrors the turn from life’s simple joy to preoccupation with the significance and inevitability of death in the Ninth Symphony by a change in musical language: Most of his symphonies are rocklike structures built on the glorious solidity of a given key, but the Ninth embraces and extends the new technique of dislocation in conveying spiritual conflict and anguish.

This more questing approach to tonality becomes apparent very early in the first movement. Fragments of a somber theme, played softly by the eight horns in unison, emerge from the shadowy string background, their unhurried spacing declaring at once that this is to be a movement on the largest scale. But before the theme is complete, a fundamental duality of key has been established, for the motif that lifts the horns off the ground is a leaping figure founded on the note E-flat, harmonized in a way that strongly contradicts the distant key of D minor.

After the first group culminates in a thundering unison theme for the full orchestra, the spacious exposition, true to Bruckner’s taste for Schubertian expansion, finds room for two further groups of subjects. But this vision of peace does not endure for long. Despite all its aspiring climaxes, lyrical yearnings, and leisurely recapitulation, the movement cannot find a final resolution. It concludes as an awe-inspiring collision between a sonorously sustained chord of D minor and the assertive E-flats of the trumpets, which pitilessly hammer home the original tonal conflict.

The second movement, less robust and more grotesque than most of Bruckner’s scherzos, carries the undermining of key one step further. Though D minor is again the home tonality, we never feel comfortably grounded in this key. After a vehement, tortured theme in the final movement, the piece concludes with a feeling of serenity (heard in the Wagnerian tubas) as the first movement’s D-minor–E-flat clash are held at bay for a few precious moments. In the absence of a true Bruckner finale, this lingering coda serves as a very acceptable conclusion, like the farewell to life of a simple and noble soul, expressed in full confidence of a life to come.

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Zubin Mehta, Conductor
There is perhaps no other musical ensemble more consistently and closely associated with the history and tradition of European classical music than the Vienna Philharmonic. In the course of its over 160-year history, the musicians of this most prominent orchestra of the capital city of music have been an integral part of a musical epoch which, due to an abundance of gifted composers and interpreters, must certainly be regarded as unique.
The orchestra’s close association with this rich musical history is best illustrated by the statements of countless preeminent musical personalities of the past. Richard Wagner described the orchestra as one of the most outstanding in the world; Anton Bruckner called it “the most superior musical association”; Johannes Brahms counted himself as 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.”
The Vienna State Opera Orchestra holds a special relationship with the private association known as the Vienna Philharmonic. In accordance with philharmonic statutes, only a member of the Vienna State Opera Orchestra can become a member of the Vienna Philharmonic. The engagement in the Vienna State Opera Orchestra provides the musicians a financial stability that would be impossible to attain without relinquishing their autonomy to private or corporate sponsors.
The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s mission is to communicate the humanitarian message of music into the daily lives and consciousness of its listeners. In 2005 the orchestra was named Goodwill Ambassador of the World Health Organization (WHO), and since 2006 the orchestra has also been Ambassador for the Phonak initiative “Hear the World.” The musicians endeavor to implement the motto with which Ludwig von Beethoven, whose symphonic works served as a catalyst for the creation of the orchestra, prefaced his “Missa Solemnis”: “From the heart, to the heart.”