Beethoven Missa solemnis

Performed October 25–27, 2012

Ludwig van Beethoven began sketching his Missa solemnis in 1818, originally intending to have it performed at the appointment of his pupil and patron, the Archduke Rudolph, as Archbishop of Olmütz. However, he quickly became engrossed by the larger implications of the liturgical texts and the possibilities of expressing them through his music that it took over four years to complete the work.

Beethoven invested much of those four years in research, copying out entire portions of Mozart's Requiem and studying monastic chant and early church compositions by Josquin des Prez, Johannes Ockeghem and Giovanni Pierluigi de Palestrina. British musicologist Donald Francis Tovey noted the striking influence of older choral styles on Beethoven's mass: "Not even Bach or Handel can show a greater sense of space or sonority. There is no earlier choral writing that comes so near to recovering some of the lost secrets of the style of Palestrina."

The result is one of Beethoven's largest-scale works. At approximately 90 minutes long, with a large chorus, orchestra and four soloists, the mass is impractical for regular use in a Roman Catholic service. The music is extremely technically difficult and places great physical demands on the performers. The vocalists must articulate some of the most involved yet exhilarating counterpoint to be found in the choral repertoire, often sung at a fearsomely high register.

Yet in spite of these obstacles to its regular use in church services, Beethoven regarded the Missa solemnis as his crowning achievement, a personal expression on the brotherhood of mankind and the fragility of peace. He pushes the chorus nearly to the point of shouting with an ecstatic and electrifying Gloria; the Benedictus that closes the Sanctus contains some of the mass's most transcendantly beautiful strains. The mass concludes with an innovative and particularly somber Angus Dei, in which pleas for mercy (misere nobis—have mercy on us) are interspersed with martial drums and trumpets. Ultimately those pleas are left unanswered.

The Wagner Effect: Mahler 3

Performed November 1–3, 2012

ENDORSEMENT
First published in 1805, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn) contained a collection of German folk poetry that tremendously influenced numerous composers, authors and artists of the nineteenth century. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose own writings were frequently the source of inspiration for composers ranging from Berlioz and Schumann to Wagner and Liszt, said the collection “has its place in every household.”

But perhaps no artist embraced Wunderhorn so deeply in his own work as Gustav Mahler. Mahler viewed these folk poems as a wellspring of culture, declaring them “essentially different from all kinds of ‘literary’ poetry, being more nature and life— that is, the sources of all poetry—than art.”

Elements of Mahler’s symphony certainly point to a Wagnerian infl uence, particularly in the transformation and evolution of small themes that emerge and reappear, peeking through like distant echoes. The opening horn theme strikes a call to awaken nature, and we hear reflections of it throughout the symphony: overtaking the orchestra in large, sweeping themes; soaring in transcendant chorales; dancing rhythmically through town-band marches. There is stark dramatic contrast, such as the juxtaposition of Nietzsche’s “Midnight Song” from Also sprach Zarathustra, with its speaker searching for redemption, against the angel choir’s promise of salvation. And if one misses these elements during the work, the Wagnerian infl uence becomes overt in the final movement, which quotes from Parsifal.

In that final movement, the orchestra emerges alone in a movement Mahler described as the culmination of the universe’s expression, as if God himself enters the conversation. As Mahler’s disciple, the conductor Bruno Walter, eloquently explained, “In the last movement, words are stilled—for what language can utter heavenly love more powerfully and forcefully than music itself?”

The Rite of Spring 100th Anniversary

Performed November 14–18, 2012

It is perhaps the most notorious scene from a classical music debut: as Stravinsky's score for The Rite of Spring began, the audience whistled, rustled and crackled, the commotion growing louder and louder until it burst into a full-blown riot at the dancers' first steps. Camille Saint-Saëns reportedly stormed out of the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in disgust (a fact Stravinsky subsequently disputed, saying that the famed French composer was not even present at the premiere). Only a year later, these same Parisian audiences heard the same score and responded by carrying the Russian composer out of the theater on their shoulders.

It is an oft-repeated tale, especially as we approach the 100th anniversary of these events. But to leave the music there—a complete hit with audiences across the world since 1914—misses a most important question: why does this work continue to capture listeners' imaginations today?

Stravinsky collaborated on The Rite of Spring with Russian artist and anthropologist Nikolai Roerich, who also created the magnificent costumes and set designs for the original ballet production. Together they sought to celebrate Russia's pagan roots, to glorify a culture that existed before Western influences arrived: a rural, pagan society closely linked to nature and the traditions from the East. On a spring morning, villagers in the meadow by the river revel in life and the pattern of yearly rituals. But by nightfall, they are on a shadowy hill, engaged in a dark ceremony that ends in the sacrifice of a young girl.

The music that resulted is revolutionary. Stravinsky based his work on traditional folk music from Russia and Lithuania. But he transformed this simple ancient material to create a perfect storm of rhythm, harmony and melodies that were unlike any ever heard before. One hundred years later, this masterpiece still thrills and captures the imagination of audiences the world over.

The Wagner Effect: Brahms 4

Performed January 17-19, 2013

OPPOSITION
Early in his career, Johannes Brahms was pegged as the antithesis of the new Wagner camp— his works in the great classical forms stood in direct opposition to everything Wagner and his revolutionary music dramas represented. But Brahms quickly proved that he would make his mark by breathing new life into old forms. He was not interested in forging new paths, because he knew that there was still more to be said in the language at hand.

Brahms' Fourth Symphony is his final statement in a form he had completely mastered—a form the mature Wagner completely ignored. And while it sums up everything Brahms knew about orchestral writing, it also points the symphony in a new direction. In this score, completed in 1885, Brahms has a wonderful time playing with the conventions of a standard four-movement layout and the textbook rules of sonata form. Throughout the symphony, there is music of enormous energy and invention, lightened by an unabashedly comic streak— unexpected from Brahms, reputedly the most sober of composers.

The magnificent finale is Brahms' masterstroke. Throughout his life, Brahms collected old scores, studying their pages to see what history might teach him. Now, in this finale, Brahms writes a set of variations on a theme from a cantata by Bach. No one before Brahms had thought of writing a strict passacaglia—a set of variations over a repeated bass line—to wrap up a symphony. And at the calm heart of this finale , with its echoes of the Pilgrims' music from Tannhäuser, the worlds of Wagner and Brahms even converge. Convention and innovation, past and present all merge in a finale that is as dazzling as any movement in symphonic music.

The Wagner Effect: Tristan and Isolde

Performed February 21 & 23, 2013

CHANGING THE COURSE
With its very opening notes, Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde initiated a new era. Inspired by the unrequited, forbidden love of the protagonists, Wagner poured out long chromatic lines and aching harmonic suspensions, changing forever the way music sounds.

Wagner frequently turned to medieval epics for his subject matter, and in 1854 he began sketching music for Tristan and Isolde, drawing on Arthurian legend. Heavily influenced by the philosopher Schopenhauer, who believed that human desire could never be satisfied, Wagner emphasized both the desperate yearning the lovers feel for one another and their inability to achieve true union.

Throughout the score, Wagner stretches unresolved harmonies nearly to their breaking point, sustaining the unbearable tension until the final moments of the last act, when a grief-stricken Isolde collapses, joining her beloved Tristan in death. Wagner declared that his work was "a monument to this loveliest of all dreams, in which, from the first to the last, love shall, for once, find utter repletion."

Wagner's innovations drew astonishing responses. Composers as different from one another as Bruckner and Berg, Mahler and Messiaen, Schoenberg and Strauss, all responded vigorously to this new world of sound and feeling. Even those whose music sounds utterly different to Wagner's, like his contemporaries Verdi, Tchaikovsky and Brahms, or later Debussy, Respighi and Shostakovich, still found their own distinct ways to respond to the example of Wagner's genius.

The Wagner Effect: Tchaikovsky 4

Performed March 21-24, 2013

DEFIANCE
Soulful, tender, brooding, forceful, heroic— Tchaikovsky’s great Fourth Symphony is all of these things and more. The Fourth Symphony was written around 1877, shortly after Tchaikovsky’s final stint as a music critic, reviewing the 1876 Bayreuth Festival for a Russian outlet. While he had earlier called Wagner “a great symphonist,” Tchaikovsky’s reaction to the operas he heard in Bayreuth was far more complex, almost paradoxical:

I should like to say something about the overall impression which this performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen has left with me…It has left me with respectful admiration for [Wagner’s] tremendous talent and his incredibly rich technique…with misgivings as to whether Wagner’s view of opera is correct… It has left me greatly exhausted, but at the same time it has also left me with the wish to continue my study of this most complicated work ever written.

It should come as no surprise then that the Fourth Symphony shares more in common stylistically with Bizet’s Carmen (premiered 1875) than any of Wagner’s operas. In these two works, both Tchaikovsky and Bizet sought a musical language that would be clear and direct, rich in meaning and creativity but still comprehensible to their audiences. No one would have accused them of following in Wagner’s artistic footsteps; indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche hailed Carmen as the “quintessential anti-Wagnerian model of operatic greatness.”

Since the CSO’s first performance of this beloved piece in 1899 under the baton of founder Theodore Thomas, it has been performed numerous times in Orchestra Hall under several brilliant conductors. In 2012/13, young, Russian-born conductor Tugan Sokhiev leads the CSO in what is sure to be a fresh, poignant performance of this favorite, a true “unburdening of the soul in music,” as the composer intended.