Program

STRAUSS JR. Overture to The Gypsy Baron HINDEMITH Mathis der Maler Symphony I. Engelkonzert (Angelic Concert) II. Grablegung (Entombment) III. Versuchung des heiligen Antonius (The Temptation of St. Anthony) ________ Intermission ________ BRAHMS Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98 I. Allegro non troppo II. Andante moderato III. Allegro giocoso IV. Allegro energico e passionato

About the Program

Johann Strauss Jr.

Born Oct. 25, 1825; Vienna, Austria Died June 3, 1899; Vienna, Austria Overture to The Gypsy Baron Even Brahms and Wagner, the two competitive, heavyweight composers of the era, shared a great fondness for the music by Johann Strauss Jr. It’s difficult today to imagine music that is so popular with average people and connoisseurs, liberals and conservatives, young and old alike, and to realize that, in the 19th century, this music was serious business, if not serious music. Johann Strauss Sr., a gifted composer who started the family dynasty, tried to dissuade his three sons from the music industry, but he lost on all three counts. According to Johann Strauss Jr., he and his brothers learned everything they knew from their father. “We boys paid close attention to every note,” he said, recalling how they would try to re-create his style when they played the piano at social gatherings. “We familiarized ourselves with his style and then played what we had heard straight off, exactly in his spirited manner. He was our ideal. We often received invitations to visit families … and would play from memory, and to great applause, our father’s compositions.” Before Johann Sr. died in 1849, at the age of 45, he saw his oldest son, Johann Jr., surpass him in fame and fortune. Johann Strauss Jr., wasn’t a particularly happy man — he married three times in an age when such behavior was exceptional, and he was regularly given to dark moods — but the music he wrote projects an aura of an almost hypnotic cheer and frivolity. At the height of his popularity, the younger Strauss employed several orchestras (all bearing his name) and dashed from one ballroom to another to put on a nightly appearance with each. Eventually Johann Strauss Jr. would be acclaimed as the Waltz King, although he wrote nearly as many polkas as waltzes and could have earned his reputation on the basis of his 16 operettas alone. It was Strauss’ first wife, Henriette, a soprano, who convinced him to try his hand at writing operettas. Indigo and the Forty Thieves was his first, premiering in Vienna in 1871, the year before Strauss made a highly successful tour of the United States, and he soon spun out a steady stream of hits, including the one that has achieved the most lasting fame, Die Fledermaus, three years later. It was his third wife, Adele, who introduced Strauss to the novel Saffi by the Hungarian writer Mór Jókai, suggesting that its mix of Viennese gaiety and gypsy exoticism would be ideal territory for musical treatment. The Gypsy Baron, as it was titled, is often regarded as Strauss’ first attempt to turn away from the frivolity of operetta and draw closer to the more serious nature of the opera. It was a great international success following its Vienna premiere in October 1885 and is still performed with some frequency today. The brilliant overture, flavored with abundant exotic touches and featuring a big waltz tune, is stamped throughout with the unmistakable Strauss genius.

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Paul Hindemith

Born Nov. 16, 1895; Hanau, near Frankfurt, Germany Died Dec. 28, 1963; Frankfurt, Germany Mathis der Maler Symphony Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Paul Hindemith was not Jewish, but his wife, Gertrud, was half Jewish by birth, so the composer was particularly watchful of the new government’s policies. Later that year, he abandoned work on an operatic love story and turned his attention to the tale of the German painter Matthias Grünewald, who was torn between a self-centered commitment to his art and a life of political activism. Mathis der Maler (Mathis the Painter) became Hindemith’s personal testament, conceived during the most challenging and difficult period in his life. It is his magnum opus. For years, he worked on little else, and he grappled with the relationship between music and politics and pondered the artist’s responsibility when the world around him is torn apart by violence and hatred. Regularly, if privately, he weighed the value of his own work — at a time when art, to many, seemed a horribly selfish, if not completely irrelevant, pastime. In the end, both Grünewald and Hindemith come down on the side of art, although the painter’s dilemma, during the Peasants’ Revolt that followed the Reformation, was neither as complicated nor as treacherous as that of a well-intentioned composer working in Hitler’s Germany. Hindemith’s choices were not always easy ones, and his decisions did not satisfy everyone. For several years he remained in Germany, watching, one by one, his Jewish colleagues Arnold Schoenberg, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, and Artur Schnabel — as well as his own chamber music partners, Emanuel Feuermann and Szymon Goldberg — leave the country.  Although Hindemith remained isolated from world events while he was writing Mathis der Maler, by the time it was completed in 1935, the opera put him in the middle of controversy. A broadcast of Mathis der Maler was canceled when word leaked out that Hindemith had once spoken disparagingly of Hitler. Wilhelm Furtwängler was advised not to stage the work because, he was told, Hitler had, years before, walked out of a performance of Hindemith’s News of the Day, incensed by the sight of a soprano singing from her bathtub. (She was extolling the joys of an apartment with hot running water.) Ultimately, Furtwängler rose to Hindemith’s defense with an essay that ran in local newspapers, and Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, made a speech denouncing the composer. Hindemith was no longer on the sidelines. In 1938, he was included — along with Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Irving Berlin — in the now-famous traveling show of “Degenerate Music.” That September, the Hindemiths left Germany for a new home in Switzerland. (They moved to the United States in 1940 and became American citizens in 1946.) The idea for an opera about Grünewald had been suggested to Hindemith by his publisher, Willy Strecker, in 1932. At first, Hindemith was more interested in Strecker’s other suggestion, an opera about Gutenberg. But he quickly came to realize that the Grünewald story was not only timely, but of enormous personal significance. Eventually, he grew to understand that Grünewald’s story, in a sense, was his story. By the time the opera was done, Hindemith admitted that Grünewald’s experiences had “shattered his very soul.” Grünewald was born in the third quarter of the 15th century and died, like his more famous German contemporary Albrecht Dürer, in 1528. Grünewald sympathized with the German peasants in the bloody uprisings that began in 1524, and, as a result, he lost the patronage of the cardinal archbishop of Mainz. Ultimately, however, Grünewald realized the futility of his political actions and came to understand that only by returning to painting could he truly better mankind. Grünewald’s masterpiece — his magnum opus — is the many-paneled altarpiece he painted around 1515 for a monastery and hospital in Isenheim, near Colmar. This great monument, one of the most powerful and expressive works in the history of art, is, in effect, the scenic backdrop for Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, and it inspired several of the opera’s scenes. Shortly after Hindemith began work on the opera, Furtwängler asked him to write a new piece for the Berlin Philharmonic. Preoccupied as he was with Mathis der Maler, he decided to write a symphony on the same subject, taking its musical material from the pages of sketches that already cluttered his desk. The symphony was completed more than a year before the opera. Each of the three movements represents one of the panels from Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece. The Angelic Concert, the opera’s overture, begins solemnly, with three resounding, organlike chords, followed by the trombones intoning an old German song, “Es sungen drei Engel ein’ süssen Gesang” (“Three angels sang a sweet song”). (The song is played three times, each time a third higher.) From there the movement takes wing, in sequences of radiant and soaring music. The Entombment is a gentle, but ultimately fearless, meditation on death. It moves slowly toward a somber climax, with a resoundingly peaceful ending. Hindemith originally planned to use this music at the end of his symphony, as the last of four movements. For a while, when he did not know how to go on, he even considered leaving it a two-movement work. But then he seized on the idea of ending not with death, but with another of Grünewald’s panels, The Temptation of St. Anthony. This turned out to be the symphony’s longest and most complex movement, written on deadline in just four weeks. The music is anguished and driven, then tormented and seemingly defeated, until the winds begin to play the Gregorian “Lauda Sion Salvatorem” (“Zion, Praise the Savior”). The brass offer a glorious halo of hallelujahs at the very end. This is the proud music of hard-won triumph. As Hindemith wrote of Grünewald, “Caught in the powerful machinery of church and state, he had the strength to resist these forces, and in his painting he could report clearly enough how profoundly he was shaken by the wild tumult of his time, with all its suffering, its sicknesses, and its wars.” ________

Johannes Brahms

Born May 7, 1833; Hamburg, Germany Died April 3, 1897; Vienna, Austria Symphony No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 98 Brahms’ Fourth Symphony is his final statement in a form he had completely mastered, although for a very long time he was paralyzed by the nine examples by Beethoven. It’s difficult to imagine what Beethoven or Brahms might have done next, since their last symphonies seem to sum up all either knew of orchestral writing. The difference is that Beethoven’s choral symphony opened up a vast new world for the rest of the 19th century to explore, while Brahms reached something of a dead end. But what a glorious ending it is. Brahms was never one to forge new paths — like Bach and Handel, he added little to the historical development of music — and yet he always seemed to prove that there was more to be said in the language at hand. This symphony begins almost in midthought, with urgent, sighing violins coming out of nowhere; it often disorients first-time listeners. Brahms meant it to — he originally wrote two preparatory bars of wind chords and later crossed them out, letting the theme catch us by surprise. The violins skip across the scale by thirds — falling thirds and their mirror image, rising sixths — a shorthand way of telling us that the interval of a third pervades the harmonic language of the entire symphony. It also determines key relationships: the third movement, for example, is in C major, a third below the symphony’s E minor key. Brahms has a wonderful time playing with the conventions of sonata form in the first movement. He seems to make the classical repeat of the exposition, but, only eight measures in, alters one chord and immediately plunges into the new harmonic fields of the development section. Listen for the great point of recognition — at ppp (pianississimo), the quietest moment in the symphony — with which Brahms marks the recapitulation. For 12 measures, the music falters like an awkward conversation, the winds suggesting the first theme, the violins not seeming to understand. Suddenly they catch on and, picking up the theme where the winds left off, sweep into a full recapitulation capped by a powerful coda. In the andante moderato, Brahms takes the little horn call of the first measure and tosses it throughout the orchestra, subtly altering its color, rhythm, and character as he proceeds. A forceful fanfare in the winds introduces a juicy new cello theme. (It turns out to be nothing more than the fanfare played slowly.) Near the end, shadows cross the music. The horns boldly play their theme again, but the accompaniment suggests that darkness has descended for good. The lightning flash of the allegro giocoso proves otherwise. This is music of enormous energy, lightened by an unabashed comic streak — unexpected from Brahms, normally the most sober of composers. Here he indulges in the repeated tinklings of the triangle, and he later boasted that “three kettledrums, triangle, and piccolo will, of course, make something of a show.” Midway through, when the first theme’s thundering left foot is answered by the puny voice of the high winds, the effect is as funny as anything in Haydn. Throughout his life, Brahms collected old scores and manuscripts to study their pages to see what history might teach him. More than once, he spoke of wanting to write a set of variations on a theme he remembered from a cantata by Bach. But no one before Brahms had seriously thought of writing a strict passacaglia, a continuous set of variations over a repeated bass line, to wrap up a symphony. The finale to Brahms’ Fourth Symphony isn’t a musty, academic exercise, but a brilliant summation of all Brahms knew about symphonic writing set over 32 repetitions of the same eight notes. Trombones make their entrance in the symphony to announce the theme, loosely borrowed from Bach’s Cantata No. 150, Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich (I Long for You, O Lord). To bring the ancient passacaglia form into the 19th century, Brahms superimposes over his variations the general outline of sonata form, with an unmistakable moment of recapitulation midway through.  A look at the finale in its entirety reveals the sturdy four-movement structure of the classical symphony: Brahms begins with eight bold and forceful variations, followed by four slow variations of yearning and quiet eloquence, an increasingly hectic dancelike sequence, and an urgent and dramatic final group that provides a triumphant conclusion. One can follow Brahms’ eight-note theme from the shining summit of the flute line, where it first appears over rich trombone harmonies, to the depths of the double bass, where it descends as early as the fourth variation, supporting a luscious new violin melody. Even in the 12th variation, where the theme steps aside so the focus is on the poignant, solemn song of the flute, the spirit of those eight notes is still with us. And as Arnold Schoenberg loved to point out, the skeleton of the main theme from the first movement also appears in the penultimate variation, like the ghostly statue in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The finale is as magnificent and as satisfying as any movement in symphonic music; it’s easy to assume that, having written this, Brahms had nothing left to say. We’ll never know whether that was so, or if, in the end, he simply ran out of time.

— Phillip Huscher, program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra