CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Pre-concert talk starts at 7:00 PM in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage with Matthias Pintscher and Jeremy Geffen, Director of Artistic Planning, Carnegie Hall.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Pierre Boulez, Conductor
Mitsuko Uchida, Piano

MATTHIAS PINTSCHER Osiris (New York Premiere, Co-commissioned by The Carnegie Hall Corporation, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and London Symphony Orchestra)
BARTÓK Piano Concerto No. 3

DEBUSSY Images

Carnegie Hall commissions in the 2007–2008 season are made possible, in part, by a grant from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Program Notes:

By Philip Huscher

Mon, Feb 25, 2008

MATTHIAS PINTSCHER Osiris

BÉLA BARTÓK Piano Concerto No. 3
Born March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania (now part of Romania); died September 26, 1945, in New York City.

Composed in 1945, the Third Piano Concerto was first performed on February 8, 1946, in Philadelphia, with György Sándor, piano, and The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy; the same players gave the New York premiere of the work at Carnegie Hall on February 26.

Scoring: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, side drum, xylophone, triangle, tam-tam, bass drum, cymbals, and strings.

After the last measure of this concerto, Béla Bartók wrote the Hungarian word vége (the end). This was the last score Bartók completed before he was moved from his 57th Street Manhattan apartment to the West Side hospital where he died four days later.

His friend Tibor Serly visited him on his last night at home, and he found Bartók propped up in bed, surrounded by manuscript pages and medicine bottles, trying to finish the orchestral score of his Third Piano Concerto. The great composer, weak and near death, was quite literally fighting the clock, filled with ideas he wouldn’t get time to tell us. Bartók’s son Peter had already drawn the bar lines on the paper, so it was simply a matter of Bartók writing in the parts. He got within 17 measures; Serly assumed the relatively straightforward task of deciphering the composer’s shorthand and filling in the blanks.

Bartók’s last five years, spent entirely in the United States, were neither productive nor happy. For two years after his arrival in October 1940, he wrote nothing new. In April 1942, his health took a sudden turn for the worse and he never regained his full strength. But Koussevitzky’s commission for the Concerto for Orchestra in May 1943 rekindled much of Bartók’s old spirit. The music began to flow. His last year, 1945, marked a new high point, except that time ran out.

For the first time in years, Bartók worked on two major pieces at once—the Third Piano Concerto and the Viola Concerto that he left in sketches on odd scraps of paper. This almost desperate surge of activity may well have come from a realization of the severity of his illness. When he left his Manhattan apartment for the last time, he was sketching a seventh string quartet and considering a commission for a double concerto from a two-piano team. Bartók turned to a hospital doctor and said, “I am only sorry that I have to leave with my baggage full.”

Bartók knew he would never play his Third Concerto; its solo part is written not in the explosive and incisive style that suited his own hands—the style of his first two concertos, which he often did play—but in a serene and more lyrical vein meant for his wife Ditta (it was intended as a birthday gift).

At the opening of the Allegretto (the marking is one of the few tempo indications Bartók actually wrote in), the piano etches a strong, simple melody—one note in each hand, two octaves apart, against a murmur in the strings. Although the music rises to moments of enormous energy and bristling excitement, the texture remains remarkably uncomplicated and transparent. It’s as if Bartók meant for us to hear every note. The left hand of the piano solo often mirrors the right hand or plays the same music in contrary motion. The scoring is light—the trombones play in only two measures—and there’s much doubling of instrumental lines; rarely does Bartók weave a dense fabric of many individual voices. To those who had never understood Bartók’s music, this new simplicity was dismissed as the sad product of his weakened condition (just as in the previous century, Beethoven’s visionary harmonies were blamed on his deafness).

The second movement is based on Beethoven’s “Heiliger Dankgesang” (Holy song of thanksgiving), the sublime third movement of the String Quartet, op. 132, written after Beethoven recovered from a serious illness. (Bartók uses the marking Adagio religioso for the only time in his music; Serly later adopted it for the unfinished Viola Concerto.) Like the corresponding movement from Beethoven’s quartet, it has an uncommon serenity and a complete command of a few perfectly suited materials. The strings begin like Beethoven’s, slowly unfolding and refolding a tiny idea. The piano pronounces a benediction of eloquent chords.

The fragile middle section is Bartók’s last evocation of night music. Over string tremolos, the piano, oboe, clarinet, and flute trade bird calls—some drawn from Bartók’s own notations made while he recuperated the previous year in Asheville, North Carolina. The orchestra is used sparingly, to wondrous effect. The piano awakens to the full power of the night, in ripples of sound and cascading chords, but the winds restore calm and quiet. The piano plays a lovely two-part invention, rises to a great climax, and then yields to the infectious pulse of the final Allegro vivace.

The finale’s main theme, with its identifying rhythm (short-long, long-short), recurs again and again, separated by aggressively fugal passages. The movement is lucid and relaxed, even in the most complex counterpoint. Bartók is in complete command throughout. There’s no mystery surrounding the last 17 bars; the composer’s shorthand instructions were all Serly needed to complete, without any doubt, what is Bartók’s last fully envisioned work.


CLAUDE DEBUSSY Images for Orchestra
Born August 22, 1862, in Saint Germain-en-Laye, France; died March 25, 1918, in Paris.

Debussy began Rondes de printemps in 1905, completed it in 1909, and conducted the first performance on March 2, 1910, in Paris. He began Gigues in 1909 and finished the score in 1912; the first performance was given on January 26, 1913, in Paris. He began Ibéria in 1908 and finished it the following year; it was first performed on February 20, 1910, in Paris.

The first complete performance at Carnegie Hall of Images took place on November 2, 1944, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Pierre Monteux; the first performance at Carnegie Hall of any movement of Images took place on November 15, 1910, when Gustav Mahler and the New York Philharmonic gave the US premiere of Rondes de printemps.

Scoring: 3 flutes, 2 piccolos, 2 oboes, oboe d’amore (in Gigues only), English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet (in Gigues only), 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba (in Ibéria only), timpani, cymbals, snare drum, xylophone, castanets, tambourine, bells, triangle, celesta, 2 harps, and strings.

The Images are Debussy’s last concert-hall orchestral works, followed only by Jeux, which was designed for dancing. They began as piano music, however—a third installment in Debussy’s sets of Images for piano. Debussy planned them in 1905, the same year he completed La mer and the second set of piano Images. His original idea was to compose this new set for two pianos; he even proposed titles to Jacques Durand, his publisher: Gigues tristes, Ibéria, and Valses—portraits in sound of three different countries.

But Debussy eventually changed his mind about two of his titles and one of his subjects—leaving, as it were, the waltz idea to Ravel—and decided to score the pieces not for two pianos but for large orchestra. (The 1905 piano Images had already required three staves on each page to accommodate the rich textures and complexity of Debussy’s ideas.) In the end, it would be another eight years before these Images were finished and played together.

Debussy’s new project began well enough; in a letter to Durand dated July 7, 1906, he said that Ibéria would be finished “next week” and that the other two would follow by the end of the month. But the next year, when none of them were done, he attempted to explain to Durand why the Images were such slow going: “I’m trying to write ‘something different’—realities, in a manner of speaking—what imbeciles call ‘impressionism,’ a term employed with the utmost inaccuracy, especially by art critics, who use it as a label to stick on Turner, the finest creator of mystery in the whole of art!” With important, groundbreaking works such as La mer and Pelléas and Mélisande behind him, and with these Images still on the drafting table, Debussy was struggling to articulate—both to understand and to define—the continually evolving “newness” of his work. He wrote to Durand that same year: “I feel more and more that music, by its very essence, is not something that can flow inside a rigorous, traditional form. It consists of colors and of rhythmicized time.”

Of the three pieces, only Ibéria was composed relatively quickly and without serious interruption or flagging interest. It was finished on Christmas Day 1908, and, although the other two pieces were completed in short score within a matter of days, neither one reached its final form for many months. For one thing, Debussy got sidetracked by the idea of turning Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher into an opera. (He worked on it off and on until he died.) But this was also an unsettled and difficult time for Debussy—his productivity was compromised by the messy details of divorce and remarriage, and by the first symptoms of the colon cancer that would later kill him. In 1909, Debussy posed for the Parisian photographer Nadar (the Richard Avedon or Annie Liebovitz of the day), who had captured all the reigning celebrities, from Rossini to Delacroix. Debussy wore an expensive but ill-fitting suit, and as his close friend René Peter noted, “Our Claude, still so young and eager, has taken on a sort of patina and no longer looks himself.” That same year, when the first French biography of the composer was published, Debussy seemed uncomfortable with the attention (“I am not sure of being absolutely all that you say I am,” he wrote to the author, Louis Laloy).

Eventually Debussy finished the remaining Images, though not without effort and growing apathy—Léon Vallas, the composer’s reliable biographer, even says that the orchestration of Gigues was completed by André Caplet. Of the three pieces, premiered piecemeal, only Ibéria enjoyed an enthusiastic reception. The other two have never achieved the popularity of Ibéria, and the set as a whole is rarely performed. Still, from the beginning, these Images have had important champions—Gustav Mahler gave the American premieres of Rondes de printemps and Ibéria (in 1910 and 1911, respectively) with the New York Philharmonic, and Frederick Stock led the American premiere of Gigues with the Chicago Symphony in November 1914, less than two years after Debussy conducted the first performance in Paris.

Since the three Images weren’t written or premiered in the order in which Debussy finally published them (Gigues, Ibéria, Rondes de printemps), there’s no definitive way of grouping them in concert. At this performance, Pierre Boulez places Ibéria last. When he once performed the triptych in the published sequence (with the biggest and strongest piece in the middle), it merely confirmed his suspicion that the kind of symmetry that works well in the visual arts—a central main panel flanked by two smaller panels—doesn’t always satisfy the ear in the same way. The order he follows at this concert—Rondes de printemps, Gigues, Ibéria—has its own linear logic, with two panels followed by a third panel that is itself a triptych—providing a certain cumulative effect. Moreover, the pacing is also logical: a moderato movement is followed by a slow movement, and then in turn by a final three-part movement that reproduces the pattern of the whole: moderato-slow-fast.

Rondes de printemps (Spring rounds). This is the only one of the Images prefaced by a motto: “Long live May! Welcome May with its rustic banner.” Debussy quotes a 15th-century Italian poet, but he transplants the setting from Tuscany to his own France. He further underlines the French connection with several passing references to a children’s song, “Nous n’irons plus au bois” (We’ll go to the woods no more), which he had used three times before, most recently in the piano piece Jardins sous la pluie (Gardens in the rain). The song itself is never quoted, but reflected as if from a distant source, each time from a slightly different angle. The music is limpid and highly fluid—Debussy often writes five beats to the bar, much as in Fêtes, the second of his orchestral Nocturnes—and Ravel noted its “vivid charm and exquisite freshness.”

Gigues. Debussy originally called this piece Gigues tristes (Sad jigs), and even though he dropped the adjective, the music is haunted and melancholy. As in Rondes de printemps, Debussy quotes folk song to help provide local color—in this case it’s a Scottish tune mournfully sung by the oboe d’amore, which makes its only appearance in Images for just this purpose. (The bassoons also suggest “The Keel Row.”) What drives the music forward is the interplay of two distinct worlds—the leisurely folk tune and a jaunty dotted rhythmic figure. (Caplet, who is credited with carrying out Debussy’s wishes in orchestrating Gigues and who clearly wanted to hear it as program music, detected a battle between “a wounded soul” and a “grotesque marionette.”) They collide, overlap, and intersect, lending the piece a sense of the unpredictable, and giving it a complexity quite at odds with its supposed folk roots.

Ibéria. Debussy spent only a single afternoon in Spain. He went to San Sebastián, just over the French border, to catch a bullfight, and was back in Saint-Jean-de-Luz in time for bed. But Debussy was haunted by the spirit of the place—“a country where the roadside stones burn one’s eyes with their brilliant light, where the mule drivers sing so passionately from the depths of their hearts,” as he later wrote. In 1903 he wrote his first Spanish piece, Night in Granada for piano, which Manuel de Falla found to be “nothing less than miraculous when we consider that this music was written by a foreigner guided almost entirely by his visionary genius.” But Ibéria is Debussy’s greatest achievement evoking a Spain he scarcely knew—”truth without authenticity,” as Falla put it.

Ibéria itself is a triptych, with two richly detailed and vigorous movements (the first set against a snappy, virtually ever-present rhythm) framing a voluptuously textured nocturne. All three are remarkably vivid and suggestive, without ever succumbing to tone painting. Debussy himself saw a watermelon vendor and heard children whistling in the third piece, though he truly grasped its essential quality when he remarked that “it sounds like music that has not been written down—the whole feeling of rising, of people and nature waking.”

Ravel (along with a number of composers including Stravinsky), who was present at the premiere of Ibéria in 1910, was moved to tears by “this novel, delicate, harmonic beauty, this profound musical sensitiveness.” Falla felt that Debussy had perfectly recreated his afternoon in San Sebastián—”the light in the bull-ring, particularly the violent contrast between the one half of the ring flooded with sunlight and the other half deep in shade.” But Debussy’s accomplishment, despite the clarity of his memory and his powers of evocation, lies much deeper, in the substance of the music itself.

Debussy makes free use of local color, calling for tambourine and castanets, and borrowing the rhythms and melodic ideas of Spanish folk music. But his imaginative and thoroughly individual treatment of the material recalls what he himself said of Albéniz: “He does not exactly quote folk tunes, but he is so imbued with them and has heard so many that they have passed into his music and become impossible to distinguish from his own inventions.” The middle movement, suggesting the sensuousness of a southern night, is the most subtly Spanish of the three pieces, with its fluid melodies freely unfolding over a languid habanera rhythm. Debussy himself was particularly proud of the way he moves from that music to the third movement, allowing the sounds of the day to gradually overtake the night—not the blaring dawn of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and Strauss’s Zarathustra, but the elusive moment of awakening we know from the Turner paintings he so loved.

Tues, Feb 26, 2008

LUCIANO BERIO Quatre dédicaces
Born October 24, 1925, in Oneglia, Italy; died May 27, 2003, in Rome.

Berio composed these four pieces at different times and for different occasions. Fanfara was written in 1982 and first performed that year by the Orchestra della RAI di Roma; Entrata was composed in 1980 on a commission from the San Francisco Symphony and is dedicated to Edo de Waart; Festum, from 1989, was commissioned by the Dallas Symphony for the opening of Myerson Symphony Center; Encore, composed in 1978 and revised in 1981, was written for the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra on the occasion of its sixtieth anniversary. The only one of the four to have been performed at Carnegie Hall is Entrata, which was given its New York Premiere on October 28, 1990with the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Edo de Waart.

Scoring 4 flutes, 2 piccolos, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, alto and tenor saxophone, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 6 horns, 5 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, organ, and strings.

It is now nearly five years since the death of Luciano Berio, and we are just beginning to take stock of his large, multifaceted catalog of work. His obituaries identified him, above all, as the composer of Sinfonia, a spectacular, wildly influential work for voices and orchestra that is one of the genuine classics of 20th-century music.

Oddly, despite the vast size of Berio’s output—and a career that lasted more than 50 years—he wrote very little purely orchestral music. A few of those works, such as Solo for trombone and orchestra, which was given its US premiere by the Chicago Symphony in 2002 (with Christian Lindberg as soloist) are large and important pieces. But others, especially several smaller compositions written for specific occasions, are almost completely unknown.

Several years ago, Paul Roberts, who had been Berio’s assistant since 1989, was asked by the publishing house of Universal Editions to go through Berio’s extensive catalog with the composer to see if there were any works he wanted to withdraw. As they discussed the list, Roberts began to uncover scores he didn’t know, such as Fanfara and Entrata, which Berio wanted to keep in his catalog even though they were never played. As Roberts continued to uncover other small works that had fallen through the cracks, he began to think of grouping several of them together as a collection that Berio himself never envisioned. That was the seed of Quatre dédicaces, the umbrella title that Pierre Boulez has given the four miniatures performed together at this concert.

As Roberts began to know Berio’s output intimately, he came to see these overlooked pieces as an integral part of Berio’s extended family of compositions. Fanfara duplicates music in Un re in ascolto, Berio’s 1984 opera, which was given its American premiere at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1996. Roberts noticed that the way Berio subdivides the strings in Encore is similar to his method in Rendering, his “reconstruction” of Schubert’s unfinished Tenth Symphony. While working on the engraving of the full score of La vera storia, an opera from 1982 and one of Berio’s central works, Roberts recognized both Encore and Entrata embedded in the music. When Berio showed Roberts the score of Compass, he realized that both Festum and Encore were inserted into that piece.

After Berio’s death, Roberts picked four short orchestral works, all composed between the late 1970s and late 1980s, that could be performed together and grouped in such a way to maximize their contrast and variety. These four pieces are small in size only. As with all of Berio’s works, they are filled with big ideas, and they are boldly conceived and imaginatively scored—fully developed, little-known snapshots by a major pioneer.


HECTOR BERLIOZ Les nuits d’été, Op. 7
Born December 11, 1803, in Côte-Saint-André, France; died March 8, 1869, in Paris.

Berlioz composed Les nuits d’été, a set of six songs to texts by Théophile Gautier, for mezzo-soprano or tenor with piano accompaniment, in 1840–41. He orchestrated “Absence,” the fourth song, in 1843, and the remainder in 1856. (Although he specified different voice parts for some of the orchestral songs, the set traditionally has been performed by one singer.) The orchestral set was never performed in its entirety during the composer’s life. Les nuits d’été received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on April 4, 1953, with soprano Eleanor Steber and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos. The first song from the cycle to be performed at Carnegie Hall was “Absence,” sung by soprano Lili Lehmann, accompanied by pianist Reinhold Herman, on November 8, 1901.

The score calls for 2 flutes, oboe, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, harp, and strings.

It’s odd that Berlioz, normally the most talkative, opinionated, and revealing of musicians (he was the first major composer to write his memoirs) had so little to say about these extraordinary songs. We don’t know why he composed them or for whom—evidently they weren’t written on commission or for any specific occasion. Unlike Berlioz’s best-known and most characteristic compositions, these are private, even personal works, and he seemed reluctant to put them in the public spotlight. He wrote them first for voice and piano, which only underscored their intimacy—particularly since they were composed right on the heels of the three-movement Grand symphonie funèbre et triomphale, an over-the-top, government-commissioned extravaganza for a military band of 200 players.

Berlioz began the first of these songs, “Villanelle,” in March 1840, picking a poem by his friend Théophile Gautier, and gradually, over the next few months, set five more of Gautier’s texts. That September, Berlioz published these six songs under the title Les nuits d’été (“Summer Nights”)—an anthology of pieces about love and desire, and, above all, longing. He made up the title himself, with Gautier’s blessing, as well as those of the individual songs. In June of the following year, Berlioz autographed a book for Marie Recio, a singer of limited talent who soon became his traveling companion and occasional musical partner, and much later his second wife. These pieces don’t betray Berlioz’s new infatuation with Marie, for they were probably written before the fact, but the attraction of Gautier’s texts does suggest unrest in his marriage to Harriet Smithson, and the sense of a great love that has gone cold.

Berlioz has left us little information about his personal life in 1841 and 1842; few letters survive and he passes quickly over these years in his Memoirs. He did begin a grand public tour in 1842, starting in Brussels and taking in more than a dozen cities in Germany before he was done. Marie joined him for the entire trip, singing in some of the concerts he conducted; it was for her that he orchestrated one of the Gautier songs, “Absence,” which she introduced in Dresden in February 1843. The tour was a great success, and Berlioz was delighted to renew his friendships with Mendelssohn and Wagner and to meet Schumann. (Knowing only his music, and the Symphonie fantastique in particular, Schumann had imagined him as a “wilder and more animated man.”)

Although Berlioz was still married to Harriet, who had, little more than a decade before, inspired the extraordinary passion of the Symphonie fantastique, he now quietly began a new life with Marie. He and Harriet officially separated in 1844; a full decade later he married Marie, exactly one day after finishing his Memoirs, in which she is not mentioned once. In 1856, just before undertaking The Trojans, his operatic retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid, Berlioz orchestrated the remaining five songs of Les nuits d’été for publication that year in Switzerland. They were never performed as a set during his lifetime, and he heard only the second and fourth songs sung with orchestra.

We don’t remember Berlioz as a song composer, but he wrote more than 50 songs, many of them supreme examples of his unsurpassed gift for melody. These six Gautier settings are the only songs Berlioz published as a group. Berlioz didn’t think of them as a cycle like Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, or Schubert’s Winterreise, or Schumann’s Dichterliebe (composed the year Berlioz began Nuits d’été), with a narrative thread and a strong musical continuity. They are linked, instead, by their poet, a common subject matter, and a certain shared musical atmosphere of delicate, moody colors. Berlioz’s decision to orchestrate them as a set, however, was unexpected, and with characteristic vision he created a new form, the orchestral song cycle, which went unnoticed until Mahler picked it up half a century later.

Berlioz arranged the six songs of Les nuits d’été with two energetic, sunny ones framing four that are sober and introspective. Berlioz calls for an unusually small orchestra—this isn’t the extravagant Berlioz who caused the poet Heinrich Heine to dream of “fabulous empires filled with fabulous sins”—and he uses it with exquisite subtlety and restraint. “Villanelle” is the simplest of songs, and yet Berlioz gives it depth and interest by changing the harmonies and the orchestration for each verse. The second song, “Le spectre de la rose” (“The Specter of the Rose”)—with a new introduction Berlioz added in the orchestral version—is more complex, beginning with a sumptuous melody that changes character as it goes, disintegrating into recitative at one point, and later soaring in a thrilling climax. The song is brilliantly scored, with shimmering string trills and a gentle, strumming harp, appearing for the only time in the cycle, to announce paradise.

“Sur les lagunes” (“On the Lagoons”), over rising and falling half steps that suggest a rocking boat, is built around a mournful refrain, like a cry of despair. Berlioz leaves the song unanswered, ending with a dominant chord that never resolves. It is the very plainness of “Absence,” with its slowly changing orchestral chords and its repeated childlike plea (“come back”) that makes it so naked and powerful. “Au cimetière” (“In the Cemetery”) moves even deeper into despair, with its numb, pulsing accompaniment, and the ghostly shiver of strings as memory brushes past. The playful questioning of “L’île inconnue” (“The Unknown Isle”) comes as welcome relief, even if the poet can’t suggest where love will last forever. At the end, we sense that it is Berlioz himself who sails off, with the wind at his back, in search of a new beginning.


IGOR STRAVINSKY Petrushka (1911 version)
Born June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum, Russia; died April 6, 1971, in New York City.

Stravinsky composed Petrushka between August 1910 and May 26, 1911. The first performance of the ballet was given by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and conducted by Pierre Monteux in Paris on June 13, 1911; Monteux and the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave the Carnegie Hall premiere on December 4, 1920. Stravinsky streamlined the orchestration in 1946, but at tonight’s performance the original 1911 version is performed.

Scoring: 4 flutes, 2 piccolos, 4 oboes, English horn, 4 clarinets, bass clarinet, 4 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbal, bass drum, tambourine, side drum, tam-tam, xylophone, celesta, two harps, piano, and strings.

The Firebird was Stravinsky’s first big hit, and it made him famous, almost literally overnight, at the age of 28. Petrushka is that most difficult of artistic creations—the follow-up. The Firebird had not only made Stravinsky the talk of Paris, then the capital of the international art world—capturing the attention of the city’s biggest names, including Debussy and Proust—but it had scored a huge success for Sergei Diaghilev, who had taken a risk hiring the young, relatively unknown composer to write music for the Russian Ballet’s 1910 season. Naturally, both men wanted another sensation for the next year.

Stravinsky already had an idea. While he was finishing the orchestration of The Firebird, he had dreamed about “a solemn pagan rite: wise elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.” These powerful images suggested music to Stravinsky and he began to sketch almost at once. (Early in his career, most of Stravinsky’s initial musical ideas were inspired by visual imagery.) At first he thought of it as a symphony, but when he played parts of it at the piano for Diaghilev early that summer, the impresario immediately knew that this was music for dance. With Diaghilev’s urging, Stravinsky continued working on the score that would eventually become their biggest sensation, Le sacre du printemps—The Rite of Spring. But in the meantime, Stravinsky got sidetracked.

When Diaghilev went to visit Stravinsky in Switzerland at the end of the summer, he was stunned to discover that the composer had begun a completely different work instead. As Stravinsky recalled, Diaghilev “was much astonished when, instead of the sketches of the Sacre, I played him the piece which I had just composed and which later became the second scene of Petrushka.”

For the second time that year, one of Stravinsky’s landmark ballet scores started out not as music to be danced, but as an unnamed abstract symphonic score. But unlike The Rite of Spring, Petrushka moved from sketch to stage without serious interruption. What had begun as just a detour from The Rite now became the main project of the year, and at the same time, the score with which Stravinsky found his modernist voice—the voice that made The Rite possible. Musically, it had started innocently enough, almost as a kind of warm-up for The Rite. “I wanted to refresh myself,” Stravinsky later explained, “by composing an orchestral piece in which the piano would play the most important part.” The narrative and the title came later, although Stravinsky admitted that “in composing the music, I had in mind a distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life.” (Petrushka is a Russian version of the male half of the Punch and Judy puppets.) As with The Rite, it was Diaghilev who immediately saw the potential in Stravinsky’s dazzling music for another dance classic:

[Diaghilev] was so much pleased with it that he would not leave it alone and began persuading me to develop the theme of the puppet’s sufferings and make it into a whole ballet. When he remained in Switzerland we worked out together the general lines of the subject and the plot in accordance with ideas which I suggested . . . I began at once to compose the first scene of the ballet.

There were still a few details to be worked out, including Stravinsky’s fee (1,000 rubles) and the selection of the painter Alexandre Benois to polish the scenario and to provide costumes and scenery. (Michel Fokine soon signed on as choreographer and Pierre Monteux agreed to conduct the premiere.) With this extraordinary team lined up, Stravinsky and Diaghilev now had their sights set on surpassing the success of The Firebird. Aside from Stravinsky’s brush with nicotine poisoning in February 1911, work on Petrushka progressed smoothly. Rehearsals were a different story. The dancers and orchestral musicians, innocent of the terrors of The Rite of Spring, still no more than a pile of sketches, found the complexities of Stravinsky’s score almost unmanageable.

Opening night, however, was a great triumph, crowned by Vaslav Nijinsky’s brilliant dancing of the title role. Brash, bold, exciting, and in-your-face “modern,” Petrushka was another overnight hit with the public. For the next two years, until the legendary premiere of The Rite of Spring set Paris afire with fresh controversy, Petrushka was the latest word in musical modernism.

The scenario is in four scenes; the first and last are public, taking place on the Admiralty Square in St. Petersburg, in the 1830s; the middle ones are set in private rooms and focus on individual characters. Petrushka opens with a busy crowd scene, a kaleidoscopic panorama of street dancers, drummers, a magician playing a flute, a street musician with his hurdy-gurdy, and three puppets—Petrushka, a ballerina, and the Moor. Stravinsky shifts focus and shuffles events like a modern filmmaker: musical passages are cut and spliced, rhythmic patterns jostle one another. Finally the solo flute charms the three puppets to life and they join in a brilliant Russian dance.

The two middle scenes are more intimate, relying less on the full orchestra, and built of more modestly scaled materials. In the first of these scenes, the spotlight falls on Petrushka, alone in his room, pondering his grotesque appearance and despairing over his inability to win the love of the ballerina. This is the music Stravinsky had first played for Diaghilev, with a piano solo “exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios. The orchestra in turn retaliates with menacing trumpet blasts. The outcome is a terrific noise which reaches its climax and ends in the sorrowful and querulous collapse of the poor puppet.”

When he first began sketching Petrushka, Stravinsky was haunted by the image of a musician rolling two objects over the black and white keys of the piano, which led him to the idea of a bitonal effect made by combining the white-note C major arpeggio with the black-note F-sharp major arpeggio. This double-sided sonority dominates Petrushka’s scene (the first music Stravinsky wrote) and as the work progressed, it came to represent the conflicting sides of his character—the human versus the puppet.

The Moor’s scene builds to a romantic encounter with the ballerina (she enters to a dazzling high trumpet solo). The lovers dance to waltzes borrowed, without apparent apology, from Joseph Lanner, an Austrian composer who was a friend of Johann Strauss, Sr. They are interrupted by the jealous Petrushka.

The finale is another surging crowd scene, characterized by various kinds of music pushing and shoving against each other. Petrushka enters pursued by the Moor, who strikes him with his saber. Petrushka falls and the crowd grows silent. But when the magician is summoned, he demonstrates that Petrushka is merely a puppet stuffed with sawdust. The square empties. Then, as the magician drags the puppet off, he sees Petrushka’s ghost on the roof of the set, thumbing his nose. This, according to Stravinsky, “is the real Petrushka, and his appearance at the end makes the Petrushka of the preceding play a mere doll.”

Copyright © 2008 by The Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Pierre Boulez, Conductor
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus, Pierre Boulez is one of the most important musical and intellectual figures of our time. Mr. Boulez was named principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony in March 1995 and served in that position until 2006, when he became conductor emeritus.

A native of Montbrison, France, Mr. Boulez pursued studies in piano, composition, and choral conducting at the Paris Conservatory. In 1953–54, he founded the Concerts du Petit Marigny, a series dedicated to modern music, which later became the Domaine Musical. He subsequently was involved with musical analysis and taught in Darmstadt and at Basel University. In 1962–63, he was visiting professor at Harvard University, and in 1976 he became a professor at the Collège de France.

Mr. Boulez began his conducting career in 1958 with the South west Radio Orchestra in Baden-Baden, Germany. From 1969 until 1972, he was principal guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. In 1971, he became both chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and music director of the New York Philharmonic, a position he held until 1977.

Mr. Boulez’s difference of opinion about state intervention in the arts as espoused by André Malraux led him into voluntary exile for several years. He returned to France in 1974, when the government invited him to create and direct a music research center at the Pompidou Centre. From the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) sprang the Ensemble Intercontemporain, one of the world’s finest contemporary music ensembles. In 1991, Boulez resigned as conductor of the ensemble, while continuing as its president.

Mr. Boulez’s compositions are widely performed, including Le marteau sans maître, Pli selon pli, three piano sonatas, Eclat/Multiples, Le visage nuptial, Répons, Notations, and . . . explosante-fixe . . . . He has published five books about music. His awards include honorary doctorates from Leeds, Cambridge, Basel, and Oxford universities, among others; Commander of the British Empire; and Knight of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Mr. Boulez’s discography includes prize-winning recordings of Parsifal and Berg’s Lulu. He has won 26 Grammy awards.


The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s distinguished 117-year history began in 1891 when Theodore Thomas, then the leading conductor in America and a recognized music pioneer, was invited by Charles Norman Fay to establish a symphony orchestra in Chicago. Thomas served as music director for 13 years until his death in 1905—just three weeks after the dedication of Orchestra Hall, the Chicago Orchestra’s permanent home.

Thomas’s successor was Frederick Stock, who began his career in the viola section in 1895 and became assistant conductor four years later. His tenure at the Orchestra’s helm lasted thirty-seven years, from 1905 to 1942. Three distinguished conductors headed the Orchestra during the following decade: Désiré Defauw was music director from 1943 to 1947; Artur Rodzinski assumed the post in 1947–48; and Rafael Kubelík led the Orchestra for three seasons from 1950 to 1953.

The next ten years belonged to Fritz Reiner, whose recordings with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are still considered performance hallmarks. For the five seasons from 1963 to 1968, Jean Martinon held the position of music director.

Sir Georg Solti, the Orchestra’s eighth music director, served from 1969 until 1991. He held the title of music director laureate and returned to conduct the Orchestra for several weeks each season until his death in September 1997.

In January 1989, the CSO began a new collaboration with Daniel Barenboim as he was named music director designate. Mr. Barenboim assumed leadership as the Orchestra’s ninth music director in September 1991, a position he held until June 2006.

Two of the world’s most celebrated conductors assumed titled positions with the Chicago Symphony beginning with the 2006–2007 season. Eminent Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink became the Orchestra’s new principal conductor, and French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez—the CSO’s Helen Regenstein Principal Guest Conductor since 1995—became the Orchestra’s conductor emeritus.

Mitsuko Uchida, Piano
Mitsuko Uchida is renowned for her interpretations of Mozart and Schubert, but she also has illuminated the music of Berg, Schoenberg, Webern, and Boulez for a new generation of listeners. Over the last two years, she has been giving performances of Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas.

Ms. Uchida performs throughout the world with many different partners. She is artist-in-residence at the Cleveland Orchestra, where she directed all of Mozart’s concertos from the keyboard over a number of seasons. She has been featured in the Concertgebouw’s Carte Blanche series, where she collaborated with Ian Bostridge, the Hagen Quartet, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, in addition to directing Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire from the piano.

Ms. Uchida’s engagements this season include recitals in Vienna, Amsterdam, Cologne, Rome, London, and New York. She performs with the London Symphony and Boston Symphony orchestras with Sir Colin Davis, with the Ensemble Intercontemporain with Pierre Boulez, and with the Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst. She also directs concertos by Mozart from the keyboard with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Next season, she will be artist-in-residence with the Berliner Philharmoniker.

Ms. Uchida recently took part in the series of Signature concerts marking the reopening of London’s Royal Festival Hall, performing music by Mozart with Sir Charles Mackerras and the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Mitsuko Uchida records exclusively for Decca. Her recordings include Mozart’s complete piano sonatas and piano concertos; Schubert’s complete piano sonatas, Debussy’s Etudes, Beethoven’s five piano concertos with Kurt Sanderling, a CD of Mozart’s sonatas for violin and piano with Mark Steinberg, and Die schöne Müllerin with Ian Bostridge. A recording of Beethoven’s sonatas, Op. 101 and Op. 106 (“Hammerklavier”) has just been released. Her recording of Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto with Pierre Boulez and the Cleveland Orchestra won four awards, including the Gramophone Award for Best Concerto.

Mitsuko Uchida has a long-standing commitment to aiding the development of young musicians. She is a trustee of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust. She also is co-director, with Richard Goode, of the Marlboro Music Festival.