CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 2:00 PM

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Valery Gergiev, Conductor

VERDI Overture to La forza del destino
LISZT Les préludes
TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 5

Encores:
JOSEF STRAUSS "Die Libelle": Polka Mazur, Op. 204
JOSEF STRAUSS "Ohne Sorgen!" (Without Cares): Polka, Op. 271

Perspectives: Valery Gergiev

This concert is made possible, in part, by the Audrey Love Charitable Foundation.

Perspectives concerts are made possible, in part, by a generous grant from The Alice Tully Foundation.

Program Notes:

By Bernard Jacobson

GIUSEPPE VERDI Overture to La forza del destinoBorn October 9, 1813, in Roncole, Italy; died January 27, 1901, in Milan.

Composed in 1861–62, Verdi’s La forza del destino was first performed on November 10, 1862, at the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg. He revised the work in 1869, and the overture, though based on the original prelude, belongs to that revised version, which had its premiere at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan on February 27, 1969. The Overture received its Carnegie Hall premiere on October 19, 1913, with the Italian Orchestral Society conducted by Cesare Sodero, in a program celebrating the centennial of Verdi’s birth.

Scoring: 2 flutes (one doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, and strings.

The popular image of opera centers on the love-duet—on the kind of piece in which, as George Bernard Shaw dryly put it, the tenor and the soprano “repeatedly call attention to the fact that at last they meet again.” But most of the great opera composers have preferred stories that, while they don’t ignore what makes the world go round, place private passion against a broader background.

This is especially true of Verdi, who was himself a strongly committed patriot and political man in the emergent Italy of the mid-19th-century, and who often chose opera plots that had a political context. Planning his new opera for St. Petersburg, his second choice of subject—the first, Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas, was vetoed by the censor—was Don Alvaro, or The Force of Destiny, by the Spanish playwright Angel Pèrez de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas, and with the help of his old librettist Piave, Verdi turned it into one of his most compellingly dramatic operas.

Next to Ruy Blas, La forza del destino seems like an old-fashioned romantic melodrama, yet it is rich in social and political overtones, without which it would hardly have appealed to Verdi in the first place. In the words of the Verdi scholar Julian Budden, the play, “written by a liberal aristocrat of the 19th century, who had distinguished himself in the Peninsular War, and set in the Age of Enlightenment, Don Alvaro could serve as a Marxist tract for the present day.” Verdi himself underscored the seriousness of the opera when he refused a request to present it at the San Carlo Theater in Naples, responding:

You should know that there are operas of ideas (bad ideas if you like) and operas of cavatinas, duets, etc., etc. for which some of your celebrities might be good, since your public likes them, but as for me, God preserve me from having them, above all in La forza del destino.

Indeed, it was to reduce the melodramatic element in the work that Verdi and a new collaborator, Antonio Ghislanzoni, drastically revised it in 1869. Constructed from the principal melodies of the opera itself, the overture composed for that revision brilliantly evokes the atmosphere of personal honor and passionate love thwarted by implacable fate. It is at once the most substantial and the most popular of Verdi’s operatic overtures.


FRANZ LISZT Les preludes, Symphonic Poem No. 3
Born October 22, 1811, in Raiding, Hungary; died July 31, 1886, in Bayreuth, Germany.

Liszt composed Les préludes in 1848, revised it over the succeeding years, and conducted the first performance in Weimar on February 28, 1854. The work received its Carnegie Hall premiere on February 25, 1894, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.
Scoring: 3 flutes (III doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 tenor trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (snare drum, cymbals, bass drum), harp, strings.

Among Liszt’s 13 symphonic poems, two—Battle of the Huns and From the Cradle to the Grave—took their subject matter from pictures. But more usually the composer’s sources of inspiration were literary, the poets he celebrated ranging from Goethe and Schiller to Byron and Hugo. More than once, he found inspiration in the writings of the French poet and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), which supplied the subject for his most popular symphonic poem, Les préludes.

Les préludes in its finished form presents a realization, and a remarkably colorful one, of Lamartine’s Poetic Meditations (actually a kind of prose ode) on life, love, and death. A short extract prefaces the score, and is reproduced here in translation for the guidance of listeners:

Is our life anything but a series of Preludes to that unknown song whose first and solemn note is intoned by death?—Love is the enchanted dawn of all existence; but where is the fate for which the first delights of happiness are never interrupted by some storm, whose mortal breath dissipates its beautiful illusions, whose fatal lightning blast destroys its altar? And where is the cruelly wounded soul that, emerging from one of these tempests, does not seek to find peace in recollecting the sweet serenity of country life? Yet man hardly contents himself for long with the enjoyment of the beneficent warmth that at first charmed him in Nature’s bosom, and when “the trumpet has sounded the alarm” he runs to the post of peril, whatever the war may be that calls him to the ranks, in order to recover in battle full self-awareness and the possession of all his powers.

It is instructive to discover that the score in fact grew out of a quite different piece: it was conceived as the introduction to a choral setting of a poem-cycle titled The Four Elements by Joseph Autran, which Liszt left uncompleted. But like some of those painters who title a canvas only after it is finished, Liszt chose well in attaching Lamartine’s words to his score, for it is hard to imagine how the scenes of rapture and strife depicted in the passage quoted, down to the clarion call of the trumpet, could be more brilliantly or evocatively realized in music.

PYOTR IL’YICH TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64
Born May 7, 1840, in Kamsko-Votkinsk, Russia; died November 6, 1893, in St. Petersburg.

Composed between May and August 1888, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony was first performed in on November 17 of that year in St. Petersburg. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on March 4, 1892, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.

Scoring: 3 flutes (III doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, strings.

The critical response, when Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony was introduced to American audiences soon after its premiere in St. Petersburg, offers one among many proofs of the difficulty that works now seen as unproblematical posed when they were new. “One vainly sought for coherency and homogeneousness,” the Musical Courier remarked after the first New York performance in March 1889. Three years later the Boston Evening Transcript asserted, “Nowhere else have we found Tchaikovsky so thoroughly imbued with the true spirit of symphonic writing as in the first movement,” but the rest of the review is much less complimentary, finding the slow movement “tiresome” and Tchaikovsky in the finale “up to his old tricks again.”

At least with regard to coherency and the true spirit of symphonic writing, it is perhaps over-optimistic to claim that modern critics no longer have problems with the Tchaikovsky symphonies. There is still a tendency to praise them in terms that suggest they are slightly jumped-up ballet music rather than “real” symphonies; and the cause of this critical impulse can probably be found in the puritanical notion that anything so colorful and uninhibited can’t really be intellectually respectable. The music’s continuing popularity proves that this notion is not shared by concertgoers at large, whose aims as a rule include pleasure.

The idea that Tchaikovsky’s symphonies are unsymphonic can hardly survive an examination of the music itself, particularly in the last and finest three of them. We need go no further than the first movement adroitly singled out by the Boston reviewer to find how surely, yet unobtrusively, the composer underpins his glittering surface with organically unifying touches. Between the little oscillating figure heard on flute and second clarinet in the main Allegro’s first theme, and the similar motif used as a counterpoint in the development section, stretches a complex web of more or less direct allusions. And the gradual addition of significance to a phrase that seemed at first quite unimportant makes its return in its original form at the recapitulation a singularly breath-catching event.

Much has been made by commentators of the other principal element in Tchaikovsky’s form-building here—the use of a motto theme to draw the argument together over all four movements of the symphony. But this technique, like the much-vaunted Leitmotif structure of Wagner’s Ring, may be less crucial in the long run than subtler devices such as the one just described. There is a certain trend in both Wagner and Tchaikovsky for the obvious unifying motifs to stand out like scaffolding on an inanimate structure, whereas the more local thematic relationships attain rather to the function of a skeleton within a living organism. Nevertheless, the motto theme of the Fifth Symphony, heard at the very outset on low clarinets, does its job effectively enough, returning with fine dramatic force toward the end of the slow movement, and again, much more stealthily, in the third-movement waltz.

This movement, by the way, was another part of the work that defeated even the sympathetic Boston critic, who complained that it “shows nothing in its intrinsic character nor workmanship to make good its claim to a place in a symphony.” Here, surely, is a case of preconceived ideas obstructing a genuine response to the nature of the music: the waltz is a frivolous dance-measure, and so it must be inappropriate to the solemn plane of symphonic thought. Perhaps the reviewer was so far seduced by the music’s charm, which is lazy enough to border on impudence, that he failed to observe the wonderful subtlety of its rhythmic organization. The opening group of phrases, 11 bars long, is no “mere” dance but a real symphonic period, and the central section on spiccato strings and woodwinds makes havoc of the usual constraints of bar lines.

The symphony’s concluding scene of celebration is set up, at the opening of the introduction to the finale, by the motto theme. Here, with an exciting sense of drama, its triumphal propensities are demonstrated for the first time. It is thus satisfying but not surprising when, after a movement full of stormy thematic interplay, the motto emerges resplendent in a jubilant coda, marked “Moderato assai e molto maestoso” (“extremely moderate and very majestic”). But Tchaikovsky has one more surprise up his sleeve: the last word is given, “Molto meno mosso” (“much less fast”), not to the motto, but to the main theme of the first movement, no longer nervous now but panoplied proudly forth on trumpets and oboes. And so victory is complete.


Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Bernard Jacobson writes frequently about classical music and is the author of A Polish Renaissance, part of the 20th-Century Composers series published by Phaidon Press.

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Valery Gergiev, Conductor
Over the course of its more than 160-year history, the Vienna Philharmonic has played an integral role in the development of music history, crossing paths with extraordinarily
talented composers and interpreters from multiple generations. Richard Wagner described the
orchestra as being one of the most outstanding in the world; Anton Bruckner called it “the most superior musical association”; Johannes Brahms counted himself 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.”

Among the many notable qualities that set the Vienna Philharmonic apart from other major world orchestras is the fact that it is governed exclusively by its members, and all decisions are made democratically. In addition, a unique relationship exists between the Vienna State Opera Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic; only a member of the Vienna State Opera Orchestra is eligible to become a member of the Philharmonic. Being in the Vienna State Opera Orchestra provides the musicians of the Vienna Philharmonic a financial stability that would be impossible to attain without relinquishing the Philharmonic’s autonomy to private or corporate sponsors.

Originally called the “Philharmonic Academy,” the orchestra from its inception embodied all the principles of the “Philharmonic idea” that are still valid today. Founded in 1842 by Otto Nicolai, the Vienna Philharmonic has at its heart a mission to communicate a humanitarian message through its music, as well as through its extended deeds, into the daily lives and consciousness of its listeners. Its musicians strive to implement the motto that Ludwig van Beethoven, whose symphonic works served as a catalyst for the orchestra’s creation, chose to preface his Missa solemnis: “From the heart, to the heart.”

Since 1933, the orchestra has adopted a guest-conductor system enlisting the talents of the outstanding conductors of the day—Furtwängler, Giulini, Erich Kleiber, Klemperer, Knappertsbusch, Krauss, Mitropoulos, Ormandy, Schuricht, Solti, Szell, Walter; and from the next generation— Claudio Abbado, Boulez, Haitink, Harnoncourt, Jansons, Carlos Kleiber, Levine, Maazel, Mehta, Muti, Ozawa, Prêtre, Previn, Rattle, and Thielemann. A special place of honor in the orchestra’s post-1945 history is devoted to the collaboration with Laureate Conductors Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan, and with Laureate Associate Leonard Bernstein.

Today the Vienna Philharmonic fully meets every demand of today’s multimedia music industry, as manifested by its vast number of recordings and films for Decca, DGG, BMG, EMI, and Philips, as well as for Austrian TV; world concert tours; and participation at the most notable festivals. At the same time, it maintains its own matchless individuality, as exemplified by the New Year’s Concert and by its dominating role at the Salzburg Festival.

The Vienna Philharmonic is much more than Austria’s most coveted “Cultural Export.” The Vienna Philharmonic has received numerous prizes for its cultural achievements, including gold and platinum record-awards, national decorations, and honorary membership in many cultural institutions. In May of 2005, the World Health Organization named the Vienna Philharmonic its Goodwill Ambassadors. In November 2006, the Vienna Philharmonic became ambassadors for “Hear the World,” a hearing awareness campaign initiative by Phonak.