Carnegie Hall Presents
Vienna Philharmonic
Christian Thielemann, Conductor
Program
Friday, March 3, 2023 8 PM
SCHOENBERG Verklärte Nacht
Verklärte Nacht was originally written for chamber ensemble and expanded for string orchestra in 1917. The narrative behind the notes, based on a poem from Richard Dehmel’s Weib und Welt (Woman and World), depicts two lovers in a moonlit forest. In anxiety and remorse, the woman confesses that she is pregnant by a previous lover; though she fears her current lover’s reaction, she hopes that motherhood will at least instill a purpose in life. The man’s reaction is unexpected: The beauty of the forest inspires him to rise to the occasion and proclaim that love will unite them and make the child genuinely their own. At the end, he embraces her and they continue their nocturnal walk.
The music paints a dark, ominous forest, then proceeds with two sonata structures: the first depicting the anxious, confessing woman, the second her warm, emphatic lover. The delicate coda shimmering over pizzicato notes provides a magical rejoinder to anyone who thinks Schoenberg was incapable of writing beautiful music. Like the abstract modern painter whose early works show that he certainly could paint representational pictures, Schoenberg demonstrates here that before he ventured into new worlds of sound, he could compose lush, Romantic melodies with the best of them.
R. STRAUSS Eine Alpensinfonie
https://open.qobuz.com/album/4035719001242
Eine Alpensinfonie had a dark genesis for such a brilliantly affirmative work. Strauss began sketches in 1900 under the title Tragedy of an Artist, a memorial to painter Karl Stauffer-Bern, who had committed suicide. Another death—that of Gustav Mahler, Strauss’s friend and colleague—was the catalyst for taking up the project again in 1911. Yet there was nothing Mahlerian about the odd new title, The Antichrist, after Nietzsche’s work of the same name; the piece was now, Strauss wrote in 1911, meant to represent “moral purification through one’s own strength, liberation through work, [and] worship of eternal, magnificent nature.” Strauss finally decided to use only the nature theme, changing the title to An Alpine Symphony.
Strauss eventually became a Wagnerian himself, but was overtaken by a sudden turn in musical history—one foreseen by Debussy, who declared that Wagner was a “beautiful sunset who has been taken for a sunrise.” The truth of this striking assessment is tellingly apparent in Strauss’s Wagnerian tone poems, which were considered modern when they first appeared at the end of the 19th century, but became old-fashioned soon after in the face of newer revolutions wrought by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Debussy himself. By 1915, when Eine Alpensinfonie was completed, this type of piece was considered deeply reactionary.
Strauss also revered Beethoven, a revolutionary who, “for a new content,” had to “devise a new form.” Strauss’s own goal was also, he wrote, “to create a correspondingly new form for every new subject.” In Eine Alpensinfonie, he created an epic depiction of a mountain climber in the Alps gradually reaching the peak and descending during a terrifying storm—a vast arc that begins in the primordial darkness of “Night,” rises to the heights, and sinks back into blackness at the end. Like Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Liszt’s Faust Symphony, Strauss called the piece a “symphony” even though it behaves like a tone poem.
Saturday, March 4, 2023 8 PM
At a Glance
This concert presents three masterpieces of 19th-century Romanticism, two by Felix Mendelssohn, an early master of the aesthetic, and one by Brahms, one of its last standard-bearers. Mendelssohn wrote both the Hebrides Overture and the “Scottish” Symphony following an inspirational trip to Scotland in 1829 when he was only 20, though he put off completing the symphony until 1842. Both works have an aura of mystery, and both have Mendelssohn’s signature refinement. Brahms was a huge admirer of Mendelssohn, going so far as to say, “I would gladly give all I have written to have composed something like the Hebrides Overture.” Like Mendelssohn, he was a Romantic who stuck with Classical structures, including sonata form. The Second is the most mellow and spontaneous of his four symphonies, yet written with his characteristic formal rigor. The orchestration has a crystalline transparency, and the brassy fourth movement is the composer’s most viscerally exciting finale, rivalling the thrilling coda at the end of the “Scottish” Symphony.
FELIX MENDELSSOHN Hebrides Overture, Op. 26
FELIX MENDELSSOHN Symphony No. 3, "Scottish"
In the deep twilight we went today to the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved...The chapel below is now roofless. Grass and ivy thrive there and at the broken altar where Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything is ruined, decayed, and the clear heavens pour in. I think I have found there the beginning of my "Scottish" Symphony.
In the deep twilight we went today to the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved...The chapel below is now roofless. Grass and ivy thrive there and at the broken altar where Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything is ruined, decayed, and the clear heavens pour in. I think I have found there the beginning of my "Scottish" Symphony.
1. Andante con moto — Allegro un poco agitato (in A minor and in sonata form with introduction)
2. Vivace non troppo (in F major and in sonata form)
3. Adagio (in A major and in abridged sonata form)
4. Allegro vivacissimo — Allegro maestoso assai (in A minor → A major and in sonata form)
BRAHMS Symphony No. 2
he did write it in four months on a summer vacation in the town of Pörtschach in southern Austria, obviously an inspiring location: Brahms quickly wrote his Violin Concerto there the next year, describing Pörtschach as “a place with so many melodies flying around.
1. Allegro non troppo (D major)
2. Adagio non troppo (B major)
3. Allegretto grazioso (quasi andantino) (G major)
4. Allegro con spirito (D major)
Sunday, March 5, 2023 2 PM
BRUCKNER Symphony No. 8
https://open.qobuz.com/album/aulh5souuabha
Score
“This art has no tricks.”- Donald Francis Tovey
“Broadly and freely in a state of bliss, released from earthly cares, fulfillment without sentimentality, without calculation.” -Wilhelm Furtwängler
1. Allegro moderato (C minor)
2. Scherzo: Allegro moderato — Trio: Langsam (C minor → C major, Trio in A♭ major)
3. Adagio: Feierlich langsam, doch nicht schleppend (D♭ major)
4. Finale: Feierlich, nicht schnell (C minor → C major)
All of Bruckner’s signatures are here, in their most uncompromising manifestations: massive brass sonorities, Gothic spires of sound, organ-like pedal points and chorales, sudden climaxes in the midst of Olympian calm, fearsome chromatic complexities alternating with primitive octaves and unisons. Bruckner is famous for transporting the listener into a so-called cathedral of sound; nowhere is this mystical sense of space more vast than in the Eighth.
The tension between a starkness reminiscent of ancient church music and a staggeringly complex motivic network is explained by Bruckner’s protégé Franz Schalk: “Bruckner’s forms were so simple, so direct that at first people overlooked them, as if they were not there. People wailed about chaotic incoherence, about pointless climaxes … As people finally began to comprehend Bruckner’s works as wholes, suddenly they stood clear in their primitive symmetry … in dimensions no one could grasp up close.”
Thielemann makes you a believer.
Thielemann is one of the few contemporary conductors to use the Haas edition of Bruckner’s 1890 revision of the Eighth (like Karajan and Furtwängler before him), rather than the later Nowak. The Haas incorporates some passages from the original 1887 version.
Program note form Carnegie Hall
3.3.2023
https://www.carnegiehall.org/Calendar/2023/03/03/Vienna-Philharmonic-0800PM
3.4.2023
https://www.carnegiehall.org/Calendar/2023/03/04/Vienna-Philharmonic-0800PM
3.5.2023
https://www.carnegiehall.org/Calendar/2023/03/05/Vienna-Philharmonic-0200PM