Program

Thursday, February 20, 2014, at 8:00Friday, February 21, 2014, at 1:30Saturday, February 22, 2014, at 8:00Tuesday, February 25, 2014, at 7:30

Cristian măcelaru ConductorJennifer Zetlan SopranoSasha Cooke Mezzo-soprano

DebussyJeux

ravelTrois poèmes de MallarméSoupirPlacet futileSurgi de la croupe et du bond

SaSha Cooke

First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

StravinskyThree Japanese LyricsakahitoMazatsumiTsaraiuki

Two Poems of BalmontNezabudochkaGolub’

JeNNiFer ZeTlaN

First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

IntermISSIon

Global Sponsor of the CSO

oNe huNdred TweNTy-Third SeaSoN

Chicago Symphony orchestrariccardo muti Music director Pierre Boulez helen regenstein Conductor emeritusYo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant

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StravinskyThree Pieces for Clarinet Solo

John Bruce Yeh, clarinet

StravinskyCat’s Cradle SongsSpi, kotkot na pechiBaj-baju kota, kota

SaSha Cooke

First Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert performances

StravinskySuite from PulcinellaSinfoniaSerenataScherzino—allegro—andantinoTarantella—ToccataGavotta con due variazioniVivo (duetto)MenuettoFinale

StravinskySuite No. 1 for Small orchestraandanteNapolitanaespañolaBalalaïka

CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines.This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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CommentS by Phillip huscher

the traDItIonal funCtIon of the orCheStra is largely a thing of the past,” Pierre Boulez wrote as long ago as 1970. “The orchestra as we know it today,” he said, in words that ring just as true in 2014—“still carries the imprint of the nineteenth century, which was itself a legacy of court tradition.” Over the past five decades, he

has continually fought to bring the orchestra and its programs into our own time, and since Boulez began his annual visits to Chicago in 1991, he has not only become our guide to the modern masters and new adventurers, but also a pioneer in the traditional world of program-ming. As in all the aspects of his extraordinary career—as composer, conductor, musical thinker—Boulez, now the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus, demonstrates an uncanny foresight and clarity of vision; he has shaken up our familiar ways of listening and thinking about music; and time and time again he has rejected the idea of doing business as usual.

In the two programs Boulez has designed for the Chicago

Symphony Orchestra this season—presented this week and next—he has created models of the kind of concert experience he has long advocated. Reacting to the rigid framework of conventional programming—which is further restricted by the conservative design of concert halls and the restraints of rehearsal schedules—Boulez

believes that we must find new ways of looking at our musical heritage. Even in the case of the most familiar works, “we have to bypass our memories and use our imaginations to discover new potentialities.”

T his week’s program takes one of the most fertile times in the history of music—the second

decade of the twentieth century—and examines it from new perspectives. The result is a panoramic journey through that time, highlighting con-nections between works by Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky, and revealing ties to two revolutionary compositions, Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, that do not appear on this program but whose

presences hover over it. This concert offers us something like an airplane view of a specific plot of music history, allowing us to see things not in the familiar linear sequence, but to observe the entire landscape, with all its crisscrossing paths, untraveled byways, and out-of-the-way

1911 Stravinsky composes Two Poems of Balmont

1912 debussy: Jeux october 16: premiere of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, Berlin

1913 May 15: premiere of debussy’s Jeux, Paris May 29: premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Paris Stravinsky: Three Japanese Lyrics ravel: Trois poèmes de Mallarmé

1916 Stravinsky: Cat’s Cradle Songs

1917 Stravinsky: Five easy Pieces (orchestrated as Suite no. 1)

1918 Stravinsky: three Pieces for Clarinet Solo Stravinsky: The Soldier’s Tale

1920 Stravinsky: Pulcinella

Pierre Boulez conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 2010

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destinations, as well as familiar landmarks. The program does something concerts rarely attempt: it tracks the intersecting lives of contemporaries and places individual works of art in a context of influences and shared ideas.

This week’s concert exemplifies what Boulez once called “polymorphous groupings,” which

allow a single program to tackle many different repertoires—solo, chamber music, orchestral. It is anchored by large orches-tral landmarks: Pulcinella, Stravinsky’s most successful redecorating project—it refashions eighteenth-century music into a work of brilliant neoclassicism—and Debussy’s Jeux, a revolutionary score with which Boulez himself has long been identified: he led the then rarely played piece in his professional debut conducting a symphony orchestra in 1956, made a famous recording of it in 1966, and included it on his Chicago Symphony debut program three years later. And it is fitted out with miniatures to fill in, with novelistic detail, the rest of the picture of this stretch of time. Small works tell us things about a composer that the big pieces do not, just as, in order to truly know a great writer, we need to read the short stories or essays as well as the novels.

T here is really no one way through a program this rich in connections

and interrelationships. But Boulez has devised a particular itinerary that balances works of radically different sizes,

flows naturally from piece to piece, juxtaposes distinct sonorities, groups together works with shared histories, and reveals often overlooked connections. The journey Boulez originally planned to lead here in Chicago he has now turned over to Cristian Măcelaru, but Boulez is still, in the truest sense of the word, our guide.

Pierre Boulez’s original sketch of programs for Chicago

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Claude DebussyBorn August 22, 1862, Saint Germain-en-Laye, France.Died March 25, 1918, Paris, France.

Jeux

ComPoSeDaugust–November 1912

fIrSt PerformanCeMay 15, 1913; Paris, France

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeSNovember 29 & 30, 1962, orchestra hall. hans rosbaud conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerformanCeSMarch 30, 31 & april 1, 1995, orchestra hall. Pierre Boulez conducting

InStrumentatIontwo fl utes and two piccolos, three oboes and english horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons, sarrusophone (played by the

contrabassoon at these performances), four horns, four trumpets, three trom-bones and tuba, timpani, xylophone, cymbals, tambourine, triangle, celesta, two harps, strings

aPProXImate PerformanCe tIme17 minutes

In May 1913, Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet presented two premieres. Th e fi rst, on the fi fteenth of the month, met with incomprehension and was quickly overlooked; the second, given two weeks later, provoked a famous scandal and made its

composer the darling of Paris.Stravinsky’s Th e Rite of Spring is, of course, the

work that made history; Debussy’s Jeux is the forgotten failure, and the immediate fate of these two works nearly ruined the friendship between the composers. Debussy was irritated that Th e Rite of Spring was heralded everywhere as the watershed score of the new century—“It’s prim-itive music with all the modern conveniences,” he said. Although the two men continued to exchange letters, they said nasty things behind each other’s backs and saw very little of each other after 1914.

Stravinsky and Debussy fi rst met backstage after the premiere of Th e Firebird in June 1910. (Debussy spoke kindly of the music, though he later told Stravinsky, “After all, you had to begin somewhere.”) Shortly after the premiere of Stravinsky’s next work, Petrushka, they met for lunch, drank champagne, and had their picture taken together. Debussy gave Stravinsky a walking stick inscribed with their initials, and a close friendship developed. One night in 1912, the two composers ran through Th e Rite

of Spring together at the piano—Debussy played the lower part at sight, without diffi culty—before Stravinsky put the fi nishing touches on his score. Around the same time, Debussy asked Stravinsky’s advice about the orchestration of his new ballet, Jeux.

T he original idea for Jeux was hatched over lunch in the grill room of the Savoy Hotel in London in 1912. Debussy had

accepted an invitation to meet with Diaghilev and the dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, who together had made a sensational, con-troversial ballet of Debussy’s Prelude to Th e Afternoon of a Faun earlier in the year that the composer had disliked. Now Debussy listened while Nijinsky sketched on the tablecloth and Diaghilev proposed a new ballet about a game of tennis that is interrupted by the crash of an airplane. According to the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, who also was present, the plan provided for “no ensembles, no variations, no pas de deux, only boys and girls in fl annels, and rhythmic movements.” Debussy rejected the subject point blank until Diaghilev off ered to double his fee.

Th e scenario was eventually rewritten—wisely, the plane crash was eliminated—as a study of jealousy and love between two girls and their tennis partner—“a sort of L’après-midi d’un faune in sports clothes,” as Pierre Boulez has written. It was called Jeux. “Th is is the decorous title for the ‘horrors’ enacted between these three persons,” Debussy wrote to Stravinsky. Here is the synop-sis given to the fi rst audience:

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The scene is a garden at dusk; a tennis ball has been lost; a boy and two girls are searching for it. The artificial light of the large electric lamps shedding fantastic rays about them suggests the idea of childish games: they play hide and seek,

they try to catch one another, they quarrel, they sulk without cause. The night is warm, the sky is bathed in pale light; they embrace. But the spell is broken by another tennis ball thrown in mischievously by an unknown hand. Surprised and alarmed, the boy and girls disappear into the nocturnal depths of the garden.

Although the ballet was not a success—it was dropped after only a few performances—and Debussy was again displeased with Nijinsky’s choreography, the music is one of his greatest achievements. Jeux is Debussy’s last orchestral score; it is both a work of summation—the finest realization of ideas going back at least to The Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun composed twenty years earlier—and a work that looks far into the future. Its innovations passed unnoticed for many years; nearly half a century after the premiere it became a new point of reference for the avant-garde and enjoyed the status of a cult classic. Since the 1960s, Jeux has been played

with some regularity, making possible a wider appreciation of its individual sound world and its originality.

T he extraordinary formal freedom of Jeux, in particular, anticipates music written much later. Listeners in 1913, and for

many years thereafter, were puzzled by the way Debussy’s music continually evolves—“instantly renewing itself,” as Boulez has written—in a fluid exchange of thematic ideas. A sense of repetition is virtually absent from this score, and when a musical idea does return, it is somehow transformed—its color or rhythm subtly altered. Jeux was denounced as formless—and dismissed as the work of an aging, outdated composer—rather than a brave new vision of form itself.

This is Debussy’s final and most sophisticated essay in writing for orchestra. Boulez has com-mented how, in this score,

“orchestration-clothing,” that ele-mentary idea, disappears in favor of “orchestration-invention”; the imagination of the composer is not limited by first compos-ing the musical text and then decking it out with marvels of instrumentation; the orches-tration itself reflects not only the musical ideas, but the kind of writing intended to give account of it.

Jeux is a masterpiece of color and character—Debussy writes dozens of precise indications: passionate, sweet and expressive, violent, nervous, ironic, joyous—and it packs a surprisingly strong emotional punch. But it is a quiet work (many pages do not rise above a piano marking, the first mezzo forte in the score does not appear until the sixty-seventh measure), and although it is densely packed, Jeux often sounds dreamy and ephemeral compared to other music. When Stravinsky’s savage Rite of Spring hit the same stage two weeks after the premiere of this music, the gentle revolution of Jeux was all but forgotten.

Debussy and Stravinsky

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maurice ravelBorn March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France.Died December 28, 1937, Paris, France.

Trois poèmes de Mallarmé

ComPoSeD1913

fIrSt PerformanCeJanuary 14, 1914; Paris, France

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeSThese are the fi rst CSo performances.

InStrumentatIonvoice, two fl utes and piccolo, two clarinets and bass clarinet, piano, string quartet

aPProXImate PerformanCe tIme11 minutes

In the spring of 1913, Stravinsky and Ravel spent two months together in Clarens, Switzerland, on the shore of Lake Geneva, collaborating on a new performing edition of Khovanshchina, the opera Mussorgsky left unfi nished at his death.

During that time, Ravel got a chance to look at the score Stravinsky was fi nishing up in time for its world premiere in May. “You must hear Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring,” he wrote to a friend from his hotel in March: “I really believe that the fi rst night will be as important as that of [Debussy’s] Pelleas and Melisande.”

But the work that tantalized Ravel even more was Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, which had been premiered in Berlin the previous fall. Stravinsky had heard the piece in a subsequent Berlin performance, had fallen under its spell, and could not stop talking about it—in fact, he had already composed his Th ree Japanese Lyrics (performed next on this program) as a kind of musical response to Pierrot. Ravel attempted to schedule a performance of Pierrot lunaire in Paris so he could hear for himself a kind of music so new and unprecedented that no description, not even Stravinsky’s detailed and insightful account, could suggest the expressive power and novel sounds of the score. When he was unable to do so, he composed his own music, the Trois poèmes de Mallarmé, under the infl uence of Schoenberg’s work, just as Stravinsky had done with his Th ree Japanese Lyrics. Th e diff erence, of course, is that Stravinsky had heard Pierrot, while Ravel got his idea of the piece second hand.

“With me, composition bears all the symp-toms of a serious illness: fever, insomnia, loss of appetite,” Ravel wrote to the wife of the Italian composer Alfredo Casella from Clarens. “After three days of that there emerged a song to words by Mallarmé.” Th e song is “Soupir,” the fi rst of the three Mallarmé songs he would write in the thrall of Schoenberg. In that same letter, he dreamed of a concert that would pair Pierrot lunaire with its musical off spring: Stravinsky’s Japanese lyrics and the set of Mallarmé songs that he had not yet even fi nished. Th at fantasy concert never took place, but once Ravel com-pleted his Trois poèmes de Mallarmé, they were premiered together with the Stravinsky songs in Paris, in January 1914. Ravel originally intended to set only two Mallarmé poems to music. Th e second song was composed in May, after he returned to Paris. But then in August, Ravel said he had fi nished another Mallarmé setting. By coincidence—and prompted no doubt by the publication in 1913 of a major new edition of Mallarmé’s poetry—Debussy was writing his own Mallarmé songs at the same time; curiously, both composers chose two of the same poems.

Th e powerful example of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire inspired both Stravinsky and Ravel to search for a new adventurousness in their writing without diluting the individuality of their own voices. “You should never be afraid of imitating,” Ravel said many years later. “I joined the Schoenberg school to write my Poèmes de Mallarmé. . . . If it didn’t become quite Schoenberg, it is because, in music, I am not so wary of charm, which is something he avoids to the point of asceticism, martyrdom even.” Th e circle of infl uence continued: Stravinsky was so taken with the opening of Ravel’s second song,

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“Placet futile,” that he echoed the same effect in the pastorale of his Soldier’s Tale in 1918.

A lthough Ravel had known and admired the writings of the late nineteenth-century symbolist poet

Stéphane Mallarmé for many years, he had only set his words to music once before (the song “Sainte,” composed in 1896, early in his career). Now, nearly two decades later, Ravel’s supple language was ideally suited to Mallarmé’s art, “where all the elements are so intimately bound up together that one

cannot analyze, but only sense, its effect,” as the composer wrote. Mallarmé described “Soupir,” the first poem Ravel chose to set, as “an autumnal reverie.” Ravel dedicated the song to Stravinsky. (This was a time of generous musical reciprocity: Stravinsky had already dedicated the third of his Three Japanese Lyrics to Ravel.) Ravel’s second song is a setting of a love poem that Mallarmé himself said evokes a painting by Boucher or Watteau. The last song, of complex and harmonically bold design, carried Ravel to an extreme of atonality to which he never returned.

troIS PoèmeS De mallarmé

SouPIrMon âme vers ton front où rêve, ô calme soeur,

un automne jonché de taches de rousseur,et vers le ciel errant de ton oeil angéliquemonte, comme dans un jardin mélancolique,fidèle, un blanc jet d’eau soupire vers l’Azur!

—Vers l’Azur attendri d’Octobre pâle et pur

qui mire aux grands bassins sa langueur infinieet laisse, sur l’eau morte où la fauve agoniedes feuilles erre au vent et creuse un froid sillon,se traîner le soleil jaune d’un long rayon.

SIghMy soul rises toward your brow where,

O peaceful sister,a dappled autumn dreams,and toward the roving sky of your angelic eye,as in a melancholy garden, faithful, a white plume of water sighs toward

heaven’s blue!— Toward the compassionate blue of pale and

pure Octoberthat onto vast pools mirrors infinite indolenceand, over a swamp where the dark death of leavesfloats in the wind and digs a cold furrowletting the yellow sun draw out into a long ray.

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PlaCet futIlePrincesse! à jalouser le destin d’une Hébéqui poind sur cette tasse au baiser de vos lèvres;j’use mes feux mais n’ai rang discret que d’abbé

et ne figurerai même nu sur le Sèvres.

Comme je ne suis pas ton bichon embarbéni la pastille, ni du rouge, ni jeux mièvreset que sur moi je sais ton regard clos tombé,blonde dont les coiffeurs divins sont des orfèvres!

Nommez-nous—toi de qui tant de ris framboisés

se joignent en troupeaux d’agneaux apprivoiséschez tous broutant les voeux et bêlant aux délires,

Nommez-nous—pour qu’Amour ailé d’un éventail

m’y peigne flûte aux doigts endormant ce bercail,

Princesse, nommez-nous berger de vos sourires.

SurgI De la CrouPe et Du BonDSurgi de la croupe et du bondd’une verrerie éphémèresans fleurir la veillée amèrele col ignoré s’interrompt.

Je crois bien que deux bouches n’ont bu,ni son amant ni ma mère,jamais à la même chimère,moi, sylphe de ce froid plafond!

Le pur vase d’aucun breuvageque l’inexhaustible veuvageagonise mais ne consent,naïf baiser des plus funèbres!À rien expirer annonçantune rose dans les ténèbres.

futIle PetItIonPrincess! envious of the youthful Heberising up on this cup at the touch of your lips,I spend my ardor, but have only the low rank

of abbotand shall never appear even naked on the Sèvres.

Since I’m not your whiskered lap-dog,nor candy, nor rouge, nor sentimental pose,and since I know your glance on me is blind,O blonde, whose divine hairdressers

are goldsmiths!

appoint us—you in whose laughter so many berries

join a flock of tame lambsnibbling every vow and bleating with joy,

appoint us—so that Eros winged with a fan

will paint me upon it, a flute in my fingers to lull those sheep,

Princess, appoint us shepherd of your smiles.

rISen from haunCh anD SPurtRisen from haunch and spurtof ephemeral glasswarewithout causing the bitter eve to bloom,the ignored neck is stopped.

I, sylph of this cold ceiling,do not believe that two mouths—neither my mother’s nor her lover’s—ever drank from the same mad fancy.

The pure vase empty of fluidwhich tireless widowhoodslowly kills but does not consent to,innocent but funereal kiss!To expend anything announcinga rose in the dark.

—Translations by Ned Rorem

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Igor StravinskyBorn June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia.Died April 6, 1971, New York City.

Three Japanese Lyrics

Two Poems of Balmont

Two Poems of BalmontComPoSeD1911, for voice and piano

1954, orchestral version

fIrSt PerformanCedate unknown

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeSThese are the fi rst CSo performances.

InStrumentatIonvoice, two fl utes, two clarinets, piano, string quartet

aPProXImate PerformanCe tIme3 minutes

Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire was fi rst performed in Berlin on October 16, 1912. Stravinsky arrived in Berlin little more than a month later, to join Sergei Diaghilev for the winter season of the Russian Ballet. Fresh from the

triumph of Th e Firebird, Stravinsky was just fi nishing a new ballet about the pagan rituals of springtime that would soon send shock waves throughout the music world. Later on, musicians would marvel that these two epochal works, Th e Rite of Spring and Pierrot lunaire, were conceived almost simultaneously, each composer unaware of the other’s achievement. In his suitcase, Stravinsky carried brand new settings of two poems by the Russian symbolist Konstantin Balmont, which, with their repeating, kaleido-scopic patterns and edgy rhythms, echo Th e Rite of Spring. Th ey also continue the recent interest in bitonality of Petrushka (neither song has a key signature).

In Berlin, Stravinsky met Schoenberg for the fi rst time, and on December 8, he attended a per-formance of Pierrot lunaire, following the music in a score the composer handed him. Stravinsky was so stunned by this work that for years he could not admit its full impact. Decades later, after Schoenberg had died, he called the experi-ence “the most prescient confrontation in my life” and pronounced Pierrot lunaire the “solar plexus as well as the mind of early twentieth-century music.” Th at very month in Berlin, Stravinsky orchestrated a little Japanese song he had written for voice and piano before leaving Russia; back at his temporary home in Clarens, Switzerland, he composed two additional settings of Japanese poems.

Stravinsky took his texts from an anthology of Japanese poems translated into Russian. “Th e impression which they made on me,” he wrote, “was exactly like that made by Japanese paintings and engravings. Th e graphic solution of problems of perspective and space shown by their art incited me to fi nd something analogous in music.” Stravinsky’s titles are the names of the ancient poets. Th ese Th ree Japanese Lyrics,

Three Japanese LyricsComPoSeDoctober 1912–January 1913

fIrSt PerformanCeJanuary 14, 1914; Paris, France

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeSThese are the fi rst CSo performances.

InStrumentatIonvoice, two fl utes and piccolo, two clarinets and bass clarinet, piano, string quartet

aPProXImate PerformanCe tIme4 minutes

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written during the final stages of The Rite of Spring, are openly indebted to Pierrot lunaire in their extraordinary scoring for an uncharacter-istic (but very Schoenbergian) small ensemble of flutes, clarinets, piano, and strings. The tonality of these songs, like that of the Balmont settings, is ambiguous (the first song, “Akahito,” has a key

signature of four flats; the other two have none at all). Four decades later, in 1954, Stravinsky orchestrated his two little Balmont settings for the same Pierrot-flavored ensemble. Together, these two groups of songs reflect the impact of Schoenberg as much as they complement Stravinsky’s own Rite of Spring.

three JaPaneSe lYrICS

akahIto

Ja belye tsvety v sadutebe khotela pokazat’.No sneg poshol. Ne razobrat’,gde sneg i gde tsvety!

maZatSumI

Vesna prishla. Iz treshchin ledyanojkory zaprygali, igraya v rechkepennye strui: oni khotyat byt’pervym belym tsvetom radostnoj vesny.

tSaraIukI

Chto eto beloe vdali!Povsyudu, slovno oblaka mezhdu kholmami.To vishni raztsveli;prishla zhelannaya vesna.

I have flowers of white. Come and seewhere they grow in my garden. But fallsthe snow: I know not my flowers from

flakes of snow.

The Spring has come! Through those chinks ofprisoning ice the white floes drift, foamy flakesthat sport and play in the stream. How glad theypass, first flowers that tidings bear that

Spring is coming.

What shimmers so white faraway? Thouwouldst say ’twas nought but cloudlet inthe midst of hills. Full blown are the cherries!Thou art, come, beloved Springtime.

—Translations by Robert Burness

(Please turn the page quietly.)

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two PoemS of Balmont

neZaBuDoChkaNezabudochka – tsvetochekOchen’ laskovo tsvetyot,Dlya tebya moj drug-druzhochek,Nad voditseyu rastyot.

Nad voditsej, nad krinitsej,Nad vodoyu klyuchevoj,Na zare s zvezdoj-zvezditsejGovorit – ty budto moj.

Nezabudochka – tsvetochekNezhno-sinen’kij glazok,Vsyo zovyot tebya, druzhochek,Slyshish’ tonkij golosok?

goluB’Golub’ k teremu pripal,Kto tam, chto tam, podsmotrel.Golub’ telom nezhno-bel,Na okontse zh tsvetik al.

Belyj golub’ vorkoval,On tsvetochkom zavladel,On yevo zacharoval,Nasladilsya, uletel.

Akh ty belyj golubok,Pozabyl ty al tsvetok,Akh ty belyj golubok,Vorotis’ khot’ na chasok.

the flowerThe Forget-me-not is blooming,all for you, my love, for you,by a brook its petals growingopening their tender blue.

Then at night when the starlight looksdown on you to shine,when the dawn breaks night’s last starfading seems to say: “Will you be mine?”

The Forget-me-not is blooming,tender eyes so sweet and blue.Do you hear me, lovely flower?Listen to the flower’s voice!

the DoveOn the window sill the roseand there on the roof the dove,do you see them now, oh look.The dove flying to the rose?

Red the flower, white the dove,red and white together lie,white and red together love,but then the dove flies away.

Oh my beautiful white dove,you forget my sill above,oh my beautiful white dove,fly back to your waiting love.

—Translations by Robert Craft

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Igor Stravinsky

three Pieces for Clarinet Solo

ComPoSeDoctober–November 1918

fIrSt PerformanCeNovember 8, 1919; lausanne, Switzerland

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeSNovember 4, 5 & 6, 2004, orchestra hall. John Bruce yeh as soloist

moSt reCent CSo PerformanCeJanuary 11, 2008, orchestra hall. John Bruce yeh as soloist

aPProXImate PerformanCe tIme7 minutes

A mere fi ve years separate the great, epochal orchestral roar of Th e Rite of Spring and these tiny, unaccompanied pieces. But after Th e Rite, which changed the history of music, Stravinsky himself was a changed man. He began to focus on minia-

tures and on works scored for a mere handful of musicians, as if he knew that he had taken large-scale orchestral composition to its limit.

Th e culmination of this new fascination with spartan musical textures was Th e Soldier’s Tale, which calls for seven players. But the trend reached its extreme in these three solo clarinet pieces that serve as a footnote to that historic score. Composed immediately afterwards, they were written as a thank-you present for Werner Reinhart, whose family fortune, made in coff ee and cotton, had fi nanced the fi rst production of Th e Soldier’s Tale in September 1918. Reinhart was an amateur clarinetist—he played in the local orchestra in his hometown of Winterthur, Switzerland—and a patron of the arts with wide-ranging interests. (In 1922, he purchased the Château de Muzot so that the poet Rainer Maria Rilke could live there rent free in his last years.)

Th ese three short monologues are among Stravinsky’s “biggest” little works. For them, Stravinsky picked an instrument with an

enormous range and an extremely wide dynamic palette, from the nearly inaudible to fortissimo. Th e fi rst piece, which explores the clarinet’s low register, began life as a song and was sketched as early as 1916. Th e second is Stravinsky’s “imita-tion” of improvisation (he had recently heard live jazz for the fi rst time), written without bar lines. Th e third revisits the tango and ragtime of Th e Soldier’s Tale.

A footnote. Volkart Brothers, run by Werner’s nephew Andreas Reinhart since 1985, now oversees a foundation that supports social and environmental issues as well as the arts.

Werner Reinhart (left), with Australian violinist Alma Moodie and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke

14

Igor Stravinsky

Cat’s Cradle Songs

ComPoSeD1915–16

fIrSt PerformanCeSNovember 20, 1918; Paris, France (with piano accompaniment)

June 6, 1919; Vienna, austria (version with three clarinets)

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeJuly 23, 1967, ravinia Festival. Cathy Berberian as soloist, luciano Berio conducting

These are the fi rst CSo subscription concert performances.

InStrumentatIonvoice, three clarinets

aPProXImate PerformanCe tIme4 minutes

Living in Switzerland during the early months of World War I, Stravinsky took refuge in collections of folk poetry and short stories that he had brought with him from Russia. He some-times found comfort in savoring the mere

patterns of syllables and sounds, “which produce an eff ect on one’s sensibility very closely akin to that of music.” Soon he began to write his own Russian songs. But these are not exercises in nostalgia. Having internalized the essence of his Russian literary and musical roots, he was now allowing it to come out in his own music.

Th e four short Cat’s Cradle Songs are among the fi rst pieces to reveal a new direction in Stravinsky’s output. In each of these songs, the vocal lines are simple, short, narrow in range, and familiarly popular in style. Yet the melodies are original, even though they do not sound it—an

accomplishment Stravinsky was particularly proud of. As he wrote in his Memoirs, “If any of these pieces sound like aboriginal folk music, it may be because my powers of fabrication were able to tap some unconscious ‘folk’ memory.” Th e spare, yet surprisingly rich, accompaniment is for three clarinetists (including the higher-pitched E-fl at clarinet), and Stravinsky is particularly resourceful at using all the registers and colors of this versatile family of instruments. Th e texts are traditional Russian lullabies Stravinsky found in the pages of his own collections. Th e fi rst performance was given in Vienna, under the aus-pices of Arnold Schoenberg’s Society for Private Performances. Afterwards, Anton Webern wrote to Alban Berg: “Th e Stravinsky was wonderful. Th ese songs are marvelous, and this music moves me wholly and beyond belief. I love it, and the lullabies are indescribably touching. How these clarinets sound!” Stravinsky’s fascination with the animal kingdom continued. His next work, Renard, was a burlesque about a fox, a rooster, a cat, and a goat.

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lullaBYHushabye baby, let me rock you.Swing! Swing! Daddy will bring you a bread roll,a pastry for mommy, a balalaika for sonny,hushabye baby, let me rock you.I will swing youand play the balalaika.Hushabye baby, let me rock you.

Cat’S CraDle SongS

SPI, kotSpi, kot, na pechke, na vojlochke.Lapki v golovkakh, lis’ya shubka na plechakh.

kot na PeChIKot na pechi sukhari tolchyot,Koshka v lukoshke shirinku sh’yot,Malen’ki kotyata v pechurkakh sidyatDa na kotika glyadyat,Chto na kotika glyadyatI sukhari edyat.

BaJ-BaJBayushki-bayu, pribayukivayuKach’, kach’, privezyot otets kalach,Materi sajku, synku, balalajku,A bayu, bayu, pribayukivayuStanu ya kachati,V balalaichku igrati,A bayu, bayu, pribayukivati.

u kota, kotaU kota, kotaKolybel’ka zolotaA u dityatki moevoI poluchshe tovo.

U kota, kotaI podushechka belaA u dityatki moevoI beleye tovo.

U kota, kotaI postelyushka myagkaA u dityatki moevoI pomyakhche tovo.

U kota, kotaOdeyalechko teploA u dityatki moevoI tepleye tovo.

SleeP, CatSleep, cat, on the stove, on the felt ledge,your paws behind your head, a fox-fur coat on

your shoulders.

Cat on the StoveThe cat on the stove crumbles the dry biscuits,the kitty in the basket sews a little cloth,the kittens sit on their little stovesand watch the pussycat,and while they watch the pussycatthey eat the dry biscuits.

the tomCat haSThe tomcat hasa little golden cradle,but my baby hasan even better one.

The tomcat hasa little white pillow,but my baby hasan even whiter one.

The tomcat hasa soft little bedbut my baby hasan even softer one.

The tomcat hasa warm little blanketbut my baby hasan even warmer one.

—Translations by Nicholas Winter

16

Igor Stravinsky

Suite from Pulcinella

ComPoSeDBallet: 1919–april 20, 1920

Suite: 1922

fIrSt PerformanCeBallet: May 15, 1920; Paris, France

Suite: december 22, 1922; Boston, Massachusetts

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeSJanuary 14, 1935; Pabst Theatre in Milwaukee, wisconsin. The composer conducting (suite)

January 17 & 18, 1935, orchestra hall. The composer conducting (suite)

moSt reCent CSo PerformanCeSMarch 5, 6 & 8, 2009, orchestra hall. roxana Constantinescu, Nicholas Phan, and kyle ketelsen as soloists; Pierre Boulez conducting (complete ballet)

March 9, 2009, Carnegie hall. roxana Constantinescu, Nicholas Phan, and kyle ketelsen as soloists; Pierre Boulez conducting (complete ballet)

CSo PerformanCe, the ComPoSer ConDuCtIngapril 17, 1965, orchestra hall. irene Jordan, Nicholas di Virgilio, and donald Gramm as soloists (complete ballet)

InStrumentatIontwo fl utes and piccolo, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, trombone, a quintet of solo strings (two violins, viola, cello, and bass), orchestral strings

aPProXImate PerformanCe tIme20 minutes

CSo reCorDIng2009. roxana Constantinescu, Nicholas Phan, and kyle ketelsen as soloists; Pierre Boulez conducting. CSo resound

How odd Stravinsky’s Pulcinella must have sounded in 1920—charming, witty, disarmingly simple eighteenth-century music from the man who had shocked Paris only seven years earlier with the fi erce modernism of Th e

Rite of Spring. But Pulcinella was also, in its own way, radical: Stravinsky seemed to be saying that the music of the future might well learn from the lessons of the distant past. Pulcinella is usually credited as the fi rst music of neoclassicism. It did, certainly, signal a shift in Stravinsky’s own thinking that served him well for years to come. “Pulcinella was my discovery of the past,” the composer wrote—“the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible.” “It was a backward glance, of course,” he later said, “but it was a look in the mirror, too.”

For all its importance to Stravinsky’s musical development, the idea for Pulcinella was not his, but that of the great Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev. By 1919, Diaghilev and the young composer were no longer on the best of terms, and Diaghilev was determined to patch up their diff erences and revive the collaboration that had produced Th e Firebird, Petrushka, and Th e Rite of Spring. One spring afternoon, when he

and the composer were strolling in the Place de la Concorde, he proposed that Stravinsky take a look at some eighteenth-century scores with the idea of orchestrating them for a ballet. “When he said that the composer was Pergolesi, I thought he must be deranged,” Stravinsky later remembered, thinking unhappily of the Stabat Mater and the opera La serva padrona. Finally, Stravinsky promised to at least take a look.

“I looked, and I fell in love,” the composer recalled. And so the two men began to plan. Diaghilev showed Stravinsky a manuscript dating from 1700 which he had found in Italy; the subject of its many comic episodes was Pulcinella, the traditional hero of the Neapolitan commedia dell’arte, and a perfect focus for the action of their own eighteenth-century ballet. Meanwhile, Stravinsky had been sifting through the pile of manuscripts that Diaghilev had thrust in his hands, picking and choosing among trio sonatas, assorted orchestral works, and operatic selections (some of them not even by Pergolesi, as we have since learned).

Th en Stravinsky set to work in a fashion entirely new to him. “I began by composing on the Pergolesi manuscripts themselves, as though I were correcting an old work of my own,” he later wrote. “I knew that I could not produce a ‘forgery’ of Pergolesi because my motor habits are so diff erent; at best, I could repeat him in my own accent.”

17

What Stravinsky created was, in fact, some-thing entirely his own. He left Pergolesi’s bass lines and melodies alone, but the inner harmonies, the rhythms, and the sonorities all bear Stravinsky’s stamp, in one measure after another. “The remarkable thing about Pulcinella,” Stravinsky later said, “is not how much but how little has been added or changed.” His achieve-ment, then, is all the more remarkable.

The music was misunderstood from the first rehearsals. Diaghilev, expecting a harmless adap-tation like Respighi’s recent tribute to Rossini, La boutique fantasque, was shocked. “He went about for a long time with a look that suggested the Offended Eighteenth Century,” the composer reported. Diaghilev was not even sure whether to acknowledge Stravinsky as the composer of Pulcinella or merely as its arranger. Stravinsky had the last word:

I was . . . attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing “simple” music, blamed for deserting “modernism,” accused of renouncing my “true Russian heritage.” People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried “sacrilege”: “The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone.” To them all, my answer was and is the same: You “respect,” but I love.

The ballet had its premiere at the Paris Opera House in May 1920. The choreography was by Léonide Massine, with scenery and costumes by Picasso. (The collaboration of these two had been part of Diaghilev’s lure.) Pulcinella was a success, “one of those productions,” the composer reported, “where everything harmonizes, where all the elements—subject, music, dancing, and artistic setting—form a coherent and homoge-neous whole.” Yet only the music endures today.

I n 1922, Stravinsky compiled an orchestral suite of eleven sections from the complete ballet and scored for the same orchestra:

woodwinds without clarinets, brass, strings divided into concertino and ripieno groups (the solo and full orchestra divisions of the baroque

concerto grosso), with no percussion. The ballet’s original vocal lines are taken by instruments.

The suite opens with a stirring sinfonia, the ballet overture (and before that, one of Pergolesi’s trio sonata movements). The Serenata, with its mournful melody over a rocking accompani-ment, began life as an opera aria for tenor. Three connected movements (Scherzino, Allegro, Andantino), all borrowed from trio sonatas, are now enlivened by Stravinsky’s witty instrumentation, subtle use of syncopation, and the steady pulse of the rhyth-mic ostinato. The ensuing Tarantella trips over its own insistent rhythmic figures until it dashes headlong into a toccata, drawn from one of Pergolesi’s harpsichord sonatas and now revived as a boisterous fanfare for full orchestra. The winds take center stage in the Gavotta, with its two increasingly elaborate variations. Stravinsky fashioned an outrageous duet for double bass and trombone from a sinfonia for cello and double bass. The Menuetto (another opera aria) gradu-ally builds momentum until it bursts in on the syncopated flurry of the finale, the same music which brings down the curtain on the full ballet. The music ends with flourishes, repeated over and over, as if the musicians were taking their bows, heads bobbing up and down.

In his old age, Stravinsky remarked with typical candor that Pulcinella was the only work of Pergolesi’s that he really liked.

Sergei Diaghilev

18

Igor Stravinsky

Suite no. 1 for Small orchestra

ComPoSeD1916–17, piano pieces

1917 to 1925, orchestral suite

fIrSt PerformanCeMarch 2, 1926; haarlem, the Netherlands. The com-poser conducting

fIrSt CSo PerformanCeNovember 12, 1940, orchestra hall. The composer conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerformanCeSSeptember 21 & 23, 2003, orchestra hall. william eddins conducting

CSo PerformanCe, the ComPoSer ConDuCtIngJuly 13, 1963, ravinia Festival

InStrumentatIontwo fl utes and piccolo, oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, horn, trumpet, trombone and tuba, bass drum, tenor drum, cymbals, piano, strings

aPProXImate PerformanCe tIme7 minutes

In the second decade of the twentieth century, Stravinsky began to compose what he called “easy” pieces. Small in scale and relatively simple to perform, they could be dismissed as mere trifl es, except that the clarity of their style and textures,

and the simplicity of their forms point to the next stage in Stravinsky’s ever-changing, chameleon-like career—the back-to-basics sensibilities of Th e Soldier’s Tale and the great neoclassic scores.

He later fashioned two short suites for small orchestra that are collections of “easy” piano pieces written between 1914 and 1917. Th e earliest of them, published as Th ree Easy Pieces for piano duet, are the March, Waltz, and Polka that open the Second Suite that is performed here next week. Stravinsky followed them up with a new group of Five Easy Pieces for his young children, Th eodore and Mika, to play. Th is set included national dances—a Napolitana, suggested by his visit to Naples the following year; Española, written after a trip to Spain in 1916; and a Balalaïka, inspired no doubt by homesickness for his native Russia. Together with an introductory andante, those three dances were orchestrated as his Suite no. 1.

Stravinsky sent all eight of these easy pieces to the writer André Gide, who tried them out with a young student and was furious that Stravinsky had neglected to include rehearsal numbers to help keep the players together (“You fi nd your

place just as you lose the child, or the child loses his place . . .”). Th at’s when Stravinsky decided not to entrust these little jewels to amateurs and children any longer, but to dress them in sophis-ticated orchestral colors and publish them as grown-up suites.

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

Igor Stravinsky (left) with André Gide, 1917

© 2014 Chicago Symphony Orchestra