Program

Thursday, October 17, 2013, at 6:30

Afterwork Masterworks

Susanna mälkki ConductorLeila Josefowicz Violin

adès. . . but all shall be well, Op. 10First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performance

StravinskyViolin Concerto in DToccataAria 1Aria 2Capriccio

LeiLA JOsefOwiCz

Debussy La merfrom Dawn to Noon on the seaPlay of the wavesDialogue of the wind and the sea

There will be no 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

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association is grateful to WBBM Newsradio 780 and 105.9 FM for its generous support as media sponsor of the Afterwork Masterworks series.

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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Program

saturday, October 19, 2013, at 8:00Tuesday, October 22, 2013, at 7:30

Susanna mälkki ConductorLeila Josefowicz Violin

Sibeliussuite No. 1 from The Tempest, Op. 109The OaktreeHumoresqueCaliban’s songThe HarvestersCanonsceneintrada, Berceuseentr’acte, Ariel’s songThe storm

StravinskyViolin Concerto in DToccataAria 1Aria 2Capriccio

LeiLA JOsefOwiCz

IntermISSIon

adès. . . but all shall be well, Op. 10First Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription concert performances

DebussyLa merfrom Dawn to Noon on the seaPlay of the wavesDialogue of the wind and the sea

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

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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Jean SibeliusBorn December 8, 1865, Hämeenlinna, Finland.Died September 20, 1957; Ainola, Järvenpää, Finland.

Suite no. 1 from The Tempest, op. 109

On May 1, 1925, just over seven months before his sixtieth birthday, Sibelius received an unexpected query from his Danish publisher, Wilhelm Hansen: “Have you written any music to Th e Tempest?” Hansen informed Sibelius that the

Royal Th eatre in Copenhagen was planning to stage Shakespeare’s fi nal play, and the producer, Johannes Poulsen, who had earlier staged Sibelius’s ballet-pantomime Scaramouche, wanted to use his incidental music.

It is tempting to see some kind of portent in this commission. Shakespeare’s Th e Tempest has long been seen as a fi nal summing up by the playwright himself, with Prospero’s curtain speech interpreted as a plea from Shakespeare himself to be liberated from the burden of con-juring characters and dramas in which they play out their existence:

Now I wantSpirits to enforce, art to enchant,And my ending is despair,Unless I be relieved by prayer,Which pierces so that it assaultsMercy itself and frees all faults.

As early as 1901, Axel Carpelan, one of Sibelius’s closest friends, had suggested the play to him as a subject: “Th e Tempest would suit you ideally. Prospero, Miranda, the spirits of earth and air, etc.” Now, with Sibelius more worried about his ultimate standing as a composer and feeling increasingly bereft of those who truly understood him—Carpelan having died in 1919—the play had a particular resonance, most particularly its presiding genius, Prospero, and his renunciation of magic at the play’s end. Sibelius’s biographer, Erik Tawaststjerna, has further suggested that Prospero’s two servants, Ariel and Caliban, came to represent respectively Sibelius’s inspirational and his earthy sides. Sibelius was well aware of the strains both these aspects of his personality had placed on his marriage, his increasing struggle to achieve the perfection glimpsed while composing his sym-phonies too often weighed down by his perennial drinking problem, not to mention his love of such luxuries as well-cut suits and cigars.

S ibelius composed Th e Tempest with appar-ent fl uency, easily meeting his deadline of September 1 that year. His incidental music consists of some thirty-four pieces of music, ranging from the briefest of cues just a few seconds long to fairly substantial pieces of around four minutes. In all lasting well

CommentS by Daniel Jaff é Phillip Huscher

ComPoSeD1925–1928

FIrSt PerFormanCeMarch 15, 1926 (complete incidental music), Copenhagen, Denmark

FIrSt (anD onLY) CSo PerFormanCeDecember 24, 1946, Orchestra Hall. Tauno Hannikainen conducting

InStrUmentatIonthree fl utes and three piccolos, two oboes, two clarinets, e-fl at clarinet and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings

aPProXImate PerFormanCe tIme20 minutes

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over an hour, The Tempest also turned out to be the most extensive score Sibelius had writ-ten since 1900; Tapiola apart, it also was the last significant piece of music he completed before his virtual creative silence, which lasted the remaining thirty or so years of his life.

Like Scaramouche, the ballet-pantomime staged earlier by Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre, Sibelius’s Tempest has traces of neoclassical courtliness, but nudged even further in the direction of a dreamlike eeriness. The music’s haunting atmo-sphere would capture the imagination of com-posers for several decades afterwards, whether the otherworldly sounds of Vaughan Williams’s Magnificat of 1932, or the film scores by Bernard Herrmann and Richard Rodney Bennett from the 1950s to the ’70s. Sibelius arranged two suites from his incidental music, creating musical vignettes or portraits rather than following the dramatic course of the play.

T he Oaktree is effectively a portrait of Prospero’s spirit servant Ariel—it opens, in fact, with a brief snatch of the baleful woodwind chords which herald Ariel’s appearance as a harpy at the banquet. This then melts into an earlier episode in the play when, to the eerie to-and-fro accompaniment of two string chords, Ariel—in the guise of a young oak tree—plays a flute (a conceit invented by the Danish producer Johannes Poulsen, pre-sumably on the basis that Prospero originally rescued Ariel from imprisonment in a tree).

In an altogether lighter vein is the following Humoresque. Over a trotting pizzicato accompa-niment, a pair of clarinets perkily twine as Ariel appears, followed by Caliban and his coconspira-tors Stephano and Trinculo, their potential men-ace hinted by the occasional sting of muted brass.

Caliban’s Song shows Prospero’s rebellious servant at his most defiant. Sibelius portrays Caliban as a caricature “Eastern” barbarian with shrill piccolos and clarinets accompanied by “Turkish” percussion—bass drum and cymbals, triangle and xylophone.

By contrast follows the rustic charm of The Harvesters, Sibelius’s artful combination of two separate numbers from the play in which Prospero conjures spirits, mainly focused on the masque he stages for his daughter Miranda and her beloved Ferdinand. The dreamlike quality of those visions is suggested by the Lydian gleam of the gamboling woodwinds.

An earthy contrast follows with the Canon, an orchestral transcription of the drunken singing by Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo of “Flout ‘em and scout ’em.”

Pizzicato strings in a playful mood introduce the Scene, which—not too obviously—portrays the spirits who, transformed into dogs, chase Caliban and his coconspirators away. A more stern string theme, taken from another number representing Caliban, serves as a contrasting central section.

The next movement, devoted to Prospero, opens with a strikingly discordant outburst. Though the Intrada was intended to represent the “solemn music” to which the magician renounces his magic, Sibelius presents this act as a terrible trauma; was it the renunciation, or the mere thought of losing his “special powers” which so horrified the composer? The following Berceuse, taken from early in the play, presents a more gentle and melancholic side of Prospero as he places an enchantment on Miranda so she may sleep. (Sibelius once recalled keeping vigil himself over his two youngest sleeping daughters: “They lay there sleeping, life awaiting them,” said the composer, himself often troubled by life.)

A long, brooding number combines an Entr’acte portraying Iris, goddess of the rain-bow, with Ariel’s Song, an orchestral version of Sibelius’s setting of “Full fathom five.” The eerie sense of foreboding prepares us for

The Storm—an abbreviated version of the play’s original overture, best heard not as music, but as a powerful sound-portrait of the tem-pest itself, intended to replace Shakespeare’s opening scene.

—Daniel Jaffé

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Igor StravinskyBorn June 18, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia.Died April 6, 1971, New York City.

Violin Concerto in D

ComPoSeD1931

FIrSt PerFormanCeOctober 23, 1931, Berlin, Germany

FIrSt CSo PerFormanCeSJuly 5, 1962, ravinia festival. ruggiero ricci as soloist, walter Hendl conducting

April 23, 24 & 25, 1970, Orchestra Hall. György Pauk as soloist, irwin Hoff man conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerFormanCeSfebruary 28, March 1, 2 & 5, 2002, Orchestra Hall. Gil shaham as soloist, David robertson conducting

InStrUmentatIonsolo violin, two fl utes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, three clarinets and e-fl at clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, bass drum, strings

aPProXImate PerFormanCe tIme22 minutes

CSo reCorDIng1994. itzhak Perlman as soloist, Daniel Barenboim conducting. Teldec

Stravinsky did not trust virtuosos. “In order to succeed they are obliged to seek immediate triumphs,” he once wrote, “and to lend themselves to the wishes of the public, the great majority of whom demand sensational eff ects from the player.”

Stravinsky was not eager to compose a violin concerto when the music publisher Willy Strecker fi rst suggested that he write something for Samuel Dushkin, a remarkable young violinist. He was particularly skeptical since he had never met Dushkin or heard him play. Only later did Stravinsky admit that he was also worried because he could not play the violin himself.

“I hesitated at fi rst,” Stravinsky wrote in his Chronicle, “because I am not a violinist and I was afraid that my slight knowledge of that instrument would not be suffi cient to enable me to solve the many problems which would neces-sarily arise in the course of a major work specially composed for it.” Strecker assured the composer that Dushkin would always be available to advise him on technical matters. Still uncertain, Stravinsky consulted Paul Hindemith, who said that Stravinsky’s inexperience might be a blessing in disguise, since it “would give rise to ideas which would not be suggested by the familiar move-ment of the fi ngers.” Stravinsky fi nally agreed

to Strecker’s proposal, but he did his homework anyway: he carefully studied all the great classical violin concertos before he wrote a note of his own.

Stravinsky and Dushkin met early in 1931 in Wiesbaden, in Willy Strecker’s house, and hit it off immediately. Stravinsky found Dushkin excep-tionally musical and down-to-earth; Dushkin was surprised that the notorious composer was unassuming and aff ectionate. Stravinsky began to compose almost at once. Th at winter, he and Dushkin met for lunch in Paris. “Stravinsky took out a piece of paper,” Dushkin remembered,

and wrote down this chord and asked me if it could be played. I had never seen a chord with such an enormous stretch, from the E to the top A, and I said “No.” Stravinsky said sadly “Quel dommage” (What a pity). After I got home, I tried it, and, to my astonish-ment, I found that in that register, the stretch of the eleventh was relatively easy to play and the sound fascinated me. I telephoned Stravinsky at once to tell him that it could be done. When the concerto was fi nished, more than six months later, I understood his disappointment when I fi rst said “No.” Th is chord, in a diff erent dress, begins each of the four movements. Stravinsky himself calls it his “passport” to the concerto.

Th e two men began to work together on their concerto, like Brahms and Joachim more than

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fifty years before. Dushkin was amazed at how slowly it went, and he often found Stravinsky hunched over the piano, “grunting and struggling to find the notes and the chords he [seemed] to be hearing.” Gradually, Dushkin watched the concerto come to life on the plain white pages of Stravinsky’s notebook. (Dushkin was amused that Stravinsky drew his own staff lines as he went, using a little roller made especially for him: “Some staves are longer, others shorter, sometimes just one line, sometimes several lines, so that when the page is finished, it looks like a strangely designed drawing, and each page looks different from the preceding page.”)

“At various intervals,” Dushkin recalled, “he would show me what he had just written, sometimes a page, sometimes only a few lines, sometimes half a movement.” Every one of Dushkin’s suggestions, no matter how simple, sent Stravinsky back to the drawing board. “He behaved like an architect who if asked to change a room on the third floor had to go down to the foundation to keep the proportions of the whole structure,” Dushkin remembered. The violinist even grew bold enough to propose entire passages of his own, which Stravinsky rejected, reminded of a pushy salesman at the Galeries Lafayette: “Isn’t this brilliant, isn’t this exquisite, look at the beautiful colors, everybody’s wearing it,” to which he had replied, “Yes, it is brilliant, it is beautiful, everyone is wearing it—I don’t want it.”

The first movement was completed on March 27. The two middle movements were fin-ished before June 16, when Stravinsky went with his family to Voreppe, north of Grenoble, where he wrote the finale while Dushkin learned the first three movements. The full orchestral score is dated September 25, less than a month before the premiere in Berlin.

The final product is pure Stravinsky—the influence of Dushkin, despite his tireless sales-manship, is entirely in the details and cannot be detected—and it is unlike any other concerto in the literature. Stravinsky’s sensibilities had already determined that he would not write a grand romantic vehicle for a dazzling artist parading his virtuosity. The composer’s interest in eighteenth-century music may have suggested the more likely model of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, where the soloist is always among

friends, collaborating and conversing, rather than stealing the spotlight.

The relationship between soloist and orchestra is fluid throughout Stravinsky’s concerto. He writes very few measures that do not include the solo violin, in ever-changing combinations with the members of the orchestra. The music is a kaleidoscope of duets, trios, and various larger chamber ensembles, and, in the finale, the solo violin even engages in a duet with the concert-master (a hint of Stravinsky’s fondness for Bach’s concerto for two violins). Stravinsky’s orchestra is not small—it is particularly heavy in winds and brass—but he rarely uses the full complement, so that it often sounds like a chamber orchestra. Stravinsky specifically asks for fewer strings than the norm to offset the solo violin, and, in the opening Toccata, the listener is scarcely aware that there are violins in the orchestra at all. (In his Symphony of Psalms, composed the preceding year, Stravinsky omitted the upper strings completely.)

The concerto is divided, unconventionally, into four movements. Two bright, bustling move-ments in D major frame two contrasted arias. All begin with the passport chord (essentially the top three open notes on the violin—D, A, E—with the middle note played up two octaves). The music is enlivened by old, familiar gestures from music’s immense attic, but, as always, Stravinsky gives each chord or melodic turn a new twist. Hindemith knew that Stravinsky would never be limited by the patterns the hand already knows; Stravinsky deliberately writes music that shakes our expectations and makes us listen freshly to every note.

The opening Toccata—from the Italian toccare, to touch—is lively and playful; the tempo is rapid and unchanging, as dependable as a Swiss watch. The two central arias—a title favored by Bach for slow movements—are both in minor keys. The first, in D minor, begins like a two-part invention for violin solo and cellos; the second, in F-sharp minor, is a long-lined, richly embellished lyrical melody. The concerto doesn’t offer the soloist a cadenza, though the entire last move-ment is tireless, flamboyant, virtuoso display, despite Stravinsky’s reluctance to call attention to the matter.

—Phillip Huscher

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thomas adèsBorn July 3, 1971, London, England.

. . . but all shall be well, op. 10

ComPoSeD1993

FIrSt PerFormanCeOctober 7, 1994, Tokyo, Japan

FIrSt CSo PerFormanCeSThese are the fi rst Chicago symphony Orchestra performances.

InStrUmentatIonthree fl utes and three piccolos, three oboes, three english horns, three clar-inets, e-fl at clarinet and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, six horns, three trumpets and cornet, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, celesta, piano, harp, strings

aPProXImate PerFormanCe tIme10 minutes

In 2000, when the Chicago Symphony played music by Th omas Adès for the fi rst time, he had already moved beyond the obvious early labels—boy wonder, the new star of English music, Benjamin Britten’s logical heir (Adès was

born fi ve years before Britten’s death). In the short time since he fi rst attracted attention in 1991, as a nineteen-year-old composer of a chamber symphony—the very work the CSO chose to introduce him—Adès had become a major artist and an international sensation. His fi rst opera, Powder Her Face, made headlines following its premiere in 1995, both for its dazzling music and its scandalous subject (it is based on the life of Margaret, duchess of Argyll, whose sexual escapades fi lled the tabloids in 1963). It has since been performed around the world (reviewing the revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last February, Th e New York Times called it an “astonishing, precocious masterpiece”). Asyla, a searing, twenty-three minute orchestral score completed in 1997, won the University of Louisville’s 2000 Grawemeyer Award, music’s most prestigious international composition prize. (Adès was its youngest recipient ever; Pierre Boulez won for Sur incises the following year.) Th at work, magnifi cent and thorny, put him in the spotlight for good.

Th roughout his twenties, Adès showed all the signs of a true fi nd: astonishing technical

sophistication; a breathtaking—sometimes startling—imagination; the ability to say some-thing entirely new and memorable in the current musical vernacular; a direct line to music’s com-municative power; and, perhaps most remarkable of all, a distinctive and original, almost instantly recognizable voice. As both a visionary and a consolidator (someone who brought an unfore-seen focus to the musical diversity of today), Adès had found a singularly successful way “to give expression to his times in ideal fashion”—to borrow Robert Schumann’s defi nition of the quality that sets only a very few composers apart from the crowd.

In the last few years, Adès has moved from strength to strength. His second opera, Th e Tempest, drew attention from around the world at the time of its debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 2004, and was a huge hit in a new staging at the Metropolitan Opera last October. Adès, a highly accomplished conductor, led the performances in both houses. (Adès is an unusually fi ne pianist as well; he wrote his piano quartet in 2001 to perform with the Arditti Quartet, and played a solo recital in Carnegie Hall in 2010.) A number of major orchestral scores have made a splash, including a violin concerto in 2005; Tevot, a massive single-movement work commissioned by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic in 2007; In Seven Days, a piano concerto composed the following year, conceived with video and inspired by the Book of Genesis; and Polaris, composed to inaugurate the dazzlingly high-tech New World Center, designed by Frank Gehry, in Miami

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Beach in 2011 (Adès conducted the work with the Boston Symphony earlier this month).

. . . but all shall be well takes us back to the beginning of Adès’s career. It is the earliest of his orchestral works, a list that now includes more than a dozen scores, culminating, at the moment, with Totentanz for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and orchestra, which was premiered at the BBC Proms in London this July. With each of these pieces, starting with . . . but all shall be well, Adès has reminded us that there is always something new and unexpected to be said in music—something that has never been put quite the same way before. “No one exhausts the possibilities,” he once told The New Yorker’s Alex Ross.

. . . but all shall be well takes its title from “Little Gidding,” the last of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

Sin is Behovely, butAll shall be well, andAll manner of things shall be well

“Behovely” means necessary or inevitable; Adès has called the piece a “consolation” for orchestra. (Eliot borrowed the lines from Julian of Norwich, who viewed sin as part of the human condition.) The music unfolds mysteriously—yet with a sense of inevitability—from the quiet bell-like opening to a full orchestral climax near the end. Adès charts the course of a small musi-cal idea—essentially a stepwise melody, moving up and down—through a lifetime’s worth of experiences. The piece somehow feels bigger than it is—satisfyingly complete on its own, yet suggesting unexplored possibilities at every turn. There are allusions to other compositions—the very end recalls Liszt’s Romance oubliée—and evocations of many kinds of music. But Adès is not one to quote, nor even one to look long-ingly back. “It is a piece about now,” he said at the time of its composition, “about our own fin-de-siècle.”

—Phillip Huscher

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

La mer (three Symphonic Sketches)

ComPoSeD1903–March 1905

FIrSt PerFormanCeOctober 15, 1905, Paris, france

FIrSt CSo PerFormanCeSJanuary 29 & 30, 1909, Orchestra Hall. frederick stock conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerFormanCeSNovember 26 & 27, 2010, Orchestra Hall. Pierre Boulez conducting

August 7, 2012, ravinia festival. James Conlon conducting

InStrUmentatIontwo fl utes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets and two cornets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, strings

aPProXImate PerFormanCe tIme23 minutes

CSo reCorDIngS1960. fritz reiner conducting. rCA

1976. sir Georg solti conducting. London

1978. erich Leinsdorf conducting. CsO (Chicago Symphony Orchestra: The First 100 Years)

1991. sir Georg solti conducting. London

2000. Daniel Barenboim conducting. Teldec

2001. Daniel Barenboim conducting. euroarts (DVD)

Although Debussy’s parents once planned for him to become a sailor, La mer, subtitled Th ree Symphonic Sketches, proved to be his greatest seafaring adventure. Debussy’s childhood summers at Cannes left him with vivid memories

of the sea, “worth more than reality,” as he put it at the time he was composing La mer some thirty years later. As an adult, Debussy seldom got his feet wet, preferring the seascapes available in painting and literature; La mer was written in the mountains, where his “old friend the sea, always innumerable and beautiful,” was no closer than a memory.

Like the great British painter J.M.W. Turner, who stared at the sea for hours and then went inside to paint, Debussy worked from memory, occasionally turning for inspiration to a few other sources. Debussy fi rst mentioned his new work in a letter dated September 12, 1903; the title he proposed for the fi rst of the three symphonic sketches, “Calm Sea around the Sanguinary Islands,” was borrowed from a short story by Camille Mauclair published during the 1890s. When Debussy’s own score was printed, he insisted that the cover include a detail from

Th e Hollow of the Wave off Kanagawa, the most celebrated print by the Japanese artist Hokusai, then enormously popular in France.

We also know that Debussy greatly admired Turner’s work. His richly atmospheric seascapes recorded the daily weather, the time of day, and even the most fl eeting eff ects of wind and light in ways utterly new to painting, and they spoke directly to Debussy. (In 1902, when Debussy went to London, where he saw a number of Turner’s paintings, he enjoyed the trip but hated actually crossing the Channel.) Th e name Debussy fi nally gave to the fi rst section of La mer, From Dawn to Noon on the Sea, might easily be that of a Turner painting made sixty years earlier, for the two shared not only a love of subject but also of long, specifi c, evocative titles.

Th ere’s something in Debussy’s fi rst symphonic sketch very like a Turner painting of the sun rising over the sea. Th ey both reveal, in their vastly diff erent media, those magical moments when sunlight begins to glow in near darkness, when familiar objects emerge from the shadows. Th is was Turner’s favorite image—he even owned several houses from which he could watch, with undying fascination, the sun pierce the line separating sea and sky. Debussy’s achievement, though decades later than Turner’s, is no less radical, for it uses familiar language in truly fresh ways. From Dawn to Noon on the Sea can’t be

10

heard as traditional program music, for it doesn’t tell a tale along a standard time-line (although Debussy’s friend Eric Satie reported that he “particularly liked the bit at a quarter to eleven”). Nor can it be read as a piece of symphonic discourse, for it is organized without regard for conventional theme and development. Debussy’s audiences, like Turner’s before him, were baffled by work that takes as its subject matter color, texture, and nuance.

Debussy’s second sketch too is all suggestion and shimmering surface, fascinated with sound for its own sake. Melodic line, rhythmic regular-ity, and the use of standard harmonic progres-sions are all shattered, gently but decisively, by the fluid play of the waves. The final Dialogue

of the Wind and the Sea (another title so like Turner’s) captures the violence of two elements, air and water, as they collide. At the end, the sun breaks through the clouds. La mer repeatedly resists traditional analysis. “We must agree,” Debussy writes, “that the beauty of a work of art will always remain a mystery, in other words, we can never be absolutely sure ‘how it’s made’.”

L a mer was controversial even during rehearsals, when, as Debussy told Stravinsky, the violinists tied handker-chiefs to the tips of their bows in protest. The response at the premiere was mixed, though largely unfriendly. It is hard now to separate the reaction to this novel and challenging music from the current Parisian view of the composer himself, for during the two years he worked on La mer, Debussy moved in with Emma Bardac, the wife of a local banker, leaving behind his wife Lily, who attempted suicide. Two weeks after the premiere of La mer, Bardac gave birth to Debussy’s child, Claude-Emma, later known as Chou-Chou. Debussy married Emma Bardac on January 20, 1908. The night before, he conducted an orchestra for the first time in public, in a program which included La mer. This time, it was a spectacular success, though many of his friends still wouldn’t speak to him.

—Phillip Huscher

Daniel Jaffé is a regular contributor to BBC Music Magazine and a specialist in English and Russian music. He is the author of a biography of Sergey Prokofiev (Phaidon) and the Historical Dictionary of Russian Music (Scarecrow Press).

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

The front cover of the first edition of La mer, for which Debussy chose a detail from Hokusai’s print The Hollow of the Wave off Kanagawa.

© 2013 Chicago Symphony Orchestra