Program

Thursday, June 14, 2012, at 8:00Saturday, June 16, 2012, at 8:00

Tuesday, June 19, 2012, at 7:30

riccardo muti ConductorIldar abdrazakov Bass

ProkofievThe Meeting of the Volga and the Don, Op. 130First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

ShostakovichSuite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti, Op. 145aTruthMorningLoveSeparationWrathDanteTo the ExileCreativityNightDeathImmortality

ILDar aBDrazakOV

First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances

IntermISSIon

BeethovenSymphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67allegro con brioandante con motoallegro—allegro—Presto

ONE HuNDrED TWENTy-fIrST SEaSON

Chicago Symphony orchestrariccardo muti Music DirectorPierre Boulez Helen regenstein Conductor EmeritusYo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO

Maestro Muti and the musicians of the CSO have graciously contributed their services for Saturday evening’s Pension Benefit Concert.

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

CommentS By PHILLIP HuSCHEr

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The Meeting of the Volga and the Don, Festive Poem, op. 130

Sergei ProkofievBorn April 23, 1891, Sontsovka, Ukraine.Died March 5, 1953, Moscow, Russia.

The canal connecting the Volga and the Don rivers opened on

June 1, 1952. The least known of the world’s major waterways, it pro-vides a strategic link between the Volga—the longest river in Europe and often called the national river of Russia—which empties into the Caspian Sea, and the Don, which pours into the Sea of Azov, and from there on into the Black Sea and through the Turkish Straits directly to the Mediterranean. Ottoman Turks had wanted to link the Volga and the Don as early as 1569. Peter the Great had similar plans in the late seventeenth century, after capturing Azov, but he gave up the idea in 1701 because of its exorbitant cost.

The canal did not become reality until the middle of the twentieth century, and even then it had to be put on hold until the end

of World War II. Construction began in 1948. The work force was mostly prisoners from labor camps. As the project neared completion, more than 100,000 convicts were on the site each day. The canal was designed by Sergei Zhuk’s Hydroproject Institute and intended as a monument to the battles for Tsaritsyn during the Russian Civil War and for Stalingrad during World War II.

Prokofiev was a logical choice to write music to celebrate the comple-tion of the Volga–Don canal, as he had proven before that he could provide appropriately ceremonial music that met with official Soviet approval. It would be the last of his works designed for a public occa-sion. In his later years, Prokofiev had struck up a friendship with the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, who, like Prokofiev, had chosen to stay in

ComPoSed1951

FIrSt PerFormanCefebruary 22, 1952, Moscow

These are the first CSO performances

InStrumentatIontwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contra-bassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, cymbals, woodblock, bass drum, snare drum, triangle, celesta, harp, piano, strings

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme16 minutes

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the Soviet Union. As a result, they both had felt the heat of extreme official political pressure and con-tinually struggled with the idea of making art for mass audiences that was still honorable, substantive, and innovative. Prokofiev would not live to read Doctor Zhivago, the novel Pasternak had slowly been writing for many years.

This “festive poem” was Prokofiev’s last score for orchestra. (He had used the term five years earlier for a composition celebrat-ing the thirtieth anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.) “As I work,” Prokofiev said, in carefully chosen words,

I remember the endless expanse of our great rivers, I remember the songs which our people have sung about them, and the lines by Russian clas-sical and contemporary poets devoted to them. I am striving in this poem to write music that is melodious, reflecting the joy of construction that now seizes our entire people.

The Meeting of the Volga and the Don is a grand work for a monu-mental project. It is longer than most occasional pieces, and its scoring is more lavish than that of many a symphony of the period. Prokofiev apparently was aiming for something between a concert over-ture and a tone poem. Despite its initial stiff manner—it opens with a ceremonial fanfare—the score is filled with much fine, expressive music that could just have easily

ended up in one of Prokofiev’s late symphonies. The central Andante section, in particular, boasts an expansive melody launched by the clarinet and handed off to the violins that is characteristic of Prokofiev at his most lyrical—the kind of big, broad melody that dis-tinguishes many of his late scores. Even when writing the brilliantly colored, exuberant, optimistic music he knew was demanded by Soviet state occasions—coming close to boilerplate newsreel music from time to time—Prokofiev is still a master of color, pacing, and the telling detail. Throughout this score, there is an unexpected com-plexity, not just of compositional dexterity and orchestral writing, but of emotional content as well. Even the final cadence, in a sudden slow tempo, seems to cast a shadow over the festivities.

The premiere was broadcast over the radio on February 22, 1952. Prokofiev had little time left to him. He made his final public appearance at the premiere of his Seventh Symphony the following October. After that, his health deteriorated quickly. Even so, he began two new pieces—a sixth piano concerto and his tenth piano sonata. He died on the evening of March 5, 1953, after suffering a stroke, and less than an hour before Joseph Stalin. The news coverage of Stalin’s death all but obliterated the announcement that Prokofiev had died. There were no flowers at Prokofiev’s memorial—Stalin’s peo-ple had cleaned out all the florists in Moscow for the state funeral.

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Suite on Verses of michelangelo Buonarroti, op. 145a

Dmitri Shostakovich was diagnosed with a serious heart

condition in 1966. Then, late in 1973, his doctors found a cancerous growth in his left lung. The major compositions of Shostakovich’s last years are permeated with thoughts of death—in particular the four-teenth and fifteenth symphonies, the fifteenth string quartet, and two works from his final year, a viola sonata and these setting of poems by Michelangelo, that were written after the cancer diagnosis.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) was the greatest artist in an age of extraordinary artistic creation. (Leonardo da Vinci was Michelangelo’s elder by twenty-three years.) E.H. Gombrich, in his widely read The Story of Art, writes that Michelangelo’s fame in his own day “was something no artist had ever enjoyed before.” He also

was the first important artist to leave a large body of both visual art and literature. “No outside force, no one’s demands, and no rivalry made him write poetry, yet he wrote it all his life,” said the Russian critic A.M. Efros, whose translations of Michelangelo’s poems Shostakovich used for his settings. “For Michelangelo, poetry was a matter of heart and conscience.” The significance of Michelangelo’s poetry was recognized during his lifetime. Giorgio Vasari, who revered Michelangelo above all those he covered in his landmark Lives of the Artists, first published in Florence in 1550—fourteen years before Michelangelo’s death—even included a quatrain from Michelangelo’s poetry in his tribute to the greatest architect, painter, and sculptor of the age.

dmitri ShostakovichBorn September 25, 1906, Saint Petersburg, Russia.Died August 9, 1975, Moscow, Russia.

ComPoSed1974

FIrSt PerFormanCeSDecember 23, 1974, Leningrad, version for bass and piano

October 12, 1975, Moscow, version for bass and orchestra

These are the first CSO performances

InStrumentatIonsolo bass voice, two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, tim-pani, triangle, snare drum, slapstick, woodblock, drum, tam-tam, bells, xylophone, vibraphone, celesta, harp, piano, strings

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme42 minutes

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The earliest surviving poems by Michelangelo are mere fragments written in the first two years of the sixteenth century, at the time he was beginning to work on the David. (Michelangelo was in his mid-twenties.) From the next twenty years, we have some twenty poems, four of which Shostakovich chose for his cycle (the ones he titled Truth, Morning, Separation, and Wrath). Starting in the 1520s, the pace of Michelangelo’s poetic writing picks up—at his peak he was writing more than a dozen poems each year. The poems express personal thoughts that his work as a visual artist could not, and because of that they meant a great deal to him—he revised several of them six times or more, and in his late sixties he undertook a project of preparing 105 poems for publication. Four hundred years later, Shostakovich clearly identi-fied with the way Michelangelo used poetry to explore themes that were too intimate to dis-play in painting or sculpture. No one understood better than Shostakovich, working in the mid-twentieth-century Soviet Union, how carefully battle lines between public art and an artist’s interior life needed to be drawn.

Even in Michelangelo’s life-time, one of his poems—one Shostakovich picked, calling it Separation—was set to music (by the now nearly forgotten Veronese composer Bartolomeo Tromboncino) and published in 1518. Much closer to our time, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss, and Benjamin Britten all set

Michelangelo’s poems to music. But Shostakovich’s Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti is the largest and most ambitious. Originally conceived to honor the fifth centenary of the artist’s birth, it ended up as a highly personal testament to concerns these two men shared—love, morality, death, and immortality—and an essay on old age, human frailty, and the imperishable nature of the great-est creations of the human spirit. Shostakovich picked poems that he liked, gave them titles, and gathered them together in a cycle of eleven movements. In its original version, for bass and piano, the suite was com-pleted at the end of July 1974. “My right arm is causing me a lot of trouble. I find it very dif-ficult to write,” Shostakovich said that summer, no doubt recognizing how few compositions he would be able to complete in his remain-ing time.

Although he initially said he did not intend to orchestrate these songs—the composer Aram Khachaturian asked him about it

Portrait of Michelangelo Buonarroti by Giulio Bonasone, 1546

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the night the suite was performed for a circle of friends and colleagues at Shostakovich’s Moscow home, in January 1975—he soon did so, turning this song cycle into a great symphonic work. It is, in effect, his final symphony, and, in fact, at the very end of his life, he told his son Maxim that he considered the suite to be his sixteenth symphony. Although the orchestration is remarkably spare, even gaunt, it powerfully underlines the inherent starkness of the music; the rage of Wrath is more unsettling than ever in the orchestral version, the intimate tone of Morning more confidential, the force of Creativity more overwhelming.

For a composer whose sympho-nies had so often unleashed shat-tering barrages of orchestral sound, here Shostakovich works with great economy: every single note car-ries great weight; the color of each strand of music is shrewdly chosen. The vocal line itself, a subtle, ever-changing mixture of declamation

and flowing arioso, owes much to Mussorgsky—the death of Boris Godunov or The Songs and Dances of Death that Shostakovich loved. But it is charged throughout with a new directness and economy. The power of simplicity in music has rarely been more overwhelming. It is as if Shostakovich wanted as little as possible to stand between him and the thoughts of the great cinquecento artist.

Shostakovich loosely groups the eleven movements into larger sec-tions: a prologue (Truth), followed by a lyrical trio of songs, and then, at the heart of the piece, a triptych of powerful dramatic statements. The last movements form a more interior, deeply personal final chap-ter with one song, Immortality, as a kind of epilogue. Although Shostakovich consciously avoided calling the work a song cycle, the whole is intercut with important cyclic cross-references—the reprise of the opening music to begin Death is the most obvious example.

a Few wordS aBout IndIVIdual SongS:

Michelangelo, who admired Dante above all writers and was said to know The Divine Comedy by heart, wrote two madrigals in praise of Dante. Shostakovich sets them as a connected pair—Dante and To the Exile, a lament over Dante’s unjust exile from Florence.

As he does throughout the suite, Shostakovich draws out powerful parallels between his time and that of the poet—the political subtext of Michelangelo’s poetry becomes Shostakovich’s as well. In the Soviet Union in 1974, To the Exile could not help but raise the image of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had been put on a plane and sent into exile that February, or the forced expulsion of musicians Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya later that year.

Dante Alighieri, attributed to Giotto, Bargello Palace, Florence

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Shostakovich told the pianist Evgeny Shenderovich, who played the first performance of these songs, that as he was writing Creativity he remembered reading how Michelangelo possessed such power and precision that he could knock out the superfluous marble in a boulder with his very first blow. Shostakovich’s music is an explo-sion of hammer blows—of chisel-ing the music into shape, forcefully and with razor-sharp accuracy, in a matter of moments.

The first four lines of Night were written by the Florentine writer Giovanni Strozzi as a tribute to Michelangelo’s

celebrated sculpture Night, begun in 1524 and now housed in the Medici Chapel in San Lorenzo in Florence. The second quatrain is Michelangelo’s response.

Immortality pairs two of the forty-eight epitaphs Michelangelo wrote for Cecchino Bracci, who died in Rome in 1544 at the age of fifteen. Shostakovich begins with an innocent little piano piece he himself wrote when he was nine years old. He ends with simple, repeated chords, like a beating heart or the ticking of a clock.

Shostakovich died on August 9, 1975, before the orchestral version of this suite could be premiered.

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Texts for

ShoStakoVICh’S SuIte on VerSeS oF mIChelangelo BuonarrotI,

oP. 145aShostakovich set Michelangelo’s poems in a Russian translation by A.M. Efros, who only had access to a German edition of the poems when he made his translation. The texts printed in this week’s program book include the original Italian poems by Michelangelo, a recent English translation of those, and the Russian text that Shostakovich set to music.

Signor, se vero è alcun proverbio antico,questo è ben quel, che chi può mai non vuole.Tu hai creduto a favole e parolee premiato chi è del ver nimico.

I’ sono e fui già tuo buon servo antico;a te son dato come e’ raggi al sole,e del mie tempo non ti incresce o dole,e men ti piaccio se più m’affatico.

Già sperai ascender per la tua altezza,e ’l giusto peso e la potente spadafussi al bisogno, e non la voce d’eco.

Ma ’l cielo è quel c’ogni virtù disprezzalocarla al mondo, se vuol c’altri vadaa prender frutto d’un arbor ch’è secco.

9 (Please turn the page quietly.)

Texts for

ShoStakoVICh’S SuIte on VerSeS oF mIChelangelo BuonarrotI,

oP. 145a

truth / IStIna

My lord, if any ancient proverb is true,it’s surely this one, that one who can

never wants to.You have believed fantastic stories

and talkand rewarded one who is truth’s enemy.I am and long have been your

faithful servant,I gave myself to you like rays to the sun;

but you don’t suffer or care about my time,

and the more I exert myself, the less you like me.

Once, I hoped to rise up through your eminence,

and the just scales and the powerful sword

were what was needed, and not an echoing voice.

But heaven is the one that scorns all virtue

if it puts it in the world, and then wants us

to go and pluck fruit from a tree that’s dry.

Est istiny v rechenyakh stariny,I vot odna: kto mozhet, tot ne khochet.

Ty vnyal, Gospod’, tomu, chto lozh’ strekochet,

I boltuny toboy nagrazhdeny;Ya zh—tvoy sluga: moi trudy dany

Tebe, kak solntsu luch,—khot’ i porochit

Tvoy gnev vsyo to, chto pyl moy sdelat’ prochit,

I vse moi staranya ne nuzhny.

Ya dumal, chto vozmyot tvoyo velichye

Menya k sebe ne ekhom dlya palat,

A lezviyem suda i girey gneva;

No est’ k zemnym zaslugam bezrazlichye

Na nebesakh—i znat’ ot nikh nagrad,—

Chto ozhidat’ plodov s sukhovo dreva.

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Quanto si gode, lieta e ben contestadi fior sopra’ crin d’or d’una, grillanda,che l’altro inanzi l’uno all’altro manda,come ch’il primo sia a baciar la testa!

Contenta è tutto il giorno quella vestache serra ’l petto e poi par che si spanda,e quel c’oro filato si domandale guanci’ e ’l collo di toccar non resta.

Ma più lieto quel nastro par che goda,dorato in punta, con sì fatte tempreche preme e tocca il petto ch’egli allaccia.

E la schietta cintura che s’annodami par dir seco: qui vo’ stringer sempre.Or che farebbon dunche le mie braccia?

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mornIng / utro

How joyful is the garland on her golden locks,

so happy and well fashioned out of flowers

each one of which thrusts forward past the others

that it might be the first to kiss her head.

Throughout the day, that dress is gratified

which locks her breast and then seems to stream down;

and what they call a spun-gold threadnever ceases to touch her cheeks

and neck.But even more delighted seems

that ribbon,gilded at the tips, and made in such

a waythat it presses and touches the breast it

laces up.And her simple belt that’s tied up in

a knotseems to say to itself, “Here would I

clasp forever!”What, then, would my arms do?

Net radostney vesyolovo zanyatya:

Po zlatu kos, tsvetam napereboy

Soprikasatsa s miloy golovoy

I l’nut lobzanyem vsyudu bez izyatya!

I skol’ko naslazhdeniya dlya platya

Szhimat’ yei stan i nispadat’ volnoy.

I kak otradno setke zolotoyYeyo lanity zakluchat’ v obyatya!

Yeshcho nezhney naryadnoy lenty vyaz’,

Blestya uzornoy vyshivkoy svoyeyu,

Smykayetsa vkrug persey molodykh.

A chisty poyas, laskovo viyas’,

Kak budto shepchet: “Ne rasstanus’ s neyu . . . ”

O, skol’ko dela zdes dlya ruk moikh!

(Please turn the page quietly.)

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Dimmi di grazia, Amor, se gli occhi meiveggono ’l ver della beltà c’aspiroo s’io l’ho dentro allor che, dov’io miro,veggio scolpito el viso di costei.

Tu ’l de’ saper, po’ che tu vien con leia torm’ogni mie pace, ond’io m’adiro;né vorre’ manco un minimo sospiro,né men ardente foco chiederei.

—La beltà che tu vedi è ben da quella;ma cresce poi c’a miglior loco sale,se per gli occhi mortali all’alma corre.

Quivi si fa divina, onesta e bella,com’a sé simil vuol cosa immortale:questa e non quella agli occhi tuo precorre.—

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loVe / lYuBoV

Kindly tell me, Love, whether my eyesreally see the beauty that I long for,or if it’s just in me when,

looking around,I see that woman’s face

carved everywhere.You must know, since you come along

with herto rob me of all peace, which makes

me angry;yet I wouldn’t want to lose even the

smallest sigh,nor would I ask for a less burning fire.

“The beauty that you see does come from her,

but it grows when it rises to a better place,

if through the mortal eyes it reaches the heart.

There it is made divine and pure and beautiful,

since what’s immortal wants things to be like itself:

it’s this, not that, that first leaps to your eyes.”

—Skazhi, Lyubov’, voistinu li vzoruZhelannaya predstala krasota,Il to moya tvoryashchaya mechta

Sluchayny lik vzyala sebe v oporu?

Tebe l’ ne znat? Ved s nym po ugovoru

Ty sna menya lishila. Pust’! Usta

Leleyut kazhdy vzdokh, i zalita

Dusha ognyom, ne znayushchim otporu.

—Ty istinnuyu vidish’ krasotu,

No blesk eyo gorit, vsyo razrastayas’,

Kogda skvoz’ zvor k dushe voskhodit on;

Tam obretayet bozhyu chistotu,

Bessmertnomu tvortsu upodoblyayas’,—

Vot pochemu tvoy vzglyad zavorozhon.

(Please turn the page quietly.)

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Com’arò dunche ardiresenza vo’ ma’, mio ben, tenermi ’n vita,s’io non posso al partir chiedervi aita?Que’ singulti e que’ pianti e que’ sospiriche ’l miser core voi accompagnorno,madonna, duramente dimostrornola mia propinqua morte e’ miei martiri.Ma se ver è che per assenzia maimia fedel servitù vadia in oblio,il cor lasso con voi, che non è mio.

Qua si fa elmi di calici e spadee ’l sangue di Cristo si vend’a giumelle,e croce e spine son lance e rotelle,e pur da Cristo pazïenzia cade.

Ma non ci arrivi più ’n queste contrade,ché n’andre’ ’l sangue suo ’nsin alle stelle,poscia c’a Roma gli vendon la pelle,e ècci d’ogni ben chiuso le strade.

S’i’ ebbi ma’ voglia a perder tesauro,per ciò che qua opra da me è partita,può quel nel manto che Medusa in Mauro;

ma se alto in cielo è povertà gradita,qual fia di nostro stato il gran restauro,s’un altro segno ammorza l’altra vita?

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SeParatIon / razlu-ka

How will I ever have the nervewithout you, my beloved, to stay alive,if I dare not ask your help when

leaving you?Those sobs and those tears and

those sighsthat came to you with my

unhappy heart,my lady, testified distressingly

to my impending death and to my torments.

But if it is true that through my absencemy faithful servitude may be forgotten,I leave with you my heart, which is

not mine.wrath / gneV

Here they make helmets and swords from chalices

and by the handful sell the blood of Christ;

his cross and thorns are made into lances and shields;

yet even so Christ’s patience still rains down.

But let him come no more into these parts:

his blood would rise up as far as the stars,

since now in Rome his flesh is being sold,

and every road to virtue here is closed.If ever I wished to shed my

worldly treasures,since no work is left me here, the man

in the copecan do as Medusa did in Mauretania.But even if poverty’s welcomed up

in heaven,how can we earn the great reward of

our stateif another banner weakens that

other life?

Derznu l’, sokrovishche moyo,Sushchestvovat’ bez vas, sebe na muku,Raz glukhi vy k mol’bam

smyakhchit razluku?Unylym serdtsem bol’she nye tayu

Ni vozglasov, ni vzdokhov, ni rydaniy.

Chto vam yavit’, madonna, gnyot stradaniy

I smert’ uzh nedalyokuyu moyu;

No daby rok potom moyo sluzhenyeIzgnat’ iz vashey pamyati ne mog,—Ya ostavlyayu serdtse vam v zalog.

(Please turn the page quietly.)

Zdes’ delayut iz chash mechi i shlemy

I krov’ Khristovu prodayut na ves;

Na shchit zdes’ tyorn, na kopyakh krest izchez—

Usta zh Khristovy terpelivo nemy.

Pust’ on ne skhodit v nashi vifleyemy

Il snova bryznet krovyu do nebes,

Zatem, chto dushegubam Rim—chto les,

I miloserdye derzhim na zamke my.Mne ne grozyat roskoshestva obuzy,

Ved dlya menya davno uzh net zdes’ del;

Ya mantii strashus’, kak Mavr–Meduzy;No esli bednost’ slavoy Bog odel,

Kakiye zh nam togda gotovit uzy

Pod znamenem inym inoy udel?

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Dal ciel discesce, e col mortal suo, poiche visto ebbe l’inferno giusto e ’l pio,ritornò vivo a contemplare Dio,per dar di tutto il vero lume a noi.

Lucente stella, che co’ raggi suoife’ chiaro a torto el nido ove nacqu’io,né sare’ ’l premio tutto ’l mondo rio;tu sol, che la creasti, esser quel puoi.

Di Dante dico, che mal conosciutefur l’opre suo da quel popolo ingratoche solo a’ iusti manca di salute.

Fuss’io pur lui! c’a tal fortuna nato,per l’aspro esilio suo, co’ la virtute,dare’ del mondo il più felice stato.

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dante

He came down from heaven, and once he had seen

the just hell and the merciful one, he went

back up, with his body alive, to contemplate God,

in order to give us the true light of it all.For such a shining star, who with

his raysundeservedly brightened the nest where

I was born,the whole wicked world would not be

enough reward;only you, who created him, could ever

be that.I speak of Dante, for his deeds

were poorlyappreciated by that ungrateful peoplewho fail to welcome only

righteous men.If only I were he! To be born to such

good fortune,to have his harsh exile along with

his virtue,I would give up that happiest state in

the world.

Spustivshis’ s neba v tlennoy ploti, on

Uvidel ad, obitel’ iskuplenya,

I zhiv predstal dlya Bozhya litsezrenya,

I nam povedal vsyo, chem umudryon.Luchistaya zvezda, chim ozaryon

Siyanyem kray, mne danny dlya rozhdenya,—

Yei ne ot mira zhdat’ voznagrazhdenya,

No ot tebya, kem mir byl sotvoryon.

Ya govoryu o Dante, o Dante: ne nuzhny

Ozloblennoy tolpe yevo sozdanya,—Ved’ dlya neyo i vysshi geni mal.

Bud’ ya kak on! O, bud’ mne suzhdeny

Yevo dela i skorb’ yevo izgnany,—

Ya b luchshey doli v mire ne zhelal!

(Please turn the page quietly.)

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Quante dirne si de’ non si può dire,ché troppo agli orbi il suo splendor s’accese;biasmar si può più ’l popol che l’offese,c’al suo men pregio ogni maggior salire.

Questo discese a’ merti del fallireper l’util nostro, e poi a Dio ascese;e le porte, che ’l ciel non gli contese,la patria chiuse al suo guisto desire.

Ingrata, dico, e della suo fortunaa suo danno nutrice; ond’è ben segnoc’a’ più perfetti abonda di più guai.

Fra mille altre ragion sol ha quest’una:se par non ebbe il suo exilio indegnio,simil uom né maggior non nacque mai.

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to the exIle / IzgannIku

All that should be said of him cannot be said,

for his splendor flamed too brightly for our eyes;

it’s easier to blame the people who hurt him

than for all our greatest to rise to his least virtue.

This man descended to the just deserts of error

for our benefit, and then ascended to God;

and the gates that heaven did not block for him

his homeland shut to his righteous desire.

I call her ungrateful, and nurse of her fortune

to her own detriment, which is a clear sign

that she lavishes the most woes on the most perfect.

Among a thousand proofs this one suffices:

no exile was ever as undeserved as his,and no man equal or greater was

ever born.

Kak budto chtim, a vsyo zhe chest’ mala.

Yevo velichye vzor nash oslepilo.

Chto chern’ korit na nizkoye merilo,

Kogda pusta i nasha pokhvala!

On radi nas soshol v obitel’ zla;

Gospodne tsarstvo lik yemu yavilo;

No dver, chto dazhe nebo ne zakrylo,

Pred Dante otchizna zlobno zaperla.

Neblagodarnaya! Sebe na gore

Ty dlila muki syna svoyevo;

Tak sovershenstvu nizost’ mstit ot veka.

Odin primer iz tekh, kotorykh more!

Kak net podley izgnaniya yevo,Tak mir ne znal i vyshe cheloveka!

(Please turn the page quietly.)

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Se ’l mie rozzo martello i duri sassiforma d’uman aspetto or questo or quello,dal ministro che ’l guida, iscorge e tiello,prendendo il moto, va con gli altrui passi.

Ma quel divin che in cielo alberga e stassi,altri, e sé più, col propio andar fa bello;e se nessun martel senza martellosi può far, da quel vivo ogni altro fassi.

E perché ’l colpo è di valor più pienoquant’alza più se stesso alla fucina,sopra ’l mie questo al ciel n’è gito a volo.

Onde a me non finito verrà meno,s’or non gli dà la fabbrica divinaaiuto a farlo, c’al mondo era solo.

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CreatIVItY / tVorCheStVo

If my crude hammer shapes the hard stones

into one human appearance or another,deriving its motion from the master

who guides it,watches and holds it, it moves at

another’s pace.But that divine one, which lodges and

dwells in heaven,beautifies self and others by its

own action;and if no hammer can be made without

a hammer,by that living one every other one

is made.And since a blow becomes

more powerfulthe higher it’s raised up over the forge,that one’s flown up to heaven above

my own.So now my own will fail to

be completedunless the divine smithy, to help

make it,gives it that aid which was unique

on earth.

Kogda skalu moy zhostki molotok

V oblichiya lyudey preobrazhayet—Bez mastera, kotory napravlyayet

Yevo udar, on delu b ne pomog.

No Bozhi molot iz sebya izvlyok

Razmakh, chto miru prelest’ so-obshchayet;

Vse moloty tot molot predveshchayet,

I v nyom odnom—im vsem zhivoy urok.

Chem vyshe vzmakh ruki nad nakoval’ney,

Tem tyazheley udar: tak zanesyonI nado mnoy on k

vysyam podnebesnym;Mne glyboyu kosnet’ pervonachalnoy,

Poka kuznets gospoden’,—tol’ko on!—

Ne posobit udarom polnovesnym.

(Please turn the page quietly.)

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La Notte, che tu vedi in sì dolci attidormir, fu da un angelo scolpitain questo sasso, e perchè dorme ha vita:Destala, se nol credi, e parleratti.

—Giovanni di Carlo StrozziCaro m’è ’l sonno, e più l’esser di sasso,

mentre che ’l danno e la vergogna dura;non veder, non sentir m’è gran ventura;però non mi destar, deh, parla basso.

Di morte certo, ma non già dell’ora,la vita è breve e poco me n’avanza;diletta al senso, è non però la stanzaa l’alma, che mi prega pur ch’i’ mora.

Il mondo è cieco e ’l tristo esempro ancoravince e sommerge ogni prefetta usanza;spent’è la luce e seco ogni baldanza,trionfa il falso e ’l ver non surge fora.

Deh, quando fie, Signor, quel che s’aspettaper chi ti crede? c’ogni troppo indugiotronca la speme e l’alma fa mortale.

Che val che tanto lume altrui prometta,s’anzi vien morte, e senza alcun refugioferma per sempre in che stato altri assale?

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nIght / noCh

The Night that you see sleeping in such a

graceful attitude, was sculpted by an Angel

in this stone, and since she sleeps, she must have life;

wake her, if you don’t believe it, and she’ll speak to you.

—Giovanni di Carlo StrozziSleep is dear to me, and being of stone

is dearer,as long as injury and shame endure;not to see or hear is a great boon to me;

therefore, do not wake me—pray, speak softly.

death / Smert’

Certain of death, though not yet of its hour,

life is short and little of it is left for me;it delights my senses, but is no fit homefor my soul, which is begging me to die.The world is blind, and bad example

goes onovercoming and drowning even the best

of habits.The light is extinguished, and with it

all valor;error triumphs, and truth cannot

sally forth.Lord, when will come what is awaited

by thosewho believe in you? For every

excess delayshortens hope and puts the soul in

mortal danger.What good is your promise of great

light to all,if death attacks first, and fixes

them foreverin the state he finds them in, with

no escape?

—Vot eta Noch’, chto tak spokoino spit

Pered toboyu, angela sozdanye.

Ona iz kamnya, no v ney est dykhanye:

Lish razbudi,—ona zagovorit.

—Giovanni di Carlo Strozzi—Mne sladko spat’, a pushche—

kamnem byt’,Kogda krugom pozor i prestuplenye:Ne chuvstvovat, ne videt’—

oblyekhchenye,Umolkni zh, drug, k chemu

menya budit’?

(Please turn the page quietly.)

Uzh chuya smert’, khot’ i ne znaya sroka,

Ya vizhu: zhizn’ vsyo ubystryayet shag,No telu y-eshcho zhalko plotskikh blag,Dushe zhe smert’ zhelanyeye poroka.Mir v slepote: postydnovo uroka

Iz vlasti zla ne izvlekayet zrak,

Nadezhdy net, i vsyo obyemlet mrak,

I lozh’ tsarit, i pravda pryachet oko.

Kogda zh, Gospod’, nastupit to, chevo

Zhdut verniye tebe? Oslabevayet

V otsrochkakh vera, dushu davit gnyot;

Na chto nam svet spasenya tvoyevo,

Raz smert’ bystrey i navsegda yavlyayet

Nas v sramote, v kotoroy zastayot?

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Qui vuol mie sorte c’anzi tempo i’ dorma,né son già morto; e ben c’albergo cangi,resto in te vivo, c’or mi vedi e piangi,se l’un nell’altro amante si trasforma.

Qui son morto creduto; e per confortodel mondo vissi, e con mille alme in senodi veri amanti; adunche a venir meno,per tormen’ una sola non son morto.

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ImmortalItY / BeSSmertIYe

Here my fate wills that I should sleep too early,

but I’m not really dead; though I’ve changed homes,

I live on in you, who see and mourn me now,

since one lover is transformed into the other.

Here I am, believed dead; but I lived for the comfort

of the world, with the souls of a thousand true lovers.

Although I have been deprived of my own soul,

I still live on in the souls of all those who loved and remember me.

Zdes’ rok poslal bezvremenny mne son,

No ya ne myortv, khot’ i opushchen v zemlyu:

Ya zhiv v tebe, chim setovanyam vnemlyu,

Zatem chto v druge drug otobrazhon.

Ya slovno b myortv, no miru v uteshenye

Ya tysyachami dush zhivu v serdtsakh

Vsekh lyubyashchikh, i, znachit, ya ne prakh,

I smertnoye menya ne tronet tlenye.

English translation from The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation, James M. Saslow. Yale University Press, 1991, 1993. © 1991 by Yale University. Reprinted by permission.

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Symphony no. 5 in C minor, op. 67

This is the symphony that, along with an image of Beethoven,

looking agitated and disheveled, has come to represent greatness in music. In fact, many people know only the very opening seconds, just as they may remember vividly and accurately no more than the Mona Lisa’s smile, or the first ten words of Hamlet’s soliloquy. It’s hard to know how so few notes, so plainly strung together, could become so popular. There are certainly those who would argue that this isn’t even Beethoven’s greatest symphony, just as the Mona Lisa isn’t Leonardo’s finest painting—Beethoven himself preferred his Eroica to the Fifth Symphony. And yet, it’s hardly famous beyond its merits, for one

can’t easily think of another single composition that in its expressive range and structural power better represents what music is all about.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony has spoken forcefully and directly to many listeners—trained and untrained—over the years; we each listen and understand in our own way. We can probably find ourselves somewhere here, among the characters of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End:

Whether you are like Mrs. Munt, and tap surrepti-tiously when the tunes come—of course not so as to disturb the others; or like Helen, who can see heroes and shipwrecks

ludwig van BeethovenBorn December 16, 1770, Bonn, Germany.Died March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria.

ComPoSed1804–1808

FIrSt PerFormanCeDecember 22, 1808, Vienna, austria

FIrSt CSo PerFormanCeOctober 16, 1891, auditorium Theatre (the Orchestra’s inaugural concert). Theodore Thomas conducting

moSt reCent CSo PerFormanCeJune 3, 2010, Orchestra Hall. Bernard Haitink conducting

InStrumentatIontwo flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabas-soon, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings

aPProxImate PerFormanCe tIme36 minutes

CSo reCordIngS1959. fritz reiner conducting. rCa

1968. Seiji Ozawa conducting. rCa

1973. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London

1986. Sir Georg Solti conducting. London

a 1944 performance under Désiré Defauw is included on From the Archives, vol. 17, and a 1961 performance (for television) conducted by George Szell was released by VaI. Excerpts from the first movement conducted by James Levine were included in the soundtrack for Disney’s Fantasia 2000.

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in the music’s flood; or like Margaret, who can only see the music; or like Tibby, who is profoundly versed in counterpoint, and holds the full score open on his knee; or like their cousin, Fräulein Mosebach, who remembers all the time that Beethoven is “echt Deutsch”; or like Fräulein Mosebach’s young man, who can remember nothing but Fräulein Mosebach: in any case, the passion of your life becomes more vivid, and you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at two shillings.

That is why we still go to con-certs, and, whether we see ship-wrecks or hear dominant sevenths, we may well agree, when caught up in a captivating performance, “that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.”

For a while, this piece was somewhat overshadowed by the Ninth Symphony, which seemed to point the way to the rest of the nineteenth century and emboldened generations of composers to think differently of the symphony, or of music in general. But the Fifth has never really lost its appeal. Robert Schumann, whose musical predic-tions have often come true, wrote that “this symphony invariably wields its power over men of every age like those great phenomena of nature . . . . This symphony, too, will be heard in future centuries, nay, as long as music and the world exist.” It is surely no coincidence that Theodore Thomas, the first music

director of the Chicago Symphony, picked this symphony to conclude the Orchestra’s inaugural concert in 1891, as well as the concert given in 1904 to dedicate Orchestra Hall. “I care not from what the station in life come the thousands who sit before me,” Thomas once told a reporter. “Beethoven will teach each according to his needs.”

A familiarity earned by only a handful of pieces in any century has largely blunted much of the work’s wild power for our ears today. And, knowing the many works that couldn’t have been written without this as their example has blinded us to the novelty of Beethoven’s boldest strokes: the cross-reference between the famous opening and the fortissimo horn call in the scherzo, the way the scherzo passes directly—and dramatically—into the finale, and the memory of the scherzo that appears unexpectedly in the finale—all forging the four movements of the symphony into one unified design. The idea of a symphony tracing the journey from strife to victory is commonplace today, but Beethoven’s Fifth was an entirely new kind of symphony in his day.

There’s no way to know what the first audience thought. For one thing, that concert, given at the Theater an der Wien on December 22, 1808, was so inor-dinately long (even by nineteenth-century standards), and jammed with so much important new music, that no one could truly have taken it all in. J. F. Reichardt, who shared a box with Prince Lobkowitz, later wrote: “There we sat from 6:30

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till 10:30 in the most bitter cold, and found by experience that one might have too much even of a good thing.”

Reichardt and Lobkowitz stayed till the end, their patience fre-quently tried not by the music—to which these two brought more understanding than most—but by the performance, which was rough and unsympathetic. Surely some in the audience that night were bowled over by what they heard, though many may well have fidgeted and daydreamed, uncom-prehending, or perhaps even bored. Beethoven’s was not yet the most popular music ever written, and even as great a figure as Goethe would outlive Beethoven without coming to terms with the one composer who was clearly his equal. As late as 1830, Mendelssohn tried one last time to interest the aging poet in Beethoven’s music, enthusi-astically playing the first movement of the Fifth Symphony at the piano. “But that does not move one,” Goethe responded, “it is merely astounding, grandiose.”

Take the celebrated open-ing, which Beethoven once, in a moment he surely regretted, likened to Fate knocking at the door. It is bold and simple, and like many of the mottoes of our civilization, susceptible to all manner of popular treatments, none of which can diminish the power of the original. Beethoven writes eight notes, four plus four—the first ta-ta-ta-TUM falling from G down to E-flat, the second from F to D. For all the force of those hammer strokes, we may be surprised that only strings

and clarinets play them. Hearing those eight notes and no more, we can’t yet say for certain whether this is E-flat major or C minor. As soon as Beethoven continues, we hear that urgent knocking as part of a grim and driven music in C minor. But when the exposition is repeated, and we start over from the top with E-flat major chords still ringing in our ears, those same ta-ta-ta-TUM patterns sound like they belong to E-flat major. That ambiguity and tension are at the heart of this furious music—just as the struggle to break from C minor, where this movement settles, into the bril-liance of C major—and will carry us to the end of the symphony.

If one understands and remem-bers those four measures, much of what happens during the next thirty-odd minutes will seem both familiar and logical. We can hear Fate knocking at the door of nearly every measure in the first move-ment. The forceful horn call that introduces the second theme, for example, mimics both the rhythm and the shape of the symphony’s opening. (We also can notice the similarity to the beginning of the Fourth Piano Concerto—and, in fact, ideas for both works can be found in the same sketchbooks, those rich hunting grounds where brilliance often emerges in flashes from a disarray matched by the notorious condition of the com-poser’s lodgings.)

Although the first movement is launched with the energy and urgency of those first notes, its progress is stalled periodically by echoes of the two long-held notes

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in the first bars; in the recapitula-tion a tiny, but enormously expres-sive oboe cadenza serves the same purpose. The extensive coda is particularly satisfying not because it effectively concludes a dramatic and powerful movement, but because it uncovers still new depths of drama and power at a point when that seems unthinkable.

The Andante con moto is a distant relative of the theme and variations that often turn up as slow movements in classical symphonies. But unlike the conventional type, it presents two different themes, varies them separately, and then trails off into a free improvisation that covers a wide range of thoughts, each springing almost spontane-ously from the last. The sequence of events is so unpredictable, and the meditative tone so seductive, that, in the least assertive movement of the symphony, Beethoven commands our attention to the final sentence.

Beethoven was the first to notice his scherzo’s resemblance to the opening of the finale of Mozart’s great G minor symphony—he even wrote out Mozart’s first measures on a page of sketches for this music—but while the effect there is decisive and triumphant, here it is clouded with half-uttered questions. Beethoven begins with furtive music, inching forward in the low strings, then stumbling on the horns, who let loose with their own rendition of Fate at the door. At some point, when Beethoven realized that the scherzo was part of a bigger scheme, he decided to leave it unfinished and move directly, through one of the most

famous passages in music—slowly building in tension and drama, over the ominous, quiet pounding of the timpani—to an explosion of brilliant C major. Composers have struggled ever since to match the effect, not just of binding move-ments together—that much has been successfully copied—but of emerging so dramatically from darkness to light. The sketchbooks tell us that these fifty measures cost Beethoven considerable effort, and, most surprisingly, that they weren’t even part of the original plan. Berlioz thought this transition so stunning that it would be impos-sible to surpass it in what follows. Beethoven, perfectly understanding the challenge—and also that of sus-taining the victory of C major once it has been achieved—adds trom-bones (used in symphonic music for the first time), the piccolo, and the contrabassoon to the first burst of C major and moves forward towards his final stroke of genius.

That moment comes amidst gen-eral rejoicing, when the ghost of the scherzo quietly appears, at once dis-rupting C major with unexpected memories of C minor and leaving everyone temporarily hushed and shaken. Beethoven quickly restores order, and the music begins again as if nothing has happened. But Beethoven still finds it necessary to end with fifty-four measures of the purest C major to remind us of the conquest, not the struggle.

Phillip Huscher is the program annota-tor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. ©

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