Sibelius - Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Program One Hundred Twenty-Second Season

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Music Director

Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant

Global Sponsor of the CSO

Thursday, February 28, 2013, at 8:00 Friday, March 1, 2013, at 1:30 Saturday, March 2, 2013, at 8:00

Esa-Pekka Salonen Conductor Yo-Yo Ma Cello Sibelius Pohjola’s Daughter, Op. 49 Sibelius Symphony No. 7, Op. 105

Adagio—Vivacissimo—Adagio—Allegro moderato—Adagio Intermission

Lutosławski Cello Concerto

(in four movements, played without pause) Yo-Yo Ma Performed in honor of the centenary of Lutosławski’s birth

Tchaikovsky Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32

The CSO thanks John H. Hart and Carol Prins for their generous support of these performances. This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Comments by Daniel GerardJaffé  McBurney    Phillip   Phillip Huscher  Huscher   Steven Stucky

Jean Sibelius

Born December 8, 1865, Tavastehus, Finland. Died September 20, 1957, Järvenpää, Finland.

Pohjola’s Daughter, Op. 49

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ibelius suffered throughout his career from a profound inferiority complex, which appears to have originated from his student years in Berlin. As a budding composer in his native Finland, he had been considered a figure of national consequence—a large fish in a then relatively provincial backwater that was Finland’s capital, Helsinki. On arriving in Berlin, Sibelius suffered something of a culture shock when he discovered for the first time Mozart, Wagner, and, above all, Richard Strauss, who—although just a year older than Sibelius—was already making a great impression on the musical world with such works as Don Juan. Sibelius compensated for his feelings of

Composed 1905–1906 First performance December 29, 1906, Saint Petersburg. The composer conducting First CSO performance March 23, 1939, Orchestra Hall. Frederick Stock conducting

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inadequacy by living in grand style, booking boxes at the opera and indulging in his taste for cigars and, above all, alcohol. Yet, indirectly, this lifestyle drove him to gain invaluable experience. Now needing extra income to support his extravagant lifestyle, Sibelius took up the violin again, having previously abandoned the instrument when he realized he would never secure the virtuoso career he desired. While playing in the conservatory orchestra, he gained valuable experience in observing the technique and coloristic potential of other orchestral instruments. Before long, Sibelius was making an impact with such orchestral works as the tone poem

Most recent CSO performance February 6, 1965 (Popular Concert), Orchestra Hall. Morton Gould conducting Instrumentation two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets and two cornets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, harp, strings

Approximate performance time 12 minutes

En saga, the Karelia Suite, the Lemminkäinen Suite (including the haunting Swan of Tuonela), Finlandia, and perhaps above all his highly popular Valse triste. Although Valse triste was played in concerts, cafés, and restaurants across Europe, Sibelius earned nothing from its success; his publisher, having cannily ensured the composer was only to be paid royalties for performances of his original version, made several alternative arrangements from which it alone profited. What may have been galling for another composer was a near-disaster for Sibelius and his young family, since Sibelius, always hopeless at managing money, often abandoned his wife and children for drunken evenings with artists and friends, so depriving his children even of funds needed for their schooling. So in 1905, with his wife Aino’s blessing, Sibelius took the highly practical step of approaching another publisher to secure a more favorable contract. Sibelius traveled to Berlin and signed a contract with the firm Robert Lienau. The first work Sibelius gave to Lienau was the final revised version of that great masterpiece, the Violin Concerto; then the following year came one of Sibelius’s most colorful and successful tone poems, Pohjola’s Daughter.

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hile in Berlin, Sibelius heard performances of several important works, including Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, Debussy’s Nocturnes, and Richard Strauss’s tone poems Ein Heldenleben and Sinfonia domestica.

Strauss’s works in particular impressed Sibelius, and indeed a number of commentators have suggested that Strauss’s tone poem influenced Pohjola’s Daughter—or at the very least, made Sibelius anxious not to be outshone by Strauss’s orchestral mastery. Certainly Sibelius wrote his tone poem for a larger than usual orchestra, adding piccolo, bass clarinet, and contrabassoon to his woodwind contingent, and a pair of B-flat trumpets to his brass section. However, it took some time for Pohjola’s Daughter to take its final form. The earliest musical sketches which made their way into that work date from as early as 1901, when Sibelius was working on his Second Symphony. It seems that Sibelius originally planned to write a symphony from this material; but then, late in January 1905, he wrote to Aino: “I’m no longer writing a symphony, rather a symphonic fantasy,” claiming “this is my genre!! Here I can move freely without feeling the weight of tradition.” The apparent symphonic genesis of this tone poem would explain its symphonic-style contrapuntal density, and, indeed, the key scheme which in several respects anticipates that of his Fourth Symphony, most strikingly the tritonic modulation from B-flat to E major which signals the first appearance of the title character.

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ibelius now endeavored to write a work drawing from Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala, from which several of his earlier program works had drawn inspiration. 3

Originally, Sibelius intended to portray Luonnotar, daughter of the heavens and mother of the waters. However, with the work all but completed, Sibelius suddenly changed its subject to her son, the wandering minstrel Väinämöinen. In doing this, he revived a story from an opera project he had abandoned some ten years earlier, The Building of the Boat, in which Väinämöinen, eager to win the love of Kuutar, daughter of the moon, attempts to build a boat out of splinters through the magical power of song. The tone poem opens in primeval gloom, colored particularly by the bass clarinet and contrabassoon, in which one can imagine Väinämöinen lugubriously ruminating as he drives his sleigh from the Northland on his way home. The music builds momentum, until suddenly a dramatic modulation, from B-flat to E major, introduces a very different sound world— tinkling harp, fleeting birdlike woodwind sounds, string tremolos, and soft timpani rumbles (might this be Sibelius’s response to having heard Debussy’s Nocturnes?). So appears Pohjola’s daughter, seated on a rainbow at her spinning wheel.

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Väinämöinen falls in love with her and tries to persuade to join him on his sleigh. She puts him off, setting several impossible tasks for him to fulfill before he may win her, including tying an egg into invisible knots and building a boat from fragments of her spindle. Eventually admitting defeat, Väinämöinen sets off on his lonely way. On submitting the new tone poem to his German publisher, Sibelius provided a program in prose which Lienau rewrote in verse and published with the score. Sibelius had wanted to name the work Väinämöinen, but his publisher, fearing the title would be meaningless to a non-Finnish public and wishing to appeal to a wider audience, proposed “Pohjola’s Daughter.” While one understands the reasoning of Sibelius’s publisher, one may regret that by focusing on the moon’s daughter, it is easy to overlook the essential drift of the narrative, which is Väinämöinen’s struggles to fulfill the tasks she sets: it is a work about the struggle and frustrations of creation, a matter Sibelius was all too familiar with.  —Daniel Jaffé

Jean Sibelius

Symphony No. 7, Op. 105

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n the early 1920s, Sibelius’s career suddenly came to a close. Even though he would live another thirty-some years, he withdrew from the music scene where he once played a major role, preferring the seclusion of his villa in Järvenpää. His decision wasn’t inexplicable—it was, in fact, even predictable as he ventured further and further from the cutting-edge territory of Schoenberg and Stravinsky into his own dark and deeply personal world of sound. His final orchestral works, this Seventh Symphony and the single tone poem, Tapiola, that followed it, carried Sibelius to the end of the line; we can scarcely imagine what music would logically have followed scores of such finality and stubborn originality. “Let no one imagine that composing is easier for an old composer if he takes his art seriously,” Sibelius

Composed sketched: 1914–15 composed: 1923–24 First performance March 24, 1924, Stockholm, Sweden. The composer conducting

once said. “Greater sureness makes one scorn solutions that come too easily.” The Seventh Symphony is an astonishing testament to his impatience with convention and his sheer determination to find new ways of saying things that mattered. By 1914, when Sibelius began to sketch this symphony, along with the Fifth and Sixth, his standards were already exceptionally high. And so all three of those symphonies are unlike any others ever written, and the seventh and last of them to be finished is so unclassifiable by the traditional names and forms that, at the premiere, Sibelius called it a symphonic fantasy, only later admitting that it really belonged with the numbered symphonies. Actually, it’s the logical culmination of the series—the pure distillation of everything Sibelius knew about symphonic form and thought.

First CSO performance January 28, 1936, Orchestra Hall. Sir Hamilton Harty conducting Most recent CSO performance December 21, 2002, Orchestra Hall. Mikko Franck conducting

Instrumentation two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, timpani, strings Approximate performance time 22 minutes

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or all its individuality, the Seventh Symphony owes its conception to the traditional centuries-old search for symphonic unity. Like earlier, influential works by Schubert, Liszt, Strauss, and Schoenberg, it is a multimovement form cast in one continuous movement. Sibelius makes passing reference to the familiar contents of the standard symphony—we hear stretches of a slow movement, part of a scherzo. It’s as if the conventional symphony has been taken apart and can’t be reassembled. In its place, Sibelius writes music that continually renews itself, as it moves with great subtlety through various tempos (there are four big tempo changes and a number of lesser ones) and switches imperceptibly from each idea to the next, from one key to another. The Seventh Symphony is a work of epic majesty, stripped of all dross. The material is stern and concentrated; we sense just how desperate Sibelius was to write not a single note too many. The opening, for example, is built of the simplest of materials—the notes of the C major scale. But the way it begins (on A, following a quiet tap on the timpani) and leads to an ominous A-flat minor chord is full of mystery and rich in implications. As the music unfolds, it’s always unpredictable and, at the same time, utterly logical. Yet nothing about this symphony is haphazard; it’s governed by the certainty that each move is the right one, even though, at every turn, Sibelius shows little concern for the conventional ideas of keys and subjects. A solo trombone melody, rising

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majestically from a great polyphonic web of sound near the beginning, carries great weight. It returns twice in the symphony, each time more insistent, and the last time leading to a massive, wrenching climax—like an ache in the very heart of the symphony. From there the music slowly unravels, although the final gesture—a long, seemingly endless crescendo, reaching urgently up to C major—is like the last, life-affirming words of a dying man. It brings an extraordinary sense of closure to this restless, ever-questing music. This would seem to be the climax of his life’s work, yet Sibelius apparently began an eighth symphony sometime late in 1926 and worked on it until at least 1933 or 1934. Portions of the score were delivered to a copyist in 1933, but subsequently retrieved. The composer apparently destroyed the symphony in the 1940s. All that remains are three measures of sketches, labeled “Sinfonia 8 commincio,” that provide little sense of the symphony’s beginning, let alone its destination. Even though Sibelius had no new works to offer the public, his popularity continued to grow (in a 1935 poll, he was the favorite composer of the New York Philharmonic Society’s broadcast audience). He remained a beloved—even revered—figure, and on his ninetieth birthday in 1955, he received 1,200 telegrams; tapes from Toscanini; and cigars from Churchill. He died in 1957, nearly thirty years after the publication of his last completed work.  —Phillip Huscher

Witold Lutosławski

Born January 25, 1913, Warsaw, Poland Died February 7, 1994, Warsaw, Poland.

Cello Concerto

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itold Lutosławski is widely considered Poland’s greatest composer since Chopin. Born to an influential family of intellectuals and politicians in Warsaw in 1913, he studied violin and piano as a boy and began composing at the age of nine. He took mathematics at Warsaw University, but soon switched full time to music, studying composition under Witold Maliszewski, himself a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, and graduating from the Warsaw Conservatory in both piano (1936) and composition (1937). Lutosławski’s music can be thought of as falling into three style periods. Of the early works to about 1956, often summarized under the inadequate label “neoclassic,” the Paganini Variations for two pianos, the Concerto for Orchestra, and Musique funèbre are best known. Composed 1969–70 First performance October 14, 1970; London, England Only previous CSO performances March 28, 29, 30, April 2, 2002, Orchestra Hall. Lynn Harrell, cello; with William Eddins conducting

Through much of this early period, he pursued two independent styles—one for functional music, often folk-inspired (Concerto for Orchestra), the other experimental and driven by an insatiable urge to perfect a personal, independent, modernist musical language (First Symphony, Overture for Strings, Musique funèbre). The turbulent events shaping Polish life in the first half of the century affected the composer’s life and music again and again. He was taken prisoner by the German army early in the Second World War, later led a precarious existence in occupied Warsaw, and after the war was subjected to official censure by the Stalinist government in Poland for his modernist tendencies, an action that drove his experimental works underground. Lutosławski’s middle period, 1956 to 1979, likewise corresponds

Instrumentation three flutes and three piccolos, three oboes, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, strings

Approximate performance time 23 minutes

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to a chapter in his country’s history, from the partial easing of political and artistic repression in the fifties to the unrest that spawned the Solidarity movement twenty years later. The works from these years typically feature a limited use of chance techniques to create elaborately colorful rhythms combined with rich harmonies based chiefly on twelve-note chords. In these works texture, instrumentation, and timbre often assume leading roles. After about 1979, however, Lutosławski adopted still another approach, now stressing thinner, simpler textures and harmonies, and lucid, even neoclassic melodic and rhythmic lines—elements that in turn create obvious connections with his early works. Among the best-known compositions of the late period are the monumental Third Symphony (commissioned by the Chicago Symphony and premiered here under Sir Georg Solti in 1983), the great violin works Partita (1984, for Pinchas Zukerman) and Chain 2 (1985, for Anne-Sophie Mutter, for whom Lutosławski was also writing an unfinished concerto at the time of his death), the Piano Concerto (1988, for Krystian Zimerman), and the Fourth Symphony (1992, for the Los Angeles Philharmonic). It is already clear that a number of Lutosławski’s pieces, from each of his three style periods, have achieved that rare distinction for a late-twentieth-century composer: a secure place in the repertory. These would surely include Musique funèbre, Dance Preludes, the Concerto for Orchestra, the String Quartet, and the Third 8

Symphony. The Piano Concerto and Fourth Symphony are showing signs of staying power, too. And—with such exponents as Mstislav Rostropovich, Yo-Yo Ma, Natalia Gutman, Heinrich Schiff, and Lynn Harrell—the Cello Concerto has long been a staple of the cello repertory.

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he idea of a cello concerto was planted by Rostropovich himself in the early 1960s, while the opportunity to realize it came in 1968 when a commission arrived from Royal Philharmonic Society in London, supported by funds from the Gulbenkian Foundation. Work on the score occupied all of 1969 and the first part of 1970. All the hallmarks of the middleperiod style are at their peak in the concerto: the lively rhythmic textures, the masterly orchestral colors, the rich and complex harmonies, the deep urge for humane communication, and the flair for high drama. Indeed, it is “drama” that comes to mind in the Cello Concerto, driven in no small part by the outsize personality of its first protagonist. Lutosławski himself was always on guard against interpreting his works according to external programs; both by personal temperament and by philosophy he was an old-school defender of the notion of “absolute” music, in which all the meaning is embodied in the purely musical relationships. Yet in this work, extramusical associations are frankly unavoidable. The composer himself sent the solo part to Rostropovich page by page as the work progressed, with explanations

couched largely in terms of a scenario in which the solo cello and orchestra confront each other as adversaries. This concept appealed strongly to the cellist, and he developed a deep identification with the dramatic persona represented in the solo part. (Even so, Rostropovich’s wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, is surely going too far when she refers to the work as “the story of a twentieth-century Don Quixote.”) The first performance was given by Rostropovich and the Bournemouth Symphony in London on October 14, 1970. Rostropovich was scheduled to repeat the work in Moscow in May 1971 and in Warsaw in September 1971, but outside events soon lent additional drama: in punishment for his defiant letter to Soviet authorities protesting the vilification of writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and recalling similar attacks on Shostakovich and Pasternak, Rostropovich was fired from his teaching post at the Moscow Conservatory and forbidden to travel, and the Moscow concert was canceled. Even when the Russian premiere finally took place in December 1972, greeted by a massive ovation in the concert hall, no mention of the concert was permitted in the Soviet press.

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utosławski’s approach to the concerto genre was not to revive its traditional nineteenth-century rhetorical or formal patterns, but to reformulate its essential principles in an original way. Thus, although the solo part presents formidable technical challenges, it has no

empty virtuosity for its own sake. There is no cadenza. The music runs without pause for about twenty-four minutes, but it falls into four clearly defined movements: an introductory monologue for the soloist; a series of dialogues between the cellist and the orchestra; a slow movement; and finally the “main event,” an extended finale. While (opening monologue aside) these movements reflect the usual fast-slow-fast pattern of older concertos, their functions have been drastically altered to suit Lutosławski’s rather different needs. The introduction finds the cellist, as if an actor alone in an empty theater, musing absentmindedly to himself, trying on now one character, now another. Finally he is interrupted by the brusque intrusion of trumpets playing what the composer called an “irascible” phrase. This very first utterance from the ranks of the orchestra serves immediate notice of the hostile, disruptive role the orchestra will assume—a role that will be fully developed later, in the dramatic confrontations of the finale. Though the cellist attempts to continue his soliloquy, the trumpets intrude again and again, erupting finally in an extended statement. Now the cellist tries a different tack. Having failed to sustain his monologue, he tries to engage the orchestra in dialogue. Each of the four episodes that comprise this second movement unfolds in the same way: the cellist issues a kind of invitation in isolated pizzicato notes, and a colloquy ensues between soloist and small groups of instruments, at first halting but 9

gradually becoming more fluent. Throughout these exchanges, the cellist continues to explore a kaleidoscopic range of manners, by turns gentle, brilliant, playful, pathetic, lyrical, comic. The brasses, excluded from these dialogues, continue to play the disruptive outside force, breaking in fortissimo to cut each episode short before it has fully developed. The last such intrusion, marking the end of the second movement, is an extended and virulent one like that which ended the introduction. In the slow, expressive third movement, the orchestral strings join with the cellist in an eloquent cantilena of a type that Charles Bodman Rae has aptly called “the dolente [sorrowful] melody,” recognizable by its “sobbing” grace-note figures and its almost folk-song–like adherence to a few simple melodic intervals. (The form of this melody in the Cello Concerto became a prototype for similar melodies in a number of later works, including the Third Symphony.) In form, the slow movement is like a da capo aria: cantilena, contrasting middle section, return of the cantilena.

The final string unison accelerates, becomes urgent, seems to bode a climax—but again is ruthlessly cut short, this time by the entire brass section, and the finale, in which the real action of the concerto will transpire, is rudely underway. Now the other orchestral groups join in a series of attacks against the struggling soloist. Eventually the soloist mounts a furious countercharge, leading to a series of skirmishes in which smaller groups of instruments seem to taunt him. The orchestra, apparently victorious, reaches a climax, delivering eleven ferocious blows; vanquished, the cellist can only whimper in reply. Before the premiere, Rostropovich confessed to Lutosławski that he always wept during this passage. “It is my death,” he said. “But Slava,” replied the composer, “you will triumph in the end!” So he shall. For in the short coda the soloist rises, indomitable, ascending brilliantly from the bottom of his instrument to its very top, proclaiming with his final, insistent cries a transcendent message: the individual will to survive. 

Learn more about Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto

—Steven Stucky

During intermission, patrons are invited to view a short film about Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto narrated by Esa-Pekka Salonen and featuring original film footage of the composer. Monitors are located in the Main Floor inner lobby, Grainger Ballroom, the 5th floor lobby, 6th floor lobby, the Terrace inner lobby, and in the Rotunda.

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Piotr Tchaikovsky

Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk, Russia. Died November 6, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32

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n 1876, Tchaikovsky was invited by the critic Herman Laroche to compose an opera based on the Francesca da Rimini episode in Dante’s Inferno. Tchaikovsky expressed interest until he realized the librettist, Konstantin Zvantsov, expected him to compose a Wagner–style music drama. Having attended the first performance of Wagner’s Ring cycle at Bayreuth between July 31 and August 5, Tchaikovsky expressed strong reservations about Wagner as an opera composer; yet he greatly admired Wagner’s handling of the orchestra, and several echoes of the German composer’s style may be heard in Tchaikovsky’s symphonic music. It seems likely, then, that Tchaikovsky did not reject Composed 1876 First performance March 9, 1877, Moscow First CSO performance November 6, 1896, Auditorium Theatre. Theodore Thomas conducting

the project altogether, but rather transformed it into the tone poem we know today. Prompted by his brother Modest’s suggestion that Francesca da Rimini would make a good subject for a tone poem, he certainly was inspired by rereading Dante’s Inferno in early August that year, and also perhaps by the opera libretto he had originally been sent. One may also hear a strong influence from Liszt, particularly in the tone poem’s baleful opening— powerfully scored for brass, bassoon, and tam-tam—portraying the gates of hell through which Dante and his guide, Virgil, pass. In his poem, Dante encounters the hapless Francesca, daughter of Guido I da Polenta, and her lover Paolo, who are together caught up in a

Most recent CSO performances November 11, 1996, Orchestra Hall (special concert). Christoph Eschenbach conducting August 10, 2002, Ravinia Festival. Christoph Eschenbach conducting

Approximate performance time 24 minutes CSO recording 1981. Daniel Barenboim conducting. Deutsche Grammophon

Instrumentation three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets and two cornets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings

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whirlwind of souls. Francesca tells Dante the reason for their eternal punishment is that she was actually betrothed to Paolo’s deformed brother, but found herself falling in love with Paolo, both of them being slaughtered by her husband after he discovered them kissing. Tchaikovsky had heard Liszt’s Dante Symphony performed over a year earlier, and, when reviewing that work, he had praised Liszt’s depiction of the underworld for showing “much imagination,” but criticized the Hungarian’s portrayal of the two lovers as being too generic—“too similar to many other such episodes in Liszt’s works.” Clearly, Tchaikovsky closely identified with Francesca and her forbidden love, his sympathy for her and Paolo’s predicament being fully evident in the tender central section of his tone poem. Although several Tchaikovsky scholars have argued that Tchaikovsky had an unproblematic acceptance of his own homosexuality, his surviving correspondence to close friends and relations—particularly to his brother Modest—reveal his alltoo-keen awareness of the stigma attached to his sexual orientation. Homosexuality was not only taboo in Tchaikovsky’s Russia— condemned by the Orthodox church—but was also regarded throughout Europe as a ‘perversion’: indeed, the medical profession had no accepted, nonpejorative term for same-sex attraction until the neutral term “homosexual’ was coined at the turn of the twentieth century. Like Francesca and Paolo, Tchaikovsky’s love was forbidden, 12

or certainly not to be spoken of in public (his disastrous attempt at heterosexual marriage in 1877 only succeeded in making his sexual orientation an “open secret”). Therefore, it is no surprise that Tchaikovsky responded so strongly to Dante’s depiction of the doomed lovers, condemned by their adulterous affair, yet so sympathetically drawn in Dante’s poem. Tchaikovsky started composing the tone poem in October 1876 and completed the work in three weeks. Eager to hear the work as soon as he could, he pressed Saint Petersburg’s leading conductor, Eduard Nápravnik, to perform the work the next season. However, there was not enough time between his completion of the tone poem’s orchestration and the projected performance that December, so the premiere was finally held in Moscow, conducted by Tchaikovsky’s conservatory colleague Nikolai Rubinstein, on March 9, 1877. It was warmly received by both public and press, Laroche devoting a long article to the work in which he hailed Francesca da Rimini as Tchaikovsky’s first unquestioned triumph in program music (the Fantasy Overture, Romeo and Juliet, had yet to reach its final form). It remained one of Tchaikovsky’s favorite works, and he himself conducted it no less than six times in his rare appearances on the podium, including on the occasion of receiving an honorary doctorate from Cambridge in the final year of his life. Although the score is often published with the relevant text from Canto V of Dante’s Inferno,

Dante, accompanying Virgil’s shade, enters the second circle of hell’s abyss. The air is filled with groans, howls, and cries of despair. Amid the sepulchral darkness, a storm bursts forth and rages. The hellish whirlwind tears along inexhaustible, carrying in its wild swirl the souls of people whose reason was obscured in life by love’s passion. Out of the countless multitudes of whirling human specters, Dante’s attention is especially drawn to the beautiful ghosts of Francesca and Paolo, tossed about in each other’s embrace. Shaken by the vision of the young spirits, which torments his soul, Dante summons them and asks them for what sin they have been subjected to such a terrible punishment. Francesca’s shade [clarinet solo accompanied by pizzicato strings], flowing with tears, tells her sad story. She loved Paolo, but was married against her will to her beloved’s hateful brother, the hunchbacked, one-eyed, vengeful Rimini. Her forced marriage could not banish Francesca’s tender passion for Paolo. Once, they were reading the tale of Lancelot [english horn over pulsating strings, punctuated with harp flourishes]. “We were alone,” Francesca relates, “and we read,

fearing nothing. Often we grew pale and our embarrassed glances met. But one instant destroyed us both [impassioned strings, forte]. When, at last, happy Lancelot takes his first lover’s kiss, he, from whom nothing will separate me, lingering kissed my trembling mouth, and the book, having first revealed to us the secret of love, fall out of our hands!” At this moment, Francesca’s spouse had unexpectedly entered [horn fanfares] and stabbed her and Paolo. And having told this, Francesca, in the embrace of her Paolo, is again carried off by the ceaseless and wildly disruptive whirlwind. Struck by eternal pity, Dante grows faint, loses consciousness, and falls, as if dead.  —Daniel Jaffé

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. Steven Stucky is a Pulitzer Prize– winning composer and author of Lutosławski and His Music. For the 2013 Lutosławski centenary, he curates the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Woven Words Festival in London.

© 2013 Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Tchaikovsky wrote his own synopsis at the head of his autograph fair copy:

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