BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 13 in E-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 1 (Quasi una fantasia)
Andante—Allegro— Allegro molto e vivace— Adagio con espressione— Allegro vivace—Adagio
CORIGLIANO Fantasia on an Ostinato
BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 2 (Moonlight)
Adagio sostenuto— Allegretto— Presto agitato
INTERMISSION
SCHUMANN Arabeske in C Major, Op. 18
SCHUMANN Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17
To be performed always fantastically and passionately— In the style of a legend Moderato tempo: Always energetic Slow and solemn: Keep gentle throughout
This performance is generously sponsored by Martha C. Nussbaum. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Symphony Center Presents thank
Martha C. Nussbaum
for generously sponsoring this performance.
COMMENTS by Richard E. Rodda
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 16, 1770; Bonn, Germany
Died March 26, 1827; Vienna, Austria
Sonata No. 13 in E-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 1 (Quasi una fantasia)
The period of the two op. 27 sonatas was an important time in Beethoven’s personal and artistic development. He had achieved a success good enough to write to his old friend Franz Wegeler in Bonn, “My compositions bring me in a good deal, and may I say that I am offered more commissions than it is possible for me to carry out. People no longer come to an arrangement with me. I state my price, and they pay.” At the time of this gratifying recognition of his talent, however, the first signs of his fateful deafness appeared, and he began the titanic struggle that became one of the gravitational poles of his life. Within two years, driven from the social contact on which he had flourished by the fear of discovery of his malady, he penned the Heiligenstadt Testament, his cri de coeur against this wicked trick of the gods. These sonatas stand on the brink of that great crisis in Beethoven’s life.
In noting the experimental nature of the form of the op. 27 sonatas (the famous Moonlight Sonata is op. 27, no. 2), Beethoven specified that they were written “in the manner of a fantasy” (quasi una fantasia). The model for the classical instrumental sonata comprised three independent movements: a fast movement in sonata form, an adagio or andante usually arranged as a set of variations or a three-part structure, and a closing rondo in galloping meter. In the op. 27 sonatas, Beethoven altered the traditional fast–slow–fast sequence in favor of an innovative organization that shifts the expressive weight from the beginning to the end of the work, and he made the cumulative effect evident by instructing that the movements be played without pause. The op. 27 sonatas are among the earliest manifestations of Beethoven’s soaring heroic manner that was to change forever the course of Western music.
The E-flat sonata, op. 27, no. 1, opens with an episode of childlike simplicity in moderate tempo that some later musicians (notably Hans von Bülow) thought unworthy of Beethoven; the eminent English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey
this page: Ludwig van Beethoven, oil portrait of the composer as a young man painted by Carl Traugott Riedel (1769–1832), 1801 | next page: John Corigliano, portrait by J. Henry Fair (born 1959)
COMMENTS noted that the bass motif here moves “like a kitten in pursuit of its tail.” Beethoven knew very well what he was about, however, since the deliberate shifting of emotional and formal weight from the beginning to the end of the sonata requires just such a low level of tension as the platform on which to build the successive movements. (The slow, dreamy music that begins the Moonlight Sonata accomplishes the same formal purpose in that work.) A sudden allegro outburst erupts in the middle of the movement, but the
JOHN CORIGLIANO
Born February 16, 1938; New York City
Fantasia on an Ostinato
John Corigliano, one of today’s most prominent and frequently performed American composers, was raised in a family rich in musical talent—his father, John, Sr., was for many years the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, and his mother was an accomplished pianist and teacher. From 1955 to 1960, Corigliano studied at Columbia University with Otto Luening and at the Manhattan School of Music with Vittorio Giannini. After graduating with honors from Columbia, Corigliano worked for three years as
calm of the opening soon returns. The second movement, which follows almost without pause, is an attenuated C minor scherzo whose haunted mood presages that of the scherzo of the Fifth Symphony. An abbreviated slow movement (Adagio con espressione) of great stillness and introspection leads by means of sweeping cadenza-like figures to the brilliant finale, whose vibrant impetuosity is interrupted on the sonata’s penultimate page by a recall of the quiet music of the Adagio before the closing dash to the end.
a programmer and writer for the New York radio station WQXR; from 1961 to 1963, he was music director of station WBAI, also in New York. He served as composer-in-residence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1987 to 1990, taught at the Juilliard School, and in 2020 retired from Lehman College, City University of New York, which granted him the title Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music and established a composition scholarship in his name.
Corigliano’s large and varied creative output—the acclaimed opera The Ghosts of Versailles (commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera); the First Symphony (jointly commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Meet-the-Composer Orchestra
Residencies Program); concertos for oboe, clarinet, flute, guitar, and piano; orchestral music; vocal and choral compositions with and without instrumental accompaniment; piano and chamber pieces; film scores—has gained wide acclaim in performances and recordings and has been recognized with distinguished honors, such as the Pulitzer Prize, Grawemeyer Award, five Grammy awards, the Horblit Prize, and an Academy Award (for The Red Violin). In 1992 Musical America named John Corigliano as that publication’s first Composer of the Year. Among Corigliano’s recent compositions is The Lord of Cries with a libretto by composer and writer Mark Adamo, premiered by the Santa Fe Opera in 2021. The work explores the “intriguing intersections between two classics of Western literature—The Bacchae by Euripides and Dracula by Bram Stoker—to warn of the monster within us, not around us.”
Corigliano’s Fantasia on an Ostinato was composed as a test piece for the Seventh Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.
John Corigliano on Fantasia on an Ostinato
Iconstructed the work as a giant arch, with the beginning and end precisely notated but with a series of interlocking repeated patterns forming the large
central section: the performer decides the number and, to a certain extent, the character of these repetitions. In other words, the shape of the piece is the performer’s to build. These repeated patterns comprise my only experiment in minimalist technique. Interestingly, the duration of the fantasia varied from seven minutes to over twenty in the Cliburn performances!
While mulling this piece, I remembered some of minimalism’s forebears— Pachelbel’s Canon, Ravel’s Boléro, and the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7, in which a relentlessly repeating ostinato figure [the Italian word for obstinate] continues unvaried (except for a long crescendo and added secondary voices) for nearly five minutes: unusual in Beethoven, who constantly varied his materials.
The first half of my Fantasia on an Ostinato develops the obsessive rhythm of the Beethoven and the simple harmonies implicit in the first part of his melody. Its second part launches into those interlocking repetitions and reworks the strange major–minor descending chords of the latter part of the Beethoven into a chain of harmonies over which the performer-repeated patterns grow continually more ornate. This climaxes in a return of the original rhythm and, finally, the reappearance of the theme itself.
Beethoven fell in love many times but never married. The source of his infatuation in 1801, when he was thirty and still in hope of finding a wife, was Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, who was thirteen years his junior, rather spoiled, and reportedly something of a vixen. She seems to have been flattered by the attentions of the famous musician but probably never seriously considered his intimations of marriage; her social station would have made wedlock difficult with a commoner such as Beethoven. For his part, Beethoven was apparently thoroughly under her spell at the time and mentioned his love for her to a friend as late as 1823, though by then, she had been married to Count Wenzel Robert von Gallenberg, a prolific composer of ballet music. A medallion portrait of her was found among Beethoven’s effects after his death. The C-sharp minor sonata was contemporary with the love affair with Giulietta and dedicated to her on its publication in 1802, but the precise relationship between the music’s nature and the state of Beethoven’s heart remains unknown; he never indicated
that the piece had any programmatic intent. It was not until five years after his death that the work’s passion and emotional intensity inspired the romantic German poet and music critic Ludwig Rellstab to describe the sonata in terms of “a vision of a boat on Lake Lucerne by moonlight,” a sobriquet that has since inextricably attached itself to the music.
Like its companion sonata op. 27, no. 1, the Moonlight shifts the expressive weight from the beginning to the end of the work and plays its movements without pause. Instead of opening with a large symphonic-style, sonata-form essay, the Moonlight initially falls upon the listener with a somber, minor-mode Adagio of the greatest introspection. Next comes a subdued scherzo and trio movement whose delicacy is undermined by its offbeat syncopations. The expressive goal of the sonata is achieved with its closing movement, a powerful essay in full sonata form filled with tempestuous feeling and dramatic gesture about which John N. Burk, former program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, wrote, “It is the first of the tumultuous outbursts of stormy passion that Beethoven was to let loose through the piano sonatas. It is music in which agitation and urgency never cease.”
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Born June 8, 1810; Zwickau, Germany
Died July 29, 1856; Endenich, near Bonn, Germany
Arabeske in C Major, Op. 18
COMPOSED 1839
By the middle of 1838, Robert Schumann’s parallel passions for music, writing, and Clara Wieck had brought the twenty-eight-year-old composer to a crucial point in his life. Denied by the adamant intervention of Clara’s father from having her hand in marriage, resigned to never becoming the piano virtuoso he had dreamed of since childhood, and seeking a more vibrant musical milieu than Leipzig as the base for Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal for Music), which he had edited since its inception in 1833, Schumann decided that a move to Vienna might improve his fortunes. He found rooms with a family named Cavalcabo, whose daughter Julia was taking lessons from Franz Xaver Mozart, Wolfgang’s son, and demonstrating some talent
as a composer for piano and voice. Schumann became friendly with Franz Xaver and was warmly greeted by a number of other prominent local musicians and artists, but he remained cautious about Vienna. By Christmas, it had become clear that his Viennese venture would fail—he could find no significant way in which to advance his career, there was no promising situation for the Zeitschrift, and he missed Clara terribly, all the more since the Viennese adored her virtuosic piano playing and continually interrogated him to learn more about her. He lingered in the Imperial City until March 30, 1839, when news that his brother Eduard had become seriously ill took him posthaste to his hometown, Zwickau; he arrived just after Eduard died. Saddened by his loss and by the disappointment in Vienna, Schumann returned to Leipzig, where after six more months of waiting to outlast Papa Wieck’s intransigence and legal obstacles, he finally married his
opposite page: Ludwig van Beethoven, portrait on ivory by Christian Horneman (1765–1844), 1803. Hans Conrad Bodmer Collection, Beethovenhaus-Bonn, Germany | this page, from top: Schumann, 1839, in a sketch by Josef Kriehuber (1800–1876) | Portrait of Franz Xaver Mozart (1825) by Karl Gottlieb Schweikart | next page: A portrait of Clara and Robert Schumann by Gustav-Adolf Mossa (1883–1971), 1913
beloved Clara on September 12, the eve of her twenty-first birthday.
Though Schumann did not realize his most immediate goals during his Viennese incursion, he did compose several piano works there, including the Arabeske in C major, op. 18. The word arabesque has been used in the West since the Middle Ages to describe any ornamentation consisting of flowing traceries of sinuous, undulating, or geometrical designs. The term was inspired by the Arab tradition, which forbids the representation of animate creatures. Instead, intricate artwork was developed around elaborate geometrical and botanical patterns that carefully interlaced scrolls, curves, and spirals with dazzling virtuosity. Schumann’s arabeske is arranged in a rondo form, in which the elegant, whispering principal theme is twice interrupted by wistful minor episodes. Added as a coda is a thoughtful paragraph in slow tempo, “a final message for the listener to turn over in his mind,” according to
the British critic Kathleen Dale, which reflects the dreamy and romantic side of Schumann’s personality. A tiny wisp of the principal theme rises from the closing measure.
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17
COMPOSED
1836 and 1838
Schumann’s C major fantasy was inspired equally by his ardent feelings for Clara Wieck, the daughter of his piano teacher and the woman he would marry in 1840, and by a request from the administrators of Beethoven’s hometown, Bonn, for a contribution to their campaign to raise funds for a monument commemorating the city’s most famous son. Though the opening movement of the fantasy, which Schumann instructed should “be interpreted in a fantastic and passionate manner,” is founded upon traditional sonata form (with a nostalgic central episode marked Im Legendenton—In the style of a legend—replacing the conventional development section), the distinguished pianist and scholar Charles Rosen noted in his book The Romantic Generation a revolutionary structural/emotional process here that moves beyond the customary dynamics and balances of traditional classical form:
[The movement] begins with great tension, descends toward resolution, and is frustrated; it moves to a point of greater tension and initiates the process over and over again. The structure is like a series of waves, starting with the climax, losing momentum each time, and then beginning again.
The second movement is an assertive and technically demanding march, which Franz Liszt greatly admired, and Clara said made her feel “hot and cold all over. . . . It strikes me as a victory march of warriors following a battle, and the [more subdued] central theme makes me think of young maidens in a village, all dressed in white, each with a wreath in her hand to crown the warriors kneeling before them.” The finale is a spacious, serene, slow movement of exquisitely subtle light and shadow that seems to suspend time itself.
Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.
above: Robert Schumann, daguerreotype by Johann Anton Völlner, 1850. Hamburg, Germany
PROFILES
Emanuel Ax Piano
Born to Polish parents in what is today Lviv, Ukraine, Emanuel Ax moved to Winnipeg, Canada, with his family when he was a young boy. Ax made his New York debut in the Young Concert Artists Series and, in 1974, won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. In 1975 he won the Michaels Award of Young Concert Artists, followed four years later by the Avery Fisher Prize. The 2024–25 season begins with a continuation of the Beethoven for Three touring and recording project with partners Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma, which takes them to European festivals in London, Dresden, Hamburg, Vienna, and Luxembourg. As guest-soloist, he appears during the New York Philharmonic’s opening week, forty-seven years after his debut with the orchestra. He returns to the Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras, National, San Diego, Nashville, and Pittsburgh symphonies and Rochester Philharmonic. A fall recital tour starting from Toronto and Boston moves west to include San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles, culminating in his annual Carnegie Hall appearance. A special project with clarinetist Anthony McGill takes the duo from the West Coast through the Midwest to Georgia and Carnegie Hall. Ax also tours with Itzhak
Perlman and Friends to Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco. An extensive European tour includes concerts in Paris, Oslo, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, Warsaw, and Israel.
Ax has been a Sony Classical exclusive recording artist since 1987. Following the success of Brahms: The Piano Trios with Kavakos and Ma, the three artists launched the ambitious, multi-year project Beethoven for Three to record all of Beethoven’s trios and symphonies arranged for trio. The first two discs of the project were released in 2022 and the third in 2024. Ax has received Grammy awards for the second and third volumes of his cycle of Haydn’s piano sonatas. He has also made a series of Grammy-winning recordings with Yo-Yo Ma of sonatas for cello and piano by Beethoven and Brahms. In the 2004–05 season, Emanuel Ax contributed to an International Emmy Award–winning BBC documentary commemorating the Holocaust that aired on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In 2013 his recording Variations received the Echo Klassik Award for Solo Recording of the Year (19th Century Music/Piano).
Ax is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary doctorates of music from Skidmore College, New England Conservatory of Music, Yale University, and Columbia University.
