Program notes by David Jensen
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born 7 May 1833; Hamburg, Germany
Died 3 April 1897; Vienna, Austria
Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn, Opus 56a
Composed: Summer 1873
First performance: 2 November 1873; Johannes Brahms, conductor; Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Last MSO performance: 10 April 2022; Edo de Waart, conductor
Instrumentation: piccolo; 2 flutes; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 2 trumpets; timpani; percussion (triangle); strings
Approximate duration: 19 minutes
In 1870, Karl Ferdinand Pohl, the librarian of the Vienna Philharmonic Society, shared a rare treat with his friend Johannes Brahms. In the thick of preparing his biography of Joseph Haydn, Pohl had come into possession of a set of six Feldpartiten (or “field suites”) for wind ensemble by the Viennese master; Brahms, who took an interest in antique manuscripts, was fascinated, but he was particularly taken by an unusual detail. The second movement of the partita in B-flat major bore the title “Chorale St. Antoni,” and its main theme was a ten-bar chorale tune divided into two five-bar phrases — a rather unorthodox metric framework for the 18th century. Taking the attribution at face value (and being a congenital classicist himself), Brahms copied down the theme, although it wasn’t until three years later that he reworked the melody into a set of variations for piano duo during a summer retreat to Tutzing, a lakeside resort town in southern Germany.
The premiere of his orchestral setting of the variations that autumn by Brahms and the Vienna Philharmonic was an immediate success, and the so-called “Haydn Variations” have since remained ensconced as one of the finest examples of the symphonic variation form to be found in the orchestral repertoire. The intrigue for audiences today, however, is that we now know what Brahms and Pohl did not: musicologists have since roundly declared that the attribution on the manuscript Brahms copied is entirely spurious. Publishers in the 19th century regularly fabricated the authorship of a given work in the hopes that the proximity to celebrity might make for a better sale, and while it’s possible that the music was penned by one of Haydn’s pupils, research remains inconclusive. The work has been presented to audiences as the “Saint Anthony Variations” with greater frequency in recent years, though it’s entirely possible that Haydn’s own artistic immortality might preclude that title from enduring in perpetuity.
The truth of which author actually deserves such a brilliant homage will likely remain lost to history, but the upshot is that this remains some of Brahms’s most elegant and intellectually fastidious music. Each of the eight variations (none of which lasts for more than a few minutes) is its own self-contained point of view defined by its own colors, character, and aesthetic, though the set as a whole continually underscores Brahms’s remarkable facility for counterpoint, gesturing repeatedly as he does to the music of the past. The finale is, in fact, a passacaglia, a Baroque form codified as a set of variations played over an ostinato (or repeating) bassline — which, in this case, is the same five-measure harmonic pattern derived from the original theme. That theme returns once more at the very end, now garlanded by ornamental scales in the winds, in what is perhaps one of the happiest moments in all of Brahms’s oeuvre.
ERNST VON DOHNÁNYI
Born 27 July 1877; Pozsony, Kingdom of Hungary (now Bratislava, Slovak Republic)
Died 9 February 1960; New York City, New York
Variations on a Nursery Tune, Opus 25
Composed: 1914
First performance: 17 February 1914; Carl Panzer, conductor; Ernst von Dohnányi, piano; Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere
Instrumentation: piccolo; 2 flutes; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; 2 timpani; percussion (bass drum, chimes, cymbals, glockenspiel, triangle, xylophone); harp; celeste; strings
Approximate duration: 25 minutes
Despite never achieving the same degree of notoriety as Franz Liszt, Béla Bartók, or Zoltán Kodály, Ernst von Dohnányi stands among the greatest talents of his native Hungary as both a pianist and composer. Following adolescent music lessons with his father, an amateur cellist, and Carl Forstner, an organist at his local parish, Dohnanyi enrolled at the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music at the age of 17, where he studied piano with István Thomán, a favorite pupil of Franz Liszt, and composition with Hans von Koessler, whose admiration of Johannes Brahms would ultimately influence his own mature musical style. Before the 19th century was over, he was touring Europe and the United States, and by the age of 30, he had secured a teaching position at the Hochschule in Berlin, where he would compose one of the strangest — and most persistently popular — works of his entire career.
In one of the most inventive examples of musical parody to be found in the 20th century, Dohnányi’s variations take as their basis the French children’s song “Ah! vous dirai-je, maman” — better known to contemporary audiences as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Such was the melody’s popularity following its publication in the mid-18th century that it received attention from a variety of composers, ranging from Joseph Haydn to Franz Liszt; Mozart himself published a charming set of 12 variations on the tune, while Camille Saint-Saëns included a rendition in his caricatures of the musical “Fossils” quoted in The Carnival of the Animals. But of all its appearances in concert music, both serious and sarcastic, throughout the last 250 years, Dohnányi’s masterful treatment here is the most extensive and elaborate, offering a vehicle for virtuoso showmanship par excellence.
A sweeping orchestral introduction immediately subverts the audience’s expectations, as though implying a concertante work cast in the dramatic mold typical of a late Romantic piano concerto. Somewhat satirically, the pianist enters with a simple statement of the instantly recognizable theme in quarter notes, as if plucking out the tune at the keyboard as a child might. Over the course of 11 variations, Dohnányi offers a tongue-in-cheek survey of the wideranging stylistic developments found in Western music over the course of the past two centuries, reworking the musical vernacular his audiences would surely have been familiar with a decidedly Lisztian technical approach.
The variations’ aesthetics range from the Classical to the Impressionistic, including everything from a Viennese waltz in the seventh variation, a Brahmsian passacaglia in the tenth, and a nod to the whole-tone harmonies pervading French music in the “Choral,” concluding with a thrilling fugato that fuses the contrapuntal processes of the past to the modern musical language of the present. In view of its liberal treatment of an otherwise quotidian tune, projected through the idioms of music history’s greatest craftsmen, it’s little wonder that Dohnányi subtitled the final draft “for the enjoyment of friends of humor, to the annoyance of others.”
FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Born 3 February 1809; Hamburg, Germany
Died 4 November 1847; Leipzig, Germany
Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Opus 107, MWV N 15, “Reformation”
Composed: December 1829 – 13 May 1830
First performance: 15 November 1832; Felix Mendelssohn, conductor; Berliner Singakademie
Last MSO performance: 29 November 2008; Nicholas McGegan, conductor
Instrumentation: 2 flutes; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; 2 bassoons; contrabassoon; 2 horns; 2 trumpets; 3 trombones; timpani; strings
Approximate duration: 27 minutes
The product of a slow and complicated gestation, the “Reformation” symphony suffered unfairly from the circumstances of Mendelssohn’s life and struggled for decades to find its place in the orchestral repertory. While touring Scotland in the summer of 1829, Mendelssohn enjoyed an especially fruitful period of creativity, and while already sketching what would later become his “Scottish” symphony and the Hebrides overture, he began conceiving of a new work as a means of burnishing his reputation as a virtuoso composer. He knew that June 1830 marked the 300th anniversary of Martin Luther’s submission of the Augsburg Confession, a landmark document of the Protestant Reformation, to Emperor Charles V, and being the enterprising young man that he was, Mendelssohn began drafting the work at just 20 years old with the view of having it premiered in Berlin as part of the celebrations honoring the Reformation’s tercentennial.
Despite having planned to finish the work several months in advance of the festivities, Mendelssohn contracted measles from his sister Rebecka, delaying its completion and rendering the anticipated debut impossible. By the spring, the symphony had more or less reached its final form, but already renowned as a prodigious pianist and composer, Mendelssohn’s energies were immediately diverted by his European tours, precluding the possibility of finding an orchestra to premiere his new symphony. On the other hand, it wasn’t for a lack of trying: as Mendelssohn traveled, the “Reformation” was rejected for performance in Leipzig, Munich, and finally Paris, where François Habeneck’s orchestra deemed it “too learned.”
Arriving in Berlin in the summer of 1832, he revised the work, which finally received its premiere at Berlin’s Singakademie, where his family had been a regular fixture since his childhood. Only a few years later, the composer came to regard the work as “a piece of juvenilia,” even going as far as to suggest that it should be burned. Mendelssohn forbade the work’s publication, and it was not performed again until 1868, the same year that it finally received a printing by the N. Simrock publishing house in Bonn. Although it was only the second of his formal symphonic efforts, more than twenty years had lapsed since the Mendelssohn’s death, and being the last of his symphonies to be published, it was designated his fifth.
The “Reformation” is an attractive example of Mendelssohn’s mastery of the symphonic structure and thematic manipulation. In an era where programmatic music was enjoying its day in the sun for composers eager to impose extramusical narratives upon their work, Mendelssohn’s fifth symphony makes numerous allusions to the Protestant faith, most notably in the inclusion of the “Dresden Amen,” a rising scalar motif sung during church services in the 19th century, in the first, third, and fourth movements. The finale itself is a deeply expressive setting of Martin Luther’s chorale “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” implying the triumph of Western Christianity’s most tumultuous spiritual transformation.
2025.26 SEASON
KEN-DAVID MASUR
Music Director
Polly and Bill Van Dyke Music Director Chair
EDO DE WAART
Music Director Laureate
BYRON STRIPLING
Principal Pops Conductor
Stein Family Foundation
Principal Pops Conductor Chair
RYAN TANI
Associate Conductor
CHERYL FRAZES HILL
Chorus Director
Margaret Hawkins Chorus Director Chair
TIMOTHY J. BENSON
Assistant Chorus Director
FIRST VIOLINS
Jinwoo Lee, Concertmaster, Charles and Marie Caestecker Concertmaster Chair
Ilana Setapen, First Associate Concertmaster, Thora M. Vervoren
First Associate Concertmaster Chair
Jeanyi Kim, Associate Concertmaster
Alexander Ayers
Autumn Chodorowski
Yuka Kadota
Elliot Lee
Dylana Leung
Kyung Ah Oh
Lijia Phang
Vinícius Sant’Ana**
Yuanhui Fiona Zheng
SECOND VIOLINS
Jennifer Startt, Principal, Andrea and Woodrow Leung Principal Second Violin Chair
Ji-Yeon Lee, Assistant Principal (2nd chair)
Hyewon Kim, Acting Assistant Principal (3rd chair)
Heejeon Ahn
Lisa Johnson Fuller
Clay Hancock
Paul Hauer
Sheena Lan**
Janis Sakai**
Yiran Yao
VIOLAS
Victor de Almeida, Principal, Richard O. and Judith A. Wagner Family Principal Viola Chair
Samantha Rodriguez, Acting Assistant Principal (2nd chair), Friends of Janet F. Ruggeri Assistant Principal Viola Chair
Alejandro Duque, Acting Assistant Principal (3rd chair)
Elizabeth Breslin
Georgi Dimitrov
Nathan Hackett
Michael Lieberman**
Erin H. Pipal
CELLOS
Susan Babini, Principal, Dorothea C. Mayer Principal Cello Chair
Shinae Ra, Assistant Principal (2nd chair)
Scott Tisdel, Associate Principal Emeritus
Madeleine Kabat
Peter Szczepanek
Peter J. Thomas
Adrien Zitoun
BASSES
Principal, Donald B. Abert Principal Bass Chair
Andrew Raciti, Acting Principal
Nash Tomey, Acting Assistant Principal (2nd chair)
Brittany Conrad Broner McCoy
Paris Myers
HARP
Julia Coronelli, Principal, Walter Schroeder Principal Harp Chair
FLUTES
Sonora Slocum, Principal, Margaret and Roy Butter Principal Flute Chair
Heather Zinninger, Assistant Principal
Jennifer Bouton Schaub
PICCOLO
Jennifer Bouton Schaub
OBOES
Katherine Young Steele, Principal, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra League Principal Oboe Chair
Kevin Pearl, Assistant Principal
Margaret Butler
ENGLISH HORN
Margaret Butler, Philip and Beatrice Blank English Horn Chair in memoriam to John Martin
CLARINETS
Todd Levy, Principal, Franklyn Esenberg Principal Clarinet Chair
Jay Shankar, Assistant Principal, Donald and Ruth P. Taylor Assistant Principal Clarinet Chair
Besnik Abrashi
E-FLAT CLARINET
Jay Shankar
BASS CLARINET
Besnik Abrashi
BASSOONS
Catherine Van Handel, Principal, Muriel C. and John D. Silbar Family
Principal Bassoon Chair
Rudi Heinrich, Assistant Principal
Matthew Melillo
CONTRABASSOON
Matthew Melillo
HORNS
Matthew Annin, Principal, Krause Family Principal
French Horn Chair
Krystof Pipal, Associate Principal
Dietrich Hemann, Andy Nunemaker French Horn Chair
Darcy Hamlin
Dawson Hartman
TRUMPETS
Matthew Ernst, Principal, Walter L. Robb Family Principal Trumpet Chair
David Cohen, Associate Principal, Martin J. Krebs Associate Principal Trumpet Chair
Tim McCarthy, Fred Fuller Trumpet Chair
TROMBONES
Megumi Kanda, Principal, Marjorie Tiefenthaler Principal Trombone Chair
Kirk Ferguson, Assistant Principal
BASS TROMBONE
John Thevenet, Richard M. Kimball Bass Trombone Chair
TUBA
Robyn Black, Principal, John and Judith Simonitsch Tuba Chair
TIMPANI
Dean Borghesani, Principal
Chris Riggs, Assistant Principal
PERCUSSION
Robert Klieger, Principal
Chris Riggs
PIANO
Melitta S. Pick Endowed Piano Chair
PERSONNEL
Antonio Padilla Denis, Director of Orchestra Personnel
Paris Myers, Hiring Coordinator
LIBRARIANS
Paul Beck, Principal Librarian, James E. Van Ess Principal Librarian Chair
Matthew Geise, Assistant Librarian & Media Archivist
PRODUCTION
Tristan Wallace, Production Manager/Live Audio
Lisa Sottile, Production Stage Manager
* Leave of Absence 2025.26 Season
** Acting member of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra 2025.26 Season
