We are proud to welcome of the world's great conductors to these concerts by the Madison Symphony Orchestra. Edo de Waart will lead a program of four works, beginning with the Prelude to Die Meistersinger. Swedish pianist Per Tengstrand joins us for a pair of Romantic rarities--both startlingly virtuosic works by composers in their 20s--Strauss's Burleske and Liszt's Malédiction. We close with Elgar's good-humored tribute to friendship, the Enigma Variations.
 

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Wagner completed his opera Die Meistersinger in 1867, and it was staged for the first time in Munich on June 21, 1868. The Prelude to Act I, however, was composed in early 1862, and the composer conducted a performance of the Prelude at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on October 31 of that year. The Madison Symphony Orchestra performed the work on ten concerts: the earliest in 1929, and the most recent in 1975. Duration 9:00.

When he was in his early 30s, Wagner made his first sketches for a Romantic opera on the life of Hans Sachs, the great 16th-century German "mastersinger."   Other projects intervened, though, and he did not turn to Die Meistersinger in earnest until he was nearly 50.  The work--Wagner's only comic opera--was completed in 1867, after more than five years of work.   By that time, Wagner was world famous, both as an opera composer and as the center of musical controversy.  Though it is billed as a comic opera (at least "comic" in a rather ponderous Wagnerian way), Die Meistersinger is at least partly artistic manifesto.  His main characters, the wise Hans Sachs, the daring Walther, and the hidebound Beckmesser are all recognizable as reflections of Wagner's views about music.  Walther's daring new song, which breaks all of the traditional song-writing rules of the mastersingers, clearly represents Wagner's views about his own style.  Beckmesser, who attempts to thwart Walther, is a rather nasty caricature of the staunchly anti-Wagnerian music critic Eduard Hanslick.

The Prelude was finished long before the opera itself, and was first performed in 1862.  True to his usual style, Wagner presents a series of Leitmotifs--musical themes representing characters and ideas from the drama itself.  The opening music is that of the Meistersinger themselves, both their processional march and a fanfare.  Walther's great love-theme follows, eventually giving way to a tongue-in-cheek version of the Meistersinger music (representing a group of rather disrespectful apprentices).  The climax of the piece is the simultaneous combination of several of the most important themes, culminating in a final grand statement of the Meistersinger processional.
 

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Burleske

Strauss composed Burleske in 1885-86. The first public performance of the work was in Eisenach, on June 21, 1890, with pianist Eugen D'Albert. This is our first performance of the work. Duration 22:00.

Burleske is among Strauss's early orchestral compositions, marking the end of his musical apprenticeship. When he was still a teenager, Strauss wrote his first orchestral pieces for the Wild Gung'l (roughly, "the wild gang"), an amateur orchestra his father conducted in Munich. In 1883, he came to the attention of the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, whose Meiningen court orchestra was possibly the finest ensemble in Europe at that time. Bülow promoted the teenager by performing and commissioning works by Strauss, and eventually naming him an assistant conductor. It was during these heady times that the young composer completed an ambitious Scherzo in D minor for piano and orchestra. In the spring of 1886, Strauss played and conducted a test-run of the new piece with the Meiningen orchestra, and was thoroughly disappointed. He later wrote to Bülow that: "...given an outstanding (!) pianist, and a first-rate (!) conductor, perhaps the whole thing will not turn out to be the unalloyed nonsense I took it for after the first rehearsal. After the first run-through, I was totally discouraged..." For his part, Bülow was not particularly encouraging, describing the work as "unplayable" after looking through the score.

The Scherzo was promptly buried, and didn't reemerge until Strauss showed the score to the pianist Eugen D'Albert, a disciple of Liszt, four years later. D'Albert was taken with the work and offered to play the premiere. Though he seems to have remained a bit ambivalent about the piece (he never, for example, assigned it an opus number), Strauss undertook some revisions to his 1886 score. D'Albert, premiered the work, now retitled Burleske, in June 1890. While it has never ranked among the most popular works in the Romantic solo piano repertoire, Burleske is still played today: a brilliant showpiece for the pianist, and a work of youthful exuberance by Strauss.

Though Strauss avoided calling this a "piano concerto"--Burleske translates as "mockery" or "farce"--the whole piece is structured very much like a vastly-extended concerto first movement. There are tongue-in-cheek touches however. Much of the basic thematic material is laid out in the opening bars, not by the piano or orchestra, but in a brusque timpani solo. The piano enters abruptly with a strident version of this idea. This theme works itself to a rather quiet conclusion, and then the piano introduces a second idea in lilting waltz rhythm. The development of these themes is carried equally by the orchestra and the solo part. There is a rather literal recapitulation of the opening section, broken up by two extended solo cadenzas, before the piece ends with a surprisingly subdued coda.
 

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
Malédiction

Liszt probably completed Malédiction sometime in 1834 or 1835. This is our first performance of the work. Duration 15:00.

Though it was it was the violinist Paganini who created the role of the Romantic virtuoso, it was Franz Liszt who transferred this role to the piano. Liszt was born in Hungary--his father was in charge of one of the farms owned by the Esterházy family (the same family who had served as Haydn's patrons decades earlier). He showed phenomenal abilities as a pianist as a young child, and his father finally succeeded in bringing young Franz to the attention of the pianist and teacher Carl Czerny in Vienna. After just a few years of study with Czerny, and additional training in Paris, Liszt embarked on the kind of tours typical of young prodigies in the 19th century, travelling to England three time while still in his teens. He performed in the artistic salons of Paris and became a close associate of Berlioz and Chopin. Liszt later toured throughout Europe as a pianist, retiring in the1840s to devote his attention to conducting and composition.

Liszt was every inch the great Romantic artist. His love affairs were passionate and often scandalous: both of his great loves, the Countess Marie d’Agoult (with whom he had three children) and Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein were married to other men. He was also widely admired for his generosity towards other musicians, and a host of younger composers--particularly Wagner, who would eventually become his son-in-law--benefited from his patronage and constructive criticism. His music was emotional, and often programmatic. While the sheer virtuosity of his piano music is there to astonish, it is rarely empty flashiness, and he was an innovative musical craftsman.

Liszt wrote his Malédiction while he was in his 20s, though its precise origins remain unknown. In 1835, he was preparing to set out on a major concert tour--cut short when Marie d'Agoult became pregnant and the couple fled from Paris to Switzerland. It is possible that Malédiction was among the pieces planned for the tour. It is also possible that it was based upon one of the now-lost piano concertos Liszt composed while still in his teens. In any case, the piece remained unpublished until 1914. The work was written originally for piano and string sextet, though it is more usually played, as at this concert, by a string orchestra. Though Liszt apparently set this piece on the shelf--it is not even clear that he played it in public--a few of its themes were recycled in later compositions.

Liszt made several pencilled notes in the score that allow for a kind of programmatic interpretation of the score. The surprisingly modern-sounding opening theme is labeled Malédiction (curse), which has come to be used as the title for the piece as a whole. The next idea, a melodramatic melody introduced by the piano above a string accompaniment is labeled orguiel (pride). Above a lush cello theme he marks pleurs--angoisses--rêves (tears--anguish--dreams). Lighter music that rounds off the first large section is labeled raillerie (jesting). Though it does not have a rigorously Classical organization, the piece has the outlines of sonata form, with an extensive section of development at the center, and a return of several main ideas at the end, with extravagant decoration by the solo piano.
 

Edward Elgar (1857-1934)
Variations on an Original Theme ("Enigma"), Op. 36

Elgar composed this work in 1898-1899. It was first performed in London, of June 19, 1899. We have performed the work on three earlier concerts: in 1968, 1979, and 1989. Duration 29:00.

Writing to his friend August Jaeger in 1899, Elgar described a recently-completed composition: a set of variations that depict thirteen of his musical and non-musical friends. Elgar incorporates several "enigmas" into this work. The first is the theme itself, which he labels "enigma." Each variation is titled according to the person represented, but their identities are hidden by his use of initials and nicknames. (Elgar himself soon gave away the secret identities, however.) He also states that there is another larger theme, which is never actually played, that nevertheless runs "through and over" the entire work. Elgar’s biographers have expended reams of paper in pursuit of this mystery. Possible candidates proposed for the "larger theme" include: God Save the Queen, Auld Lang Syne, a theme from Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, and the major scale. It has also been suggested that this unplayed theme might be a non-musical concept such as friendship. The answer is probably unknowable: the usually articulate Elgar was notably vague on this point. There is even the possibility that Elgar, whose sense of humor was well known to his friends and associates, was being deliberately obscure as a joke!

The Enigma Variations consists of a brief theme and fourteen variations (Elgar adds a self-portrait to the depictions of his friends.).

Theme. Elgar’s theme, only 17 measures long, is deceptively complex and contains a huge amount of melodic and harmonic raw material to be used in the succeeding variations. It begins with strings alone, in Gminor, and then shifts to contrasting material in G Major, returning to G minor in the last phrase.

Variation 1 ("C. A. E."), L’istesso tempo. Caroline Alice Elgar was married to the composer in 1889, and according to Elgar, her life "...was a romantic and delicate inspiration." This section stays close to the harmonic and melodic outlines of the theme, but fleshes it out with ornamentation and lush orchestration.

Variation 2 ("H. D. S.-P."), Allegro. Hew David Stuart-Powell was a gifted amateur pianist who often played trios with Elgar (a violinist) and the cellist Basil Nevinson (the "B. G. N." of Variation 12). The toccata-style figuration probably refers to Stuart-Powell’s habitual warm-up routine, although the highly chromatic melody is probably intended a joke--this pianist was notoriously conservative in his musical tastes.

Variation 3 ("R. T. B."), Allegretto. Richard Baxter Townsend was an author with a passion for amateur theater. According to his friends, Townsend had an extremely high voice, but loved to play old men in comic roles: growling his lines as low as he could, and suddenly breaking into a high falsetto. There is accordingly a humorous contrast between low an high textures in this variation.

Variation 4 ("W. M. B."), Allegro di molto. In this variation, Elgar pokes gentle fun at a somewhat pompous country gentleman and scholar, William M. Baker. During one of Elgar’s visits to his home, Baker officiously read an itinerary of the day’s activities and left the music room with an inadvertent slam of the door. The tittering of his guests is heard near the middle.

Variation 5 ("R. P. A."), Moderato. Richard P. Arnold, son of the poet Matthew Arnold, is characterized in this section. He is alternately solemn and lighthearted. This variation continues without pause into Variation 6.

Variation 6 ("Ysobel"), Andantino. The viola’s prominent role in this variation refers to Isobel Woods, an amateur violist. The figure given to the violas throughout this section is taken from a beginner’s exercise in crossing strings.

Variation 7 ("Troyte"), Presto. The architect Arthur Troyte Griffith was a boisterous friend and sometime piano student of Elgar’s, although he was apparently not a star pupil. Elgar notes that he tried "...to make something like order out of the chaos," but that "...the final despairing ‘slam’ records that the effort proved to be in vain."

Variation 8 ("W. N."), Allegretto. Elgar was associated with Winifred Norbury, an elderly devotee of music, through his connections with the Worcestershire Philharmonic Society. The music depicts both her stately 18th-century home and her characteristic laugh. This variation continues directly into the next.

Variation 9 ("Nimrod"), Adagio. The title is a labored pun on the name of August Jaeger, one of Elgar’s closest friends: "Jaeger" in German means "hunter," and Nimrod was the "mighty hunter" of the Book of Genesis. This movement is not a portrait of Jaeger’s forceful character, but rather depicts a long conversation between Elgar and Jaeger on the grandeur of Beethoven’s music. Elgar has provided some reminiscences of the slow movement of Beethoven’s "Pathetique" sonata in the opening bars.

Variation 10 ("Dorabella -- Intermezzo"), Allegretto. According to at least one Elgar biographer, he fluttering nature of this section refers to the voice of Miss Dora Penny, an acquaintance of the composer. Elgar himself referred to this as "...a dance of fairy-like lightness." This section serves as a bridge between the serious Variation 9 and the more rowdy Variation 11.

Variation 11 ("G. R. S."), Allegro di molto. George Robertson Sinclair was organist of Hereford Cathedral, but this music also refers to his bulldog Dan. One day, during a picnic, Dan slipped down a muddy bank into the River Wye, and had to swim for a time, looking for a place to climb out. In the opening bars, we hear Dan sliding down the slippery slope, paddling in the water, and barking with joy when he finds a landing-place. The more majestic tones of the brass depict Dan’s master.

Variation 12 ("B. G. N."), Andante. Basil G. Nevinson, an amateur cellist, was a longtime friend of Elgar’s. In this section the theme is expressively developed by the cellos. Variation 13 follows immediately.

Variation 13 ("*** -- Romanza"), Moderato. Being intentionally enigmatic, Elgar let the asterisks "...stand for the name of of a lady who was, at the time of the composition, on a sea voyage." (In all probability, it was his friend Lady Mary Lygon.) According to Elgar, we hear "...the distant throb of the engines of a liner." He also quotes a melody from Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.

Variation 14 ("E. D. U. -- Finale"), Allegro. The stirring finale is about Elgar himself: the initials refer to his nickname, "Edoo." The quotations from Variations 1 and 9 are programmatic: Elgar saw his wife Alice and August Jaeger as the two greatest influences on his life and his music.