Program Notes: Raise the Curtain

JULES MASSENET 
Overture to Phèdre 
BORN: May 12, 1842, in Montaud, France 
DIED: August 13, 1912, in Paris 
WORK COMPOSED: 1873 
WORLD PREMIERE: 1874 in Paris 
SEATTLE SYMPHONY PREMIERE: December 29, 1903, at Christensen Hall, with Harry F. West conducting 
FIRST PLAYED IN BENAROYA HALL: December 31, 2003, with Gerard Schwarz conducting 

What to Listen For:  

• Massenet’s musical interpretation of a Greek tragedy, from the initial dissonant chords that set the scene to Phèdre’s mournful melody as she descends toward madness.  

• Passionate and dramatic orchestral writing which no doubt inspired the work’s inclusion in Seattle Symphony’s very first concert program in 1903. 

In 1873, French conductor and founder of the Pasdeloup Orchestra, Jules Pasdeloup, commissioned the up-and-coming Jules Massenet to write a symphonic overture for his popular Sunday afternoon concerts in Paris' Cirque d’Hiver theater. For inspiration, Massenet turned to Racine’s play Phèdre, which itself was drawn from the Greek tragedy by Euripides titled Hippolytus. Full of cursed love, deceit and meddling gods, the twisted plot offered Massenet ripe opportunity for musical drama.  

The overture opens with angry, dissonant chords juxtaposed against soulful laments in the strings, immediately setting the tragic tone. Phèdre, who has fallen in love with her stepson Hippolytus, is depicted in the melancholy clarinet melody that follows. The cellos introduce a more active theme representing the younger Hippolytus, who has rejected his stepmother’s advances. The music accelerates as the stormy sea threatens to kill Hippolytus. After a final lament from Phèdre, who has vowed to kill herself, the overture ends with the orchestra proclaiming her fate with two forceful chords.  

ARTHUR HONEGGER 
Pastorale d’Eté  
BORN: March 10, 1892, in Le Havre, France 
DIED: November 27, 1955, in Paris 
WORK COMPOSED: August 1920 
WORLD PREMIERE: February 17, 1921, in Paris 
SEATTLE SYMPHONY PREMIERE: February 4, 1929, at the Metropolitan Theatre, with Karl Krueger conducting. 
FIRST PLAYED IN BENAROYA HALL: May 5, 2011, with Jakub Hruša conducting. 

What to Listen For: 

• Solos from two instruments with distinctly pastoral associations — the horn and English horn — feature prominently, while the flute interjections evoke gentle birdsong. 

Solos from two instruments with distinctly pastoral associations — the horn and English horn — feature prominently, while the flute interjections evoke gentle birdsong. 

Arthur Honegger was born in France to Swiss parents. Although he lived and worked in France, he maintained his Swiss citizenship for his entire life and served in the Swiss army during the First World War. As a young composer, Honegger became associated with the group known as Les Six, a cohort of colleagues (including Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc) who were eager to rebel against the heavy Germanic styles of Wagner and Strauss, and to establish a new and distinctly French sound that brought more whimsy and clarity to modern music.  

The popularity of Les Six boosted Honegger’s career so much that, in the summer of 1920, he escaped the bustling city and his hectic schedule for a retreat in the Swiss alps, where the serenity of a remote village inspired his Pastorale d’Eté (“Summer Pastoral”). Honegger prefaced his score with the opening line of Arthur Rimbaud’s poem Aube (“Dawn”): J’ai embrassé l’aube d’été (“I embraced the summer dawn”). Reflecting these words, the Pastorale begins with murmuring strings and a quietly uplifting horn melody that depicts the calm of the rising sun as it awakens the natural world. A long crescendo leads to a burst of sunshine, and animated rhythms accompany a playful melody that passes between the woodwinds. The energy builds before succumbing to the serene refrain of the opening, the original horn melody now languorous in the heat of midday. Snippets of the playful tune peek through the texture while the music continues to fade and the peaceful summer day comes to an end.  

FRANZ SCHUBERT 
Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759, “Unfinished” 
BORN: January 31, 1797, in Vienna 
DIED: November 19, 1828, in Vienna 
WORK COMPOSED: 1822 
WORLD PREMIERE: December 17, 1865, in Vienna 
SEATTLE SYMPHONY PREMIERE: December 29, 1903, at Christensen Hall, with Harry F. West conducting. 

What to Listen For:  

• Breaking from the classical tradition of opening a symphony with dynamic vigor, Schubert’s Eighth begins with an unsettling and rhythmically ambiguous mood that sets the tone for the entire work.  

Breaking from the classical tradition of opening a symphony with dynamic vigor, Schubert’s Eighth begins with an unsettling and rhythmically ambiguous mood that sets the tone for the entire work.  

When Franz Schubert passed away at the age of 31, the vast majority of his compositions were largely unknown. During his lifetime, he was well regarded as a composer of songs and dances written for social gatherings, but he struggled to stand out in a Vienna that was starstruck by Beethoven. His manuscripts were scattered around the homes of family and friends, only to be discovered and performed for the first time in the decades following his death. Schubert’s Eighth Symphony, the “Unfinished,” was first heard a full 43 years after it was written.  

Scholars still debate the reasons why Schubert seems to have abandoned his Eighth Symphony. He left a sizable stack of fragments behind for all sorts of projects, so perhaps he had simply moved on. He was also suffering from an illness — symptoms point to syphilis or mercury poisoning — which may have affected his psychological outlook and motivation. However, musicologist Alfred Einstein believed Schubert was unable to finish the work because “nothing could approach the originality, power and skill of the first two movements.” 

In this work, Schubert defied the standards set by Beethoven, whose symphonies had intimidated many of their contemporaries, by bringing an unprecedented shape and structure to his own musical phrasing and tonalities. Unlike many Classical and early Romantic symphonies that begin with energetic, confident statements, the Eighth’s Allegro opens with an ominous, skeletal phrase from the cellos and basses followed by nervous quivers in the strings that accompany the melancholic melody of the oboe and clarinet. The chilling pauses and dramatic turns between major and minor sonorities throughout the rest of the movement contribute to the underlying sense of unease. 

The Andante opens with a melody in E-major and moves to a minor key in its second theme, a mirror image of the Allegro’s minor-to-major pattern. Much like the first movement, this theme is unsettled in nature, this time slipping into remote keys and chromaticism. Solo violins create a unique, hovering transition to the second theme, which then takes a winding harmonic path to the symphony’s simple yet profound conclusion.  

RICHARD WAGNER 
Götterdämmerung: Suite (Tate Version) 
BORN: May 22, 1813, Leipzig, Germany 
DIED: February 13, 1883, Venice, Italy 
WORK COMPOSED: 1848–1874  
WORLD PREMIERE: August 17, 1876, at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany 
EXCERPTS FIRST PLAYED IN BENAROYA HALL: September 12, 1998, with Gerard Schwarz conducting and Jessye Norman singing the role of the soprano. 

What to Listen For: 

• The seamless and lengthy unspooling of musical lines within a richly textured orchestration.  

• The use of leitmotifs — short musical phrases that refer to specific characters and emotions — as musical hints to the underlying drama of the opera’s plot.  

Götterdämmerung (“Twilight of the Gods”) is the fourth and final installment of Richard Wagner’s epic music drama, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Completed over the course of 26 years, the four operas known as the Ring cycle dominated most of his career and left a seismic impact on the operatic world. In 1848, Wagner wrote the libretto for what he then titled Siegfrieds Tod (“Siegfried’s Death”), the opera that eventually became Götterdämmerung. He had originally conceived it as a stand-alone work, but later envisioned a larger series that would tell the story of Siegfried’s life and the origins of the magical gold ring that wreaked havoc on the world. Wagner then wrote the libretti for the first three operas in the cycle, working in reverse chronological order.  

When the text was finished, he proceeded to compose the music in its intended order, completing the first opera, Das Rheingold, in 1854, then Die Walküre in 1856 and half of Siegfried in 1857. Then after a long hiatus, during which he composed his operas Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, he returned to the Ring, finishing Siegfried and Götterdämmerung in 1874. Its long gestation meant that the Ring Cycle captured a quantum leap in Wagner’s music as well as the art form as a whole.  

Throughout the Ring, Wagner’s innovative use of leitmotifs — musical phrases that represent characters, objects and emotions — provides a narrative cohesion to the sprawling 15-hour saga based on Norse mythology. The plot is a complicated web of gods, heroes, dwarves and giants, who struggle with their lust for power and their desire for love while the forces of nature fight for annihilation and renewal. By manipulating the leitmotifs in any given scene, Wagner signals the underlying motives and secret desires of his characters and the world around them.  

The great English conductor Jeffrey Tate (1943–2017) was a renowned Wagnerian who rose to fame as the assistant to Pierre Boulez for the legendary 100th-anniversary production of the Ring at Bayreuth in 1976. He went on to conduct over 20 Ring cycles around the world. His suite of music from Götterdämmerung begins on a mountaintop at dawn, with an impassioned love scene between Siegfried and Brünnhilde before Siegfried departs on a heroic journey. The low brass intone the fate motif, signaling the doomed nature of his journey, while Brünnhilde hears Siegfried’s horn call in the distance.  

The suite then moves to Act 3, the culmination of the entire Ring cycle, where two of Wagner’s most complex and rich orchestral writings can be found: the Funeral March and the Immolation Scene. The funeral procession features dirge-like timpani strokes and brass lamenting the hero’s death. The leitmotifs of Siegfried, his mythic sword Nothung and his mission are all present. The opera, and Tate’s suite, concludes with Brünnhilde lighting a funeral pyre on the banks of the Rhine. While holding the ring, she rides her horse Grane into the flames, sacrificing herself to rid the world of the ring’s curse. The mighty river rises up to reclaim its gold while the gods of Valhalla are engulfed in flames, leaving nature to begin anew.  

All notes by Catherine Case © 2023