MainStage 2, 2023-24
Extended Program Notes
Sumi Tonooka
www.sumitonooka.com
Sketch at Seven
I wrote these pieces as a set of orchestra miniatures for different sections of the orchestra, based off an original solo piano work for my first reading with the SFCO.
The inspiration is a sketch book of drawings and musical journals that I made when I was very young that was sent back to me after some forty years by Billy McCoy, the love of my life who kept them pristine during several lifetimes of us not being together. He told me that over the years the book inspired him whenever he was down to keep going with his music. When I opened the sketchbook it was like a doorway into the past and future, mysterious and profound and a key to our reconnection. The piece is in his memory and dedicated to him.
Sumi Tonooka
Robert Schumann
Born June 8, 1810, Zwickau: Died July 29, 1856, Endenich
Cello Concerto in A minor, Opus 129
In September of 1850, Robert Schumann, his wife Clara, and their six children moved to the city of Düsseldorf, where he was to become the city’s new music director. The presence of the well-known composer and his famous piano-virtuoso wife immediately sparked a flurry of activity among Düsseldorf’s elite, who put on numerous parties and concerts to celebrate their arrival. Schumann was greatly inspired by his new surroundings and composed prolifically during the early months of his tenure, completing his Cello Concerto in a mere fourteen days on October 24, 1850. Clara was thrilled with the piece, writing in her diary: “It pleases me very much and seems to me to be written in true violoncello style.” She was equally as delighted when she revisited the work some time later: “I have played Robert’s Violoncello Concerto through again, thus giving myself a truly musical and happy hour. The Romantic quality, the vivacity, the freshness and humor, also the highly interesting interweaving of violoncello and orchestra are indeed wholly ravishing, and what euphony and deep feeling one finds in all the melodic passages!” Though Clara was enthusiastic about the concerto, Schumann had a difficult time arranging the premiere. More than one cellist rejected it and publishers shied away when the composer could not secure a soloist, forcing Schumann to abandon his hopes of a performance. The Cello Concerto finally received its premiere posthumously on June 9, 1860, at a concert in Leipzig honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Schumann’s birth.
Today we refer to this piece as Schumann’s Cello Concerto out of convenience, but Schumann originally called it Konzertstück (Concert Piece) rather than Konzert (Concerto) on the original manuscript. This choice signaled his desire to bypass the strict formal conventions of the concerto genre and write something with room for compositional experimentation and flexibility instead. He retained the traditional fast-slow-fast concerto structure, but the three movements were heard without pause, allowing Schumann to try new techniques for connecting the sections of a multi-movement work. This formal ambiguity was heightened by a second distinctive feature, a strong sense of thematic unity where music from the first movement reappears in later movements in entirely new guises and moods, making the concerto seem like one expansive musical idea. The introspective, impassioned character of the solo part was also out of the ordinary since it was a far cry from the show-stopping virtuosic displays nineteenth-century audiences expected. The first movement opens with three quiet chords in the winds and pizzicato strings before the cello’s broadly expressive opening theme. The essence of these chords pervades the lyric second movement, where the soloist engages in a tender dialogue with the orchestra, notably in a duet with the principal cello. The Finale is a pleasing rondo with an accompanied cadenza that sets the stage for the rousing conclusion.
Franz Schubert
Born January 31, 1797, Vienna: Died November 19, 1828, Vienna
Symphony No. 9 in C Major, D.944, “Great”
In his own time, Schubert was best known as an accomplished composer of music meant for household use. His pen produced a seemingly endless variety of songs, dances, and keyboard pieces perfectly suited to the salons of Vienna’s elites, where artistic displays were an important part of the intellectual activities. Success in the concert hall eluded him, but that did not stop Schubert from composing large-scale chamber works, operas, and symphonies despite the fact that he would likely never hear them performed. His boundless creativity resulted in a large catalogue of works that were never published or performed in his lifetime and would only be discovered after his death, including his grand Ninth Symphony.
Schubert began work on the Ninth Symphony during the summer of 1825 in the midst of a five-month holiday that took him to some of the most beautiful parts of Austria. He was joined by his friend, the baritone Johann Michael Vogl, the first performer of many of Schubert’s songs. Schubert had just recovered from a long bout of ill health, so he was energetic about travelling and ready to resume composing as soon as possible. While visiting the cities of Gmunden and Gastein, he sketched out a symphony of epic proportions that he finished orchestrating in 1826 once he returned to his studio in Vienna. Despite his excitement about his new symphony, Schubert realized that there was no chance of giving a public performance. He had hoped to premiere the work in a benefit concert similar to one he attended in 1824 – the concert in which the legendary premiere of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 took place – but Schubert had no funds to mount such a performance. Instead, he donated a copy of the score to Vienna’s prominent Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Society, who gave him a small honorarium and arranged a run-through of the piece in the latter part of 1827. This informal event turned out to be the only chance for Schubert to hear the Ninth Symphony in his lifetime since the Society chose not to promote it in their public concerts, citing its extreme length and difficulty as reasons, and Schubert died only a year later.
In 1838, a decade after Schubert’s death, Robert Schumann visited Vienna and met Schubert’s brother Ferdinand, who was also a composer and performer of some renown. Ferdinand showed Schumann the manuscript of the Ninth Symphony and Schumann was immediately enthusiastic about the piece, inspiring Ferdinand to present him with a copy of the score as a gift. Schumann took the score back to Leipzig and showed it to Felix Mendelssohn, who was equally enthusiastic about the discovery and immediately began preparing a performance to introduce audiences to Schubert’s forgotten masterwork. At long last, the premiere of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony took place on March 21, 1839, at the Leipzig Gewandhaus with Mendelssohn conducting. Early audiences were impressed with the symphony but also struggled to make sense of it since the piece was so much longer and more involved than what they were used to. As a way of explanation, Schumann wrote of the piece: “Here beside sheer musical mastery of the technique of composition is life in every fiber, color in the finest shadings, meaning everywhere, the acutest etching of detail, and all flooded with a Romanticism which we have encountered elsewhere in Franz Schubert… The brilliance and novelty of the instrumentation, the breadth and expanse of the form, the striking changes of mood, the whole new world into which we are transported—all this may be confusing to the listener, like any initial view of the unfamiliar. But there remains a lovely aftertaste, like that which we experience at the conclusion of a play about fairies or magic. There is always the feeling that the composer knew exactly what he wanted to say and how to say it, and the assurance that the gist will become clearer with time.”
At just under an hour, the Ninth Symphony was unusually long for its time. In his review, Schumann referred to the work’s “heavenly length,” and the vast scope of the piece is held together by Schubert’s elaborate musical ideas, with innovative melodies, expansive harmonic movement, driving rhythms, and brilliant use of tone color throughout. In this piece, Schubert fulfilled his desire to write a symphony on the ambitious scale of Beethoven’s Ninth and considered it to be his first mature symphony, with all previous attempts merely having been a kind of preparation. The first movement opens with a gracious slow introduction heralded by a glorious French solo and the main body of the movement presses forward as musical ideas are combined in an impressive process rivalling anything by Beethoven. The oboe takes the lead in the slow movement with a march-like melody from which the jaunty dotted rhythmic figures will come to pervade the entire orchestra. The Scherzo is outgoing and friendly, contrasted by the more lyrical Trio section. Both sections are reminiscent of some of Schubert’s most beloved genres, the dances and songs he produced in abundance for Vienna’s salons, now orchestrated and imbued with Beethovenian jest. The final movement is a fast-paced perpetual motion with spinning triplets that produce an unstoppable drive. Snippets of musical ideas from the previous movements are brought back in new guises, and there are even a few moments that seem to recall Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” As to the symphony’s nickname, “Great” was likely used to differentiate the piece from Schubert’s shorter Sixth Symphony known as the “Little C Major” since the two symphonies are in the same key. But today, “Great” has come to refer to the powerful influence of this piece and its essential place in Schubert’s symphonic output.
Program notes by Heike Hoffer