Stutzmann conducts Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathétique’ Symphony

Johannes Brahms
Nänie, Op. 82 14’
Song of the Fates, Op. 89 12’
Song of Destiny, Op. 54 16’

INTERVAL: 20 minutes

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74 ‘Pathétique’ 45’

BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Nathalie Stutzmannconductor

Surtitles by Damien Kennedy

This concert is being recorded by BBC Radio 3 for broadcast in ‘Radio 3 in Concert’ on Tuesday 31 May at 7.30pm. It will be available for 30 days after broadcast via BBC Sounds, where you can also find podcasts and music mixes.

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BBC Symphony Chorus

This concise, but far from ‘little’ masterpiece was composed in 1880–81, in memory of the painter Anselm Feuerbach and dedicated to his widow. Like Brahms, Feuerbach had striven to reconcile strong Romantic impulses with equally strong neo-Classical ideals. Earlier, in his monumental AGerman Requiem, Brahms had used biblical texts to create a kind of humanistic funeral rite, but now he realised he needed something different. ‘Won’t you try to find me some words,’ he wrote to his friend Elisabet von Herzogenberg. ‘They aren’t heathenish enough for me in the Bible.’ Elisabet suggested he try the Psalms, but they too yielded nothing. Eventually Brahms either found or remembered Nänie, a poignant but dignified recreation of the spirit of Classical Greek lamentation by the pioneering German Romantic poet, philosopher and dramatist Friedrich Schiller. Brahms set it for four-part chorus with an orchestra whose colours he selected carefully: no bright trumpets, but three solemn trombones and timpani, plus a harp – highly appropriate for a text that acknowledges the divinely inspired lyre-player Orpheus.

Nänie (‘Funeral Song’) begins with a long, tenderly expressive solo for oboe, which the choral voices then develop, their lines intertwining sensuously like the idealised human forms on a Grecian funeral urn. ‘Even beauty must perish,’ says the text, yet the music hints that art can perhaps outlive the frailty of human beauty. After the mention of the one whose music once managed to ‘soften the Ruler of Shadows’ – clearly Orpheus – the harp enters. A more impassioned central section tells us that even the gods are moved by the transience of beauty. At the end, though, Brahms manages a gentle touch of consolation. Schiller’s poem ends with the stark image of the ordinary human sinking unsung into the Underworld. Brahms, however, repeats the previous phrase, ‘Yet to be a lament in the mouth of the loved ones is glorious’, to which horns, woodwind and harp add a serene benediction.

BBC Symphony Chorus

Gesang der Parzen (‘Song of the Fates') is Brahms’s last major work for chorus and orchestra. Like Nänie, it manages to say a great deal in a short stretch of time (about 12 minutes). Composed between the Second Piano Concerto (1881) and the Third and Fourth Symphonies (1883–5), it is one of Brahms’s most unsettling expressions of the melancholic, death-haunted tendency that can be heard even in some of his most positive-seeming works. Song of the Fates is a setting of a song from Goethe’s blank-verse drama Iphigenie auf Tauris (‘Iphigenia in Tauris’), which retells the story of the ancient Greek priestess-heroine Iphigenia, who heroically stands up for truth even when it may lead to her death. In the song, which Iphigenia sings in the play, we are told that the gods are pitiless, their decisions are arbitrary, and that the humans they seem to raise one moment may be dashed down the next: ‘They [the gods] should be doubly feared by him whom they raise up!’ In the final verse an old man contemplates the gulf between the human and the divine, ‘thinks of children and those to come, and shakes his head’.

The choral writing in Songs of the Fates has a monumental simplicity and directness, as though Brahms is particularly keen here that we should heed Goethe’s words and take his dark vision to heart. Around this the orchestra weaves music of intense contrapuntal expressiveness, with particularly sombre textures in the bass, enhanced by contrabassoon and bass tuba. The orchestral accompaniment to the old man’s final words contains some of the most mysterious and ambiguous harmonies in all Brahms. Half a century later, the modernist Anton Webern found validation for his own thinking in this strange music: ‘Its really remarkable harmonies already take it far away from tonality’ The chromatic path has begun.’ Whatever one thinks of Webern’s somewhat partisan judgement, the final moments of Song of the Fates do leave an eerie, disturbingly unresolved aftertaste.

BBC Symphony Chorus

Brahms began his Schicksalslied (‘Song of Destiny’) in 1868, soon after completing A German Requiem, but although it is much smaller in scale (around 15 minutes), it took almost as long to finish: the score wasn’t completed until 1871, three years later.

Part of the problem, for Brahms, lay in the form of the text, verses from the novel Hyperion by the mentally fragile, at times exquisitely visionary poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843). Many of the German Romantics of Hölderlin’s generation used images from ancient Greece to evoke a sublime creative freedom, felt to be sadly lacking in their all-too-real contemporary existence. But Hölderlin seems to have felt this divine–human separation with special intensity. Brahms was clearly impressed by this, but the demands of balanced musical form, so important to a ‘Classical-Romantic’ like Brahms, inclined him away from Hölderlin’s dramatic sequence: two stanzas of ‘still serenity’ followed by a sudden, devastating plunge into a bleak ‘unknown’. Instead, Brahms’s instincts inclined him towards a more balanced structure, with some kind of final reference to the opening section. But surely bringing back the opening words, even in condensed form, would weaken the power of Hölderlin’s ending?

It was the conductor Hermann Levi (who later gave the first performance of Schicksalslied) who offered an answer: have the orchestra alone bring back the prelude to the first section. The chorus remains silent, so that the last words we hear are Hölderlin’s ‘ins Ungewisse hinab’ (‘down into the unknown’), but the orchestra has more to tell us. The result is a work that, while remaining movingly true to Hölderlin’s vision, achieves its effects within a musically satisfying form of its own. The gorgeous orchestral prelude delivers a subtly mixed message: nobly arching woodwinds and muted strings evoke the tranquillity of the Elysian Fields, but underneath quietly tolling timpani, sounding an unmistakably funereal rhythm, remind us of mortality. After the chorus has sung of ‘shimmering celestial breezes’ and ‘blissful eyes’ that ‘shine eternally’, two eerily hushed discords on winds and timpani are followed by a plunge into a surging minor-key Allegro for Hölderlin’s comfortless final verse. Eventually fury yields to quiet desolation, then the tempo drops to Adagio and the original orchestral prelude returns, but in a different key from the opening, with the addition of liquid slow string figures and solemn trombones. Brahms hardly ever used this kind of ‘progressive tonality’, and nowhere else on this scale. It is a masterstroke, enhancing the sense of distance from the original vision. The blissful existence of the Olympian gods has been glimpsed, but ultimately, alas, it is not for us.

^{Programme notes © Stephen Johnson
Stephen Johnson is the author of books on Bruckner, Wagner, Mahler and Shostakovich, and a regular contributor to BBC Music Magazine. For 14 years he was a presenter of BBC Radio 3’s Discovering Music. He now works both as a freelance writer and as a composer.}

Johannes Brahms

The line between them isn’t unbroken, but there’s a strong argument that Brahms is Beethoven’s natural successor: the leading inheritor of the traditions his predecessor invented, refined and perfected. While Romantic contemporaries such as Wagner placed great stock in music’s ability to express grand narratives and greater truths, Brahms – like Beethoven, mostly – favoured so-called ‘absolute music’: free from narrative, music about nothing but itself. Born in Hamburg to a musical family, Brahms was a precociously gifted child but wrote much of his most enduring music after his 40th birthday: four dramatic symphonies, the second of two piano concertos, the sweeping Violin Concerto. In stark contrast to these expansive pieces, his intimate late works for piano and for organ portray a solitary man who knew his time was nearly up.

^{Profile © Will Fulford-Jones
Will Fulford-Jones is a writer and editor who works widely across music and the arts.}

INTERVAL: 20 MINUTES

1  Adagio – Allegro non troppo
2  Allegro con grazia
3  Allegro molto vivace
4  Finale: Adagio lamentoso

Was it a grand musical suicide note, a submission to the forces of ‘fate’ that he’d struggled with for his whole life, even an admission of his homosexuality, and that it could no longer be tolerated in St Petersburg society? Few pieces have provoked quite as much speculation and rumour about secret meanings as Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony.

In many ways, however, Tchaikovsky has only himself to blame. It was he who famously called it ‘a symphony with a secret programme’ (or story) in a letter to pianist Alexander Ziloti in 1892, also writing to his friend Konstantin Romanov (grandson of Tsar Nicholas I) that ‘I have put my whole soul into this symphony’. A few days after its premiere, on 28 October 1893, Tchaikovsky contracted cholera. It is widely thought that he’d been drinking unboiled water while the disease was circulating in St Petersburg, and by the time he allowed doctors to see him, it was too late.

Some have suggested that his fateful sip was the deliberate act of a depressive, or even that he was forced into a Socratic suicide by a kangaroo court of St Petersburg bigwigs after a homosexual affair was discovered. If not, why name the symphony the ‘Pathétique’?

In fact, the symphony’s title was his brother Modest’s idea, and the original Russian means something closer to ‘passionate’ or ‘emotional’ rather than simply ‘pathetic’. And, in truth, there’s little evidence to back up any of these far-fetched theories. Tchaikovsky had suffered depressive episodes throughout his life, but felt that working on the Sixth Symphony had actually raised his spirits. He began an E flat Symphony (later reworked into his Third Piano Concerto) but abandoned it when he realised it wasn’t what he hoped to express. When he arrived on the ideas for what became the ‘Pathétique’, however, he attacked his work with passion. He’d grappled with ‘fate’ in earlier works, too – most overtly in his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies. The difference here was that Tchaikovsky portrayed fate winning the day, in a revolutionary denial of a conventional triumphant finale that would pave the way for symphonies by Mahler, Shostakovich and many others.

Rather than conveying a secret story, the true power of the ‘Pathétique’ lies in its audacious determination to replace the public optimism and joy of earlier symphonies with very private pain and sorrow. Its fundamental battle is launched in the first movement’s collision of hope and despair, energy and agony. Its two central movements serve almost as interludes, the second a lopsided but nonetheless sensual waltz in 5/4 time, the third offering an ironically hollow doppelgänger of a conventional triumphant finale. The symphony’s devastating true finale demonstrates Tchaikovsky at his most radical, as the music returns inescapably to its sorrowful opening theme, before simply slipping into silence at its close.

^{Programme note © David Kettle
David Kettle is an Edinburgh-based writer and editor who contributes regularly to The Scotsman, The Daily Telegraph, The List and The Strad.}

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

After study at the School of Jurisprudence and four years working in the Ministry of Justice, Tchaikovsky enrolled at the newly founded St Petersburg Conservatory (1862–5). He came into contact with the ‘The Five’, whose leader, Balakirev, supervised the younger composer's Romeo and Juliet overture (1869), which already displayed a gift for tragic lyricism. Despite his homosexuality, he married a young female admirer of his music in 1877, which proved disastrous after a matter of weeks. That year also saw the beginning of a 14-year association with Nadezhda von Meck: though they never met, she acted as Tchaikovsky's benefactress and soulmate by correspondence, and the ballet Swan Lake, the Fourth Symphony and the opera Eugene Onegin were the results of her support. A fallow period followed the successful Violin Concerto (1878), lasting until the symphony Manfred (1884). Between 1890 and 1892 he wrote two further ballets, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, demonstrating a skill and seriousness of purpose in the medium unusual for a composer principally renowned for his symphonies. He died, possibly through suicide, within 10 days of conducting the premiere of his Sixth Symphony.

^{Profile © Edward Bhesania}

Biographies

Nathalie Stutzmann conductor

When Nathalie Stutzmann takes up her post as Music Director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra at the start of the 2022/23 season, she will become the second woman in history – after Marin Alsop – to lead a major American orchestra. This season she began her three-year tenure as Principal Guest Conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. She is also Chief Conductor of the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra, Norway.

She pursues her conducting career while continuing her work as a leading contralto, in which capacity she has appeared with the world’s leading orchestras and made over 80 recordings. She studied conducting with the legendary Finnish teacher Jorma Panula and was also mentored by Seiji Ozawa and Sir Simon Rattle.

Recent and future guest-conducting highlights include appearances with the Helsinki Radio, London, Pittsburgh and San Francisco Symphony orchestras, the Munich, New York, Oslo and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic orchestras, Minnesota Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris and NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, Hamburg. In 2019 she made her BBC Proms conducting debut, performing Wagner, Brahms and Mozart.

Having also established a strong reputation as an opera conductor, she has led productions of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in Monte Carlo and Boito’s Mefistofele in Provence. This year she conducts Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades in Brussels, followed next year by new productions of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute in New York.

Her newest album, Contralto, in which she both sings and conducts Baroque opera arias, was released in January 2021: it was named ‘Exceptional’ by Spain’s Scherzo magazine and was awarded a ‘Diamant d’Opéra Magazine’ in France and a ‘Classique d’Or’ by RTL Luxembourg.

Nathalie Stutzmann was named Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur and Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.