Program Notes

Dieterich Buxtehude (1637-1707)

Chaconne in E minor

A renowned virtuoso and one of the most important composers of the middle Baroque period, the German-Danish Dieterich Buxtehude spent most of his career as organist of the Marienkirche in the northern German city of Lübeck. Like later composers including J.S. Bach, Handel and Telemann, he combined his church duties with outside activities, most notably a series of evening concerts known as Abendmusiken. The concerts made the Marienkirche a magnet for musicians in that part of Europe. The 20-year-old Bach journeyed on foot from Arnstadt, a distance of 260 miles, to listen to and learn from Buxtehude, and Handel and Johann Mattheson also made the pilgrimage to Lübeck, where the soon-to-retire Buxtehude offered each his job on the condition that his successor marry his daughter; both declined.

Among Buxtehude’s extensive catalog of organ works are several chaconnes and passacaglias, pieces which use variation techniques over short, repeated harmonic progressions. The orchestral arrangement of the E minor chaconne in tonight’s program was made by the Mexican composer and conductor Carlos Chavez in 1937.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Orchestral Suite No. 2

European music in J.S. Bach’s time was in a state of transcontinental ferment as composers and musicians – and the relatively new medium of printed sheet music – transported local and national styles across state lines. Such was the context in which Bach, whose entire life was circumscribed within a relatively small area of northern Germany, assimilated diverse musical currents and became the most universal of composers.

Bach had direct experience of French music at an early age, when as a teenager he heard the orchestra kept by the Duke of Celle. The mostly French players would likely have performed orchestral suites, a form that originated in France as collections of dance movements extracted from stage works. The francophile tastes of German courts in the first half of the 18th century created increasing demand for these Ouvertures, as they were also known, and German composers including Telemann, Johann Kuhnau and Johann Friedrich Fasch turned out suites by the dozens.

Bach’s four orchestral suites, the most French-accented of his music, date from between roughly 1720, when he was writing secular music for Prince Leopold in Anhalt-Cöthen, and the early 1730s, when he served as both Kantor of Leipzig’s Thomasschule and director of the city’s Collegium Musicum. The exact chronology of the suites is impossible to determine, but the suite now known as the second was likely written last, for the Collegium, in the late 1730s. It begins with a stately overture, characterized by typically French dotted rhythms and containing a lively, contrapuntal central section, followed by a series of dance movements closing with a lively Badinerie. Several sections – including the central part of the Overture, the Badinerie and the Double – are distinguished by a dazzling, technically demanding flute part, giving the suite a concerto-like character; it has been suggested that Bach wrote it specifically for the French virtuoso Pierre-Gabriel Buffardin, the principal flautist at the court of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden.

Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)

Symphony No. 7

The premiere of Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony on December 30, 1884, was a triumph a long time in coming. An insecure, unsophisticated, pious Catholic from humble Austrian village origins, Bruckner strove for many years to achieve the same success in the concert hall that, as a gifted organist, he enjoyed on the organ bench. His obsessive hard work and relentless self-criticism helped precipitate a nervous breakdown that put him in a sanatorium for three months when he was 42; when it came to criticism from outside, the press was pleased to oblige, savaging him mercilessly. He was 56 when the premiere of the Fourth Symphony finally brought him some recognition as a capable symphonist, and 60 when the Seventh was immediately received as an unqualified success. It remains his most popular work.

He claimed that the principal theme of the opening Allegro moderato, a lyrical line in horns and cello ascending from a penumbra of tremolo strings, came to him in a dream. Two contrasting subjects are introduced, a more subdued theme announced by oboe and clarinet, and a dancelike theme in strings; a thoughtful development leads to recapitulation and an extensive coda over an unchanging E in the bass. The subsequent Adagio was written shortly after Bruckner learned that Wagner, whom he idolized, was near death, and may have been intended as an elegy. It incorporates Wagner tubas, the deep-voiced horns Wagner developed for use in the Ring cycle, as well as quotes from Tristan und Isolde and Bruckner’s own Te Deum. The climax features a cymbal crash that Arthur Nikisch, who conducted the premiere with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, persuaded Bruckner to add to the score; some performances omit this controversial afterthought.

The hearty Scherzo opens with an octave-leaping trumpet call which Bruckner said was inspired by a rooster’s crow; its Trio resembles a Ländler, an Austrian folk dance, complete with rustic droning notes. A tripping theme in the violins ushers in the exciting finale. Intertwined in the development with a chorale-like second subject over pizzicato low strings, it is ultimately revealed to be an adaptation of the symphony’s opening theme, and with that revelation the piece ends in a blaze of glory. This closing movement is at once naïve, ingeniously constructed and suffused with beneficence and affirmation, recalling Mahler’s characterization of Bruckner as “half simpleton, half God.”