In the fall of 1823, Schubert was asked to provide incidental music for the play Rosamunde, Fürstin von Zypern (“Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus”) by Wilhelmine von Chezny. Madame von Chezny had been the librettist for Weber’s opera Euryanthe, an opera Schubert did not like, but he was anxious for a stage success and quickly accepted the assignment. Schubert was pressed for time, however, and–working at white heat–he wrote three entr’actes, two ballets, a Shepherd’s Melody, and several choruses, but he did not have time to write an overture. He solved this problem by resorting to a trick Rossini also used: he substituted the overture he had written three years earlier for a performance of Hofmann’s melodrama Die Zauberharfe (“The Magic Harp”).

The Viennese public did not have much time to enjoy Schubert’s music. Madame von Chezny’s play was apparently dreadful beyond imagination–it opened on December 20 and folded after two performances. Like many other artists associated with a failure, Schubert was left begging to be paid for his efforts. To von Chezny he wrote: “As regards the price of the music, I do not think I can put it at less than 100 florins without depreciating the music itself. In case that price should be too high, I beg your honor to fix the price yourself, but not at much below the above-named figure.”

The play may have vanished, but Schubert’s overture, ballet music, and entr’actes have found enduring life in the concert hall, and this concert begins with a performance of the entr’acte heard after the third act. The fourth act opens with Rosamunde tending her flock in a pastoral setting, and Schubert’s interlude between the acts prepares that gentle scene gracefully. A flowing opening melody alternates with somewhat more jaunty material before Schubert rounds matters off with a final recall of the opening theme.

Schubert recognized that there would be no more performances of the play and thus of his incidental music, but he was particularly fond of this entr’acte and did not want it to disappear. He re-used its opening melody in the slow movement of his String Quartet in A Minor (1824) and in his Impromptu in B-flat Major (1827).

Program note by Phillip Huscher

Anna Clyne is a composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music, combining resonant soundscapes with propelling textures that weave, morph, and collide in dramatic explosions. Her work, which includes collaborative projects with cutting-edge choreographers, filmmakers, visual artists, and musicians, has been commissioned and performed worldwide. She was appointed one of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composers-in-Residence by Riccardo Muti, along with Mason Bates, and took up the post in the 2010–11 season.

Born in London and raised in the U.K., Clyne began her musical studies on a piano with randomly missing keys. As she began to find her way across the keyboard, she simultaneously began to compose. At the age of eleven, she wrote and performed her first fully notated piece for flute and piano. She continued to compose sporadically, but when she moved to Edinburgh in 1998, then to Ontario in 2000, and finally to New York in 2002, these richly artistic environments brought her music to life through a myriad of people, coincidences, adventures, twists and turns, and collaborations. Clyne’s music has been composed for and programmed by such artists as Björk, Martin Scorsese, ETHEL, and BalletX. Clyne holds degrees from Edinburgh University and the Manhattan School of Music. Her principal teachers include Julia Wolfe, Marina Adamia, and Marjan Mozetich.

Anna Clyne on Night Ferry

I come to ferry you hence across the tide
To endless night, fierce fires and shramming cold.
–Dante

To those who by the dint of glass and vapour,
Discover stars, and sail in the wind’s eye
–Byron

Night Ferry is music of voyages, from stormy darkness to enchanted worlds. It is music of the conjurer and setter of tides, the guide through the “ungovernable and dangerous.” Exploring a winding path between explosive turbulent chaoticism and chamber lyricism, this piece weaves many threads of ideas and imagery. These stem from Riccardo Muti’s suggestion that I look to Schubert for inspiration, as Night Ferry will be premiered with the Entr’acte No. 3 from Rosamunde and his Symphony No. 9 (Great).
The title, Night Ferry, came from a passage in Seamus Heaney’s Elegy for Robert Lowell, an American poet who, like Schubert, suffered from manic depression:

You were our Night Ferry
thudding in a big sea,
the whole craft ringing
with an armourer’s music
the course set wilfully across
the ungovernable and dangerous

More specifically, Schubert suffered from cyclothymia, a form of manic-depression that is characterized by severe mood swings, ranging from agonizing depression to hypomania, a mild form of mania characterized by an elevated mood and often associated with lucid thoughts and heightened creativity. This illness sometimes manifests in rapid shifts between the two states and also in periods of mixed states, whereby symptoms of both extremes are present. This illness shadowed Schubert throughout his adulthood, and it impacted and inspired his art dramatically. His friends report that in its most troublesome form, he suffered periods of “dark despair and violent anger.” Schubert asserted that whenever he wrote songs of love, he wrote songs of pain, and whenever he wrote songs of pain, he wrote songs of love. Extremes were an organic part of his make-up.
In its essence, Night Ferry is a sonic portrait of voyages; voyages within nature and of physical, mental, and emotional states. I decided to try a new process in creating this work– simultaneously painting the music whilst writing it. On my wall, I taped seven large canvasses, side by side, horizontally, each divided into three sub-sections. This became my visual timeline for the duration of the music. In correlation to composing the music, I painted from left to right, moving forward through time. I painted a section, then composed a section, and vice versa, intertwining the two in the creative process.
The process of unraveling the music visually helped to spark ideas for musical motifs, development, orchestration, and, in particular, structure. Similarly, the music would also give direction to color, texture, and form. Upon the canvas, I layered paint; charcoal; pencil; pen; ribbon; gauze; snippets of text from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; fragments of Gustav Doré’s illustrations for this wonderfully evocative poem; and a selection of quotes from artists afflicted with, and blessed by, this fascinating illness.
The first text written on the canvas, to the far left side, in the bottom left corner reads “from a slow and powerful root . . . somewhere on the sea floor.” These are a couple of lines, quoted out of order, from Rumi’s poem Where Everything Is Music. Copied below is a passage from this beautiful poem, in translation by Coleman Barks. His words unite the profound depth, power, and parallels of nature and the human existence as conveyed in Heaney’s image of Lowell as a “Night Ferry.”

We have fallen into the place
where everything is music . . .
This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.
Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!
They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can’t see

In addition to the above, I also found inspiration from the extraordinary power of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Maestro Muti’s baton, and also the unique voices of the individual musicians within the orchestra. Writing for an orchestra is usually an anonymous endeavor, but I am in the fortunate position of knowing the musicians and their musical voices through this residency. I found myself not writing solely for the instruments, but for the specific musicians of the CSO. Thank you to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for this wonderful opportunity.

Symphony No. 9 in C Major, D. 944, "Great"
FRANZ SCHUBERT

Schubert’s final year has become the stuff of legend. Before he died in November 1828 at age 31, he composed a series of extraordinary masterpieces, including the Mass in E-flat Major, three final piano sonatas, the songs of the Schwanengesang cycle, and the Cello Quintet. Towering above all these is his “Great” C Major Symphony, whose manuscript is dated March 1828. And, as the legend has it, Schubert never heard a note of any of these works–the manuscripts were consigned to dusty shelves upon his death, and it was years before the music was performed, much longer before it was understood. Not until eleven years after Schubert’s death did Robert Schumann discover the manuscript of the symphony in Vienna and send it off to Leipzig, where Felix Mendelssohn led the première on March 21, 1839. That dramatic beginning established it as one of the masterpieces of the symphonic literature.

This has always made a terrific story, even though most of it is untrue. Recent research (which includes dating the manuscript paper that Schubert used in different years) has shown that he actually composed this symphony during the summer of 1825. He had recently recovered from a serious illness, and now he went on a walking tour of Upper Austria with his friend, the baritone Michael Vogl. In the town of Gmunden, mid-way between Salzburg and Linz, Schubert began to sketch a symphony and worked on it all that summer and over the next two years (the date “March 1828” on the manuscript may be the date of final revisions). And Schubert did hear at least some of this music. Orchestral parts were copied, and the orchestra of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde played through it in the composer’s presence before rejecting it as too difficult. Far from being welcomed into the repertory following Mendelssohn’s première, the symphony actually made its way very slowly. Attempts to perform it in London and Paris in the 1840s foundered when players jeered the music and refused to continue because of its difficulty; the American première had occurred (1851) before this symphony was heard in those two cities.

Schubert scores the symphony for classical orchestra (pairs of winds, plus timpani and strings), but he makes one addition that transforms everything. To Mozart’s orchestra he adds three trombones, which are given important roles thematically (it is part of the originality of this symphony that Schubert is willing, for the first time, to treat the trombone as a thematic–rather than supportive–instrument). Their tonal heft dictates a greatly increased string section and occasional doubling of the woodwind parts, and everything about this music–its sonority and range of expression–suggests that Schubert envisioned its performance by a large orchestra.

Very early this symphony acquired the nickname “Great,” a description that needs to be understood carefully. It was originally called the“Great C-Major” to distinguish it from Schubert’s brief Symphony No. 6 in C Major, inevitably called the “Little C-Major.” And so in its original sense, “Great” was an indication only of relative size. But that description has stuck to this music, and if ever a symphony deserved to be called “Great,” thisis it.

It has a magic beginning. In unison, two horns sound a long call that seems to come from a great distance. In the classical symphony, the slow introduction usually had nothing to do thematically with the sonata-form first movement that followed but served only to call matters to order and prepare the way for the Allegro. It is one more mark of Schubert’s new vision that this slow introduction will have important functions in the main body of the movement. Schubert repeats this opening melody in various guises before the music rushes into the Allegro ma non troppo, where strings surge ahead on sturdy dotted rhythms while woodwinds respond with chattering triplets–Schubert will fully exploit the energizing contrast between these two rhythms. The second subject, a lilting tune for woodwinds, arrives in the “wrong” key of E minor (Schubert deftly nudges it into the “correct” key of G major), and all seems set for a proper exposition, when Schubert springs one of his best surprises: very softly, trombones intone the horn theme from the very beginning, their dark color giving that noble tune an ominous power. That theme now begins to penetrate this movement, and the rhythm of its second measure will take on a thematic importance of its own. The development is brief, but the recapitulation is full, and Schubert drives the movement to a thrilling conclusion: trombones push the music forward powerfully, and the opening horn call is shouted out in all its glory as the movement hammers to its close.
The slow movement is marked Andante con moto, and the walking tempo implied in that title makes itself felt in the music’s steady tread. A solo oboe sings the sprightly main theme, while the peaceful second subject arrives in the strings. There is no development, but Schubert creates another moment of pure magic: over softly-pulsing string chords, a solo horn (once again sounding as if from far away) leads the way into the recapitulation. Schumann’s description of this passage, often quoted, is worth hearing again: “Here everyone is hushed and listening, as though some heavenly visitant were quietly stealing through the orchestra.” The recapitulation itself is not literal, and Schubert drives to a great climax where the music is suddenly ripped into a moment of silence, the only point in the entire movement where the steady opening tread is not heard. Only gradually does the orchestra recover as the cellos lead to a luminous restatement of the second subject, now richly embellished.

The Allegro vivace is the expected scherzo and trio, but again Schubert surprises us: the movement is in sonata form and develops over such a generous span that if all repeats are taken, it can approach the length of the two opening movements. Strings stamp out the powerful opening, and violins soar and plunge as it begins to develop. Part of the pleasure here lies in the way Schubert transforms the sledgehammer power of the opening into a series of terraced, needle-sharp entrances in the course of the development. By contrast, the trio sings with a rollicking charm before horns lead the way back to a literal reprise of the scherzo.

The finale, also marked Allegro vivace, opens with a salvo of bright fanfares. So quickly do these whip past that one does not at first recognize that they make the same contrast between dotted and triplet rhythms that powered the first movement–now these return to drive the finale along a shaft of white-hot energy. This is the movement that caused early orchestras to balk, and it remains very difficult, particularly for the strings. It is in sonata form with two subjects, the first growing smoothly out of the flying triplets and a second that rides along the energy of four pounding chords. The first theme provides the speed–those showers of triplets almost seem to throw sparks through the hall–while the second subject and its pounding chords take on a menacing strength as Schubert builds to the climax. Along the way, attentive listeners will hear a whiff of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and Schubert’s own close is as powerful as those of the master he so much admired.