Symphonie Fantastique

January 23 – 26, 2025

GIEDRĖ ŠLEKYTĖ conducts
ERIN HANNIGAN oboe

HANNAH EISENDLE Heliosis
R. STRAUSS Oboe Concerto
BERLIOZ Symphonie Fantastique

A work of opulent orchestral colors and effects that tells a “fantastic” story, starring Hector Berlioz himself, besotted with a Shakespearian actress. His passion-propelled Symphonie Fantastique follows the love-sick hero’s drug-induced visions to a glittering ball, the march to the scaffold and a demonic Witches’ Sabbath with the Dies irae pounding out a hair-raising theme amid tumult. Giedrė Šlekytė “the embodiment of youthful energy, enthusiasm, and determination“(La scena musicale) makes her DSO premiere leading Strauss’s tuneful Oboe Concerto, with Principal Oboe Erin Hannigan in the spotlight. 


View Program Notes


Join us for a special pre-concert talk with Assistant Conductor Shira Samuels-Shragg! The talks will take place from Horchow Hall starting at 6:30pm on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and 2:00pm on Sunday.

WRR101 Interview with Erin Hannigan

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Giedrė Šlekytė

Conductor

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Erin Hannigan

Principal Oboe

Nancy P. & John G. Penson Chair

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Program Notes

by René Spencer Saller

If 31-year-old Eisendle (pronounced EYE-zend-luh) lives as long as Richard Strauss, another half-century or so, her career path looks almost limitless. Like Strauss and Berlioz, the other composers on this program, she is a skilled conductor. Praised for her interpretations of 20th- and 21st-century repertoire, the Vienna native has conducted the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Tonkünstler-Orchestra, the Göttingen Symphony Orchestra, the Wiener Concert Verein, the Johann Strauss Festival Orchestra Vienna, the Carinthian Symphony Orchestra and other leading ensembles. In 2023 Eisendle was appointed Kapellmeister and répétiteur at the Stadttheater Klagenfurt, where she made her debut with Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. More recently, she was selected as musical director of Wiener Blut for the Johann Strauss 2025 Vienna Festival.

As a composer, Eisendle finds inspiration in the seemingly mundane, the endless array of random sounds and noises, accidental melodies and rhythms, that float up from the street to her balcony. She explained in a recent video interview that she listens for intriguing sounds among the ambient noises that most of us tune out, then tries to translate them into her own harmonic language, sometimes improvising on the piano until she gets it right.

In heliosis she explores the sensation of heat, using relentless rhythms, iridescent textures and quasi-pictorial instrumental effects to convey both the life-giving and deadly powers of her subject. The title refers to the medical term for sunstroke, derived from helios, the Greek word for the sun. Commissioned in 2021 by the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna (RSO), heliosis received its premiere the following year, under Alsop’s baton, at the 2022 BBC Proms.

The Composer Speaks

“A summer piece, but not the kind with a clear landscape under sky blue and sunshine. Dirty, sultry, sticky soot. Being thrown into a desert. Sun, burning over sandy dunes and jagged cairns. Heat that robs the breath, numbs, dazes. Glaringly awake presence tries to fight back. Overstimulated senses, split consciousness—controlled focusing and ordering against letting go. Stiffening in the corset or passing over into loss of control.

“The opening hurls us precipitously into the midst of a dynamic climax. Rhythmic material explodes. Diverse rhythms convey inflamed senses like the wavering between clear wakefulness and exhausted surrender. A glint of dust in the fiery wind, a billow of heat over asphalt runways. The rhythmic structure pushes relentlessly forward, driven by the glow and without pausing. Like a perpetuum mobile, mechanical. The climax suddenly dies away, yielding space to perceiving astonishment. The machine continues to churn, more subterranean, jolted by small eruptions.

“Responsible for the sonic topography of the desert landscape are the strings, playing on and behind the bridge, letting the intensity of the sun be felt. In between, whispered and whistling soliloquy. High shimmering, deep wafting, strong contrasts between rhythmic stability and oblique interjections. Extreme highs over deep glissandi, swells and compact chords.

“As consciousness splits when overheated, at a certain point the orchestra splits. Tempos slide apart. A unison line, some instruments remaining stable, others ‘taking off. Piu mosso [more motion, or faster]. Incessant.” —Hannah Eisendle

In the last decade of his life, Richard Strauss lived in virtual exile, embittered and broken. Although he had never technically joined the Nazi party, he had been pragmatic, or craven, enough to collaborate when it served his interests. In 1933, after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Strauss was named head of the Reichsmusikkammer, the state music bureau, a job that involved purging German music of its Jewish and modernist elements. Strauss lost the position when he ran afoul of the Gestapo in 1935, after they intercepted a letter he’d written to his librettist, Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew. Seven years later, in despair over the apparent triumph of fascism, Zweig and his wife, Lotte, clasped hands and killed themselves by overdosing on barbiturates.

Strauss opted to survive, which involved a great deal of groveling and back-pedaling. He had a very good reason to swallow his pride: his beloved Jewish daughter-in-law Alice needed his protection, as did his two Jewish grandsons. His waning clout may have saved their lives, but it went only so far. In the summer of 1942 — the same year that the Zweigs committed suicide  Strauss was rebuffed at the gate of the Theresienstadt concentration camp after he attempted, unsuccessfully, to intervene on behalf of Alice’s imprisoned family members. Disgusted by the senseless destruction and cruelty of war, he retreated to his mental sanctuary: the perfect purity of the Classical era. As he explained in a letter to his grandsons, “art is the finest gift of God that exalts over all earthly suffering, and our beloved music is the most delightful.” Although Strauss was eventually cleared during the denazification hearings after the war, his posthumous reputation was tainted by his ties to the Third Reich. He moved to Switzerland to avoid testifying and did not return to Germany until the legal ordeal was over. He died within a year.

An American Oboist’s Request

One of the few foreign occupiers whom Strauss didn’t snub was the American serviceman John de Lancie, a corporal in the U.S. Army unit responsible for securing Garmisch. In his civilian life, de Lancie was principal oboist with the Pittsburgh Symphony. He knew Strauss’s music well and could discuss it with a nerdlike devotion to detail. Strauss took a liking to de Lancie and conversed with him at length, but when the American asked if he would consider writing a concerto for oboe, Strauss said no. Despite this curt refusal, the suggestion took hold in his mind as he considered the unique challenges and rewards of the project. Strauss’s Oboe Concerto is difficult even for the most proficient players, requiring the soloist to play for 56 bars without a break, including during most of the passages scored for full orchestra. Superhuman breath control is a minimal prerequisite: ideally, the oboe emits the kind of “endless melody” that Strauss’ idol Richard Wagner extolled. Strauss finished the Oboe Concerto on September 14, 1945, and completed the orchestration about a month later. It received its premiere on February 26, 1946, in Zürich, with Marcel Saillet as soloist and the Tonhalle Orchester under Volkmar Andreae’s baton. Two years later, while preparing the score for publication, Strauss revised and expanded the coda in the final movement.

De Lancie, who found out about the Oboe Concerto from a newspaper article, was amazed to learn that Strauss had granted him the rights to the U.S. premiere. At the time de Lancie was junior oboe in the Philadelphia Orchestra, and because protocol demanded that solo roles be performed only by the principal, he offered first-performance privileges to his friend Mitch Miller, of the CBS Symphony Orchestra in New York. In addition to performing with jazz legends such as George Gershwin and Charlie Parker, Miller earned mainstream fame as a music producer and host of the hit television show Sing Along with Mitch, which aired from 1961 to 1964.

De Lancie’s only known public performance of the work that he inspired took place on August 30, 1964, in Michigan, at the Interlochen Center for the Arts. By that point he had ascended to the principal oboe position in the Philadelphia Orchestra. Some 23 years later, he recorded the Oboe Concerto for the RCA label.

A Closer Listen

Scored for solo oboe and a small orchestra consisting of paired flutes, clarinets, bassoons and horns, plus English horn and strings, the Oboe Concerto blurs the boundaries between chamber and orchestral music. The plangent voice of the featured instrument reigns supreme but never bullies. The oboe’s name comes from the French phrase haut bois, or “high wood,” with “high” meaning loud in this context, although the pitch is high, too, allowing the treble woodwind to cut through the timbral landscape like a scythe slashes through tall grass.

The concerto is structured in three linked movements, played attaca, or without intervening pauses. The first movement is set in D major, the home key, and opens with a deceptively simple cello-sung figure built on D-E-D-E. Two related ideas follow, including a theme that alludes to both Beethoven’s iconic Fifth Symphony “Fate” motif and Strauss’s tone poem Metamorphosen, a grief-struck “study” for 23 solo string instruments that he completed a few months before starting the Oboe Concerto. About midway through the first movement, the oboe sings a graceful duet with clarinet, one of several passages reminiscent of chamber music. The luminous central Andante, set in B-flat major, has the character of an art song, featuring ardent imitative passages and a lyrical cadenza accompanied by spare plucked strings.

The rollicking, rondo-style third movement returns to D major with a sprightly exchange between flute and oboe, which the violins further elaborate. After the second cadenza, the finale shifts to a lilting Allegro coda in 6/8 time, but Strauss doesn’t linger in lullaby-land very long before the tempo accelerates, driving the concerto to a dramatic close.

With Berlioz, there was always a new passion: a new woman to stalk, a new polemic to publish, a new musical project to launch. His obsession with Harriet Smithson amounted to what the French call a coup de foudre: a lightning strike to the heart. On September 11, 1827, the Irish born actress played Ophelia in a performance of Hamlet that the composer attended. The double-whammy of Smithson and Shakespeare hit him hard.

His love for Shakespeare was chronic and benign. His love for Smithson raged on for several years—never mind that he spoke very little English, she barely any French; never mind that he was, at least at the beginning of the affair, engaged to marry another woman (a woman whom he later plotted to murder, along with her mother and fiancé, but that’s another story). After enduring a violent, confusing courtship, Smithson married Berlioz. Ruin and sorrow ensued.

Although Berlioz didn’t invent musical Romanticism, no one was a better figurehead for its wild early days. His scandalous personal life, his inflammatory music reviews, and his groundbreaking sonic experiments upended the norms of 19th-century concert culture. Symphonie fantastique, his magnum opus, wasn’t merely subversive: it was revolutionary, thrilling and dreadful, a kind of blasphemy.

Symphonic Psychedelia

In 1969, during one of his Young People’s Concerts, Leonard Bernstein called Symphonie fantastique “the first psychedelic symphony in history.” Summarizing its story line, he quipped, “Berlioz tells it like it is. You take a trip, you wind up screaming at your own funeral.”

Bernstein was essentially blurbing the composer’s own program notes, which Berlioz maintained were indispensable for a complete understanding of his work. Earlier symphonies — such as Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony (Pastorale), a major influence on Symphonie fantastique — depicted landscapes and moods, but none told a story so explicitly, with particular melodies and sound effects lining up with specific characters and plot points. Symphonie fantastique is an opera without singers.

Today we recognize Berlioz’s symphonic debut as the archetypal program symphony —music that describes characters, events and emotions, as opposed to absolute music, which is, at least theoretically, nonrepresentational — but audience members at the 1830 Paris premiere were unprepared for such detailed notes, especially on such a sordid topic.

Here’s the synopsis: A sensitive young artist (obviously Berlioz) falls desperately in love with a total stranger (obviously Harriet Smithson); attempts to poison himself with opium; but instead has a nightmare about murdering his beloved, being condemned to death by guillotine, witnessing his own execution, and attending his own funeral in the company of ghouls, witches and devils.

Shock value aside, Symphonie fantastique is a singular achievement. It embodied a new art form, a synthesis of music, literature, drama and autobiography. Berlioz’s oft-mentioned idée fixe — the recurrent melody that serves as his Smithson proxy and unifies the symphony’s five movements — predated the so-called Wagnerian leitmotif. Wagner wasn’t the only composer whom Berlioz influenced. His daring harmonies and arresting instrumental sonorities (the final movement’s col legno bowing, which sounds like rattling skeletons, for example) anticipated similar sound experiments by 20th-century avant-gardists.