Overture Magazine - 2015-2016 Season January-February 2016 | Page 33

program notes {
the Decca Label, garnering Grammy,
Mercury, Gramophone and Echo Klassik
awards in the process.
Among Mr. Bell’s many accolades are
The Avery Fisher Prize, the Paul Newman Award from Arts Horizons and the
Huberman Award from Moment Magazine. Mr. Bell received the Humanitarian
Award from Seton Hall University and
has been inducted into the Hollywood
Bowl Hall of Fame.
Perhaps the event that helped most to
transform his reputation from “musician’s
musician” to household name was his
incognito performance in a Washington,
D.C. subway station in 2007. Ever adventurous, Bell had agreed to participate in
the Washington Post story by Gene Weingarten that thoughtfully examined art
and context. The story earned Weingarten
a Pulitzer Prize and sparked an international firestorm of discussion.
Growing up in Bloomington, Indiana,
Mr. Bell began playing violin at age 4. He
holds an artist diploma in Violin Performance from Indiana University where he
currently serves as a senior lecturer at the
Jacobs School of Music.
Joshua Bell last appeared with the BSO
in June 2006, performing Corigliano's
Violin Concerto (The Red Violin), with
Marin Alsop conducting.

About the concert:
Overture to William Tell

Gioachino Rossini

Born in Pesaro, Italy. February 29, 1792;
died in Passy, near Paris, France,
November 13, 1868

Although he didn’t know it at the time,
William Tell was to be the last of Gioachino
Rossini’s many operas. Only 37 years old
when it was premiered in Paris on August
3, 1829, Rossini had no plans to retire, but
somehow his workaholic period between
ages 17 and 36 (during which he composed
more than 30 operas, most of them smash
hits) finally caught up with him. Too
wealthy to need to work anymore, he lived
on for another 40 years: writing very little

music, growing fat (tournedos Rossini was
named for him), and wittily presiding over
one of Paris’ liveliest salons.
Although it contains some of Rossini’s
greatest music, William Tell is rarely staged
today. Weighing in at five epic acts, it is
difficult to produce and, moreover, boasts
a demanding lead tenor role that few today
can sing. Not a scintillating comedy like
The Barber of Seville, it is a serious, highly
embellished retelling of the William Tell
myth, based on Friedrich Schiller’s dramatic play, set in 13th-century Switzerland.
But its overture has had quite a different fate. A miniature tone poem in four
sections, it is the greatest of Rossini’s
countless overtures and one of the most
famous ever written. How it must have
thrilled its first audiences who didn’t
automatically associate its galloping
finale with the Lone Ranger and “Hi-oh,
Silver”! Opening with an extraordinary
passage for five solo cellists setting a
brooding atmosphere of Switzerland
suffering under Austrian oppression, it is
a tour de force for orchestra. Next comes
a thrilling mountain thunderstorm that
even Richard Strauss might envy. Minor
mode brightens to major as the clouds
roll away for a peaceful Swiss landscape,
featuring an authentic Swiss ranz de
vaches (cattle-calling song) tune for English horn and flute. Finally, the famous
trumpet call announces the arrival of the
Masked Man. But Rossini actually labeled this music “Victory and Liberty,” as
the orchestra foretells Tell’s liberation of
the Swiss people from Austrian tyranny.
Also sprach Zarathustra

Richard Strauss

Born in Munich, June 11, 1864; died in
Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria,
September 8, 1949

With his sixth tone poem, Also sprach
Zarathustra of 1896, Richard Strauss
decisively proved that he was the most audacious composer in Europe. Not content
to express a straightforward story in music
as he had done with his previous Don Juan
and Till Eulenspiegel, here he took on the
most controversial philosophical treatise of

the day: Friedrich Nietzsche’s eponymous
book, published just three years earlier.
Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra is a
series of 80 discourses on a variety of moral
and philosophical topics, each of them
ending with the phrase (in English): “Thus
spake Zarathustra.” “Zarathustra” is the
German rendering of Zoroaster, the 6th
century B.C. Persian religious philosopher
whose teachings are still followed by the
Zoroastrians of India and the Middle East.
But the ideas promulgated in Nietzsche’s
work are his own. His Zarathustra lives
apart from the world on a lofty mountaintop, from which he descends periodically
to share his wisdom with unenlightened
humanity. Very roughly, Nietzsche opposed the constraints on man’s thinking
and action imposed by traditional systems,
including religion and science; humankind
must cast them away in order to achieve a
higher state of enlightenment. The goal is
a new order of being: the Übermensch or
Superman, a concept hideously distorted
by the Nazis in the 20th century.
As well as being drawn to Nietzsche’s
rejection of traditional religion, Strauss was
also attracted by the poetic beauty of his
language. (The philosopher was himself a
well trained musician and onetime disciple
of Wagner, and in his autobiography
commented that his Zarathustra could
be considered “a musical composition.”)
And despite the vilification he received,
Strauss was actually very conscious of the
limitations of what his music could do. As
he explained: “I did not intend to write
philosophical music or portray Nietzsche’s
great work musically. I meant rather to
convey in music an idea of the evolution of
the human race from its origin, through
the various phases of development, religious
as well as scientific, up to the ... idea of the
Übermensch. The whole symphonic poem
is intended as my homage to the genius
of Nietzsche.”
Strauss’ tone poem is in one long,
interlinked movement: the spectacular prologue (now firmly associated with Stanley
Kubrick’s 1968 film epic 2001: A Space
Odyssey), eight sections bearing titles from
Nietz