When Riccardo Muti was a boy growing up in the southern Italian town of Molfetta, just north of Bari on the shore of the Adriatic Sea, he and his family traveled by carriage one night to Castel del Monte, the celebrated 13th-century octagonal castle that stands on a rocky hill, dominating the Apulian countryside. They arrived at dawn. “Opening the curtains,” Muti recalled much later, “I was surprised to find the castle built by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II right before my eyes, like an enormous crown fallen from heaven, a striking sight I’ve never forgotten.” Throughout his years as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s music director, a photo of the Castel del Monte hung in Muti’s studio in Orchestra Hall—a memento of his childhood and a reminder of the piece of land he now owns and loves to visit that sits nearby.
When Philip Glass came to Chicago for the orchestra’s first performance of his 11th Symphony under Muti’s direction in February 2022, Glass noticed the photo hanging on the wall. He and Muti began to talk, and in a way that can only happen when two creative spirits are charmed to meet and get to know one another a bit, that brief encounter was the inspiration for this new piece that Glass has written for Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Glass first came to Chicago in 1952, at the age of 15, to begin an unusual University of Chicago program that allowed students to skip their last two years of high school and begin a university education. He soon found his way to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra just as it was beginning to work with its new music director, Fritz Reiner, and was playing at the peak of its powers. On Friday afternoons, Glass hopped the Illinois Central train from Hyde Park to Orchestra Hall to buy a cheap student ticket to the orchestra’s matinee programs. Last year—sitting in a box this time—for the first time Glass heard the orchestra that he had admired 70 years earlier in Bartók and Stravinsky play his own music. The Triumph of the Octagon is the first work he has written with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in mind.
Glass’s title, The Triumph of the Octagon, refers to the castle’s famous eight-sided floor plan, with eight octagonal towers at each of the eight points—a layout of exceptional precision and rarity in the 13th century. In 1996, Castel del Monte (Castle of the Mountain) was named a UNESCO World Heritage site, as a unique piece of medieval architecture; it is also the basis for the castle in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, and appears on the Italian-issued 1 euro cent coin. Now, with Glass’s new score, the Castel del Monte joins the very slight list of architectural landmarks that have inspired music—a structure built of sustained chords and rolling arpeggios rather than blocks of limestone.
In February 2022, I traveled to Chicago for performances of my Symphony No. 11. It was a thrill to hear this great orchestra and conductor in the hall where I would visit as a student in the early 1950s. After those performances, we began conversations about writing a new piece specifically for this orchestra with the initial idea to create an “Adagio for Muti.” The final title of the work came from a suggestion from Maestro Riccardo Muti about Castel del Monte, a 13th-century castle in southeastern Italy.
The mystery of this ancient place and the uniqueness of its geometric proportions, specifically its eight octagonal towers, was an interesting catalyst; while I have written music about people, places, events, and cultures, I cannot recall ever composing a piece about a building. What became clear was that I was not writing a piece about Castel del Monte per se, but rather about one’s imagination when we consider such a place.
I dedicate this work to Maestro Muti, in honor of his many successes as conductor of the CSO and important contributions to the world of music.
—Philip Glass
We owe this music to Goethe. At his recommendation, Mendelssohn went to Italy, and there, struck by the landscape and a brilliance of sunlight, and the disposition of a people previously unknown to him, began his A-Major Symphony—a product of the northern mind intoxicated by the Mediterranean spirit. Mendelssohn’s grand tour, lasting two years and undertaken with no guide other than Goethe’s comments, allowed him to see the whole of life in a new perspective. When Mendelssohn wrote home to his sister Fanny, he noted, with obvious surprise, that his new A-major symphony was the “most cheerful piece I have yet composed.”
Mendelssohn stopped to visit Goethe in May 1830, just before he began his Italian journey. He played the piano for Goethe every day, sometimes choosing his own music, or works by Bach and Weber; once he tried, with utter failure, to interest the 80-year-old master in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. They parted, not knowing it was the last time they would see each other. Mendelssohn landed in Venice on October 9. For months he wandered the Italian countryside, lingering in Florence and Rome.
In the meantime, music was beginning to take shape. On December 20, Mendelssohn wrote home, “After the new year I intend to resume instrumental music and to write several things for the piano, and probably a symphony of some kind, for two have been haunting my brain.” Mendelssohn stayed in Rome through Easter to hear the music at St. Peter’s, and then left for Naples, where he expected to write the only remaining movement, the Adagio. “If I continue in my present mood,” he wrote shortly after arriving, “I shall finish my ‘Italian’ symphony ... in Italy.”
When Mendelssohn returned home, however, the A-Major Symphony wasn’t done. Even after the score was completed, in chilly Berlin on March 13,1833, Mendelssohn wasn’t satisfied. In May he conducted the “Italian” Symphony in London, but afterward he put it back on the shelf, like a disappointing souvenir of his great journey. From time to time, he would take it down and tinker with it, but he never thought highly enough of the music to send it to his publisher. After Mendelssohn’s premature death in 1847, several of his scores, including the “Italian” Symphony, were finally published, widely performed, and welcomed into the repertoire.
It’s hard to imagine what Mendelssohn found to fault in this nearly perfect symphony. Perhaps, as the English critic Donald Tovey suggested, “an instinct deeper than his conscious self-criticism may have prevented him from altering it.” The opening is one of but a handful in all music that is instantly recognizable simply by its sonority—rapid-fire, repeated wind chords set in motion by one giant pizzicato plucking of the strings—even before Mendelssohn’s famous, bustling melody gets going. The melody itself is one of the composer’s most natural and unforced, racing unstopped over the hills and valleys of the movement, slowing only to make way for a lovely clarinet solo.
Mendelssohn waited until he got to Naples to write the Adagio, a movement of particular grace and nobility. The composer and pianist Ignaz Moscheles said that Mendelssohn took his theme from Czech pilgrims; Tovey heard a religious procession passing through Naples. Mendelssohn himself didn’t comment, perhaps assuming that music of such obvious beauty didn’t require a setting. The third movement—more minuet than scherzo—is colored with the composer’s characteristic light touch, though the sober trio in particular proves that one can still say serious things lightly. Mendelssohn called his finale a saltarello (the fast and jumpy Italian folk dance); some claim it’s more like the tarantella, once prescribed as a cure for the bite of the tarantula. Unlike either, and going against the grain of virtually all symphonic finales known to Mendelssohn, this dance begins in the minor mode and stays there to the last chord. Despite its bitter cast, it makes a brilliant and decisive ending.
“I will never be converted to Italian music,” Richard Strauss wrote to his father, Munich’s most celebrated horn player, during his first trip to Italy in the summer of 1886. But Aus Italien, the large-scale symphonic work he began sketching as soon as he arrived, is, in fact, a love poem to Italy in all its splendor—its ancient ruins, the bucolic countryside, the glory of its paintings and sculpture, and, yes, its music. Strauss began to sketch musical ideas almost as soon as he arrived; Aus Italien, the work he ultimately fashioned from his musical snapshots, is, along with Berlioz’s Harold in Italy and Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, one of the great musical travelogues.
By Strauss’s own yardstick, Aus Italien was his earliest significant work. “This is the first work of mine to have met with opposition from the mob, so it must be of some importance,” he wrote after the premiere in Munich on March 2, 1887 (less than a month after the premiere of Verdi’s Otello in Milan). He said that he was “immensely proud” of the controversy it stirred: “Some people applauded lustily, others hissed loudly, but finally the applause won the day.”
Strauss himself described Aus Italien as “the connecting link between the old and the new methods” of composition. It is, in other words, the transition between those early orchestral pieces of his that we rarely hear today—the first horn concerto, a Burlesque for piano and orchestra, the F-Minor Symphony—and the landmark tone poems that immediately followed—beginning with Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration—that would make him almost unimaginably famous. Strauss himself called Aus Italien a “symphonic fantasy,” suggesting its hybrid status between a four-movement symphony with pictorial qualities—a descendant of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony of a half-century earlier—and the rich programmatic works by Liszt. Composed just one year after Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, Strauss’s new score opens the window wide on a different kind of orchestral landscape altogether. (There is no escaping a new influence on Strauss, as well: On his way home from Italy, Strauss stopped over in Bayreuth to hear Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal.)
All the characteristics of the soon-to-be-famous Strauss are already present in Aus Italien, except perhaps for economy (and that would never become Strauss’s strong suit). On page after page of Aus Italien we find the bold orchestral swagger of Don Juan, or the broad lyric outpouring of Death and Transfiguration, the brilliantly descriptive writing of Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks—works that were all written within the next decade. Strauss still owes a great deal to Brahms’s orchestral music, but, as he pointed out, with Aus Italien he was taking “a first step toward independence” as a tone poet.
Aus Italien was the only work for which Strauss published a specific program, later learning to trust that the music could speak for itself. The first movement, marked Andante and titled “In the Country,” suggests the magical effect of the Roman countryside “bathed in sunlight as seen from the Villa d’Este at Tivoli.” This expansive and atmospheric music, which Strauss called a prelude, comes the closest to the model of the symphonic poem by Liszt, another influential composer who found musical inspiration in his Italian travels. The second movement, inspired by standing amid the Roman ruins, conveys “fantastic images of vanished glory, feelings of melancholy and grief amid the brilliant sunshine of the present.” Strauss said it resembled a “great symphonic first movement,” and the shadow of Brahms lingers over much of this music, even though Strauss, finally finding his own voice, knew that Brahms was the past. “On the Shores of Sorrento,” Strauss’s third movement, is his first effort at serious musical pictorialism—the rustling of the wind, birdsong, “the distant murmur of the sea”—and with these few exquisitely scored pages he suggests that this will prove to be one of his greatest talents. The finale is based on “a well-known Neapolitan folk song” and, at the end, “a tarantella which the composer heard in Sorrento.” The first tune, so ubiquitous and natural sounding that Strauss mistook it for folk song, is, in fact, the ever-popular “Funiculì, funiculà” composed by Luigi Danza in 1880 to celebrate the new funicular railway on Mount Vesuvius, which put on a spectacular show the day Strauss visited. The entire movement—“a hilarious jumble of themes,” as Strauss admitted—is colored by fireworks of its own and was meant to depict “the colorful bustle of Naples.” The tarantella eventually sweeps the finale to its conclusion, though not without a fond glance back at the glorious Italian countryside.
—Phillip Huscher