Program Notes | Xian Conducts Prokofiev & Strauss

Anton Webern
Born: December 3, 1883 in Vienna, Austria
Died: September 15, 1945 in Mittersill, near Salzburg, Austria
Composed: 1904
World Premiere: May 26, 1962 in Seattle, Washington; Eugene Ormandy led the Philadelphia Orchestra
Duration: 12 minutes
Instrumentation: three flutes, two oboes, English horn, four clarinets (two in B-flat, two in A), bass clarinet, two bassoons, six horns, two trumpets, timpani, triangle, cymbals, two harps, and strings

Austria’s Anton Webern had an extraordinary impact on the music of the 20th century. His output was modest and his works tended to be very short; however, he compressed both content and emotion into brief spans with admirable economy. He and his friend and colleague Alban Berg (1885–1935) were the most important students and protégés of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951). Both men followed Schoenberg’s lead in abandoning tonality and eventually adopted serialism as well. Webern’s career was tragically ended by a bullet from an American soldier’s gun, shot by mistake at the very end of the Second World War.

Webern commenced his musical career as a musicologist, earning a Ph.D. in Renaissance music in 1906. He was an intellectual, and his music is that of an abstract thinker. That stated, he was educated in the heady atmosphere of late 19th-century romanticism. The music he composed prior to his study with Schoenberg will astound listeners who only know his ascetic later works. Early Webern relies on the post-Wagnerian harmonic vocabulary of late Brahms, mature Reger, and especially Richard Strauss. Im Sommerwind is a prime example.

This 12-minute tone poem was Webern’s first attempt at a large orchestral composition. Its impetus was “Im Sommerwind,” a poem by the North German author Bruno Wille (1860–1929), whose autobiographical novel Offenbarungen des Wacholderbaums (Revelations of a Juniper Tree, 1901) was a personal favorite of Webern. The poem is a description of a summer day in bucolic surroundings, with sunlit forest and meadows given added life by the breeze. Wille’s free verse resonated with Webern, who loved being outdoors. He worked on the score during the summer months of 1904, completing Im Sommerwind on September 16 at Preglhof, a family estate where he customarily spent his holiday. He would meet Schoenberg just weeks later.

Late romanticism is evident in Im Sommerwind, with echoes of Wagner, Liszt, and Strauss. The music is forgivably derivative yet still shows clear signs of the composer who would emerge. One Webernian characteristic is the minimalist approach to the expanded ensemble (e.g., five clarinets, six horns, two harps). He carries Mahler’s orchestral chamber music sonorities to an extreme. In some passages, so few instruments are playing that we wonder, where is this large orchestra?

Other Webernian traits are the close control of motivic development, command of counterpoint, and sense of formal balance. Yet what one hears is music of ravishing beauty, broad paragraphs of post-romantic, Straussian sound, with a keen ear for orchestral nuance. For example, he eschews low brass (perhaps the darker sounds of trombones and tuba were inconsistent with the pastoral subject matter) and the strings divide to as many as sixteen parts.

Webern never heard Im Sommerwind performed; in fact, the premiere did not take place until May 1962, when Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra performed it in Seattle. Webern often showed the manuscript to his own students, however, to prove that his roots were grounded in Viennese tradition.

Webern’s Death: An American Tragedy
Music history is filled with bizarre stories of how composers expired. They range from unsolved murder (Alessandro Stradella, d. 1682 and Jean-Marie LeClair, d. 1764)) to bicycle accident (Ernest Chausson, d. 1899); from poisoning from having ingested inedible mushrooms (Johann Schobert, d. 1760) to drowning as the result of a submarine torpedo (Enrique Granados, d. 1916). None is more ironic, however, than Anton Webern’s death in 1945.

Late in April 1944, Webern was drafted into the Nazi air raid protection police. He was 60. The tide of the war had shifted. Within months, the Allies landed in France and the Russian army was advancing from the east. By early 1945, fuel and water throughout Germany and Austria were in short supply. Webern was desperate to remove his family from the near-daily bombings of Vienna and its immediate environs. At the end of March, he and his wife left their home in Mödling, south of Vienna. They traveled on foot with their daughter and two grandchildren to Mittersill, about midway between Innsbruck and Salzburg, to join their other daughters. Hitler committed suicide on April 30. One week later, Germany surrendered and the war in Europe was over. Allied forces would remain in Germany and Austria long afterward. The American army occupied Mittersill.

On September 15, 1945, Webern apparently violated a curfew by stepping out on the porch of his daughter’s home after dinner to smoke. He was shot three times in the abdomen and chest by an American soldier. The wounds were fatal.

The circumstances of the shooting remain confused. Some of the post-incident reports were contradictory. It now appears that Webern’s son-in-law, Benno Mattel, was under investigation and surveillance by American military authorities for black market smuggling. The soldier who fired the shots at Webern may have thought he was aiming at Mattel.

Regardless, the events of that mid-September night snuffed out one of the century’s most creative and lyrical voices.

Sergei Prokofiev
Born: April 23, 1891 in Sontzovka, Ukraine, Russia
Died: March 5, 1953 in Moscow, Russia
Composed: 1935
World Premiere: December 1, 1935 in Madrid, Spain; Robert Soëtens was the soloist while Enrique Fernández Arbós conducted
Duration: 26 minutes
Instrumentation: woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, bass drum, snare drum, triangle, cymbals, castanets, violin solo and strings

A Young Lion Rattles Cages
With Prokofiev, the man is never far from the music. In his early works, the exuberance and rebellion of youth express themselves in iconoclastic, daring pieces that scandalized the pre-revolutionary Russian musical establishment (including the conservative Glazunov). Prokofiev exploited an adventurous vocabulary with glib abandon, pushing the boundaries of tonality with rhythmic drive to match his aggressive dissonance.

Prokofiev lived abroad from 1918 to 1934, first in the US and then in Paris. But his was a profoundly Russian spirit. Despite misgivings about the political climate in his homeland, he returned to the Soviet Union permanently in spring 1935. In his later years, his abrasive style ceded to a simpler, more accessible musical language that is most easily explained as neoclassicism but may actually have been prompted by political guidelines for composers dictated by the Stalinist regime.

From Sonata to Concerto: A Concept Evolves
Prokofiev started work on the Second Violin Concerto in 1935 in Paris; he completed the piece in the USSR at Voronezh and Baku. The commission materialized from a group of admirers of the French violinist Robert Soëtens. Prokofiev had met him in 1932 in conjunction with the premiere of his Sonata for Two Violins. Soëtens had performed the sonata with Samuel Dushkin, who was touring with Stravinsky at the time. Soëtens was the soloist at the premiere of Prokofiev’s concerto in Madrid in December 1935.

Prokofiev’s initial concept had been a grand concert sonata for violin and orchestra, but as it progressed, the piece grew beyond the confines of any sonata. True, no strong assertive profile is hinted at in the warm, opening solo measure of the first movement; this theme hardly bespeaks a hard-driving, aggressive movement. Yet Prokofiev’s sense of balance is impeccable, and soon a more characteristically rhythmic pulse counters the lyricism that introduces the concerto.

The first movement is uncharacteristically subdued, perhaps not so flashy as other violin concertos, but it overflows with haunting, memorable themes. As biographer Harlow Robinson has observed:

What is most different about the Second Concerto is its predominantly cantilena character: its melodies are some of the most beautiful, flowing and lyrical that Prokofiev ever wrote. Nor does he cut them short, impatient with emotional display, as he did in many of his earlier compositions.

In short, the music has room to breathe, and we all breathe more effortlessly with it.

Prokofiev’s genius may be most evident, however, in the tumultuoso finale, where his addition of castanets, triangle, and snare drum add zest and humor. The music historian Michael Steinberg has suggested that the Spanish accents in the finale were Prokofiev’s bow to the city where he knew the work would first be performed. It is easy to understand this concerto’s popularity.

Richard Strauss
Born: June 11, 1864 in Munich, Germany
Died: September 8, 1949 in Garmisch, Germany
Composed: 1898
World Premiere: March 3, 1899 in Frankfurt, Germany; the composer conducted
Duration: 40 minutes
Instrumentation: three flutes plus piccolo, four oboes (4th doubling English horn); three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, eight horns, five trumpets, three trombones, two tubas, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, small snare drum, tenor drum, two harps, and strings; the score specifies 16 first violins, 16 seconds, 12 violas, 12 celli, and eight double basses

In a New York Times review of a performance of Ein Heldenleben, Bernard Holland once wrote, “There is a kind of exalted vulgarity in Strauss’s tone poems; they are a guilty enjoyment.”

Guilty as charged. We all love this deliciously decadent music, which persuades through the power of excess. Ein Heldenleben has been praised as the proudest of Strauss’ compositions for orchestra and castigated as shameless self-aggrandizement. How strange to think of a young man of 34 reflecting back on a lifetime of accomplishment already so rich, as if his career were drawing to a close. In fact, all Strauss’ great operas—including the masterpieces Salome (1905), Elektra (1909), and Der Rosenkavalier (1911)—lay in the future. He would live another half-century after composing Ein Heldenleben.

The piece is one enormous movement that subdivides into six major sections:

         I. The Hero (main theme, horn section)
         II. The Hero’s Adversaries (transition)
         III. The Hero’s Companion (second principal theme)
         IV. The Hero’s Deeds of War (development section)
         V. The Hero’s Works of Peace (recapitulation)
         VI. The Hero’s Retreat from the World and Fulfillment (coda)

Strauss’ printed score reflects none of these titles. All the programmatic information associated with these sections is gleaned from the composer’s letters and remarks to friends.

Celebrating Oneself, Throwing Darts at the Critics
How does one bring coherence to a single forty-minute movement? Certain aspects of Ein Heldenleben are related to sonata form, for example the two principal contrasting themes. The strong, masculine horn theme represents the hero. That music contrasts with the feminine “companion” theme, stated by solo violin, which reflects every facet of his wife’s personality. (The violin solo, incidentally, is exceedingly taxing for the concertmaster, amounting to several solo cadenzas.) Separating these two musical ideas is a transitional passage associated with the hero’s adversaries, which in Strauss’ case means the critics. Both Austrian and German music critics were, by and large, very favorable to Strauss. It remains something of a mystery why he portrayed them as so mean-spirited and despicable.

Controversial Battle Scene
Romain Rolland, the eminent French critic and one of Strauss’ close friends, called Heldenleben’s “Deeds of War” section “the most admirable battle ever portrayed in music.” The segment has, however, generated controversy because of its incessant percussion. Its position within the whole functions as a dramatic and musical development. Similarly, the ensuing “Works of Peace” section is a sort of recapitulation-cum-episode, returning to former themes while introducing a transition. Finally, this monumental work closes with the hero’s release from the world, in a grand, cathartic coda.

Master of Orchestration
Whether we hear this work as bombast, self-promotion, or autobiography, we must admire Strauss’ superb command of the orchestra. Whatever mood he endeavors to express, he finds the ideal timbres and colors to deliver it. As George Marek has noted:

His zest for life, his virile vitality, his being unafraid to sing a song of long breath, his erotic force, which is never turned aside by embarrassment, and finally, the ability to handle the huge orchestra, squeezing from it all the richness of its tonal resources, an ability so sure that he seems like a modern-day Cagliostro—all these are found in this, the last of the great tone poems.

In the Composer’s Words
Richard Strauss was not only a prolific composer and conductor, but also an active essayist and correspondent. Beginning in the 1880s and continuing until the year of his death, he wrote hundreds of articles, including analyses of his own and others’ compositions, thoughts on the philosophy of music, the mechanics and art of conducting, and the creative process. The following are excerpts from one of his essays on the subject of inspiration. It was published in a collection called Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen (Reflections and Reminiscences), issued in 1949. His observations reveal a knowledge of literature and philosophy as well as others’ music—and an unexpected strain of humility.

* * *

What is an inspiration? In general, a musical inspiration is known as a motive, a melody with which I am suddenly “inspired,” unbidden by the intelligence, particularly in the morning immediately awakening, or in a dream [like Hans] Sachs in Die Meistersinger … Did my imagination work independently at night, without my consciousness, without being bound to “recollection” [Plato]?

My own experience: When at night I am stuck at a certain point in my composition, and in spite of all my digging no further profitable work seems possible, I shut the piano or my sketchbook, go to bed, and when I wake up in the morning, the continuation is there. By means of which mental or physical process?

Or shall we term inspiration that which is so new, so thrilling, so compelling and which penetrates “into the very depths of the heart” [Leonore], that it cannot be compared with anything that preceded it?... What then is direct inspiration, primary invention, and what is the work of the intelligence in these divine forms? Where is the boundary between intellectual activity and imagination?

The question is especially difficult to decide among our classicists; the wealth of their melodies is so enormous, the melody itself so new, so original, and at the same time so individually varied, that it is difficult to determine the line between the first immediate inspiration and its continuation, its extension to the finished, expanded singing phrase. Particularly in Mozart and Schubert who died so young, and at the same time created a lifework of such colossal scope! (My father always said: “What Mozart did, that is, composed up to his thirty-sixth year, the best copyist of today could not write down in the same amount of time.”) It must have been prompted by the flying pen of angels …

“Genius is industry,” Goethe is supposed to have said. But industry and the desire to work are inborn, not merely acquired. –Richard Strauss

Strauss’ Eroica? Or His Autobiography?
E-flat major is the heroic key in music. As such, its roots are usually traced to Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, but in fact they stretch back even further than Beethoven, at least to Mozart’s The Magic Flute and his Symphony No. 39. Richard Strauss chose deliberately when he set Ein Heldenleben, the last of his great tone poems, in E-flat. He wanted the associations with nobility of spirit and action. If there were any doubt about his intentions in this enormous work, whose title means “A Hero’s Life” in German, Strauss dispelled it with his aggressive, assertive, and huge brass section. He wrote to a friend that he was scoring Ein Heldenleben for so many horns because they were a “yardstick of heroism.”

Strauss intended Ein Heldenleben to be an illustration of his obstacles removed, of his achievements and triumphs. He demurred at acknowledging Heldenleben as an autobiographical work when he wrote it, insisting that the tone poem illustrated “not a single poetical or historical figure, but rather a more general and free ideal of great and manly heroism.”

Liberal quotations from his own compositions, however, belie that declaration. The tone poem has been denounced as an unforgivable display of pompous egotism, an accusation that relates it to Wagner. Strauss’ obsession with the noble hero is also a direct outgrowth of Wagnerian philosophy.

2025–26 marks the GRAMMY and Emmy Award-winning conductor Xian Zhang’s 10th season as Music Director of the New Jersey Symphony, and her inaugural season as the Music Director of the Seattle Symphony with whom she has been a long-term collaborator since her debut in 2008. Zhang has also been appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the NCPA Orchestra in Beijing, beginning this season. Following her tenure as Music Director of Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano between 2009–16, she continues as their Conductor Emeritus.

With the New Jersey Symphony, Zhang has commissioned composers such as Wynton Marsalis, Jessie Montgomery, Qigang Chen, Chen Yi, Steven Mackey, Thomas Adès, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Christopher Rouse, Vivian Li, Gary Morgan, Christian McBride, Paquito D’Rivera, and Allison Loggins-Hull. She is also responsible for introducing their annual Lunar New Year celebration. Under her artistic leadership, the New Jersey Symphony won two awards at the mid-Atlantic Emmy Awards in 2022 for their concert films, including EMERGE which was conducted by Xian Zhang, directed by Yuri Alves and co-produced with DreamPlay Films.

As a guest conductor, Zhang appears regularly with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and The Philadelphia Orchestra. Her Deutsche Grammophon recording with the latter (Letters for the Future with Time For Three, released 2022) won GRAMMY awards for Best Contemporary Classical Composition (Kevin Puts’ Contact) and Best Classical Instrumental Solo.

2025–26 highlights include returns to The Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, St. Louis Symphony, and National Arts Centre Ottawa. In Europe, she returns to Netherlands Radio Philharmonic with a performance at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and makes her debut at the Finnish National Opera conducting Tosca. This follows her huge success at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she recently conducted Madama Butterfly and Tosca to great acclaim:

“The success of Kurzak’s performance was due in no small part to Xian Zhang’s sensitivity as a conductor. Zhang has an exceptional ear for balance, as well as the ability to draw the softest, most transparent tones imaginable from the orchestra. […] With such skills and obvious audience appeal, Zhang should prove a valuable addition to the Met’s conducting staff.” – New York Classical Review

Other recent highlights include subscription programs with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, Houston Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra, Montreal Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Orchestra of St. Luke’s (including Brahms Requiem at Carnegie Hall), and Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse.

Zhang previously served as Principal Guest Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and BBC National Orchestra & Chorus of Wales, the first female conductor to hold a titled role with a BBC orchestra. In 2002, she won first prize in the Maazel-Vilar Conductor's Competition. She was appointed New York Philharmonic’s Assistant Conductor in 2002, subsequently becoming their Associate Conductor and the first holder of the Arturo Toscanini Chair.

Violinist Francesca Dego is celebrated for her compelling interpretations and flawless technique.

Recent engagement highlights include North American appearances with the Dallas Symphony a playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with Fabio Luisi, St Louis Symphony Orchestra with John Storgårds, Houston Symphony with Andrés Orozco-Estrada playing Brahms Concerto, National Symphony at both the Kennedy Center in Washington and Wolf Trap Festival, Detroit Symphony, San Diego Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, Utah Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, and NACO Ottawa. On the world stage, Francesca has performed with NHK Symphony, Tokyo Symphony, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, West Australian Symphony, Auckland Philharmonia, and Queensland Symphony. Recent European highlights have included Orchestre de Champs Elysées with Philippe Herreweghe, Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille, Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, Orquesta de Castilla y León, Luxembourg Philharmonic, Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne, Brucknerhaus Linz, Swedish Radio Symphony, Bergen Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Centre, Philharmonia (London), London Philharmonic Orchestra, Hallé (Manchester), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as the top Italian orchestras.

Francesca’s 2025-26 season includes debuts with Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performing Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 conducted by Jonathon Heyward; Seattle Symphony and Austria’s Erl Festspiele performing Busoni’s Violin Concerto; New Jersey Symphony and The Phoenix Symphony with conductor Xian Zhang; Dortmunder Philharmoniker performing Brahms Violin Concerto; and Granada Symphony and Enescu Philharmonic performing Barber’s Violin Concerto. She returns to Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, Richmond Symphony, and Teatro Carlo Felice Orchestra. Francesca will be a resident artist at Wigmore Hall in the 2026-27 season, where she will perform in recitals.

In 2023, Francesca made her recording debut with the London Symphony Orchestra as the first artist to be featured on Apple Classical in A New Dawn with Bologne’s Chevalier de St Georges Concerto No. 2 with conductor Jonathon Heyward. Francesca plays an Antonio Stradivari violin on loan from J & A Beare.