Symphony No. 2: AussöhnungPress and Program NotesSymphony No. 2: Aussöhnung made its German premiere on September 2, 2000, with the Munich Philharmonic featuring Judith Bettina, soprano, and James Levine conducting. The pictures on this page are from that performance.
Symphony No. 2: Aussöhnung has been recorded by the Houston Symphony, with Sergiu Comissiona as conductor, on the Elektra/Nonesuch label. Click here for information about this recording.
Symphony No. 2: Aussöhnung
My grandparents on both sides were German Jews, and German culture played a large role in my upbringing. My maternal grandparents, Wilhelm and Eleanor Simon, immigrated to the US in 1913, but returned to Berlin with my mother in 1929. They preferred Germany, until 1933. Then they returned reluctantly to New York. But the double immigration, like a marriage and divorce twice repeated, only seemed to intensify their ties to Germany. German was spoken at home; Goethe was the greatest author that ever lived. Wilhelm Simon was an impassioned Wagnerian. When I was a little boy, he took me aside to talk to me about Wagner and play his old 78 recordings of Wagner for me. He despised Mozart and Beethoven. In the late 1970's, I met the soprano, Judith Bettina, who lived in my apartment building on the upper West Side of Manhattan. We became close musical and personal friends. Every morning for years, we met for coffee. One morning in the early eighties, she arrived at my apartment with a book of Goethe poems, which she had purchased the night before from a homeless peddler. They'll sell anything. She had stayed up late reading through the poems and told me that after she read Aussoehnung, she had burst into tears. Judith asked me to read it, and I immediately had a strong emotional connection and personal relation to the poem. She suggested to me that I turn the poem into a song. "Keep it on your piano and when the spirit moves you, write the song," she said. For many weeks, she would see the book sitting on the piano, and always asked whether I had set the poem yet. Time passed. One day she lost her patience. She told me to go to my studio and NOT come back out until I had written that song. One hour later, I came out of the studio with the song completed and we read through it together at the piano.
Judith Bettina gave the world premiere of Symphony No. 2: Aussöhnung on October 25, 1986 with the Houston Symphony Orchestra, Sergiu Comissiona conducting. In its original incarnation, the Symphony, including the song movement, had ten movements and lasted about forty minutes. After the premiere, I decided to eliminate three of the movements. The recording on Nonesuch, and the version that now stands, has seven movements and lasts 30 minutes. Each movement represents a different action or emotion in the poem. I prefer not to be specific here in a programmatic sense, as I do not wish to dictate to the listener. It is enough to say that in terms of dramatic narrative the movements leading up to the 7th movement (the song) runs parallel to the poem. The tension is released in the song setting of the final movement, just as the release of tension in the Goethe poem emerges at the end of the poem -- Da Fuhlte sich - o dass es ewig bliebe! -Das Doppel-Gluck der Tone wie der Liebe.
15 years have passed since Symphony # 2 was first performed. It means very much to me that my first major work to be performed in Germany is the European premiere of my "German Symphony", sung by Judith Bettina. This work is an expression of the very deep connection I feel through my family to the German musical and literary tradition. It is an honor to have it performed by James Levine and the Munich Philharmonic. Click here for a program note in German by Tobias Niederschlag.
The Houston Post "During the year that he has lived here, Houston Symphony composer-in-residence Tobias Picker has not exactly been idle...Picker [also] has been writing music, which is the main purpose of his residency here under the Meet the Composer program... "Subtitled Aussöhnung (Reconciliation), Picker's Second Symphony takes its name from a poem by Goethe on the power of music to restore an awareness of beauty to senses that have become dulled by stress and everyday cares. "In a burst of inspiration, he set the poem as a song, thinking it might become part of a larger orchestral work. Indeed it did become both the theme and the culmination of his 30-minute, 10-movement Second Symphony. "Though the song...was composed first and is the theme upon which the nine variations are based, it is placed at the end of the work, expressing the resolution and reconciliation of various ideas and emotions dealt with in the variations. "Despite the fact that the theme is heard last, Picker said that the music really flows organically from the musical ideas heard in the first variation. He also said that the nine short variations are grouped into three larger sections. The first two sections have a slow-fast-slow sequence of variations, while the third section is cast in a fast-fast-slow plan. And there is a short prelude before the nine variations."
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Several factors influenced this symphony, all of them German.
In 1985 Judith was visiting me in Houston where I was the Composer in Residence of the Houston Symphony Orchestra. I told her that I had been commissioned to write a symphony for the orchestra and she suggested that I incorporate the Goethe poem into it. By then, Judith had been my muse for many years. I realized what a good idea she had given me and began to work on the symphony that day. The song had come to mean so much to me personally and it also represented for me a musical "freeing". So the symphony was conceived as a theme and variations. The song is the theme. All of the other movements are variations. Until then, my music was mainly conceived according to my own interpretation of 12-tone and serial practice. However, the song was completely tonal. So, I found a way to integrate the tonality of the song into a series of cyclical 12 tone permutation-rows based on the theme and exposition of the song. The variations have the pitch "Do" in common. That is, "Do" ALWAYS occurs in the same place in each variation. Even the rhythm of the song was transferred to all the variations, whether slow or fast.
A short Prelude and Postlude frame the seven movements. The prelude is an exposition of the 12 tone material which I "married" to the tonal material of the song in order to make all of the music of the symphony. The Postlude is the Prelude in retrograde (or backward). Even the dynamics are in retrograde, giving the feeling of being swirled back in time and suggesting the eternal natural recurrence of the conflict between passion and pain.
