Minnesota Orchestra Tours Japan: Mahler

Mahler's Symphony No. 5 Listen in RealAudio Performed by the London Philharmonic 1989; CD 49888 Minnesota Orchestra Tours Japan Home
Program Notes by Mary Ann Feldman Gustav Mahler Born May 7, 1860, Kalischt, Bohemia; died May 18, 1911, Vienna Symphony No. 5 Instrumentation: 4 flutes (2 doubling piccolo), 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets and bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, bass drum, bass drum with cymbals attached, snare drum, triangle, glockenspiel, tamtam, slapstick, harp and strings Nothing in any of my conversations with Mahler and not a single note point to the influence of extra-musical thoughts or emotions upon the composition of the Fifth. It is music, passionate, wild, pathetic, buoyant, solemn, tender, full of the sentiments of which the human heart is capable, but still "only" music . . . --Bruno Walter Of high significance in the Minnesota Orchestra's repertory for the tour of Japan this September is Mahler's Fifth Symphony. The composer's stirring symphonies have a long history with this Orchestra--dating back to 1921, when the founding music director, Emil Oberhoffer, conducted the Symphony No. 4. This was four decades before Leonard Bernstein, later to be Eiji Oue's mentor, brought the works to the forefront of the American orchestral repertory. Their sound, their preoccupations, suited the restless, questioning temperament of the rebellious '60s. Along the way, there were other Mahler events here, and of special interest are recordings remastered in the CD format, including the Symphony No. 1 which Dimitri Mitropoulos cut with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra on November 4, 1940. In the first 50 years of the Orchestra's chronicle, the Symphony No. 5 was represented only by its Adagietto movement, for strings and harp, which was programmed in the 35th and 42nd seasons. It remained for Stanislaw Skrowaczewski to conduct the first complete performance here in 1967. Edo de Waart conducted the Fifth in September 1986, his inaugural week as the Orchestra's eighth music director, and in May 1997 Eiji Oue concluded his second season with this mighty work. Oue recalls its impact on him when, in 1975, he heard a performance of it in Tokyo by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on tour with Sir Georg Solti: "I resolved then that one day I would return to Japan with a great American orchestra and conduct the Mahler Fifth." That dream comes true this month. A New Direction When Mahler undertook to write his Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1901, the four symphonies behind him were vocal works, either directly or implicity. His Fourth had concluded with a child's view of heaven--the poetic summit of the symphony. In the preceding works, he had constructed entire movements based on song, drawing from his Wayfarer songs in the Symphony No. 1 (which does not actually use the voice) and his Youth's Magic Horn songs in Nos. 2, 3 and 4, which bring the singer to the stage. As for No. 5, he confided to his friend Natalie Bauer- Lechner, "The human voice would be entirely out of place here. There is no call for words, everything is said in purely musical terms . . ." Although there are reflections of the past--like the grim trumpet fanfare that announced the Fifth--Mahler was ready to cut a new path. He brought an increased orchestral opulence to the work, interweaving his abundant ideas in a polyphonic tapestry that is richer and more dense than before. It is hardly a coincidence that from the volumes of Bach's works he took to his cottage retreat that summer, he chose to study the motets. But Mahler's flair for the dramatic did not diminish. It is already implicit in the tonal anchors of this symphony, which begins in C-sharp, setting the atmosphere for a sorrowful funeral march, and concludes in the jubilance of D major. This is also the key of the mid-point Scherzo, to which this very C-sharp has been the leading tone established long before. Since Mahler's music stems from all the emotions that churn in a lifetime, it is tempting to search for an underlying program. He began composing the Fifth Symphony with its centerpiece, a Scherzo like none other before. It has been thought to represent humankind at the peak of its powers. But Mahler declined to attach a program to this score. He was adamant that it was an abstract orchestral work, conveying everything he had to say in the language of absolute music. He might have endorsed his friend Bruno Walter's assertion that no "extra-musical thoughts or emotions" seeped into the powerful expression of the Fifth Symphony--though when you experience it, you may judge Walter's protestation a bit extreme. As in Beethoven's Fifth, there is a journey of the spirit, but each may make of it what he or she will. That is the birthright of the listener. Considering Mahler's horrendous schedule as director of the world's leading opera house, it is astonishing that he produced so many massive works, including nine completed symphonies and sketches for a tenth left upon his death at age fifty-one. (Today's bypass surgery or a transplant would have given him the time and strength to complete the tenth and possibly several more.) Composed in the summers of 1901 and 1902, during his brief respite from the frenetic pace of the opera world, the Symphony No. 5 dates from a happy time in his life. He was aware of his maturity both as an artist and as a man. In March 1902 he married the talented and ravishing Alma Schindler, who was already expecting their first child. The union of the 41-year-old Court Opera director and the youthful daughter of a well-known painter came as a surprise. An aspiring composer herself, and a pupil of Alexander Zemlinsky, she would soon complain about the burden of marriage to a genius. (Nevertheless, she would ally herself to several more, either as lover or wife). But in their honeymoon summer, she did her best to accommodate him, especially by serving as copyist for the emerging symphony. Recalling the genesis of the Fifth, she wrote: "I tried to play the piano quietly, but when I asked him, he had heard me, even though his work-cottage was a long way off in the wood. And so I changed my occupation and copied everything that he had finished of the Fifth Symphony, always straight away so that I finished my manuscript only a few days after he himself did. He began to get more and more used to not writing out the parts in full, only the first bars, and then I learned to read and hear scores as I wrote them, so that I became more and more a genuine help to him." Outspoken and confident enough to be critical, Mahler's bride did not hesitate to tell him what she thought was wrong with the work after hearing the first rehearsal: it was overscored, she declared. She could not hear the themes--only the rhythm was discernible. Having blurted out what she thought, she hastened home in tears. Alma described the scene: "He followed. For a long time I refused to speak. At last I said between my sobs: 'You've written it for percussion and nothing else!' He laughed and then produced the score. He crossed out the whole side drum part in red pencil and half the percussion instruments, too. He had felt the same thing himself, but my passionate protest turned the scale." Alma felt no need to be modest about her value to genius, which continued with Walter Gropius, Franz Werfel and Oscar Kokoschka. No doubt her honesty spurred Mahler to undertake revisions that had been in the back of his mind anyhow. He began by thinning out the score. Ultimately, the revisions of the Fifth were the most extensive he ever made. Following two runs-through with the Vienna Philharmonic in September 1904, he realized that the orchestration had not been adjusted to the complexity of his evolving polyphonic style. "I have had to do some retouching," he told his publisher on September 27 of that year, and these revisions continued to the last year of his life, when he was gravely ill with heart disease. Shortly before taking to his bed, he addressed the conductor Georg Göhler, a Bruckner-Mahler champion: "I simply cannot understand how I could have fallen back into such beginner's errors at that time . . . when a completely new style required a new technique." The official premiere of the Fifth, which Mahler conducted in Cologne on October 18, 1904, pleased him no end. "An excellent performance!" he reported. "Audience immensely interested and attentive--despite all their puzzlement in the early movements! After the Scherzo even a few hisses. Adagietto and Rondo seem to have won the day." The second movement, which, with its intricate development, functions like a traditional symphonic first movement, challenged the first American audience as well. A writer in the Musical Courier of February 21, 1906, reported that "it is an almost impossible task to follow [the second movement themes] through the tortuous maze of their formal and contrapuntal development. One has to cling by one's teeth, so to speak, to a shred of theme here and there, which appears for an occasional instant above the heavy masses of tone, only to be jumped upon immediately by the whole angry herd of instruments and stamped down into the very thick of the orchestra fray. . . ." Begun in the first year of this century, Mahler's Fifth prophesied the direction that music would take. Not only is the harmonic vocabulary astringent and forward-looking, but at certain points the elusive tonality hints at the disintegration of the tonal system captained by Arnold Schoenberg, a Mahler disciple who dedicated his most important theory book, Harmonielehre, to the memory of the master. The composer Ernst Krenek, who 50 years ago was teaching at Hamline University and collaborating in performances with Dimitri Mitropoulos, ascribed enormous significance to the trilogy of Mahler symphonies that began with the Fifth: "How they acted as catalyst in the critical stage of the musical language at that time is shown by the fact that they were followed in 1908 by those utterly revolutionary Three Piano Pieces by Arnold Schoenberg which threw open the door to the vast and still unconquered field of atonality." The division of the big symphonic canvas into "parts," like a painter's triptych, is nothing new with Mahler. He had similarly structured two earlier symphonies. At the center of the Fifth, designated Roman numeral II, stands the gigantic Scherzo, with its wild humor and radiance in contrast with all that has come before. Before the summer holiday of 1901 had ended, Mahler also drafted the funeral march and stormy fast movement to comprise Part I. The following summer, working from the crack of dawn in his little hut in the forest, while his wife complained to her diary that she had "sunk to the level of a housekeeper," he produced the final panel of his three-part symphony, balancing the first: Part III consists of the soulful Adagietto, an instrumental song close in mood to the last of the Rckert songs, "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" (I have forsaken the world) and the vigorous Rondo-Finale, with its many contrasting keys and developmental episodes. Commenting on the Fifth in the latest volume of his Mahler project, Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897-1904), Henry-Louis de la Grange observes that the title "Rondo" is misleading and inappropriate, since the refrain appears less frequently than the fugal episodes. What is most striking is the alternation of homophony and counterpoint, a procedure characteristic of Mahler. But structure is not the subject of this provocative symphony. Form is the servant of the message, and what Mahler says to us will help us understand our humanity, and ourselves. Part I TRAUERMARSCH: IN GEMESSENEM SCHRITT. STRENG. WIE EIN KONDUKT. (FUNERAL MARCH: IN A MEASURED STEP. STRICT. LIKE A PROCESSION.) A trumpet fanfare announces the funeral march in C-sharp minor. The hollow call is more than a summons, for it returns as a motto, either fierce or brooding, to supply mortar to the structure. But the subsequent outcry from the horns is the germinal motive of Part I. Violins and cellos give out the desolate main theme, striding over the inexorable bass pulse that unifies much of the music. Undergoing a metamorphosis in the winds, this doleful strain assumes an elegiac tone in the new key of A-flat, but tragedy remains the undercurrent. Suddenly the tempo quickens, and a booming bass supports a contrasting episode, full of impassioned protest and mounting to a turbulent climax. To herald the return of the cortege, the tuba, replacing the horns, calls out the familiar motive that will be carried over as the seed of the second movement. The elegiac strain also returns in due course, while a bittersweet strain from the violins moves things towards the conclusion, the thought shadowed by the rhythm of the fanfare, beating ominously in the timpani. Before the close the tension builds to yet a higher plane of grief, at whose summit Mahler penned a single word: Klagend (lamenting), which substitutes for the most elaborate of programs. The final passage is a ghostly specter: a muted trumpet repeats the dread summons, which a flute echoes above the sinister rumbling of bass drum--all of this pianissimo and despairing in mood. STURMISCH BEWEGT. MIT GRÖSSTER VEHEMENZ. (STORMY. WITH GREATEST VEHEMENCE.) The first movement has functioned as a prologue to this frenzied fast movement, a raging protest incorporating themes from the opening. The phrase which erupts high in the winds, and will unify this broad melodic frieze, has descended from the outcry of the horns in the preceding movement; the interval of a leaping ninth traces its shattering cry. Suddenly the hysteria is calmed by the sorrowful song of the cellos, spacious in line and cast in the pulse of the funeral march, its progenitor. These opposite poles of thought, demonic and lamenting, alternate throughout the course of the movement, which proceeds to development. Mahler evokes high drama (of a kind that tempted an early commentator to produce a 23-page interpretation of the score, to the composer's chagrin), particularly in a long cello recitative unfolding above a drumroll. The real crisis is deferred, and when it breaks, the climax is resolved by a brass chorale pitted against wild figurations rushing madly through the strings. This moment hints at the triumphant destiny of the symphony. For the time being, however, the protest prevails, its passion ebbing upon the cry of the ninth and punctuated by a single drumbeat. Mahler indicates a long pause in the score. When the symphony resumes, the storms have passed, and a new mood prevails. PART II SCHERZO: KRÄFTIG, NICHT ZU SCHNELL. (VIGOROUS, NOT TOO FAST.) The gargantuan Scherzo--"completely unlike anything I have written before," said Mahler--is both the heart and the turning point of the symphony. A synthesis of peasant Ländler and the urbane waltz, the elements are so well kneaded, he said, that "no crumb remains unmixed or unaltered. Every note is fully alive, and it all spins round like a whirlwind or like the tail of a comet." Everything develops further from within itself, a principle for his mature music. Contradicting the nihilism implied in the first part, this centerpiece revels in the brilliant sunshine of D major, as a flourish of horns initiates the first of the dance tunes; the first horn seizes upon this idea as an obbligato, leading to a thrilling echoing of horn calls, as if bouncing across the mountainsides that Mahler loved so well. Violins trace the contours of an elegant waltz, and are imitated by cellos. All in all, the ebullience of this movement contradicts the death images of Part I. A poignant horn strain provides the link to the trio section, whose nostalgic waltz tune is plucked by strings before migrating to other instruments. (A critic once remarked that this movement has enough waltzes to set up an operetta for life.) The horn flourish musters a repeat of the opening Scherzo section, whose ideas are enmeshed in a thicket of polyphony. Part III ADAGIETTO: SEHR LANGSAM. (VERY SLOW.) The Scherzo has provided a pivot from darkness to light. Now the radiance continues in the purest lyricism, cast for strings and harp alone; the rest of the orchestra is sidelined in what amounts to a prologue to the finale. A long violin cantilena suggests an introspective mood, as if withdrawing into the self. Or is it love? After all, Mahler was newly married to the beauteous Alma. The music justifies a romantic interpretation. Edging a step higher, the heart of the movement is given over to a love strain: though its statement is brief, the ecstasy is unrestrained. Once the passion has been declared, the reposeful strain of the beginning returns. The late Mahler specialist Deryck Cooke has pointed out that the quietude of this Adagietto has much in common with Mahler's great song, "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen," which ends with the words "I live alone, in my own heaven, in my love, in my singing." The music subsides to a long-held pianissississimo (ppppp), whose glow is startlingly terminated by the finale. RONDO-FINALE: ALLEGRO. With the emergence of the finale Mahler unleashes a flow of melody. Certain motives are folk-like; for instance, the bassoon recalls a figure from the Wunderhorn realm of his earlier works. This is the first of three tunes that come to the forefront, the others relegated to oboe and clarinet. The bassoon's engaging theme is associated with the tale of a cuckoo who out-performs a nightingale in a contest. The actual rondo refrain of the finale borrows the last four notes of the bassoon's cheery rhetoric; once again, horns play a prominent role. Suddenly, the cellos dig into a sturdy Baroque-like subject that spearheads an exuberant fugue. Fugal gestures of the Bach tradition alternate with full-throated lyricism in Mahler's exploitation of his rich subject matter, and the interrelationships of the ideas are heightened by an amalgam of sonata and rondo principles. To crown the movement, the brass chorale briefly introduced in the second movement returns to link the gloomy first part with the joyful close. The mighty brass contingent calls out in the spectacular race to the end, a stunning conclusion that inevitably brings audiences to their feet.