Monday, December 14, 2015

August 6, 2009: Getting to know the Mahler first

The major work on the first concert in the San Francisco Mahler Festival that begins next month will be, appropriately enough, Gustav Mahler’s first symphony.  This is an excellent way to begin, because it demonstrates the way in which Mahler's symphonies lived in a dual world of traditional symphonic structures and orchestral settings of songs.  The first symphony is, in many ways, a reflection on his first song cycle, his Songs of a Wayfarer, since two of the movements have roots in two of the songs in the cycle.

I have previously described the cycle as a mini-opera on the traditional Romantic theme of unrequited love.  The woman the poet loves is marrying another, so he sets out on a walk to recover his spirits.  Instead, he gets increasingly miserable, ending it all in the words on the final song.  The two scenes that are adapted by the symphony are the initial walking scene and the tragic conclusion.

The German scholar Ernst Robert Curtius writes about Ovid being gifted in the art of scene description through disclosure ("the grove is not there from the beginning, it comes into existence before our eyes).  This is basically how Mahler begins his symphony.   The song material he adopts is preceded by a lengthy scene-setting introduction. It begins with a descending fourth, the first interval of the song, against a hushed string background. Elements of the scene emerge through bird songs, fanfares, and distant folk melodies. This builds at a slow and steady pace until Mahler is finally ready to present us with the song itself in a strictly orchestral form following the model of an opening symphony movement. Unlike the song, in which the poet's thoughts are constantly interrupted by the memory of his beloved, the symphony is all positive energy that practically charges into the second movement.   That movement is a scherzo based on folk dance;   but, as a sign of Mahler's preference for unifying elements, it begins with that same descending fourth.

The spirit of the song cycle returns in the third movement in which the dire conclusion of the song cycle is cast in the setting of a deliberately ironic funeral march, introduced as a solo for double bass.   As in the introduction to the first movement, the funereal nature is disclosed through a series of interruptions, which threaten to disrupt its solemn pace.   However, it proceeds, leading anyone who knows the song cycle to thing that it has the last word.

It doesn't.  It is followed  by a concluding fourth movement that  begins with what can best be described as a battle scene.  It is rather in the spirit of the fight at the end of the second act of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre but without any singing and far more rhythmic chaos.   The spirit of distant fanfares from the introduction now charge into the foreground.   This is very much a triumph-of-spirit conclusion that "gets over" all the sorrow of the song cycle and the funereal setting of the preceding movement.   This sense of "Mahler triumphant" will conclude many of his following symphonies, making this particular symphony an opportunity to prepare the ear for much of what will ensue from Mahler's compositional efforts.

Mahler's first symphony is one of his shortest, but it has been conceived on a grand plan.   It provides the serious listener with a representative introduction to his sense of scale, his command of full orchestral forces, and a musical rhetoric with a strong sense of the dramatic.   If one comes to know Mahler through this symphony in the first concert of the Festival, one will have an anchor of familiarity to approach all of the other works being presented in the remaiSning two concerts.

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