If the primary agenda of each of these concerts was to get inside Mahler's head, with Thomas as "tour guide," to gain better understanding of the experience of listening to his music, than the selection of the "Florentiner Marsch" by Mahler's younger contemporary, Julius Fucík, was slightly anachronistic. This march was composed in 1907, four years before Mahler's death, which is to say at a time when Mahler's "memory banks" were so full that it is a wonder his head had not yet burst. (Fate had a different ending in store for him in the form of heart disease.) Thomas explained that he made the selection for its representation of the spirit of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is a perfectly valid explanation. Personally, I would have preferred something more along the lines of the elder Johann Strauss' "Radetzky March," not only for the dark spirits it evoked from the novelist Joseph Roth but also for its capacity to arouse crowds of drunken enthusiastic tub-thumpers at their worst. If alienation was a key element of Mahler's character (as he claimed it to be), we would have done well to begin with the context of the sorts of things that alienated him!
It turned out, however, that this need to set context was not that necessary for the three themes that Thomas chose to explore: Mahler's relationship to nature, his use of funeral marches, and the evolution of his approach to scherzo. The core of the first theme was a performance of the third movement of the third symphony. As I observed in a preview piece, Mahler was already at work in "musical landscape painting" in the introduction of his first symphony; but, by the time he began work on the third, he had set himself up with a cabin at Steinbach on the Attersee, east of Salzburg. In this setting he could experience nature in its fullest, the nightmarish as well as the pastoral; and all of those impressions found their way into the six movements of the third symphony (along with a seventh movement that eventually ended up concluding the fourth symphony). Beyond the immediacy of nature itself, Mahler was also heavily influenced by Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn), an anthology of folk poetry compiled by Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, in which there is a similar cohabitation of nightmare with peaceful innocence.
Each movement of the third symphony has a programmatic title. The first is "Summer marches in;" and the remaining movements have titles of the form "What … tells me." For the third movement the title is "What the beasts of the forest tell me;" and one of its thematic sources is a Wunderhorn poem setting in the eleventh of the fourteen songs published in the three volumes of Mahler's Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit (Songs of Youth) collection, "Ablösung im Sommer" (Replacement in Summer). The replacement has to do with the death of the noisy cuckoo and the assumption of his duties by "Mrs. Nightingale" with a decidedly different style. (The two have a singing contest in another Wunderhorn poem.) This was sung by Thomas Hampson in an orchestral setting by Luciano Berio before the third symphony movement was performed. (Mahler had composed these fourteen songs for voice and piano. If it was Berio's objective to orchestrate this particular song on the basis of the decisions Mahler made for the third symphony, then he did an admirable job.) To take another issue with the programming, this would have been an excellent opportunity to Hampson to sing Mahler's setting of another Wunderhorn song, "Das irdische Leben" (The Earthly Life), which is also a thematic source for the symphony movement; but an exhaustive accounting of the sources for this movement could probably have filled the entire evening's program!
The funeral march topic was introduced with a performance of the funeral march from Gaetano Donizetti's opera Dom Sébastien. Many who heard Mahler's first symphony last week will probably recognize the connection almost immediately; and in this presentation Thomas illustrated the point through its connection to the final song in the Songs of a Wayfarer cycle. When Quinn Kelsey sang this cycle with piano accompaniment in recital last February, I wrote that he approached it "as the mini-opera captured by the narrative that cuts across the four poems in the cycle." In last night's performance Hampson's sense of opera was as keen as his sense of art song, and he definitely gave the dramatic its due. However, from an operatic point of view, this is also an opportunity for the baritone to get even with all those sopranos who dominate the spotlight with their bel canto mad scenes. Hampson was dramatic; but, had he let go of himself a bit more and been a bit more "unhinged," he could have brought more of that madness (and its culmination in suicide, which is how I read the text) to the surface.
This brings us to the final theme of the evening, in which Thomas made a case that Mahler's scherzo movement provided the most expressive release when his own spirits were at their most unhinged. This discussion occupied all of the program following the intermission and took the form of a "Gradus ad Parnassum," where the first step was actually a scherzo by Mahler's fellow student at the Vienna Conservatory, Hans Rott, whose own ending could well have made for its own "mini-opera song cycle." Here is the Wikipedia summary:
Rott's mind snapped in October 1880, whilst on a train journey. He was reported to have threatened another passenger with a revolver, claiming that Brahms had filled the train with dynamite. Rott was committed to a mental hospital in 1881, where despite a brief recovery, he sank into depression. By the end of 1883 a diagnosis recorded 'hallucinatory insanity, persecution mania - recovery no longer to be expected.' He died of tuberculosis in 1884, aged only 25. Many well-wishers, including Bruckner, attended Rott's funeral at the Zentral-Friedhof in Vienna.(As a point of chronology, Mahler completed his Wayfarer songs in 1884.)
It would be a bit excessive to assert that every scherzo Mahler wrote was haunted by Rott's ghost; but it is probably fair to say that Rott planted a seed that yielded fruit far more bizarre than anything he had composed in his own short lifetime. Thomas followed the steps from Rott's scherzo through the scherzo movement's of Mahler's symphonies, coming to rest at the seventh. This was a perfect case study, since, while Mahler had excelled in expanding the scherzo to his extended time frames (particularly in the fifth symphony), the seventh symphony scherzo is frighteningly compact. From this point Thomas resumed the journey and brought it to the Rondo burleske movement from the ninth symphony. In both of these symphonies, Mahler had moved on from his earlier Wunderhorn inspirations; but the nightmares of those folk traditions are still with him. Furthermore, as if the horrors of folk legends were not enough, both of these symphonies were composed after Mahler's heart condition had been detected. (The ninth was, of course, his attempt to trick Fate. He did not want death to take him after he had composed nine symphonies; so he titled his ninth symphony Das Lied von der Erde. He then felt safe in calling his next symphony his ninth and died while working on his tenth!)
As I wrote at the beginning of this piece, all of this was being documented in video for a future Keeping Score. Those program are only one hour long. It is clear that one could spend an entire hour tracing Mahler's personal "journey" through the scherzo form without bringing anything else into the story. This is the problem that arises when one takes on a composer who (without my intending to sound hyperbolic) was profoundly influenced by everything. It is hard to imagine how a one-hour Public Television program will be able to do the work that these three weeks of San Francisco Symphony concerts have been achieving; but it will be sufficient if the resulting video whets the appetite for Mahler in those who had never previously given him much thought.
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