Friday, December 18, 2015

September 27, 2009: Mahler in love and death

There was something exhausting about the first offering of Gustav Mahler:  Origins and Legacies at Davies Symphony Hall this past Wednesday evening.  In his capacity as narrator, Michael Tilson Thomas discovered that making a point about Mahler is a bit like the old advertisement about eating potato chips:  You just cannot stop with one.  (Some may recall that Umberto Eco invoked the same simile for killing monks in explaining how he came to write The Name of the Rose.)  In writing about Wednesday's event, I made note of Mahler's "prodigious store of memories;"  but I did not mention how tightly knit the fabric of those memories was.  Pull at one memory-thread;  and the next thing you know you have your hands filled with others.  Having dwelt at great length on the influences of nature and funeral marches on Wednesday, along with an evolutionary perspective on Mahler's approach to the scherzo form, Thomas used the final event in this week's series to get down to the most fundamental basics, love and death, the first preceding the intermission and the second following it.

Considering the size of the Mahler corpus, it is interesting how little love figures in it.  The Songs of a Wayfarer cycle is, of course, a narrative about unrequited love.  However, with its strict Aristotelian descent along a path from the shock of rejection to the contemplation (and probably achievement) of suicide, these songs amount to further bricks in the "wall of the dark side" built up around most of Mahler's settings of Wunderhorn texts.  Love as a positive force only really emerges in the final movement of the third symphony ("What love tells me");  but, for all of its positive energy, it still feels a bit like a detached abstraction.  As Thomas observed in last night's remarks, love only came to Mahler through his meeting Alma Schindler;  and the woman whom he would marry in 1902 inspired two significant works, both of which were composed in the same time frame.  The first was the settings of the five poems of Friedrich Rückert that opened last week's program, and the second was the Adagietto movement of the fifth symphony.  Last week I cited Michael Steinberg calling the Adagietto a "cousin" of "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen;"  and Thomas reinforced this case with specific examples of migrating surface features.  More interesting to me, however, is the way in which Mahler scaled back on the four songs that he orchestrated, leading me to call Steinberg's specific example "a song for low voice, harp, and orchestral accompaniment."  The Adagietto uses the same reduced resources and drops out the voice.  The result is a far more intimate take on love than the gradual crescendo that concludes the third symphony.  (Next week we shall discover that Mahler could make irony out of that very intimacy in the movement that follows the Adagietto, but that is another story.)

Following the Adagietto Thomas Hampson gave another performance of the Wayfarer Songs.  Thanks to SFGate, I have been able to track observations about his health in the wake of his decision not to perform on Thursday;  and in that context I can now understand why I felt that he had been holding back in his Wednesday performance.  Last night there were clear signs that his body was not quite out of the woods;  but, possibly because it was his final performance, he seemed a bit more inclined to pull out the dramatic stops and let the full force of the deranged mind behind the text emerge.  As I suggested above, this is ultimately an account of a precipitous descent;  and both Hampson and Thomas hurtled us down that slope with all the neurotic spirit endowed in the score by Mahler's creative imagination.

Chronologically, the Wayfarer songs should have preceded the Adagietto.  However, if we think in terms of a transition from the ecstasies of love to the agonies of death in the second half of the concert, the song cycle makes for an excellent bridge.  Thomas began that second half by returning to the nightmarish scherzo of the seventh symphony, which, as I previously observed, was composed after Mahler learned of his fatal heart condition.  One could almost say that, once Mahler received his diagnosis, his life became a frantic burst of productivity to say everything that remained to be said in music before death overtook him.  That sense of a race against death was evident in Thomas' interpretations of both the scherzo and the Rondo burleske of the ninth symphony.  However, the new perspective only emerged fully in Thomas' review of the ninth symphony in its entirety, culminating in the painful sense of resignation in its concluding (Adagissimo) section.  Drawing upon the significance of the "turn" embellishment in these final moments, Thomas had Hampson superimpose the opening phrases of the first Wayfarer song (which uses the same embellishment) as an act of retrospection at the end of the road.  In other hands this could have been a cheap trick;  but, whatever physical weakness he may have had to confront, Hampson delivered these phrases in a subdued voice that captured a conception of wisps of haunting memory at the moment of death.  There are rare occasions in a concert hall when the delivery has been so intensely moving that applause feels like it would spoil the moment.  Most of the audience did not share this feeling with me, but I just wanted to sit there and think on all of the nerves that had been so effectively touched in a passage of music that could not have taken ten minutes.

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