After the premiere of my Five Rhythmic Etudes for orchestra in 2007, a person whose opinion I trust came up to me and told me that the first movement was a tiny masterpiece. I don’t know whether the rest of the world would agree, but it certainly felt good to hear it. This movement feels much the same. One reason I’ve chosen to study Mahler’s symphonies is because of their sprawling, rambling scope, similar to novels by Tolstoy. This movement, though, is focused and concentrated in the manner of a tiny masterpiece.
Mahler’s text is from the venerable Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and as I mentioned in my previous post on the fourth movement, it seems to balance Nietzsche’s text. The resources are somewhat different–children’s and women’s choruses and an orchestra without violins. The music is wholly different in mood. Where the fourth movement is solemn and seems to suggest a deliberate mode of expression, this fifth movement is joyful and exuberant. The folk poetry of Wunderhorn recieves an simple, folk-like setting, as though we should know this song already.
A first for Mahler (at least in the symphonies) is the use of voices as a timbral resource rather than as pure textual exposition. Throughout, the words “bimm, bamm,” to be performed “as the sound of a bell,” work in this fashion, but at other moments, the the voices perform similar roles, most strikingly in the highest women’s voices in mm. 96-99, where a melisma on the word “Stadt” contributes to the overall texture.
To break up the folk-like, sing-song approach to the text, Mahler frequently avoids strict hypermeter, with many three-bar phrases, and often constructing four-bar phrases in a 3+1 kind of structure (as in mm.13-16 and 96-99). Another common hypermetrical structure here is groups of four bars plus two bars. These asymmetries seem to break up the piece, giving it the same sophistication as other of Mahler’s movements.
Beyond the wonderful use of treble voices, the orchestration is fantastic. The absence of violins (Brahms did this before, of course) immediately shifts the emphasis to the winds, with wonderful effects. The bassoons and contrabassoons are featured in a way that hasn’t happened earlier in the piece, and is quite refreshing–by this time, it is necessary to exploit the orchestral palette a little bit to help maintain interest. Measures 65-83 are an essentially instrumental treatment (the voices are treated timbrally) of the material, and work in the kind of developmental way that vocal writing doesn’t always permit. While the shape of the movement is relatively small, the scoring isn’t.
The placement of this movement within the symphony is important. Does the five-movement second part balance the gigantic single-movement first part? We seem to contrast unity with variety, relatively organic form with a more sectional group of forms–a minuet, a scherzo, a recitative and a chorus, followed by the sixth movement. Mahler’s world is fully articulated, as rich and as full as the natural world, compunded by the depth and variety of the creative world.