It’s the new fiscal year in many states, as I was reminded on NPR this morning. It’s a big day for me in my intellectual life, too. I have completed my survey of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and have moved on to the nine Mahler Symphonies. Hopefully, at least a few people will be taking this journey with me, one symphony every two months, from now until the end of 2010. I’m writing these entries on my blog, www.martiandances.com/blog, but I’ve also fed the blog to Facebook, where it will appear as a “Note.” Feel free to comment on either location, although since I’m in charge of the blog, and Facebook is in charge of Facebook…
I dropped my wife off at the airport today, which meant a two-hour drive home from Amarillo by myself. As I pulled out of town, I dropped my reference recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 (Bernstein with Amsterdam) into the CD player, and I got to thinking about some of the differences between Beethoven and Mahler.
Of course, there is more than half a century between Beethoven’s last sonata (Op. 111 from 1822) and Mahler’s first complete symphony (finished in 1888). In that period are Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn (and his Bach revival), Smetana and the first round of nationalists, Liszt, most of Brahms and (the big one, at least in my received wisdom) Wagner. I think it might be safe to say that for Mahler, the two most influential figures are Beethoven, the first composer for whom a symphony was always a major artistic statement, and Wagner.
Charles Rosen suggests that the Classical style was informed, at its root, by the dramatic and comic developments in operatic music. It seems quite possible to me that for Mahler, who earned his daily bread conducting opera, not symphonic music, that we must look in many ways to the developments in opera by Weber (whose final opera Die Feen (or is it Der Drei Pintos? help!) Mahler attemped to complete) and Wagner (whose operas Mahler helped to introduce in Vienna and which he guarded jealously from his assistant conductors throughout his career).
I’m particularly interested in how Mahler creates the scale of these works. As a composer, I don’t feel confident about writing long movements, and I want to develop this ability. Some observations based on my re-hearing of the “Titan:”
- Mahler sometimes employs sectional forms, which allows (nay, demands) the repetition of vast swathes of music. The second and third movements of the present piece are indicative of this.
- Where Beethoven is more prone to repetition (and sequential writing) on the motivic level, Mahler seems more likely to repeat thematically. Again, repeating long(er) passages is the result. By comparison, my music repeats much less frequently than either of these two composers, although much more often than, say, Schoenberg in his Erwartung period. The trick isn’t repetition–it is meaningful repetition.
- In general, Mahler’s music is much more melody-driven than Beethoven’s (and mine). This will be an excellent study for me, as it will give me a chance to see whether in the face of additional evidence I still truly believe that rhythm is of greater importance than melody or harmony.
- It would be apples and oranges to compare the orchestration of Beethoven’s piano sonatas to Mahler’s symphonies. That said, even over the noise from the “loud” pavement on US 287, I have begun to make notes of effects I want to look at more closely. We are so fortunate to have recordings right at our fingertips… I heard a string passage this afternoon that I can’t wait to dig into, and the beginning of the fourth movement is a perfect illustration of when and why to use unmeasured tremolo in the strings.
- Again… loud pavement makes for bad listening, but are Mahler’s harmonies in this piece a great deal simpler than Beethoven’s? This is why I’m doing this project. As many times as I’ve listened to this piece, I haven’t even begun to hear it.
I want to throw a question out there that was inspired by a liner note I once read about this piece: Is Mahler, in writing this symphony, actually using collage (or even pastiche) techniques? Many of the melodies (especially in the first movement) are derived from Mahler’s earlier works (particularly, Des Knabben Wunderhorn). Other melodies are folk tunes, and still others bear resemblances to canonical works. Is Mahler’s intent to somehow document a sonic realm of the imagination? Is this a viable way to understand this piece?