Posts Tagged ‘sonata-allegro form’

Mahler, Symphony No. 6, movement 4

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

I will be the first to admit that I have not done my homework to the extent I would ideally like to over the past two weeks.  Perhaps I should have allotted more time to the 822 measures of this movement, but truthfully other things have got in the way.  To allow myself an extension would simply impinge on the three remaining pieces, and since by the time I am ready to write the next blog entry, we will also be on the cusp of moving, it seems better to summarize my observations and move forward today.

With this movement, it seems very difficult to get past Mahler’s symbolism–the hammer blows, the major-minor motive and the rest.  Tony Duggan, in his excellent summary of recent recordings of this piece, deals with some of the many performance issues, such as the ordering of the movements (which differs from my edition, the Dover miniature score and from many recent recordings), and the precise number of hammer blows (Mahler’s final decision appears to have been two, while my score, a reprint of the 1906 Nachfolger edition, calls for three).  He also suggests that this piece is the most classically ordered of all of Mahler’s symphonies, and I find myself tending to agree with that statement.

In an interesting way, the two hammer blows that Mahler retained seem to delineate the exposition, development and recapitulation of a sonata-allegro form, with the third (missing) blow indicating the coda.

Mahler opens this movement with an interesting texture and harmony–a German augmented-sixth chord that resolves deceptively to the tonic in m. 9, the first appearance of the major-minor motive in this movement.  The motive is presented as it appeared in the first movement, in the brass, and accompanied by timpani and drums, but with the strings offering a countermelody that contains material of motivic importance for the rest of the movement.

In m. 16, a tuba solo introduces further new material, including an octave leap.  Throughout this symphony, the octave leap has been an important element, and part of the cohesiveness of the work as a whole is Mahler’s use of the octave (and sometimes larger intervals) to create a sense of drama and pathos.  Rodney Winther teaches that small intervals build tension, while large intervals build drama, and Mahler employs both, but the drama of this movement is the aspect that wins out, I think.

The tuba solo is accompanied by a descending chromatic bass, which is highly typical of Mahler.  In mm. 19 and 22, the clarinets and horns have an interesting effect that I typically associate more with later composers, such as Stravinsky.  The clarinets articulate the beginning of a phrase, but the horns sustain the final note, as though the echo has a different timbre than the initial attack.  In the end, it is this sort of synthesis and blending that makes for fantastic orchestral writing, and Mahler is transcending the German orchestrational style in this instance.  A comparison with the scoring techniques used by composers of a generation earlier–Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner–reveals a much more conservative approach, with much greater use of simple block and mixed scoring techniques.  Composers of the same generation and younger, however, start to show this sort of adventurous approach to orchestration–Richard Strauss and Schoenberg, for example.  Strauss would seem to be the first of these new orchestrators to achieve notoriety–before Mahler, perhaps?

I don’t often wish that I were a trumpet player, but m. 46 has an absolutely fantastic line that makes me a little bit envious.  This is followed by another typical descent to the cadence, as the music shifts to C-minor in m. 49 for a chorale setting, first in a very dark woodwind and horn timbre, then in a lighter timbre that uses the middle, relaxed registor of the horns.  Again, Mahler is being expository here, and this material reappears later in the movement in a drastically transformed body.

From this point, the tempo and scoring become faster and fuller, and by m. 114, the written tempo is Allegro energico, the tempo of the first movement.  The martial, mechanistic feel of that movement is carried forward here in a section that, if not quotation, is at least style-copy.

In m. 182, marked pesante, the low brass state a theme that begins with a decsending octave, here on A.  This theme reappears after both of the hammer blows, and as the dark coda, which would have followed the third hammer blow in Mahler’s sometime plan for this movment. 

Measure 228 sees the harmony move from D major to D minor, with both the descending octave idea and a texture that is reminiscent of the material in the first few measures of this movement.  This portion of the piece is developmental in nature, and as it builds to the first hammer blow (m. 336) the music becomes more an more rhythmically compelx, particularly around m. 290, where Mahler juxtaposes several divisions of the beat as the music leads to a cadence in G major in m. 296.

A trend that I have detected in Mahler’s work is a growing concern with counterpoint.  Almost nowhere in this movement does Mahler use a simple “melody with accompaniment” texture.  Whether imitation or inversion or augmentation, Mahler seems to have come to a more “crafty” approach to his art.  At the same time, Mahler’s counterpoint does not adhere strictly to the traditional “rules,” and dissonance is often freely introduced without preparation.   For an example of this tendency, see mm. 302ff, wherein a two-measure motive is passed around imitatively, often with strikingly dissonant results.

I find myself shorter on time than on ideas about this piece–again, I refer myself to my notes on it.  The last three canonical symphonies remain–I am undecided about the Tenth, Das Lied von der Erde or some of the other pieces I might work with.  The Seventh, Eighth and Ninth are enormous compositions with which I am somewhat less familiar with than the first six symphonies, and come December, I will have to see where my thinking about Mahler lies.  If I have learned what I need to from this master, I may move on (to what, I am not certain).

Schedule for the Seventh will be as follows:

  • July 1-12: Movement 1
  • July 13-24: Movement 2
  • July 25-August 5: Movement 3
  • August 6-17:  Movement 4
  • August 18-31:  Movement 5

Hope to have you with me!

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Mahler, Symphony No. 6, first movement

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Part of the problem in thinking about this piece will prove to be cutting through what I think of as the “mythology–” a tragic piece responding to tragedy, with hammer blows, and fate-motives–and getting to what makes it, in the end, a magnificently effective musical statement.

The truth is that none of the extramusical meaning means a thing if the piece isn’t well-crafted and well-executed.  Fortunately for us, Mahler was not only pouring his soul into the piece, but he was using his mind as a composer at the peak of his creative powers.

I must begin with some thoughts about scoring, because this orchestra is simply enormous.  I remember being a college student and seeing the Cincinnati Symphony fill its stage to near capacity for this piece, and it seemed as though not a single musician more could have been on the platform.  One of my music history teachers, John Trout, taught that Mahler’s orchestra was of that size not for the sake of power, but to allow a greater number of combinations of instruments, and to illustrate this, he used an example from the Kindertotenlieder, the work Mahler finished just before the Sixth.  Indeed, in that vocal texture, Mahler did score delicately, but he also didn’t score for an orchestra of the size found in the Sixth.  As much as Mahler’s scoring is at times delicate, always well-conceived and above all masterful, I think, in this movement at least, it is about power.  Sixteen brass have the effect at times of a slap in the face, particularly when the trumpet in F is near the top of its range. 

Most of the mood of this first movement is simply menacing, and it is cast in one of Mahler’s strictest sonata-allegro forms, with no slow introduction as in the opening movement of the First.  To my hearing, the secondary theme begins in the pick-ups to m. 77, with the key change to F major, a closely-related key to the home key, a-minor.  The exposition is repeated, with the development section clearly beginning in m. 128.  The recapitulation begins in m. 291, with the return of the main theme in A major and the secondary theme at m. 357 in D major–keeping the same relative harmonic distance of “adding a flat” but not the same key relationship.  A coda begins at m. 379, in precisely the place that it “ought” to begin in a sonata model.

Mahler has not, up to this time, been an especially strict follower of the classical forms, and I have to wonder what caused him to begin to be so now.  In reading program notes and musicological discussions of this piece, I have never read that, in addition to hiding autobiographical information and working through his not-inconsiderable angst in this piece, Mahler also adheres as close as can be expected to a formal model that had largely passed by the wayside (although Beethoven was always close to Mahler’s mind, and to the minds of his contemporaries).  This is Mahler’s first all-instrumental four-movement symphony (the First was originally in five movements), and as arch-Romantic as its expression seems, at the same time, its conception, at least in this first movement, is as meta-Classical as Brahms or Mendelssohn.

With the formal overview covered, then, here are some spots I find to be of interest.

The main theme, beginning in m. 6 has a highly characteristic octave jump that creates from the first moments of the piece a lurching, yet strangely deliberate quality.  This octave motive, though, is only part of Mahler’s material.  In m. 8, the violins have the first appearance of a developmentally supple fragment that will appear again and again through the movement, most interestingly in inversion as the head motive of the secondary theme. 

Dotted rhythms are crucial to this piece–they are propulsive, pulling the ear constantly forward, but with each iteration giving a sense of pause before the “late” second note.  Almost every measure of the main theme includes them, with the exception of those measures in which the melody dissolves into running 16ths (as in mm. 11-12). 

In a technique again typical of the Classical sonata-allegro, the transitional material begins with a modified version of the main theme in m. 25.  This time, the octave leap is down, not up.   A sequence in m. 31 over an insistent pedal A starts to open up the harmonic realm, until the main theme returns in m. 43 over a chromatic descent from A to E, the goal of this section.

In m. 53, the running 16th notes come apart into trill gestrues in the woodwinds and low strings.  The scoring is compelling, particularly the last statement of this idea in m. 56 by the contrabassoon in its low register with the basses.  Here is a deviation from the Classical model–at this point, the secondary theme should enter in the dominant, but Mahler instead returns to the tonic to give the first appearance of a motive that he has used before, but will take on paramount importance in this symphony–the major triad changing to a minor triad on the same root.  In this first instance, mm. 59 and 60, it appears in the trumpets and oboes (note the intriguing use of dynamics here), in the home key, A.  It is followed by a transitional passage that does lead to the second theme, in the key of F, which is reached by a deceptive resolution of the dominant in m. 77.

Before continuing on, I must consider this changing chord-quality motive.  A change from a major to a minor chord is rarely part of the “textbook” tonal vocabulary.  It would tend to suggest a passing tone, often from IV to iv to I (la-le-sol is the specific voicing I have in mind).  A more likely event might be a diatonic minor triad becoming a secondary dominant chord, as, for example, i to V/IV, but this is the retrograde of what Mahler is giving us.  Does this fall under the rubric of “coloristic chord succession” from the Kotska-Payne textbook, where those authors throw up their hands, as if to say, “Sometimes composers just write what sounds good!”  The other usage of this sort of succession that comes to mind is in the Italian madrigalists, particularly Gesualdo, in which this sort of motive becomes a means for expressing a text.  As a motive, then, it has the advantage of being unfamiliar enough to the listener that it doesn’t simply blend into the texture.

The secondary theme is derived from the first theme–its head motive is a reworking of the material found in m. 8.  This motivic tautness is a characteristic that I greatly admire in all of Mahler’s music–while his work may seem sprawling, there is an underlying unity that justifies its dimensions, and Mahler truly does not overstay his welcome.  I don’t consider myself to have a great attention span, particularly for the spoken word, but, truthfully, sometimes for musical utterance as well.  Mahler holds my attention, not through variety but through unity.

I find it interesting that at the beginning of the first ending (m. 121), Mahler returns to A minor in a retrograde fashion from the way he got there–moving from F down to E, and thence to A in the bass.  This would not be a completely tonal solution but for the fact that the F is not the root of the chord here.

Again, Mahler’s development section is tightly conceived, even if it ranges widely from a harmonic standpoint.  Measure  149 sees the main theme in e minor, which moves quickly back to the home key in m. 156.  One of my favorite melodic moments in the piece happens at m. 163, when a very strident, almost Tchaikovskian melody appears in the violins and high woodwinds.  It is, of course, derived from the main theme.

Measure 180 has a typically Mahlerian descent in the bass to a new key–now D minor.  This means of modulating is typical of Mahler,  and I believe he may have borrowed it from Wagner; more research is needed on this point. 

Measure 201 begins a slow section that is a point of repose (almost relief) within this massive movement.  Although the Seventh Symphony has a more pastoral character, Mahler uses cowbells for the first time in this section, with an interesting notational solution instead of the standard roll notation that he might have borrowed from the snare drum.

With that, I must close–I’ve far exceeded the time I allotted myself this morning, and other duties beckon.  I refer myself to my notes in the score.

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