Posts Tagged ‘Third Symphony’

Mahler, Symphony No. 9, 4th movment

Sunday, January 9th, 2011

We all have those concerts that we wish we had the chance to hear, but didn’t.  In the Spring of 1996, I was talked out of going to hear the Cincinnati Symphony play Mahler’s Ninth, and as I’ve worked through the piece over the last two months, I’ve been regretting missing that experience.  Nonetheless, coming to it late is better than never, and I only wish I had more time to really dig in–I’m already ten days later than I had hoped!

That said, before I begin my comments, I’m pleased to have come to the end of my Mahler cycle.  I’d been considering spending 2011 with some great scores of the 194os, but I’m feeling the need to take some time away from this project–at least until May 1, which is the deadline for the textbook I’m working on for National Social Science Press.  The book, to be entitled Music: Notation and Practice in Past and Present is inspired by a book that I picked up in the early 90s, when I was just beginning to become serious about music.  That book, Introduction to Music by Roald Pen, was a reference and my first visit to many ideas in music and about music, and I hope to be creating a contemporary analogue to it.  My posts for the time being will be excerpts from my drafts, as I plow through music theary and music history.

But–one last time to Mahler.  This last movement–his final completed statement–unfolds and develops with a stateliness and slowness that I htink is most parallelled in the finale of the Third Symphony.  Ending with an Adagio is somewhat atypically of Mahler.  There are highly predictable, very tonal moments, and there are also very strange, very contrapuntal moments.  Above that, I hear this piece as a group of deferred climactic moments, each of which allows the movement to expand in scope and makes the ultimate climax all the more satisfying.

After an extended dominant tone, the first presentation of the chorale appears in mm. 3-10.  Mahler makes fascinating use of enharmonic equivalence–he can only be understanding these pitches as being equal-tempered, then, despite the ill-advisedness of playing them as such.  The movement is filled with root motions by descending third, by deceptive progressions and, most interestingly, by progressions which cut against the grain of traditional functional tonality.  Are they backward-looking, or simply intended to sound strange?

Following the chorale presentation, where there should be a confident, full-chorded cadence, there is, in m. 11, a single Db.  At m. 13, the strings enter, again full-throated, with a fuller, clearer cadence in m. 17, where the first independent wind voice is heard.  The horn has always been Mahler’s instrument.

The music changes from Db major to C# minor in m. 28, and the first violins have a quotation fro mthe last movement of the Second Symphony in m. 31.  Measure 34 sees the reappearance of the solo viola–the signature sound of this symphony.  The remainder of this minor-key section is a slower, transitional passage that ends with a return to Db major in m. 49,  coupled with a return of the solo horn and the chorale theme, in variation. 

Gradually, more and more instruments fill in the texture, as Mahler has held the winds largely in reserve.  Measure 63, a dominant chord on D major, seems to herald a climactic moment, only to diminuendo to a return of the chroal material, again in the strings,with only the bassoons doubling the basses.  This is perhaps the most string-dominated of Mahler’s work since the Fifth Symphony.

Over the next two pages, another climactic approach is developed, this time with the first entry of the trumpets, only to be deferred in m. 73.  After a cadence in m. 77, another transitional passage leads to C# minor in m. 88.  Of note, however, is the first passage in this movement for winds without strings, mm. 81ff.

The minor-key section at m. 88 has a degree of harmonic stasis unusual to this point in the movment, with an implication of the subdominant key in m. 97.  From this point, the texture builds to the actual climax of the movement, but not before the first entry of the percussion combined with the first point at which the brass is fully-voiced.

The climactic moment of the movement is in m. 126, with a cadence that begins a further variation of the chorale material.  Measure 138 features a fantastic pianissimo tutti color, with the flutes an octave above the violins and the horns doubling the celli.  An aftershock of the climax appears in m. 142, followed by a diminuendo to a long coda.  Measures 153-5 have an interesting coloristic moment in which the line moves up while the instruments involved move “down”–violin to viola to cello. 

The last page is masterful–it seems to fade into nothingness, just as the First Symphony began from nothing.  There is as much silence on this page as there is anywhere else in Mahler’s preceding work.  With a quiet Db major chord, Mahler’s work, and my comment on it, ends.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 7, third movement

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

The central movement of this five-movement symphony is in the keys of D major and D minor and is structured as a scherzo-trio.  The scherzo material has the feel of something of a moto perpetuo, and this is not Mahler’s first effort in this vein.  It grows from the tiny seed of a half-step (Bb-A) in the timpani and low strings, gathering momentum over the first twelve bars, with each new aspect of the texture–first the horns, then the woodwinds, then a dotted-note flute motive, and finally the arrival of a theme in m. 13–seeming to grow out of the existing material.  If the goal of this study is to unlock some of Mahler’s compositional secrets, I think I have started to find them.  Just as Mahler’s Mahler-ness–his cliches, the predictable aspects of his style–begin to pile up in my mind, I am coming to see how it is that he is able to structure large-scale pieces and more importantly, to maintain the interest of the listener over what may seem an excessive length of time. 

A summary, then, of what I’ve learned thus far:

  • introduce new material sparingly, and base new ideas on old ones.  The first 100 bars of this movement are a fantastic example of this.  The first 24 bars are based on Mahler’s elaboration of the material presented in the introductory passage.  That material is then used to preface a new theme beginning in m. 24, and accompanied by motives that have already been stated.  The suggestions of hemiola made by the opening statement–does it begin on an upbeat or a downbeat–are played out in this theme, as in m. 30ff.
  • Use harmony sparingly.  Mahler extends the horizons of his pieces by avoiding, at all costs, things that I encourage my undergraduate theory students to pursue with a vengeance, in a harmonic sense.  While my students–and admittedly, I myself–tend to write one chord per melody note (chorale style) or one chord per measure (probably an anachronistic reflection of our familiarity with 20th-century popular styles), Mahler tends to have long swathes of music that are based on the same chord.  These aren’t exactly pedal points, but Mahler is thinking in terms of a chord being a key area rather than a single harmonic event.  In some ways, the harmonic rhythm present in much of Mahler is more reminiscent of Mozart or Haydn than it is of composers closer to Mahler in time.  Even Brahms tends toward a more regular harmonic rhythm that I would consider to be a hallmark of the Romantic style.
  • Repetition is not a dirty word for Mahler, even though exact repetition is rare.  When material returns, it is almost always reorchestrated, if not completely reworked.  There is a great deal of repwithout insipidness as a result.  Repetition is welcome in this music.
  • At the same time, Mahler’s music is filled with variety of every type.  Even when he is being his most Mahleristic, there is no sense that we have heard this before.  While I have always perceived the Seventh Symphony as being third in the middle grouping of Mahler’s symphonies, a rehashing of the previous two–the bold Fifth, the cataclysmic Sixth–as I dig deeper, there is less evidence of that.

So, that said, here are some interesting spots in this movement.  I have Schenkerian training, and some might consider me a Schenkerian, but I am always open to other explanations.  However, the passage in mm. 54-62 is so striking an example of an upper neighbor being used to extend a melody that it can’t go without comment.  There is literally nowhere for the G in the violins in m. 58 to go except back to the F# from whence it came, which it does in m. 60.

The transitional section beginning in m. 108 is sublime.   Again, Mahler is being tight with his material, but we see much of the motivic material used thus far in this little passage that also brings the music to D major in m. 116.  The quasi-echo effect of this phrase is a wonderful transitional device.

As mysteriously as it appeared, the scherzo vanishes beginning around m. 155.  Triplets have been replaced by eighths, drifting away into an awkward contrabassoon solo in m. 159.  When the triplets reappear, it is in a muted allusion to the opening material beginning in the following bar.

The Trio material, beginning in m. 179, is a reworking of the woodwind theme first stated in m. 38, only now in the major mode, and in inversion.  As always, Mahler is somewhere between major and minor, and steadfastly refuses to commit to either.

Beginning in m. 210, a persistent call-and-response begins, first between solo viola and celli, then between violins and horns (m. 218ff), then bassoons and brass (m. 226ff), then between trombones and horns (m. 236ff) leading to a climactic moment in m. 243 (marked “Pesante”).  This build-up, however, has not been to some grand release of tension that we would expect of Mahler, but to a prefunctory gesture  that dissolves into a new theme (composed of old motives) in the horns and celli.  This theme, begining in m. 246, is a parody of material from the Third Symphony, as if Mahler is poking himself in the ribs.  A further question–is this self-parody, or self-plagiarism?  Unlike some composers (including me), Mahler was a tireless revisor of his own works, and the Third Symphony was foremost among these, so at any rate, it could not have been accidental.  As a composer who engages in a fair amount of quotation, both of others and myself, I always hope that the listener will catch it–surely an act of parody rather than plagiarism.

The trio ends with the indication Wieder wie am Anfang (“Always as the beginning.”)  Unlike earlier composers (even as late as Brahms and Dvorak), Mahler does not simply indicate a Da Capo and repeat the Scherzo verbatim.    After a transitional section in E-flat minor, which is the perfect setup for preparation for the Bb that begins the scherzo proper, a significantly expanded introduction ensues (m. 293ff).  This allows Mahler to incorporate material from the trio (the call-and-response motive in m. 306ff).

An orchestrational concern–if Mahler could have written a timpani solo in mm. 323ff, would he have done so?  The basses seem to be covering the unavailable timpani notes.

Measure 408 includes the first use I am aware of of the “snap” or “Bartok” pizzicato; certainly the first in Mahler, and an interesting reworking of the introductory material, now being used to introduce a coda.  Trio material appears, now fully voiced, in the form of the Third Symphony quote in m. 417, and from this point, the movement peters out as gradually as it faded in.  If the idea behind this piece is night, then this movement steals in and out in the manner of a dream.  As for myself, I am a night sleeper, and when I remember a dream, it is almost always just before waking.  Perhaps Mahler would have a more receptive audience for this Symphony in my wife, who frequently naps in the evening, only to wake for quite some time around midnight.  I barely know that night happens, but Becky lives a great deal of her life there.

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Mahler, Symphony No. 1, “Blumine”

Monday, August 24th, 2009

As a working composer, I am always very interested in false starts, incomplete pieces, works which composers abandon at any stage of composition, even after performance.  The process of composition is just as important to me as the product.  It is only fitting, then, that I at least take a peak at the “missing” movement, titled “Blumine,” from Mahler’s first symphony.

In the original 1889 symphony, “Blumine” was the second of five movements, with a programmatic scheme.  By the time of the original 1899 publication, Mahler had dropped the program of the symphony, and with it, this movement.  The score ended up in the hands of one of Mahler’s pupils, and came to light in the 1950s.  It was subsequently published and recorded in the late 1960s.  Since then,  most performances and recordings have kept to the four-movement plan which seems to have been Mahler’s final intention, but “Blumine” occasionally pops up.

As a composer, I must ask myself why an entire completed and performed movement was deleted from this piece.  Compositionally, the piece works.  It is beautiful, well-scored, unambiguous and basically successful.  As always, Mahler’s use of the orchestra, while not as adventurous as in the other movements of the symphony, is flawless.  From this composer, I would expect nothing less.  But Gustav Mahler was his own worst critic, and frequently made extensive revisions during rehearsals and after the premieres of his symphonies (his Tenth symphony was probably left incomplete because of the time spent on a major revision of the Third Symphony).  It is believed that many works by Mahler simply have not come down to us because the composer destroyed them, guarding his legacy carefully, perhaps.

So why would Mahler have excised “Blumine?”  One flaw of the piece is that it is somewhat limited thematically, and feels at times more like a strophic song than a symphonic movement.  I have been discovering that Mahler’s use of repetition is a key to understanding his ability to build large forms, and here the repetition is not unwelcome–the piece works–but it is somewhat unabated.  There is a single theme, based on a single motive.  There is some development, but it is not extensive.

A second reason that suggests itself is that it just doesn’t seem to adhere to the composer’s style as expressed in the other movements.  This piece is very clearly an intermezzo, standing between the more significant first movement and the more forceful Landler that would become the second movement.  Mahler’s middle movements are rarely the sort of fluffy, friendly pieces that we see in “Blumine.”  Where is the angst, the drive, the seriousness?  In addition to the dramatic suggestions, the style simply seems dated.  It is more like Berlioz than Mahler.  Perhaps Mahler came to realize that the symphony became too disparate in sentiment with the inclusion of “Blumine,” and when it came time for publication, it seemed best to leave the piece behind.  The Wikipedia article on this piece suggests that it existed before the rest of the symphony as incidental music for a play unrelated.  While Mahler may have had good feelings for the piece, it lacks the passion, the irony, the dramatic import of the rest of the piece, and even seems mispaced harmonically (C-major, where the other movements are in D-minor or D-major).

An interesting diversion, to be certain.  Score and recordings are readily available (I found a good recording on the Naxos Music Library), and any serious Mahler fan should check them out.

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