48th Season (2008-2009) Program Notes

Concert I: The Richness of Autumn - Saturday evening, November 15, 2008 at 8:00pm

Symphony No. 1 in D Major (“Titan”) by Gustav Mahler (born in Kalischt, then Bohemia, on July 7, 1860; died in Vienna on May 18, 1911)

Langsam. schleppend; sehr gemächlich; belebtes Zeitmas (Slow, dragging; very unhurried; in animated tempo

Kräftig bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell (Robustly energetic, but not too fast)

Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen (Solemn and measured, without dragging)

Stürmisch bewegt (Stormily agitated)

As a young man, Mahler was such a flaming idealist that he would conduct only the second-string repertoire of operas, works by Albert Lortzing and Heinrich Marschner and even lesser composers. He did not feel that either he or the orchestras at his command in the provincial German houses where he managed to find employment were adequate to the masterpieces of Wagner or Mozart. He could not bring himself to “profane” these works, he said, with inferior players and singers. In 1883 he had made a pilgrimage to Bayreuth in order to hear Wagner’s Parsifal, and nothing was ever good enough after that. He was only the son of a penniless Jewish coachman, after all, and what musical experiences he had had were with bugle calls and the military bands attached to some local army barracks nearby his parents’ home.

In 1883 and 1884 he somehow found work in the opera house at Cassel (in northwestern Germany, near Cologne), with its by no means poor or undistinguished theater, as the assistant director, so he could browbeat himself as much as he wanted and deny himself juicy conducting assignments in the name of high standards to his heart’s content. Such flagellation meant just that much more time to devote to his own compositions, of which he already had quite a few, all of them as yet unperformed. It was probably in Cassel, at the age of perhaps 16, that he began composition of his first symphony, a work that grew and grew in size and complexity. It was based on a very popular novel, The Titan-like Mahler’s Symphony, very long and very romantic-by “Jean Paul,” the pseudonym of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1749-1825) whose works had already influenced the passionate musical compositions of Robert Schumann and had driven other lesser (and more impressionable) composers to contemplate suicide as graphically exampled in many a Jean Paul novel.

It was not, however, until Mahler was appointed to a position with the Budapest Royal Opera in 1888 that he could make arrangements for a public performance of this sizable work. To keep his potential audience interested, Mahler wrote up a rather ambitious program outline of his “Symphonic Poem in Two Parts,” in which he described the various movements as follows:

Part I. Days of Youth. Youth, flowers and thorns.

1. Spring without end. The introduction represents the awakening of nature at early dawn.
2. A Chapter of Flowers. [This movement, an Andante, was withdrawn by Mahler after an early performance of the score and never re-instated.]
3. Full sail! (Scherzo)

Part II. Commedia umana. (The Human Comedy)

4. Stranded. A funeral march à la Callot [Jacques Callot, a 17th-century French artist whose engravings were famous throughout Europe. The composer was inspired by a pictorial parody well known, especially to all children in South Germany, The Hunter’s Funeral Procession. The forest animals accompany the dead sharpshooter’s coffin, he who in life had repeatedly shot at them, to his grave. The hares carry flags; in front is a band of gypsy musicians and music-making cats, frogs, crows, etc.; and deer, stags, foxes, and other four-footed and feathered denizens of the forest accompany the procession in comic postures. In the present piece the imagined expression is partly ironically gay, partly gloomily brooding]. This march is immediately followed attaca by . . .
5. Dall’Inferno al Paradiso (From the Inferno to Paradise), Allegro furioso, the sudden outbreak of a profoundly wounded heart.)

Mahler later disavowed this program outline and all other attempts to attach a story to his music, but it indicates nonetheless how his young creative mind worked and what was in it as he composed his music.

His first movement he first marked Langsam, schleppend wie ein Naturlaut (“Slowly, and drawn out like a sound of nature”), which may reminds us of one of his most famous quotes: “My music is, throughout and always, but a sound of nature.” (Another quote, less well known, dates from his first days in the United States after he had been appointed conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1909, at what was then the highest annual salary ever paid a conductor in this country: $30,000. He was taken to see Niagara Falls for the first time, and he gasped as he cried out, “Endlich fortissimo!” (At last, a fortissimo!)

The second movement is a scherzo, basically a Ländler, or peasant dance somewhat resembling a slow waltz, but full of rubato.

The third and most famous movement is the Funeral March, which gives an odd melody (the French nursery tune “Frère Jacques” in a minor key) to an oddish solo instrument, the contrabass, or double bass, after which, according to a Mahler biographer, Paul Stefan, “ an oboe bleats and squeaks in the upper register; the shrill E flat clarinet quacks; while over a quiet counterpoint in the trumpets, the oboes are tootling a vulgar street-song.” It all seems another indication of Mahler’s often parodistic nature.

The final movement is turbulent and shattering, driving to an enormous climax wherein Mahler indicates that seven horns must cut through the heaving orchestra in a “chorale of salvation from paradise after the waves of hell.” The late Bruno Walter felt that this demonic conclusion is “a triumphant victory over life’s struggle.”

The amazing re-assessment and resulting popularity of Mahler’s music in the United States is basically the missionary work of three people. Mahler himself completely rebuilt the New York Philharmonic Orchestra after he was appointed conductor in 1909, and in doing so spread the gospel of his own music, so that The New York Post wrote, “Mahler has worked a miracle! No wonder the Mahlerites are growing fast in numbers!” But the Austrian-born conductor Bruno Walter also lifted Mahler performances to a high pinnacle of perfection, and was a good friend to the composer as well, particularly in the latter’s more vividly neurotic crises. And, perhaps most of all, the American Leonard Bernstein programmed and recorded all ten of the Mahler symphonies as well as his song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde, most of them several times, in performances with the New York Philharmonic, in the course of his tenure, from 1958 until he retired in 1969, that never failed to galvanize audiences to a fervor that was almost palpable. For many hearers they were among his finest moments on the podium.

-Musical annotations by Clair W. Van Ausdall for Maestra Susan Deaver and the North Shore Symphony Orchestra

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