On tonight's show:
Colorado MahlerFest
Charley looks forward to Colorado MahlerFest later this month with a past performance of the Fifth Symphony.
Mahler: Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor
Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra
Robert Olson, conductor
recorded 1/12-13/02
Program notes
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor
Part I
I. Trauermarsch: In gemessenem Schritt
II. Stürmisch bewegt--Mit grösster Vehemenz
Part II
III. Scherzo: Kräftig, nicht zu schnell
Part III
IV. Adagietto: Sehr langsam
V. Rondo Finale: Allegro giocoso--Frisch
“You wouldn't believe the trouble it's giving me,” said Mahler while composing his Fifth Symphony. “Both the construction and the ordering of the details and proportions…call for supreme mastery. As in a gothic cathedral, what appears to be total confusion must be resolved into a superior order and harmony.”
Resolution came during the summer of 1901. “There is nothing romantic or mystical about it,” Mahler wrote to a friend. “It is simply an expression of incredible energy. It is a human being in the full light of day, in the prime of his life…The human voice would be absolutely out of place here. There is no need for words; everything is expressed in purely musical terms.”
By the following summer, the Fifth was finished. In the meantime, Mahler had met and married Alma Schindler, who became his copyist. During a try-out of the new work, she recalled, “I had heard all the melodies while I was copying them, but I heard none of them now. Mahler had given the percussion and drums so overwhelming a role that hardly anything but the rhythm was recognizable. I ran home, crying out loud…I broke out, sobbing, ‘But you've written a symphony for percussion!’ He laughed. Then he picked up the score and drew a long red line across the whole side-drum part and nearly half of the rest of the percussion.”
Years later, after five revisions of the Symphony, Mahler wrote: “Yes, I have actually had to reorchestrate it completely. I can't understand how I could have written so much like a beginner. Evidently the routine I had acquired in my first four symphonies simply left me in the lurch, as if a wholly new message demanded a wholly new technique.” The Fifth was dedicated “to my dear Alma, my faithful and courageous comrade in all weathers.”
Mahler conducted the first performance on October 18, 1904 in Cologne. The work was greeted with catcalls and scattered applause. One critic claimed the opening movement was followed by “a breathless silence which proved more effectively than tremendous applause that the public was conscious of the presence of genius.” It was a minority view. After the Viennese première, Robert Hirschfeld called Mahler “The Meyerbeer of the Symphony,” complaining that “there was a time when the public was interested in freaks of nature only--giants, six-legged calves, Siamese twins. But now it has lost all notion of what is wholesome in art and takes an interest in nothing but spiritual freaks.”
After the first rehearsal in Cologne, Mahler had written to Alma: “The Scherzo is a very devil of a movement. And the public--what are they to make of this chaos out of which new worlds are forever being created, only to crumble in ruin a moment later? What are they to say to this primeval music, this foaming, roaring, raging sea of sound, to these dancing stars, to these breath-taking iridescent and flashing breakers? I'm going for a walk along the Rhine, the only Cologner who will quietly go his way after the première without calling me a monster. O that I might give my symphony its first performance fifty years after my death!”
The Scherzo is the centerpiece of the entire symphony, forming the second part of a three-part work. The first part begins with a Funeral March, which can be regarded as a long introduction to the second movement, marked “stormily agitated, with greatest vehemence.” Similarly, Part Three begins with the famous Adagietto, which can be viewed as a link to the Rondo-Finale. The last movement contains a fragment of the song Praise from a Lofty Intellect, Mahler's dig at music critics.
Despite Mahler's acquired abhorrence of programs for his works, several writers have tried to affix a scheme to the Fifth Symphony. Hans Tischler, for one, wrote: “Mourning and pain (first movement). Fighting and wounds (second movement). Irony and shadowy insecurity, coupled with a forced gaiety (third movement); relieved by the Interlude (fourth movement). The fifth movement concludes the work more cheerfully, describing daily work and haste, still the best phases of ordinary human existence.” Biographer Michael Kennedy writes: “The Fifth is Mahler's ‘Eroica,’ progressing from tragedy to triumph.”
The score calls for 4 flutes, 3 piccolos, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, triangle, glockenspiel, gong, harp and strings.
©2010 Charley Samson
