"Der Titan" by Gustav Mahler
Here follows a review of a piece of music. I am amused, and I am writing in an intentionally archaic style. My emotions regarding the piece are genuine. But you gentle reader may find the whole process tiresome. Be warned.
Hearing with New Ears
or
"I guess I was in the right mood at the right time."
It is many years since I first heard a symphony by Gustav Mahler, but I still recall that first experience fondly, if no longer acutely. It was the 1993-94 season, when Leonard Slatkin was still the music director and principle conductor of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. To my embarrassment, I can no longer recall with certainty just which symphony was then performed. I believe it was the fifthh. Only later did I hear the first symphony, again in St. Louis, and only years after that did I embark upon a careful study of the musical tradition in which Mahler takes part. Ere first I heard any of his work, I was informed, warned really, that it was music for a rarefied taste, that many found it tedious or long, unapproachable somehow. I walked away from that first encounter thinking that this was a skilled composer of whom I would like to learn more. By contrast I left Mahler's first symphony thinking that it was a rather simpler work crafted of rather less interesting themes. How very wrong I was.
I remembered Mahler's first symphony, "Der Titan," as a pleasant but less strong piece than his "mature" work. I accurately recalled that it bestowed a symphonic treatment upon material that I interpreted as Yiddish folk tunes. I carried no other lasting impression from that first hearing. I was not then aware of Mahler's reputation for using folk material to represent oppression or pain. Neither was I so familiar with the forms and features of the Western tradition as I am now. That said, after hearing the recent New York Philharmonic radio broadcast performance of "Der Titan," (6 June 2006 on KBIA, Columbia Missouri) under the able baton of Loren Maazel, I cannot understand how it was that I failed to be moved to my core.
The first movement begins innocuously enough with a single note (an A, apparently) played in many octaves by the full compliment of orchestral strings, creating a glistening effect that feels dark and woodsy in the musical vernacular of the nineteenth century. It is punctuated first by a brass fanfare and then by effects in the woodwinds: "bird-calls" in the Romantic pastoral tradition. At this point I made a mistake. I left my car and went inside. But I was sufficiently intrigued by this half remembered music that I turned it on again once I was comfortably installed in my home. I was immediately struck by the comparatively modest length (in light of later Mahler) and tightly knitted structure of the first movement. I said to my long suffering lover and companion roughly "well, Mahler can be pithy." After this Mr. Mahler gradually won my full and undivided attention.
The interior movements of the version of the piece performed (evidently Mahler reworked much of it after its Viennese premiere) no longer felt simple or light. Folk like materials were in evidence, but the effect seemed more disturbing now. The prhrasing felt relentless. The bass line in its insistent, if not quite mechanical repetition struck me as a parody of the entire pastoral tradition. The unnerving regularity of phrases left me more than an little uncomfortable. I was transfixed. The proportion of the movements felt classical. The materials felt Romantic. But the rhetoric was almost modern. The scherzo, with its Yiddish seeming folk tunes treated in similar fashion bore my expectations out. I cannot help but wonder what Mahler was trying to say. The music conveyed to me a sense of being ground down underneath a very heavy burden. Perhaps the ridicule of masses of unruly and uncaring peers.
The final movement could not answer such personal and non-musical questions, but it did provide an unparalleled emotional ride. The published program describes the surreal funeral of a huntsman accompanied by the animals upon whom he would lately have preyed. This doesn't seem to me to adequately describe the emotion depicted. Hints of the opening of the first movement return, with the haunting string sound again interrupted by fanfares and chirping birds, but now it is juxtaposed with snatches of ponderous four-square Germanic and Yiddish folk music. The ending felt nothing if not genuinely transcendent. I suppose it could be interpreted as hollow, but I felt genuinely released. I can't say that I really know what Mahler meant with this piece, but I can say that it was a memorable trip. Now that I have heard this symphony with new ears, I shall not soon forget it.
Hearing with New Ears
or
"I guess I was in the right mood at the right time."
It is many years since I first heard a symphony by Gustav Mahler, but I still recall that first experience fondly, if no longer acutely. It was the 1993-94 season, when Leonard Slatkin was still the music director and principle conductor of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. To my embarrassment, I can no longer recall with certainty just which symphony was then performed. I believe it was the fifthh. Only later did I hear the first symphony, again in St. Louis, and only years after that did I embark upon a careful study of the musical tradition in which Mahler takes part. Ere first I heard any of his work, I was informed, warned really, that it was music for a rarefied taste, that many found it tedious or long, unapproachable somehow. I walked away from that first encounter thinking that this was a skilled composer of whom I would like to learn more. By contrast I left Mahler's first symphony thinking that it was a rather simpler work crafted of rather less interesting themes. How very wrong I was.
I remembered Mahler's first symphony, "Der Titan," as a pleasant but less strong piece than his "mature" work. I accurately recalled that it bestowed a symphonic treatment upon material that I interpreted as Yiddish folk tunes. I carried no other lasting impression from that first hearing. I was not then aware of Mahler's reputation for using folk material to represent oppression or pain. Neither was I so familiar with the forms and features of the Western tradition as I am now. That said, after hearing the recent New York Philharmonic radio broadcast performance of "Der Titan," (6 June 2006 on KBIA, Columbia Missouri) under the able baton of Loren Maazel, I cannot understand how it was that I failed to be moved to my core.
The first movement begins innocuously enough with a single note (an A, apparently) played in many octaves by the full compliment of orchestral strings, creating a glistening effect that feels dark and woodsy in the musical vernacular of the nineteenth century. It is punctuated first by a brass fanfare and then by effects in the woodwinds: "bird-calls" in the Romantic pastoral tradition. At this point I made a mistake. I left my car and went inside. But I was sufficiently intrigued by this half remembered music that I turned it on again once I was comfortably installed in my home. I was immediately struck by the comparatively modest length (in light of later Mahler) and tightly knitted structure of the first movement. I said to my long suffering lover and companion roughly "well, Mahler can be pithy." After this Mr. Mahler gradually won my full and undivided attention.
The interior movements of the version of the piece performed (evidently Mahler reworked much of it after its Viennese premiere) no longer felt simple or light. Folk like materials were in evidence, but the effect seemed more disturbing now. The prhrasing felt relentless. The bass line in its insistent, if not quite mechanical repetition struck me as a parody of the entire pastoral tradition. The unnerving regularity of phrases left me more than an little uncomfortable. I was transfixed. The proportion of the movements felt classical. The materials felt Romantic. But the rhetoric was almost modern. The scherzo, with its Yiddish seeming folk tunes treated in similar fashion bore my expectations out. I cannot help but wonder what Mahler was trying to say. The music conveyed to me a sense of being ground down underneath a very heavy burden. Perhaps the ridicule of masses of unruly and uncaring peers.
The final movement could not answer such personal and non-musical questions, but it did provide an unparalleled emotional ride. The published program describes the surreal funeral of a huntsman accompanied by the animals upon whom he would lately have preyed. This doesn't seem to me to adequately describe the emotion depicted. Hints of the opening of the first movement return, with the haunting string sound again interrupted by fanfares and chirping birds, but now it is juxtaposed with snatches of ponderous four-square Germanic and Yiddish folk music. The ending felt nothing if not genuinely transcendent. I suppose it could be interpreted as hollow, but I felt genuinely released. I can't say that I really know what Mahler meant with this piece, but I can say that it was a memorable trip. Now that I have heard this symphony with new ears, I shall not soon forget it.