orchestra (85 musicians)
It is tempting to believe that Mahler anticipated, or at least intuited, in his Sixth Symphony the threefold tragedy that was to strike just one year after the symphony’s premiere in Essen, Germany on May 27, 1906: the death of his elder daughter Maria from diphtheria, his ignominious downfall from the post of music director at the Vienna State Opera, and the diagnosis of his critical heart condition. Each of these tragic events would be represented in the Finale by a massive Hammerschlag (hammer blow). However, later he was seized by superstitious instincts and he removed the third hammer blow from the second edition of the published score.
The Symphony opens with a tramping, march-like figure (Man marching to his fate?) that serves as a brief prelude to the fiercely energetic first theme in the violins, a theme covering a range of two and a half octaves and full of huge leaps. The second principal theme bursts in joyfully, passionately (again, in the violins) in F major. The development section begins with a resumption of the tramping, march-like music, and eventually settles into a quiet passage that bespeaks a strange, otherworldly calm. Distant cowbells and celesta announce, according to Mahler, “the last greeting from earth to penetrate the remote solitude of the mountain peaks.” Eventually the march returns us to familiar terrain, and joyfully exuberant statements of the second theme sweep the movement to a triumphant conclusion in A major.
The second movement is a study in the macabre, full of nightmarish, cacophonous, fantastic visions underlined by unsettling rhythmic irregularities. The third movement stands as an oasis of tranquility and rest from the raging emotional storms that preceded it and that will return in the Finale. The style is lyrical throughout (often soaring rapturously, as if in flight from a cruel world), the scoring is often of chamber music delicacy. The distant realm evoked by cowbells and celesta reappears in joyful exuberance.
The Finale is one of the biggest movements Mahler ever wrote - not just long (at half an hour it is certainly that), but truly vast in scope, in development of its ideas and in range of emotional substance. The strange, eerie, even terrifying Introduction, which includes its own funeral march, sets the stage for the titanic conflict that breaks forth. Phantasmal visions, strident marches, frenzied outbursts, mad pursuits, dizzying falls and ascents, unearthly calm, ardent lyricism and much more are swept into a cosmic orbit, reaffirming Mahler’s contention that “a symphony should be like the world - it must embrace everything.”
oeuvre@22792 generated in Montréal by litk 0.600 on Tuesday,
November 29, 2011. Development & maintenance: DIM.