I’ve had a couple of requests from both orchestra members and audience members (weren’t you paying attention?! 
Bad audience, bad!) to repost my pre-performance remarks on Beethoven 6, so here they are…..
KW
To the January 2007 incarnation of the Oregon East Symphony-
Just a very quick shout out to everyone who played in the last OES concert, from the lifers to the new faces….
It was a tough week, a tough schedule, a tough program, lousy weather, cold building, over-worked staff, over-worked musicians, bad piano. Nobody would have blamed you if things had been a bit half-assed at the concert.
GREAT WORK. I’m still smiling when I think about it. I’m glad I didn’t tell you just how hard Beethoven 6 really is, but I can tell you now that it is just about the hardest piece in the repertoire, and you all captured what was hardest about it (the notes are just very difficult, but the music is nearly impossible). Well done.
I hope the town appreciates you all as much as I do. I’ve certainly heard from the audience at that concert that they do.
Ken
After months of worry, possible repertoire changes, concern about personnel and budgets, travel problems, back problems, general irritability….. when Ken is flipping through his score 20 minutes before the first rehearsal and gradually, all around him, players are warming up practicing bits of Das Lied von der Erde….
PS- I think it will be good.
PPS- Chris’s piece is very good too, and a great contrast to Mahler….
Five years ago, I would never have guessed he would be the one. He was known in the orchestra for his acerbic wit and penchant for practicing Paganini. He knew more about violins than anyone else in the band. He didn’t seem to exude job satisfaction, but he had that battle-tested tough-guy swagger that so many full-time orchestra musicians adopt along the way. He had a solid gang of friends in the orchestra- they all seemed to share his sarcastic sense of humor. In my few hangs with him, I found him funny and entertaining.
Over the last year, everyone in the band knew he’d had a rough time- despair at this state of life after ten years in the job and god-knows-how-many auditions, a break up with a girlfriend, but these things are common in the music world. Even when he needed weeks off work for depression, nobody began to think the unthinkable.
This week, the unthinkable became reality. The orchestra is in shock. Thirty-seven years old. Everyone is going around saying things like “I meant to ring him up before we left and just ran out of time.”
We hear this is a tough business every single day, and accept that as a fact of life. The fact is, it can be too tough, and if it could be too much for him, it could be too much for anyone. Some exit fast with pills, others slowly with booze. I don’t know if he would have made it in another field, any more than people know if it would have made any difference if they’d stopped by his flat the other day, or if one of those auditions had panned out better. Maybe he just had an incurable disease, like cancer, but the disease was an idea that ate away at his brain the same way cancer eats away at your body. Fuck it all…. I don’t know….
This is a community of human beings.
Be kind.
c. 2006 Kenneth Woods
Mahler/Schoenberg • The Song of the Earth
Das Lied von der Erde (” The Song of the Earth “) is a large-scale work for two vocal soloists and orchestra by the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler . Laid out in six separate movements, each of them an independent song, the work is described on the title-page as Eine Symphonie für eine Tenor- und eine Alt- (oder Bariton-) Stimme und Orchester (nach Hans Bethges “Die chinesische Flöte”) (‘A Symphony for One Tenor and One Alto (or Baritone) Voice and Orchestra (After Hans Bethge’s ‘The Chinese Flute’)'). Mahler’s copious use of ‘Chinese’ characteristics in the music marks the work as unique in his output. Composed in the years 1907 – 1909 , it followed the Eighth Symphony —but was not given a number, allegedly because of the composer’s superstitious fear of the supposedly ‘mortal significance’ of a ‘ninth symphony’. The work takes approximately sixty-five minutes in performance.
Mahler conceived of the work in 1907. The summer of that year is likened to the three hammer blows of the Sixth Symphony (written in 1903-1904). [ citation needed ] First, Mahler was pressured into resigning from his post as Director of the Vienna Court Opera due to political intrigues within the administration, partly involving anti-semitism ; next, his oldest daughter Maria died from scarlet fever and diphtheria ; finally, Mahler himself was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect. “With one stroke,” Mahler wrote to his friend Bruno Walter , “I have lost everything I have gained in terms of who I thought I was, and have to learn my first steps again like a newborn”. [ citation needed ]
In his heightened awareness of his own mortality and rootlessness as a Jew, Mahler became interested in a volume of ancient Chinese poetry translated into German by Hans Bethge , titled, Die Chinesische Flöte (“The Chinese Flute”). The translation was based on a French translation of the original material. Mahler was very taken by the vision of earthly beauty and transience expressed in these verses [ citation needed ] and chose seven (two of them used in the finale) to set to music. The result was what some have termed a “song-symphony”, a hybrid of the two forms that had occupied most of his creative life. [ citation needed ]
Having already finished his 8th Symphony, Mahler worried along at the ” Curse of the Ninth “. Convinced that a ninth symphony would kill him, Mahler proceeded to compose Das Lied von der Erde , which he subtitled “A Symphony for Tenor , Contralto and Large Orchestra” and left unnumbered. Thus he hoped to skirt around the curse, since his Ninth Symphony would actually be his tenth. Ultimately, however, Mahler did succumb to the “Curse”: his next, instrumental symphony, which he numbered his Ninth , was the last work Mahler completed in full (only the first movement of the Tenth was orchestrated at his death).
Completed in 1908, Das Lied von der Erde is the first work of its kind, the first complete integration of song cycle and symphony, a form later imitated by other composers (notably Dmitri Shostakovich and Alexander von Zemlinsky ). The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music refers to it as a “song-symphony”. It is also regarded as one of Mahler’s most personal works, a statement echoed in one of the composer’s own letters .
The debut public performance was given on 20 November 1911 in the Tonhalle in Munich , with Bruno Walter conducting.
Das Lied von der Erde is scored for a large orchestra consisting of piccolo , three flutes (the third doubling on second piccolo), three oboes , English horn , four clarinets (the third doubling E-flat clarinet), bass clarinet , three bassoons (the third doubling on contrabassoon ), four horns , three trumpets , three trombones , bass tuba , percussion ( timpani , tam-tam , bass drum , cymbals , side drum , glockenspiel , triangle , and tambourine ), celesta , two harps , mandolin , and strings. Mahler deploys these resources with great restraint: only in the first, fourth and sixth songs does the entire orchestra play at once, and in some places the texture almost resembles chamber music, with only a few instruments playing.
Mahler’s habit was to subject the orchestration of every new orchestral work to detailed revision over several years: though the musical material itself was hardly ever changed, the complex instrumental ‘clothing’ would be altered and refined in the light of experience gained in performance. In the case of Das Lied von der Erde , however, this process did not occur: the work’s publication and first performance occurred posthumously.
The scoring also calls for tenor and alto soloists. However, Mahler also includes the note that “if necessary, the alto part may be sung by a baritone”. For the first few decades after the work’s premiere, this option was little-used. However, following the pioneering recordings of the work by baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau under conductors Paul Kletzki and Leonard Bernstein , the use of baritones in this work has become increasingly common.
Arnold Schoenberg began to arrange Das Lied von der Erde for chamber orchestra, reducing the orchestral forces to string and wind quintets, and calling for piano , celesta and harmonium to supplement the harmonic texture. Three percussionists are also employed. Schoenberg apparently never finished this in his lifetime, and the arrangement was completed by Rainer Riehn in 1980.
Four of the Chinese poems used by Mahler ( Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde , Von der Jugend , Von der Schönheit and Der Trunkene im Frühling ) are by Li Tai-Po , the famous Tang dynasty wandering poet. Der Einsame im Herbst is by Chang Tsi and Der Abschied combines poems by Mong Kao-Yen and Wang Wei , plus several additional lines by Mahler himself.
The first movement, entitled ” Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde ” (“The Drinking Song of Earth’s Misery”) sets a tone for the rest of the piece with its refrain, “Dark is life, is death”, each successive repeat sung a semitone higher. Like many drinking poems by Li Po, the original poem mixes drunken exaltation with a deep sadness. Mahler intensifies this sadness into expressionistic horror. The music verges on chaos and madness, dense and loud but vivid. As is often the case with Mahler’s music, the instruments are as much “voices” as the singer, each with a will of its own; they scream, cackle, sob and moan, in a frightening cacophony. The singer’s part is notoriously difficult since the tenor has to struggle at the top of his range against the full onslaught of the orchestra. According to music philosopher Theodor W. Adorno , the tenor should create the impression of a “denatured voice in the Chinese ( falsetto ) style”, perhaps in the style of Peking opera. This gives the voice its shrill, piercing quality, and is consistent with Mahler’s practice of pushing instruments, including vocal cords, to their limits. The abrasive tone of Chinese opera is exploited to great effect, embodying as much the horror and agony in the words, ” Dem Morschen Tande dieser Erde ” (“the rotting trash of this earth”), with the image of the ape howling over graves.
This is followed by ” Der Einsame im Herbst ” (“The Lonely Soul in Autumn”), a much more subdued piece whose tone colors can be described as “faded gold”. It begins with a repetitive shuffling in the strings that brings to mind the drifting of leaves, mirroring the restlessness of the soul. Solo wind instruments pierce through the fog. The singer laments the dying of flowers, the passing of beauty. The damp, clammy, intimate sadness is reminiscent of ” Kindertotenlieder “. Contrary to the stereotypical image of Mahler’s music, the orchestration in this movement is sparse and chamber music -like, with long and independent contrapuntal lines.
The third movement, ” Von der Jugend ” (“Of Youth”) creates an intentionally artificial scene of ancient China , with a porcelain pavilion , reflective pools , “friends, beautifully dressed, drinking, chatting, some writing down verses.” The music in this movement is the most obviously pentatonic and faux-Asian. But the seemingly crass Orientalism serves another purpose: It is as if, through the fogged looking-glass of memory, the landscape of one’s own youth becomes as foreign and exotic as that of a distant country.
Directly following this is ” Von der Schönheit ” (“Of Beauty”). Young girls are picking flowers on the riverbank; young boys ride by on their horses. The music of this movement is mostly delicate and sensuous, with a violent outburst in the brass as the young men ride by. The middle two movements practically go together as one single intermezzo. The deliberately fake China depicted in these two movements, with its porcelain pagodas on Lake Lucerne, its young girls picking lotus by the Danube, is the only true home for those without one. According to Theodor W. Adorno , Chinese poetry became for the late Mahler what German folk songs had been for him earlier: a disguise for his sense of Jewish “otherness”.
The movement ends with a long orchestral postlude. One of the girls casts “long looks of yearning” after her secret lover. And the long gaze of the music itself lingers after the last words have been sung, almost as if unwilling to part with it. All the lost happiness of a lifetime seems compressed into the sunlight of one lazy afternoon.
The true scherzo of the work is the fifth movement, entitled ” Der Trunkene im Frühling ” (“The Drunkard in Spring”). It can be considered a companion song to ” Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde ” – the narrator is enjoying himself perhaps too much, like a man who has nothing left to lose. Musically, it also calls back to the earlier movement by using a horn theme reminiscent of the opening motif. Mahler’s usage of tempo changes in this movement is brilliant. In addition to generally lilting and staggering dotted rhythms, the actual tempo changes every few measures, each tempo having practically no relationship to the previous one, and transitioning with sudden and random unpredictability. The drunkard rages at life, which has become a series of unnatural shocks and jolts, without memory or continuity. “What has spring to do with me?” he cries, recalling Baudelaire ’s line ” Le Printemps adorable a perdu son odeur! ” (“Spring, the beloved, has lost its scent!”) The tone color also changes with these tempo changes. In the middle section a solo violin introduces a moment of tenderness, as in the second Nachtmusik of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony . Here the violin is the voice of a bird, singing outside the drunkard’s window, telling him that spring has come. But to the drunk man, real life appears “as in a dream”.
The final movement, ” Der Abschied ” (The Farewell), is nearly as long as the previous five movements combined. Its text is drawn from two different poems, both involving the theme of leave-taking. With the first notes on the tam-tam (marked schwer (= heavy)) all hope seems to have vanished with the setting sun. The length and heaviness of this movement make the previous ones seem like unreal flickers of light flashing across a background of unending darkness, as in the Buddhist idea of life as an illusion. The orchestra sounds as if broken into pieces. The instruments fall in small clusters or play by themselves, each voice piercing the emptiness for a moment before breaking off, as if choked by what does not bear saying. From countless kitchens, backyards, alleyways and shop windows come the plaintive voices of evening, each one isolated in its own vacuum. In the instrumental funeral march at the center of the movement, these voices become more and more discordant, like a crowd of lost souls crying out in misery. They paint a picture of universal loneliness, no longer the personal misfortune of the second movement, but the all-embracing “Earth’s Misery” mentioned in the title of the first. This is the life-world whose harsh essence becomes clear to the one leaving it; yet he holds onto this world with the last of his strength. As if art itself no longer sufficed to express this, Mahler explicitly writes moments of silence into the score, the music seems always in danger of dissolving into nothingness. For the first time in Western music, the spaces left empty become eloquent in their own right, as in a Chinese landscape painting.
The last movement is very difficult to conduct, because of its cadenza writing for voice and solo instruments, which often flows over the barlines, ” Ohne Rücksicht auf das Tempo ” (Without regard for the tempo) according to Mahler’s own direction. Bruno Walter related that Mahler showed him the score of this movement and asked, “Do you know how to conduct this? Because I certainly don’t.” Mahler also hesitated to put the piece before the public because of its relentless negativity, unusual even for him. “Won’t people go home and shoot themselves?” He asked. But the last farewell is fundamentally ambiguous: through the eyes of leave-taking, the wounded earth at last shines out in all its beauty. Hope seems to hide in the tissues of the music, beneath its uncompromising bleakness. Kafka ’s phrase, “There is hope, but not for us.” may capture the message. The movement ends with a few lines added by Mahler himself to the original poems:
The dear earth everywhere Blossoms in spring, and grows green anew. Everywhere and forever, forever Blue lights the horizon. Forever… forever…
The singer intones the last line over and over like a mantra , accompanied by a sparse mix of strings, mandolin, tam-tam, and celesta, until the music fades into silence, “etched on the air”, as Benjamin Britten put it. Against all reason, the dying man keeps his eyes open. Resignation and hope can no longer be distinguished.
Of Das Lied von der Erde Mahler himself wrote that “I think it is probably the most personal composition I have created thus far.” Its popularity has also made it his most universally loved. Full of anger, love and longing, Mahler managed a perfect synthesis of the lyrical and philosophical aspects of his music in this work. A piece that, from such a personal perspective, can speak so deeply of universal human issues, is truly brilliant.
References
External links
Retrieved from ” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Lied_von_der_Erde ”
Upcoming Concert
Saturday, February 3, 7pm
@ Colonial Heights Presbyterian Church
Ken Woods, Conductor
Chris Thomas • World premiere of a new work: “Snapshots”
Mahler/Schoenberg • Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth)
Alexis Hamilton, Mezzo; Brennen Guillory, Tenor
Chris Thomas • Snapshots
Notes from the composer-
Snapshots is a work written only a month ago. This title is short for “ Snapshots of Los Angeles . ” Each short movement intends to depict a prominent feature in LA.
I. Shades of Brown
What is the most prominent image in Los Angeles ? Not the iconic Hollywood sign, nor the palm trees or downtown skyline. Even these images are overpowered by a far greater sight: they are all lost in a sea of atmospheric smog. This piece is meant to pay a tribute to a dazzling achievement of mankind, the hazing out of world famous landmarks once invisible to the naked eye.II. Hollywierd This piece depicts some of what you might when venturing to the land of Hollywierd . You’ll notice the music frequently changes directions. Just like that famous boulevard, each street corner (and everything in between) contains life more colorful than every Rocky Horror Picture Show theatre in the Northwest combined! Contrary to the image Hollywood makes for itself on the big screen, the real Hollywierd is teeming with shoppers, disillusioned tourists, and colorfully-costumed crooks waiting to alleviate you of a wallet or car.
III. Fahrenheit 405
We’re journeying to an inside joke of Southern California . Interstate 405 around here is the “great Satan” of Los Angeles . If you mistakenly exit upon this road, you are guaranteed a two-hour siesta. The pavement is as sticky as the La Brea Tar Pits. This city is known for some of the scariest drivers in America . Sociologists attribute this to many causes, but us locals really know what makes people crazy around here. Listen to how the music tells the 405 mantra.
IV. Romariffic!
This tune is on the personal side. In my recent experience of having moved to LA, Brigitte and I were blessed with a baby kitten: Roma (named after our favorite café in Eugene). When we get home each day, the hour-long freeway battle doesn’t seem so bad. She may bite our toes and shred the carpet, but the erratic and playful nature of cats is a good source for musical material. My idea is to write music that captures the behavior and character of our kitten.
Chris Thomas©2007
If this is your first visit to this thread, you may wish to start from the first song of the cycle, which you can read about and listen to here.
One of the recurring literary themes of Kindertotenlieder is the notion of haunting. Wenn dein Mutterlein is the poem that deals most directly with this idea.
These songs, and particularly Wenn dein Mutterlein, slightly turn the notion of haunting on its head- it is the narrator’s wife, the still living mother of his children, who is described as a ghostly figure who he never really sees, and it is the child who is vividly described. He says “when your dear mother comes in the door, and I turn my head, look at her, my glance falls first not on her face” Later, he again says that when she “comes in the door with her candle’s glimmer,” it is again as if he is unable to see his wife, as if she is no longer real. Candles are of course, often associated with ghosts in literature.
On the other hand, the daughter’s “dear little face” is “bright with joy.” He describes how she would “enter with her, slip into the room behind her as usual.” He is more able to see the person not there than the person still there, and the song ends with him alone “You, too quickly extinguished gleam of joy in your father’s cell.”
Mahler has constructed the whole cycle as an exercise in coming to terms with tragedy, and the cycle ends hopefully, and yet the healing that occurs only occurs in relation to the welfare of the children. There is never any sense in which the narrator of the family seems to recover. In fact, as we will see in the final song, the narrator’s wife ceases to be a figure of the living world at all. She has instead become a divine caretaker “They are sleeping as though in their mother’s house.”
Interestingly, Mahler’s own associations with the deaths of a child in his youth seem to be all connected to his mother. His relationship with his mother seemed to be decisively shaped by the death of his older brother. How interesting then that in these songs, the mother is never allowed to grieve, and that there is no relationship between the parents, only two parents trying to connect to the lost children.
You can listen again here in WMV, here in QuickTime and on YouTube here.
If you’re interested in Mahler’s music, you may want to visit this earlier series on Mahler 2, complete with extensive audio samples.
c. 2006 Kenneth Woods
All rights reserved
As someone who grew up in Wisconsin in the 70’s, that glorious era of blizzards and ice storms, I love snow- it’s my favorite weather. Of course, snow has become a bit like free beer- a rarity- and I miss it. I can’t remember when I last had a white Christmas.
So, I should have been celebrating when the snow started falling here yesterday afternoon, but times have changed. In the lost world of my youth, snow was never to deter you from getting your work done- it offered false hope to young kids desperately hoping that school would be cancelled, but it almost never was, and I can’t really remember anyone ever missing work for snow.
At the first sign of a flake floating to earth in its lazy trajectory, sand and salt machines would pour onto the streets, plows would be scraping the roads clean before anything could stick. If the roads were closed, you’d take your snowmobile to work. If the gas stations ran out of gas, you’d cross-country ski. We proud cheese-heads used to laugh at the feeble folk of the South, who would close school if it was snowing in the next state.
How times have changed. Now days, less than an inch of snow is enough to send should-be rough-and-ready musicians racing for shelter. Imagine- violists without snowmobiles- I guess people just don’t take their careers as seriously as they used to. I won’t even tell you, dear reader, just how many players missed rehearsal last night because of our dusting of powder, but it was a lot. So many that I would have cancelled rehearsal altogether, except the people who’d really had to come a long way and deal with mountains and the like were many of those who made it, they wanted to play before they got back in the car, and so we played a bit of Beethoven and called it a night. I love a lot about the Northwest- it’s a great place to be thirsty, with the best beer, wine and coffee in the world, but I sometime think it would be good to get Garrison Keeler out here for a few months to give seminars in Midwestern-style winter stoicism. Oh, and in how to lash a bass to the back of an Arctic Cat.
c. 2006 Kenneth Woods
UPCOMING CONCERT
Symphony Chamber Music Pendleton Center for the Arts
2:00 PM, Sunday, January 21st, 2007
Rick Rowley, piano
Kenneth Woods, cello
Debussy- Cello Sonata Janacek- Pohadka
Strauss- Cello Sonata in F Major
Information from the OES office oes@uci.net
Beethoven 6 shows Beethoven more or less inventing a new way of composing- something none of his earlier symphonies actually did.
Music of the generation before Beethoven was composed in a highly rhetorical manner. Musical ideas interact with each other in patterns similar to those we encounter in language- the most common of which is your classic antecedent/consequent phrase structure.
All of Beethoven’s first five symphonies basically deal with musical ideas using tools learned from Mozart and Haydn. The difference is not in how Beethoven works with ideas, but in how long (the 3rd symphony) or how intensely (the 5th).
In the 6th, Beethoven moves decisively away from musical phrases structured around linguistic models- instead, the models in the processes of nature. Musical materials are developed in a whole different way. Instead of using the rhetorical techniques of fragmentation, imitation, augmentation and so on, Beethoven mostly works with layers of repetition and evolution. Some listeners who don’t “get” this piece complain that it is boring- this is because they are used to a more concise way of building music. The 5th (particularly the first movement )is, in fact, one of the most extreme examples of a “tight” approach to composition in all of music- there is no moment that doesn’t carry the music forward.
The 6th, on the other hand, is happy to keep us waiting- nature moves at her own pace. There is a fascinating passage in the development of the first movement at letter D. Beethoven builds a huge passage on the repetition of a one-bar long motive, which he never develops or modifies. Instead, he has a 24 bar crescendo in 4 bar long harmonic blocks to a fortissimo which takes 16 bars to dissipate. The only outcome of the passage is that he starts in Bb and ends in D. Then, completely breaking all remaining rules of composition, he repeats the entire 40 bar chunk of music but now moving from G major to E major, which is a very strange place to end up in a movement in F major. The mere fact that in this F major work you have Beethoven repeating and E Major chord for 16 bars is so radical compared to anything he’d ever done up to that time as to be almost beyond comparison in musical history- we’re talking Rite of Spring level of scandal, but there could have been no Rite without the Pastoral.
c. 2006 Kenneth Woods
To those of you waiting anxiously for the next Kindertotenlieder piece, I’m sorry for the delay. I had a long trans-Atlantic this week en route to the current Oregon East Symphony concert, and I’m trying to whip my cello playing back into shape for a concert on Sunday, and those Mahler blogs are quite time consuming, even when you have access to your computer.
I finally made it to Pendleton yesterday afternoon and went straight to rehearsal. We had a youth orchestra rehearsal from 4-6 and OES from 7-10. Interestingly, the kids are doing Beethoven 5 and the “grownups” (note the quote marks) are doing Beethoven 6. Having been completely consumed with administrative nightmares last week, I pretty much walked into those rehearsals without having looked at either piece in some months, something I generally never do. Sometimes, though- IF YOU ALREADY KNOW THE PIECE- that’s not the worst thing to do, because you come to the rehearsal really fresh and attentive. What really struck me last night is just how much more modern, innovative and radical the 6th is than the 5th, which we all think of as the “revolutionary’ piece in Beethoven’s output. The Pastoral really stands apart from all the other symphonies he wrote- he works with ideas in ways he never did again. The piece uses repetition in a truly radical way.
Anyway, there I was working on it last night thinking Janacek and Philip Glass both should have been sending him royalties. There really is nothing new under the sun….. c. 2006 Kenneth Woods
UPCOMING CONCERT-
Saturday, January 20th, 2007
7:30 PM, Vert Auditorium
Pendleton Oregon
Program-
Nielsen- Helios Oveture
Grieg- Piano Concerto
Rick Rowley, piano
Beethoven- Symphony No. 6 “Pastoral”
Concert information available at oes@uci.net or call 541 276 0320
Finally, on to the emotional heart of the cycle, “Wenn dein Mutterlein.” If the text of the second song is the most intense, the music of this song is probably the most overtly funereal. Mahler even marks the tempo as schwer (heavy) and dumpf (dull or muffled).
If this is your first visit to this series, you may want to start from the beginning with the first movement of the cycle.
The text of the poem (in the form Mahler left it after significant re-writing and changes):
“When your dear mother comes in the door, and I turn my head, look at her, my glance falls first not on her face, but on the place closer to the threshold, there where your dear little face would be if you, bright with joy, came in wither her as usual, my little daughter! When your dear mother comes in the door with her candle’s glimmer, for me it is as always when you would enter with her, slip into the room behind her as usual! You, too quickly, too quickly extinguished gleam of joy in your father’s cell.”
Over again to Mitch Friedfeld for an introduction-
“Of all the Kindertotenlieder that Mahler set, he reshaped Wenn dein Mütterlein the most. He begins with the second stanza of the poem, omitting the last three lines; then continues with the first half of the first stanza, and ends the song with the three lines formerly omitted from the end of the second stanza. The result, most critics believe, is a masterpiece of a song that is a vast improvement over Rückert’s poem. It also bears mentioning that this song more than any of the other Kindertotenlieder, is a male’s song – the mother plays a prominent role as a subject. This is in no way to argue that the cycle “belongs” to either a male or female vocalist; that is a matter purely of personal preference.
Wenn dein Mütterlein – When thy Mother dear – is the only song specifically about Rückert’s daughter. In fact, as we have seen, it is the only song that is about one specific child; the others are about both children or either child. The song states its intentions with the very first line (even if you don’t speak German, say these words to yourself, with a heavy step): Wenn dein Mütterlein / Tritt zur Tür herein. Note the simple but effective rhyming of Mütterlein and herein; we’ll see an even more effective rhyming at the end of the song. The action of the mother – walking – Mahler portrays by pizzicato bass notes and a steady tread. She appears at the door, and the father sings. But when he does, we are faced again with the awful truth. Most of us know what this first verse is about: When the mother enters the room, the father looks not at her, but where his daughter’s face would have been, bright with joy. Starting on a low G, the parent sings two identical upward lines, coming back down to rest on D. The next two identical lines start on middle G and proceed down, coming to a devastating halt on the same D. This upward and downward motion conveys the parent’s listless, restless (rest-less!) pacing across their now silent room. But there’s much more. Mahler constantly changes time signatures so that the feeling of aimlessness is even more pronounced. In the seventy bars of music there are over twenty changes of time (Henry-Louis de La Grange for sure counted them, but I just can’t find the notation). Russell calls this song the most symmetrical in the whole cycle: Not only is it strophic, but “In each stanza an orchestral introduction in 4/4 time is followed by a vocal section in which 3/2 time alternates with 4/4 time.” But combined with the steady tread of the cellos, the effect of the alternation is downright disorienting.
There is much to ponder. First of all, after the preceding song’s through-composition, we have returned to a symmetrical structure; it is a straightforward ABAB. This is the only song of the cycle that does not use a major-minor modulation. The coloration and variation is achieved by other means, notably the time changes. And do you notice something missing? The song totally dispenses with violins! The low strings and violas (yes, sometimes playing in their high register) do all the string playing, which darkens the mood considerably. it is the “alternate orchestra” again. Mahler once more forges a continuity of the cycle by recalling early in this song a passage that occurred close to the end of the previous one. In overview, several writers have perceived in Mahler’s use of spare counterpoint a Bachic influence, and Mahler was in fact studying Bach at this time.
Russell notes how Wenn dein Mütterlein is connected both musically and literarily to the first two Kindertotenlieder:
“…images of eyes and seeing which recall the second song; the image of a radiant child’s face in wenn du freudenhelle, which recalls both the sun described as hell in the first song and the radiance of a child’s eyes which is the pervasive image of the second song; the image of the candle shedding its beams in der Kerze Schimmer, which evokes associations with the Lämplein in the first song, and images of Flammen, Strahl, and Leuchten in the second song; and most strikingly, the climactic image of the song in its last words, zu schnell erlosch’ner Freudenschein, which evokes a complex of images formerly encountered: the Freudenlicht der Welt of the first song, conflated with the word scheinet used there of the sun, the Leuchten of the child’s eyes in the second song, and of course the associated image of the extinguishing of light which came in the first song in Ein Lämplein verlosch.”
One other touch bears special emphasis, and it has to do again with the low G’s. As I stated above, I think this is a man’s song, and not just because the singer is talking about the mother. Hampson and Foster really make those low G’s come from the depths. Not only do these G’s start the singer’s lines, they are present in the phrases that end the verses as well. And what words do they end them on? The first stanza ends on the words mein Töchterlein. The second stanza also ends on a low-G phrase, but on the words erlosch’ner freudenschein, which means “the gladdening light too quickly extinguished.” In other words, the low G’s express “My dear daughter,…the gladdening light too quickly extinguished.” The word Freudenschein is stretched out over two bars, then repeated, in a melisma that takes a long time to resolve. But Mahler is not finished. He ends the song on the dominant, not the tonic, an unusual step for him which Russell sees as implying that the grief has not been accepted – and as Henry-Louis de La Grange describes “as if the father’s grief had deprived him of the strength for even a final sigh.” No wonder some singers have a hard time getting through this cycle. An instrumental postlude leads you to believe that the song is starting again, but the pizzicato bass slows down and breaks off, “as if the footsteps of the mother had halted,” Russell says.
The ending of the song on the dominant, Russell continues, “is a way of implying that the grief given vent in the song remains unresolved, that the reality of the father’s loss has not yet been accepted. That inability to accept loss is precisely the theme of the next song – which however not only takes us out of a world of candle-lit darkness into a world of sunny daylight, but also points positively toward relief.” But not without a turn for the worse along the way.”
You can see the performance of Wenn dein Mutterlein in WindowsMediaVideo here, or in QuickTime here or you can visit YouTube.
If you’re interested in Mahler’s music, you may want to visit this earlier series on Mahler 2, complete with extensive audio samples.
c. 2006 All rights reserved
Music, even vocal music, is ultimately an abstract art form. Musical ideas, even those attached to words, are inherently abstract.
Nevertheless, we all find ourselves searching for the meaning of musical ideas. Wagner went so far as to assign meanings to themes through his technique of Leitmotif. He even expected his audiences to know who or what each theme stands for, and yet, what happens when Shostakovich quotes some of those same Leitmotifs in his 15th Symphony? Do they continue to mean the same thing there as they do in The Ring? Of course not.
Some themes seem so significant to the composers that use them, that one can’t help but want to understand what they meant to them. Shostakovich is a case in point- the obvious example is his DSCH motive, which appears in several important pieces, but there are actually many specific music ideas that he used in every single piece he every wrote- common gestures that are wired so deeply in the DNA of his music that they really demand our attention.
Shostakovich learned a lot from Mahler. Both of them seemed to look at their entire life’s work as a unified single project, and Mahler also has musical ideas that appear in all his music. The interval of the perfect fourth is an obsession for Mahler, and, as Donald Mithcell rightly points out, Mahler was able to build two entire symphonies (the 3rd and 4th) out of one modest song, Das himmlische Leben.
The melodic idea which opens the second song of Kindertotenlieder (and also, as Mitch pointed out, is foreshadowed in the ending of the first song) is one of those kernels that Mahler couldn’t let go of. It may be most instantly recognizable as the theme of his famous Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony, but it is also possibly the most important motive of the last movement of the same piece. It’s also the main theme of the first movement of the Fourth Symphony.
Perhaps no movement of Mahler has been more argued about than the Adagietto. For years, many commentators and performers saw it as a work of mourning, and it was even played at many a famous funeral. Then, someone very correctly pointed out that he had written it for his wife, Alma. “Aha!” everyone said, “the Adagietto is a love song! It’s not about death at all!”
Well, if the Adagietto is a love song, then it stands to reason that its main theme is a love theme. We might even call it Alma’s theme, except Mahler called the second theme of the first movement of the Sixth Symphony the “Alma” theme. In fact, the Alma theme in the Sixth is based on the exact same scalar ascent of a perfect fourth, just in a different modal placement.
Of course, you can already see that we’re quickly on complicated psychological ground when you put a theme associated with love for one’s wife into a song about the eyes of a dead child. Surely it would have made more sense to use that motive as the basis of the third song, Wen dein Mutterlein (When your dear Mother), which actually deals with the narrator’s spouse?
So maybe it’s not an Alma theme at all? We know that the Fourth Symphony is also a work about the death of a child because the song which is the last movement tells us the child is in Heaven, (although people are generally less scared of it than of Kindertotenlieder because it has a more innocuous title). Is it significant that this theme appears in the first movement of the Fourth and in this song? Maybe it is a love theme in a broader sense, not Alma specific at all? Love for a child, love for a spouse, love for a friend?
The fact is, it appears in so many contexts and in so many guises we could never know what it really means. Or perhaps, Mahler wanted it to have a complexed and multilayered meaning.
In fact, I think it appears in so many contexts and so many guises that we can safely conclude that Mahler himself, like us, was trying to understand what it means- at least he may have been trying to understand what it meant to him. This gesture, as well as a few others, seemed to quite literally haunt him throughout all his life. They’re like musical ghosts, shadows that were always with him and yet which he could never pin down.
So perhaps that very un-knowability is the reason that he chose this song in which to use this iconic theme. After all, the poem is about haunting- being haunted by memories, and trying to understand what those memories, what those mental pictures, those “dark flames” really meant.
If you’re enjoying this series, you may want to visit my series on the Second Symphony, which begins here.
Thanks for reading, and we can move on to song 3 tomorrow.
A view from the podium, Favorite posts, Mahler, Nuts and bolts
There are some pieces of music which are widely misunderstood because they’re too popular. I had a “teacher” in grad school who taught the History of Opera course who thought Puccini was an idiot because he was popular, and that we should all be listening to Pfitzner every day. Nothing against Pfitzner, but Puccini was not the idiot in that scenario.
Then there’s the “I played it youth orchestra so it must not be that good” effect. Some of the first pieces I played as a kid were the last ones I “got” as an adult.
Wagner’s personality can be a barrier for some listeners, Strauss’s for others. Shostakovich’s music continues to be misunderstood by many because some scholars can’t let go of the political baggage of the Cold War. All kinds of pieces have “stuff” attached to them, and Kindertotenlieder has its own baggage, which is that many can’t get past they’re discomfort with the subject matter. I think a lot of that discomfort is misdirected, and part of my intent with this series is to help listeners understand what the piece is really about. Today, on the other hand, I’m reminded of the wise words of a teacher (as opposed to “teacher”) in grad school, a wonderful professor of analysis named Brian Hyer- ”We play tunes because they’re cool.” Deeper messages aside, KTL is a collection of very cool tunes. I thought I’d just touch briefly on two little random memories of our work on this performance.
I tend not to study scores at the piano all that much, and, as it happened, on this occasion I hadn’t used the piano at all. However, when I got to Toluca we arranged a piano rehearsal with Jesus and me. In this movement in particular, I was completely surprised at what a different piece it is without the orchestra. I shouldn’t have been so surprised- if you look at the notes on the page, you can see that these songs are a bit special even by Mahler’s standards.
You may remember in my comments on Nun will die Sonn’ that I talked about how sparseness of texture is a particular feature of the songs, and about how this enables each note and each interval to really have an impact. One of the other results of this lean approach is that the harmony in these songs is rather more acidic than is typical in Mahler. So acidic, in fact, that Mahler often uses the warmth of the orchestra sound to soften the rather hard harmonic corners. When we read the songs with piano, I was really struck at just how modern, how dissonant and how acidic these songs, and particularly this song, are. Listeners will often hear musicians describe how performing conditions can affect a performance. More often than not, what musicians are talking about the acoustics of the hall- reverberant rooms mean you have to play drier, dry rooms mean you need to play more sustained, some halls tend to make the brass overpowering, others the low strings muddy.
As we prepared this concert, it quickly became apparent that a much more unusual factor was in play. Toluca is at nearly 9,000 feet above sea level, which makes it one of the highest concert venues in the world- higher even than Aspen. Higher altitudes mean thinner air, and thinner air means breathing is harder work, which is bad news for wind players, and really bad news for singers. Jesus came from his home, which is at sea-level, and although he had sung in Toluca many times, he told me on day one that the thin air there always made for a struggle.
Singers have two main tools for shaping their performance- text and breathing. Conductors have two main tools for shaping their interpretation- balance and tempo. High altitude is bound to bring breathing and tempo into conflict. Now, a great singer becomes so artful in working around problems caused by altitude that almost nobody onstage or in the audience would ever know what was going on. On top of this, a professional singer has reserves of breathing capacity more than adequate to compensate for high altitude. Jesus had a very few requests for me of places it would be helpful to keep things flowing along, but those were all places were we would both have wanted to do that anyway for purely music reasons.
However, Mahler being Mahler, there are always places were he makes demands that would test any performer under the most ideal circumstances, and there are spots in KTL where you could never have enough breath, where Mahler asks the singer to spin out an impossibly long line. One such place occurs in this song- Jesus and I talked about it in that first piano rehearsal, but singing with piano takes even less air than with orchestra. Once we started working with the orchestra we tried to find a way to get through the spot in question in one breath while allowing the music all the spaciousness Mahler asks. I should point out that this spot is one were over half the studio recordings I own have an extra breath, so this was a matter of Jesus setting the highest possible standards for himself under the most difficult conditions.
As it turned out, in the concert maybe I took a bit too much time, maybe the absorbent effect of 2000 people in the hall meant he had to use even a bit more air than in the rehearsals, maybe it was just a bit of caution by a master performer not to jeopardize the whole song for one subtle touch that nobody would notice, but Jesus took the extra breath.
The next day in Mexico City, down just a little bit to 7,400 feet elevation, he soared through the spot in one breath without problem. Of course, I’m not saying where the spot is- the fact that many of you didn’t notice it when you listened yesterday is proof that he did the right thing. Have another listen here in WMV, here in QuickTime and here on YouTube.
If you’re enjoying this series, you may want to visit my series on the Second Symphony, which begins here.
c. 2007 Kenneth Woods
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