{"id":1506,"date":"2010-03-01T00:43:09","date_gmt":"2010-02-28T23:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/?p=1506"},"modified":"2010-03-01T10:19:41","modified_gmt":"2010-03-01T09:19:41","slug":"another-perspective-peter-davison-on-the-adagietto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2010\/03\/01\/another-perspective-peter-davison-on-the-adagietto\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Perspective- Peter Davison on the Adagietto."},"content":{"rendered":"

The Bridgewater Hall- Mahler in Manchester<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>\"Mahler<\/a><\/p>\n

Hi everyone-<\/em><\/p>\n

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I have a crazy turnaround between gigs this week and I need to write something about Shostakovich 7 while the experience is still fresh, so we\u2019re callin\u2019 in the reserves. <\/em><\/p>\n

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I mentioned to Peter Davison<\/a> the other day that I wanted to follow up on this piece (please do read it!) <\/a><\/em>about Mahler\u2019s song, Nun seh Ich wohl, from Kindertotenlieder. \u00a0In recent years, there has been a great deal of valuable research highlighting the importance of Alma\u2019s arrival in Mahler\u2019s life as being part of the inspiration for the famous Adagietto movement. \u00a0For much of the 20<\/em>th<\/em><\/sup> C., many interpreters and commentators assumed that the Adagietto was about death- the later research indicated that it was about Mahler\u2019s love for Alma. My point in that earlier post was that the piece is clearly about both love and death, and more- maybe even life. Fortunately, Peter has taken up where I left off.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Since I can\u2019t provide the words, I\u2019ll do what I\u2019m best qualified for and provide the music. Mahler\u2019s song Liebst du um Schonheit was very much a love offering to Alma- he declined to orchestrate it as part of the Ruckert Lieder because it was intended just for her. You can listen to it, Um Mitternacht and an excerpt from Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen from my concert with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Symphony and baritone Paul Rowe<\/a> in December via the links below. \u00a0I find it very exciting to hear these gifted young musicians responding to their first encounter with the Ruckert Lieder, and I hope you enjoy their committed playing and Paul’s beautiful interpretation.<\/em><\/p>\n

KW<\/em><\/p>\n

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Love, Life\u00a0and Death in Mahler’s Adagietto<\/strong><\/p>\n

— Peter Davison<\/p>\n

I’m grateful to Ken for inviting me to contribute a piece to his Mahler blog. He’s off to Cambridge next week conducting the University Chamber Orchestra; another feather in his cap after his successful BBC Radio Four appearance and a powerful performance of\u00a0Shostakovitch’s Leningrad Symphony in Wrexham last Saturday.\u00a0 Readers will know that\u00a0Mahler’s Fifth Symphony<\/strong> will be performed at\u00a0The<\/strong> <\/strong>Bridgewater Hall<\/strong> next\u00a0Thursday 4 March<\/strong> by the\u00a0Halle<\/strong> directed by\u00a0Sir Mark Elder<\/strong>. The performance will preceded by a new work by jazz musican,\u00a0UriCaine<\/strong> called\u00a0Scenes from Childhood<\/em><\/strong>. But now for the blog!<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n


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Interpreting Mahler is a source of endless fascination. It is easy to\u00a0identify in his music\u00a0a variety of literary references, musical quotations, sound-symbols and other meaningful gestures, yet we can remain\u00a0unsure what the music means. Mahler himself was often contradictory in what he said about his music and he became very wary of fixed programmes. Yet clearly he wrote music that consists of complex constellations of musical and extra-musical references, which tend to point in the same direction; a direction which the music on its own is usually quite adequate to express. Since music is a language of feeling and psychological process, it doesn’t need to have a specific meaning.\u00a0However, finding the references and sources can still enhance our understanding,\u00a0even if\u00a0it is\u00a0not essential to it. Sometimes in Mahler we know something makes musical and emotional sense, but we simply cannot explain\u00a0why. A\u00a0limited deconstruction of the music\u00a0can provide\u00a0an explanation and take away some of our puzzlement that Mahler’s music at times seems\u00a0at different levels\u00a0both to make sense and\u00a0not to make sense.<\/p>\n

But let’s turn to the famous Adagietto movement of the Fifth Symphony. Mahler was one of the sharpest intellects that ever took to writing music, so there is always a thoughtful motivation behind the narrative scheme of his symphonies.\u00a0Readers of\u00a0this blog\u00a0will by now already understand that the Fifth Symphony is at one level a reflection\u00a0upon whether to say “yes” or “no” to life. It is the big question which Nietzsche suggests we all must face in his philosophical work,\u00a0Also Sprach<\/em> <\/em>Zarathustra<\/em>.<\/em> <\/em>He advocates saying an unequivocal “yes”; one which\u00a0accepts that\u00a0amidst joy there must be suffering and that to live a full life, we must accept our\u00a0mortality without fear and resentment. This is because the two experiences – joy and suffering – are inextricably linked, and there can’t be one without the other.<\/p>\n

So it should be\u00a0no surprise that\u00a0Mahler’s Fifth Symphony opens with a fateful trumpet fanfare and a gloomy\u00a0funeral march. This is followed by an explosion of\u00a0un-containable grief which threatens to make the symphonic argument collapse altogether. In the work’s second movement, there is an outburst of anger and\u00a0grief, interspersed by moments of\u00a0gloomy introspection and the painful reminiscence of past woes. But\u00a0there is also a struggle for transcendence which offers us a\u00a0brief glimpse of the symphony’s goal;\u00a0a magnificent D major chorale.\u00a0But even after we have seen dry-land amidst the storm, the music once again\u00a0sinks into nihilistic despair. What\u00a0stands in the way of the longed-for goal? Some demon in Mahler (and us)\u00a0cannot let go of the doubt\u00a0created by\u00a0past negative\u00a0experiences and the nagging reality of death. The first part of the symphony seems to say; we are all tragic victims, play-things of the gods who vent their anger upon us helpless human beings, whose hopes and desires are inevitably thwarted.\u00a0If this\u00a0were truly\u00a0so, then life\u00a0would be\u00a0hardly worth living!<\/p>\n

Part II of the symphony\u00a0is less intense than Part I, as if the trauma of Part I is being held at arm’s length.\u00a0The bitter-sweet scherzo\u00a0hesitates between\u00a0saying “yes” and\u00a0“no” to Nietzsche’s big question. The movement seems to draws us towards the dance of life and yet, at the same time,\u00a0pulls\u00a0us\u00a0away\u00a0into\u00a0melancholy and loneliness.\u00a0The music\u00a0alternates between\u00a0world-weariness and a state of wild intoxication. Life is presented as both\u00a0enticing and frightening. The passage of time and the proximity of death\u00a0seem to rob life of\u00a0hope and\u00a0meaning, yet the finite nature of man and his existence are also the very essence of life’s joys.\u00a0So how can anyone decide what attitude to adopt?\u00a0With that big question still unanswered,\u00a0we come to symphony’s third part and its fourth movement, the famous Adagietto. Ken has already hinted that this movement may be about both love and death, and his view\u00a0makes good sense.\u00a0Part one of the symphony\u00a0is about\u00a0the fact of death and the emotions associated with it. Part two (the scherzo) shows how fleeting life’s pleasures can be. The invitation to life is\u00a0symbolised in a waltz\u00a0with a seductive woman\u00a0who lures a man\u00a0to his fate with the promise of\u00a0earthly delights.\u00a0But in Part three, beginning with the Adagietto, we enter an\u00a0intimate inner space where time stands still and where the vicissitudes\u00a0of life cannot touch us. But \u00a0the refined sensuality of this music tells us that we are no longer being tempted into\u00a0a dance\u00a0to the\u00a0death with a femme fatale, but that erotic feeling has become something less sinister.<\/p>\n

How does Mahler achieve this? There is an obvious melodic connection between the Adagietto\u00a0and the song “Nun seh’ ich wohl” from the\u00a0Kindertotenlieder<\/em>.<\/em> In that song, the rising three-note figure\u00a0expresses poignant yearning and pathos.\u00a0The grieving father recalls\u00a0the\u00a0glance of the lost child which had previously\u00a0intimated its\u00a0tragic destiny and longing for eternity. The eyes are thus a window\u00a0upon the soul,\u00a0allowing us to glimpse the deepest reality of the other. In\u00a0the Adagietto, the mood is serene, rather than grief-stricken, but the gesture of spiritual intimacy is the same. The\u00a0promise of hedonistic oblivion\u00a0in the scherzo has here become spiritualised.\u00a0Sexuality has become personalised and life-giving. Compare this with Tristan and Isolde! In that work, the lovers feel they can only achieve true union in death because,\u00a0beyond\u00a0the human world, nothing can intrude upon them, nor\u00a0apply\u00a0limits of time and space to their feelings. Mahler\u00a0seeks a similar release from worldly limitation\u00a0in the Adagietto, but\u00a0he achieves it here and now in\u00a0the security of his inner world. In the Adagietto, the spiritualization of sensual desire is achieved by\u00a0the death of the ego in relation to the temporal world. But it is not a lonely place, as Mahler suggests\u00a0a very human\u00a0kind of love, filled with tender regard for the other and which relishes human intimacy as the gateway to the life of the soul. He is not searching for some intoxicated climax of feeling\u00a0that can lead only to a life-rejecting\u00a0suicide-pact.\u00a0For Mahler, love is something renewing and creative which should give\u00a0us the zest to go into the world at\u00a0ease with ourselves.<\/p>\n

So it doesn’t really matter whether the Adagietto\u00a0was written as a love-token for Alma or not, nor in what sense it advocates abandoning the world. It is primarily an appropriate\u00a0slow movement\u00a0for the scheme of\u00a0the Fifth\u00a0Symphony.\u00a0The movement\u00a0finds profound relationships between\u00a0love for the other, the death of ego and achieving transcendence. We might sum this up and say that\u00a0the movement\u00a0restores Eros, and this may help us\u00a0to understand better why Mahler made a musical portrait of Alma in the Sixth Symphony and\u00a0why he was inspired\u00a0to joyous reverence for the feminine in the Eighth (which Mahler later dedicated to Alma).\u00a0A word of warning though- we must be careful not to\u00a0confuse Alma the real person\u00a0with Mahler’s\u00a0idealisation of her. He wanted her to be a\u00a0conflation of great physical beauty and a soul-mate, but\u00a0this led to\u00a0unrealistic expectations and blindness to her weaknesses; problems which\u00a0in the end\u00a0got the marriage into serious trouble. Alma certainly helped Mahler feel good about himself and\u00a0stimulated his creativity, but perhaps she achieved this more\u00a0by what she represented than what she actually was. Later she awoke very painful emotions in Mahler. But it was the burden of\u00a0Alma’s whole life to be a creatively gifted woman in her own right who\u00a0yet had to play the role of a passive muse and nurse-maid to the art of others. It was a role she both\u00a0valued and despised, resulting often in\u00a0serious tensions between her and\u00a0the highly talented men she captivated.<\/p>\n

But back to the Fifth! After the\u00a0scherzo, the structure of the\u00a0symphony provides a mirror-image of the first two movements, but\u00a0now transformed into their opposites. The Adagietto is thus paired with movement number two. Instead of extroverted anger, conflict and striving, we now have introverted calm and\u00a0sustained lyricism. The wind and brass fall silent, and we hear the harp as if it were\u00a0the lyre of Orpheus, enchanting and praising\u00a0the gods, singing with a beauty that restores their sympathy for humanity. Mahler has this Orphic side to his musical personality. He believed that music allowed him\u00a0both to address\u00a0and express the divine. To underline this mood of transcendence, the Adagietto encompasses thematic links to several of the Ruckert songs\u00a0composed in the same period. <\/a>Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen<\/a><\/em>,<\/a> of course,\u00a0suggests a blissful retreat from the world, but there is also\u00a0Um<\/a><\/em> <\/a><\/em>Mitternacht<\/a><\/em> – At Midnight,<\/a> which alludes to the Nietzschean idea that\u00a0light lies buried amidst the darkness.\u00a0We can also hear\u00a0in the final bars the tender lyricism of Liebst du um Schonheit<\/a><\/em> – which was\u00a0indisputably written as a love-gift for Alma.\u00a0While pondering these Ruckert connections, I also re-read Nietzsche’s\u00a0Midnight Song<\/em> in its more extended version and found the following passage:<\/p>\n

“Sweet Lyre! Sweet Lyre!\u00a0 Your sound, your intoxicated, ominous sound, delights me! – from how long ago, from how far away does your sound come to me, from a far distance, from the pools of love!…The world itself has grown ripe, the grapes grow brown, now they want to die, to die of happiness. You higher men, do you not smell it? An odour is secretly welling up, a scent and odour of eternity, an odour of roseate bliss, a brown, golden wine odour of ancient happiness, of intoxicated midnight’s dying happiness which sings:<\/em> <\/em>The world is deep; deeper than the day can comprehend!”<\/em><\/p>\n

This sums up the\u00a0atmosphere of the\u00a0Adagietto<\/em> perfectly, and its role in the symphony becomes clearer. In deep contemplation, we connect with something that allows the “yes to life” to be said, Something profoundly beautiful emerges\u00a0which gets us past the anxiety of Part I. Mahler suggests that\u00a0beneath the surface of things, something is born from the inner life which is not subject to fate and which can\u00a0transform the victim-feelings of the symphony’s opening into\u00a0joy. We may call that thing\u00a0love, the divine presence or simply a state of intimate being, but\u00a0whatever we call it, it\u00a0connects us to the eternal realm.\u00a0And after this axis of transformation,\u00a0Mahler can\u00a0honestly assert his\u00a0“yes” to life. The\u00a0funeral march\u00a0of the work’s opening turns into its opposite; the exuberant, life-affirming\u00a0Rondo Finale<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If you think that this transformation is musically a bit shallow, then listen again to the opening of the Adagietto. The harp plays an ambiguous\u00a0C and\u00a0A motif, the strings enter and the rising melody begins,\u00a0but only when we reach that upward leaning E which resolves to the\u00a0F are we sure that this is F major and not A minor. A minor is the key of the second movement, and faint hints of the angry minor third heard\u00a0from its beginning can also be found in the Adagietto\u00a0at bars 19-22. The flattened minor sixth and ‘Neapolitan’ inflections (that is B-flat in A minor) which create a lot of the angst in the second movement\u00a0are also heard in the Adagietto, but\u00a0reharmonised. We can hear\u00a0the same notes and intervals, but\u00a0accompanied by F major harmony, so that they become\u00a0contained within a serene and expressive cantilena.<\/p>\n

I could go on showing other links between these two movements, but you will have the idea by now.\u00a0Mahler is always eager to show us that\u00a0opposites belong together. It is paradoxical, but he proves his point musically by showing how closely related these things are; with only a small change of harmonic context and a slower tempo, the same musical ideas are rendered\u00a0unrecognisable.\u00a0In the song\u00a0Um Mitternacht,<\/em> <\/em>the dark night of the soul leads to a triumphant vision of the light. So also in the Adagietto, at midnight, in deep repose, perhaps even looking into the beloved’s eyes, the whole mystery of life is revealed, so that when dawn comes, the symphony’s hero is ready\u00a0to face\u00a0life\u00a0positively. Mahler\u00a0shouts out\u00a0his “yes” to life,\u00a0after\u00a0he has found the love to heal the wounds with which\u00a0the symphony began.<\/p>\n