{"id":1641,"date":"2010-05-21T12:03:50","date_gmt":"2010-05-21T11:03:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/?p=1641"},"modified":"2010-05-21T12:03:50","modified_gmt":"2010-05-21T11:03:50","slug":"experts-perspective-mahler-9-a-bitter-burlesque","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2010\/05\/21\/experts-perspective-mahler-9-a-bitter-burlesque\/","title":{"rendered":"Expert’s perspective- Mahler 9, a bitter burlesque"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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

In American football, coaches learn that when a play is working for you, go keep going to it until the other team figures out a way to stop it. In this spirit, I’ve asked Peter Davison, whose previous contributions to this series ahve been so valuable and complimentary, for his thoughts about Mahler 9. The Halle, with their Music Director, Sir Mark Elder, will perform Mahler 9 as part of Mahler in Manchester on the 27th of May, 2010 in The Bridgewater Hall.<\/a><\/p>\n

Burlesque and Elegy in Mahler’s Ninth symphony<\/strong><\/p>\n

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I often think of Mahler’s Ninth symphony as his “New World” symphony, because it says good-bye to the familiarities of Vienna and tries to draw a line under the traumas of 1908. In that year,\u00a0Mahler\u00a0not only lost his position as Director of the Vienna Opera and\u00a0went ot the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but he\u00a0lost his first child and learned that his own health was detoriorating. For Mahler, composing was therapeutic. It was a way of getting to grips with the torments of his emotions and the sensitivity of his inner being. At the time of composing the ninth in 1908-9. Mahler had a lot of life experience to digest.<\/p>\n

The Ninth symphony is often heard as valedictory; a work about Mahler’s own farewell to life, although there is little real evidence that this was his intention. There is certainly an air of resignation, but it is\u00a0acceptance in\u00a0a higher sense; namely he goes through a process of mourning\u00a0to find inner peace. But as ever with Mahler, the music is never just about him, but a universal expression of\u00a0compassion for the lot of man. Man is born to suffer.<\/p>\n

So much can be said and has been said about the first movement of this work, that I don’t want to focus on it here. It is simply\u00a0the best music Mahler ever wrote; a compelling essay on the human condition. It narrates the\u00a0confrontation between Man’s aspiration to joy and hostile fate. It is suffused by\u00a0anxious longing and, at times, paralysing fear. Yet within its enormous emotional and psychological compass, there\u00a0is a perfect symphonic resolution. This begs the question – why compose three more movements after this at all?<\/p>\n

Mahler was reluctant to let the\u00a0format of the traditional symphony go much as he was attached to Vienna itself.\u00a0But we can hear these three movements as a paranthesis to the first movement, i.e. Mahler’s explanation in more specific terms of what has been first presented as universal drama; like a Passion story in fact. But what\u00a0do these three later movements express which illuminates the first?\u00a0 The bitter irony of the Landler and Rondo Burleske are expressions of\u00a0righteous anger.\u00a0Mahler had\u00a0lost his job in Vienna. He had been toppled from a great height by back-biting and gossip. We\u00a0can hear these movements as depictions of the hustle and bustle of ordinary life, but increasingly devoid of\u00a0any meaning. The Landler takes the most simple white-note motive, a rising C major tonic to dominant scale, and subjects it to serious violence. Only occasionally are there\u00a0moments of sentimental longing to return to the innocence which this motive represents in its purest form.\u00a0The movement\u00a0marks a\u00a0loss of innocence, so that urban life seem like a dreadful parody of true nature. There is grotesquerie, distortion and disintegration. What should be a dance of life-affirming joy has become the epitome of sardonic humour and ugliness. It is music of profound disappointment.<\/p>\n

The Rondo Burleske takes this feeling a step further with its allusions to the flower movement of the third symphony and\u00a0Lehar’s Merry Widow. All that is pretty surface is here blown apart by angry ripostes, resentful remarks and wicked asides. It is as if someone has walked into a Viennese salon and ripped down all the soft furnishings or thrown ink\u00a0at the watercolours on the walls. The fugal\u00a0voices of Mahler’s musical god,\u00a0J.S. Bach, have here become transformed into a demonic crowd of carping critics who shout down\u00a0the voice of truth. But who is angry with whom? This is a full-scale row with fingers pointing in all directions. We are in the thick of it; the pettiness, the squabbles, the absurdity of wounded egos and ruined reputations. Mahler knew he had allowed himself to be drawn into pettiness and that it had robbed him of his well-being. Mahler connected his personal situation with the universal truth. When we allow the small-minded to drag us down to their level, we become ourselves small-minded like them.<\/p>\n

I made a discovery the other day while listening to the radio. I heard a work\u00a0I did not quite recognise, but which nonetheless sounded very familiar. Then I realised why I\u00a0knew it. It was the music of Mahler’s\u00a0Rondo Burleske<\/em>, but without its savage “wrong-note” irony. Instead I heard a pleasant rustic dance. At the end, I found it was from the\u00a0Suite Pastorale<\/em> by Chabrier – a suite drawn from ten pictorial piano works. This was the\u00a0Dance Villageoise<\/em>. Why would Mahler so obviously parody this rather ordinary work by one of the most bourgeouis of all 19C composers? But that is the point! Mahler hated the picturesque attitude to nature, because it could only see the\u00a0surface of\u00a0beauty and could never accept\u00a0the wild, spontaneous and dark side of nature, nor its deep spirituality. The implication is that Mahler’s anger is being directed towards the hypocrisies of the bourgeouis culture around him. This is what had undone him in Vienna; why he\u00a0had been\u00a0so misunderstood.\u00a0Mahler believed that he spoke with the voice of true Nature, and because he was uncompromising in that regard, Vienna had rejected him and his music. So the acerbic humour of the Rondo is aimed at his “Friends in Apollo”, as\u00a0Mahler wrote in the\u00a0score. It\u00a0is a gesture of defiance\u00a0against those who could only judge by the standards of formalism and surface beauty; the social conservatives, the power-hungry careerists and\u00a0the simply ignorant. The Friends in Apollo were being given a lesson in angry Dionysian energy by Mahler preaching with fire and brimstone.<\/p>\n

But there is something else to notice about this movement. It is a Rondo, and Rondos usually end symphonies by summarising what has gone before and resolving the drama with wit and playful detachment. Here the\u00a0Rondo appears as a set-back. We have returned to a state of inner turmoil\u00a0which seems to precede the first movement’s universal vision of tragic human destiny. It is a regression stimulated by worldly defeat and antagonism. There is no tragic dignity or soulfulness to be found, except in the fleeting anticipations of the adagio which emerge tantalisingly during the movement. Mahler may have had in mind Tchaikowsky’s Pathetique\u00a0 Symphony which posits a false sense of triumph before a tragic slow-movement finale. But there is not much triumph, false or otherwise in Mahler’s Rondo. It is\u00a0diabolical and cynical; music of angry and destructive\u00a0protest “A plague on all your houses”….so to speak. Mahler knows deep down that he cannot stay in this hellish place. he must move on, put it behind him.<\/p>\n

The work’s Adagio finale is then a refuge from this state of bitterness. Mahler searches deep inside himself to\u00a0restores\u00a0his soul to balance after deep trauma and hurt. This\u00a0is expressed in the hymn-like opening of the movement. Mahler\u00a0rediscovers some semblance of tragic dignity and reconnects with the atmosphere of the first movement. The\u00a0unwionding of the inner tension\u00a0comes through grief and mourning, through entering loneliness and confronting the most difficult questions. Mahler\u00a0thereby\u00a0finds some affirmation, by\u00a0accepting loss and what life really is. But he must have found it hard to forgive or to be positive about a society that silences true nature; the child-like voice which is so often\u00a0drowned out\u00a0by the chatter of the world. He may at the end of this symphony\u00a0have found some\u00a0personal closure, but he was never again able to feel at home in Vienna.<\/p>\n

Peter Davison<\/em><\/p>\n

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Postscript:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Anyone interested in listening to Chabrier’s\u00a0Dance Villageouise<\/em> can listen here.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tXpe2XqvYuU<\/a><\/p>\n

I hear other Wunderhorn songs in this music:\u00a0Lob des hohen Verstands<\/em> and\u00a0Das irdische Leben<\/em>.You can imagine that Mahler may have identified a bourgeouis Frenchman as the ultimate falsifcation of true Nature (an opinion\u00a0Wagner\u00a0and Nietzsche\u00a0might have held).\u00a0Lob des hohen Verstands<\/em> is about\u00a0a donkey passing judgement on the music of the cuckoo and the nightingale.\u00a0Das irdische Leben<\/em> is about the mother who does not feed her hungry child; the the dark side of Nature, when it seems indifferent to the loveless predicament of her own off-spring. If anyone wants to speculate why Mahler has absorbed this\u00a0work by Chabrier, please feel free to post your thoughts.<\/p>\n