{"id":4628,"date":"2012-09-08T17:30:38","date_gmt":"2012-09-08T16:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/?p=4628"},"modified":"2020-04-19T18:13:15","modified_gmt":"2020-04-19T17:13:15","slug":"strauss-and-mahlers-perilous-descent-from-the-summit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2012\/09\/08\/strauss-and-mahlers-perilous-descent-from-the-summit\/","title":{"rendered":"Strauss and Mahler’s perilous descent from the summit"},"content":{"rendered":"

I took a break from studying Mahler 3 this afternoon to watch Bernard Haitink\u2019s Prom performance of the Strauss Alpine Symphony<\/a> with the Vienna Philharmonic. Putting these two titanic scores side by side made for an interesting comparison. The Alpine and the Third are their creators\u2019 most explicitly programmatic orchestral works, but where Strauss printed his program in the score, Mahler retracted his before the work\u2019s publication.<\/p>\n

Mahler made the right choice, but it\u2019s a pity he didn\u2019t go to the lengths someone like Brahms would have to cover his programmatic tracks (of course, Brahms knew a thing or two about writing works with secret programs<\/a>). If only he\u2019d burned all his letters and sketches that mention the bloody program. Nonetheless, Mahler made it known that even though he\u2019d had a<\/em> program in mind when he wrote it, and set two poems to music in the course of the work, and peppered the work with quotes from a third song, Das himmlische Leben<\/em>, he wanted the work approached as \u201cabsolute music.\u201d Strauss kept and even advertised his<\/em> program,\u00a0 yet it is his work that is purely orchestral, and his work which is in many ways the\u00a0 more abstract.<\/p>\n

Strauss\u2019s use of musical \u201cprograms\u201d is probably the most misunderstood case study of the most misunderstood area of musicology: the false dichotomy between \u201cabstract\u201d and \u201cprogrammatic\u201d music. Strauss was sane and centered enough not to take too much offense at the complaints of critics and scholars that his use of programs made for music that was simplistic and one-dimensional, and lacking purely musical coherence and logic. Even the Wikepidia article on the Alpine contends that: “In general, however, it is believed that comparisons to any kind of traditional symphonic form are secondary to the strong sense of structure created by the piece’s musical pictorialism [sic] and detailed narrative.” Poppycock. The piece works formally whether you know anything about the narrative program or respond to the pictorialism.<\/p>\n

It is blindingly obvious to anyone who spends any time getting to know any of Strauss\u2019s purely orchestral works that such naysayers literally couldn\u2019t be more wrong. Whether it\u2019s the Alpine, Tod und Verklarung<\/em>, Don\u00a0 Juan or Till Eulenspiegel<\/em>, all of these works possess a truly staggering level of purely musical coherence and logic. Each of the tone poems, the Alpline and Domestica deal with a specific abstract challenge of a given musical form and the results are always original, insightful, \u00a0compelling and completely successful as \u201cpure\u201d or \u201cabstract\u201d music. I\u2019m not na\u00efve enough to hope that we could do away with or forget the programs, but I do think listeners, players and critics alike would all do well to try to set them aside and focus on the music first. Let “Death and Transfiguration” be “Orchestral Piece in C,” let Heldenleben become Symphony in E-flat Major. You’ll quickly learn not only \u00a0great deal about Strauss, but about composition.<\/p>\n

Musicians and music lovers able to digest Strauss\u2019s music in musical terms will invariably realize that it was always the listener who reduced Strauss to purely programmatic terms who was being \u201csimplistic and one-dimensional.\u201d Give someone a program, tell them what the piece is “about,” and I guarantee you they’ll listen less inquisitively, less actively and less intelligently than they would if it were presented to them just as music. But give them several programs and….?<\/em><\/p>\n

So am I suggesting the programs given to us by Strauss himself are not valid or not helpful? Not at all.\u00a0\u00a0 The problem with programs is not that they\u2019re untrue, but that they\u2019re only part of the truth. Most music has not only one program, but many, whether it’s a Strauss tone poem, a Mahler symphony or a Beethoven quartet.<\/p>\n

The program of the Alpine Symphony is simplicity itself- a group of hikers wake up, climb a mountain, get caught in a storm, come down off the peak and go to bed. It\u2019s all very picturesque, I suppose.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Strauss looking ready for the climb<\/p><\/div>\n

However, there\u2019s so much more to this piece. It’s more than “merely” a Symphony in B-flat Minor, more than storytelling and more than picture-painting.<\/p>\n

1-After several false starts, Strauss\u2019s immediate inspiration to complete the piece was the death of his friend, Gustav Mahler. The whole work can be heard as an homage to a great man; another, greater Heldenleben<\/em> in which a hero ascends to the ultimate heights of artistry and professional achievement, but the life of any man is but a short day compared to Nature, and the sun sets even on Mahler. The Alpine is not just a day on a mountain, but the life of an artist.<\/p>\n

2-\u00a0 The Alpine Symphony began in 1899 as sketches for a work called K\u00fcnstlertrag\u00f6die<\/em>, or “Tragedy of an Artist.” \u00a0The parallel with Mahler makes even more sense in light of this, but this also hammers home the tragic character of a work that begins and ends in complete darkness. The end of the Alpine Symphony is as bleak and desolate as any page in the literature, yet so many people think of the piece as an overblown bit of film music. If only more performers and listeners engaged with the music rather than the printed program.<\/p>\n

3- The Alpine is a work of a very different epoch than the earlier tone poems. It was completed in 1915, as war was enveloping the continent and, as Mark Berry put it in his review of Haitink\u2019s Proms performance<\/a> \u201cThe lights were going out all over Europe; their relighting we still await.\u00a0\u201c I completely agree with Mark on the importance of remembering this context for the piece.\u00a0 It is a requiem for an idea, for an ideal and for an era- a requiem for the model of German culture embodied for Strauss in the mirror-image figures of the Jewish Gustav Mahler and the anti-Semite Richard Wagner. In many ways, the Alpine says about World War I what Metamorphosen says about World War II. It’s a day on a mountain, a life on an artist, and the arc of a society.<\/p>\n

4- Strauss himself saw in Mahler and Wagner what he felt was a shared misplaced trust in Christianity.\u00a0 On learning of Mahler\u2019s death he wrote \u201cThe death of this aspiring, idealistic, energetic artist is a grave loss … Mahler, the Jew, could achieve elevation in Christianity. As an old man the hero Wagner returned to it under the influence of Schopenhauer. It is clear to me that the German nation will achieve new creative energy only by liberating itself from Christianity …\u201d Of course, Mahler\u2019s relationship with Christianity was uneasy, and ultimately, Mahler\u2019s true faith was, like Strauss, only in Nature. The Alpine is a day on a mountain, a life of an artist, the arc of a society and the failure of religion.<\/p>\n

Strauss himself considered the Alpine Symphony an even more Nietzschean work than Also sprach Zarathustra<\/em>. It was originally titled Der Antichrist<\/em>. “I shall call my alpine symphony: Der Antichrist<\/em>, since it represents: moral purification through one’s own strength, liberation through work, worship of eternal, magnificent nature.\u201d Mahler himself knew a thing or two about composing a Nietzchean symphony- his Third not only includes a setting of Nietzsche, but also declares\u00a0 man\u2019s relationship with Nature to be the focal point of human experience. The immense, wild and often terrifying first movement of Mahler 3 paints a picture of Nature not as a picturesque panacea but as a worthy adversary, against which a great man measures himself with humility and resolve. Likewise, in the Alpine, Strauss doesn\u2019t want us just to marvel at the picture-postcard beauties of the Alps, but test ourselves against mountains, to find strength in what we struggle against. The K\u00fcnstlertrag\u00f6die<\/em> Strauss illuminates so powerfully in the Alpine is that the strength you find in this struggle, the triumph you experience on the top of the mountain is fleeting.<\/p>\n

Likewise, I find that many people stop looking for meaning in Mahler 3 as soon as they read his program. The program is only one truth- the piece is about Nature and divine Love, but also about music, about friendship and loss, about revolution and reconciliation. And yet, when we wrote about some<\/a> of the other programs embedded<\/a> in this amazing score I had more than one colleague write to me sceptically saying that Mahler\u2019s program told us all we need to know about what Mahler 3 means.<\/p>\n

One could make the case that even though it is twice the length of the Alpine Symphony, that Mahler 3 only tells half a story when compared to the Strauss- Mahler ends on the highest summit. Strauss was brave enough to continue the journey Mahler had taken to the halfway point- down the back side of the mountain, through the terrors that follow every triumph and into the darkness that awaits at the end of every human journey.<\/p>\n