This year’s festival centers on Mahler’s 7th Symphony with performances on the 21st and 22nd of May. Festival details and booking information are here.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n He himself said the funeral march which opens his Second Symphony was a memorial service for the hero of his First Symphony. His Third Symphony is full of hints of the gentle song, Das himmlische Leben<\/em>, which would later conclude his Fourth. Almost all of the thematic material in his Fifth is drawn from the famous opening trumpet fanfare- a fanfare heard for the first time in the opening movement of this Fourth Symphony. And his Sixth Symphony seems clearly to have emerged from the rubble left behind in the wake of the cataclysm which is the second movement of the Fifth Symphony. Of all the Mahler symphonies, I think the Sixth is the one that ends in the most definitive way. After all, how can you have a story that is \u201cto be continued\u2026\u201d when all of the major characters have been brutally killed off?<\/p>\n I\u2019ve written before about the parallels between the Second and Sixth Mahler symphonies. In both cases, there is a pretty clear narrative of heroic striving against seemingly insurmountable obstacles. In the case of the Second, just when all seems lost (and the world literally comes to an end), there is a moment of divine intervention and everything turns out great. In the Sixth, instead of the benevolent hand of a merciful God delivering mercy in humanity\u2019s hour of need, we have the cold hand (or hammer) Fate, unsentimentally beating our hero into oblivion.<\/p>\n Where then in the narrative of the Sixth Symphony is there room for Mahler\u2019s trademark \u201cto be continued\u2026\u201d?<\/p>\n Well, one doesn\u2019t have to look too hard at the first movement of Mahler 7 to see that it is, very much, a musical<\/em> continuation of the Sixth. The key alone tells us this. It was no accident that Mahler 6 was in A minor- that was the key of the second movement of the Fifth Symphony from which it grew. The first movement of the Seventh is in E (originally E minor, ending in E major). E is the dominant of A, the key of the Sixth. One would have expected E to have been the second most important key in the Sixth Symphony- after all, it is the dominant which we expect to take us home to the tonic. However, in the Sixth, Mahler undermines the role of the dominant. Rather than arriving in the home key of A minor via the dominant E, he almost always approaches it from what we call the parallel major, A major. Even in a minor key, the dominant-tonic cadence is one of the most galvanizing and cathartic gestures in music. In the Sixth, we don\u2019t cadence into the tonic key from the dominant and exhale a sigh of relief, we collapse into it from the parallel major with a scream of despair. The upshot of this is that the key of E never gets its due in the Sixth Symphony.<\/p>\n And so, in the Seventh, it is if Mahler says to us- \u201cever wondered what happened to the key of E while the key of A was getting his a$$ kicked in the last episode? Well\u2026..\u201d<\/p>\n On the biggest structural level, the opening movement of Mahler 7 also offers something of a rebuttal to the narrative of Mahler 6. If Mahler was the composer of \u201cto be continued\u2026\u201d, Brahms was the composer of \u201con the other hand\u2026.\u201d Brahms almost always composed in opposing pairs. His Tragic Overture is like a dark mirror image of the jolly Academic Festival Overture- the two pieces were written one after the other. The more definitive the statement he made in one piece, the more urgently\u00a0he seemed to need to present a counter argument. After his taught, dramatic and Beethovenian First Symphony (which took him seventeen years to write), Brahms answered with his pastoral Second Symphony (written in just months). Perhaps the Seventh is Mahler\u2019s \u201con the other hand\u2026\u201d work?<\/p>\n The collapse from A major to A minor (or, more generally, from major to minor) is the main generative idea of the Sixth Symphony. In the Seventh, Mahler opens with a movement which, after an introduction which starts in B minor and works its way through a few keys (not unlike the slow introduction with opens the last movement of the Sixth), journeys from E minor to E major.<\/p>\n For most composers, such a journey would not be so unusual- all of Beethoven\u2019s minor key symphonies and concerti end in the parallel major, as does Brahms\u2019 First, Schumann\u2019s Fourth, Dvorak\u2019s Seventh and Schubert’s Fourth. For Mahler, this journey is not unheard of (for instance, the Third Symphony outlines a huge journey from D minor to D major). It is, however, not to be taken for granted. The Second Symphony, in C minor, finds salvation not in C major but in E-flat Major<\/a>. The Sixth taught us that minor doesn\u2019t have to progress to major. After that harrowing work, Mahler\u2019s listeners could never again take a happy ending for granted. \u201cOn the other hand,\u201d in the opening movement of the Seventh, Mahler reminds us that minor can<\/em> lead to major.<\/p>\n There are other stylistic and thematic similarities between the opening movement of the Seventh and the dark world of the Sixth. The march rhythms which underpin the main material of the movement emerge of the same sort of primordial ooze which opens the Finale of the Sixth, and carry us into a strikingly similar sound world. The second theme of the first movement of the Seventh is cut very much from the same cloth as the second theme of the first movement of the Sixth (the so-called \u201cAlma Theme\u201d). Both have the same temporal \u201ctugs\u201d on the weak\u00a0beats, and similar flowing quavers carrying the line forward.<\/p>\n\n
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<\/span><\/span>Mahler- Das Lied von der Erde, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen<\/h2>\n\t£<\/span>12.00<\/bdi><\/span><\/span>\n<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n
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<\/a>Gustav Mahler may well have been the first composer to end each of his symphonies with the postscript \u201cto be continued\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
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