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Gustav Mahler\u2019s\u00a0Das Lied von der Erde<\/em>\u00a0is a work that ends with the beginning of a journey.<\/p>\nAcross the first five movements, and through much of the sixth, the narrative voices we hear are passive ones.\u00a0 In the third and fourth songs, the poetry of Li T\u2019ai-po observes youth and beauty, but as if through a glass wall. In the second song, \u201cThe Lonely one in Autumn\u201d Chang Tsi describes a describes a soul paralysed by grief and isolation. In the first and fifth songs, Li T\u2019ai-po brings us into the nihilistic world of a heroic figure reduced to seeking consolation in endless drink. \u201cDark is life, is death\u201d laments the poet, \u201cLet me be drunk!\u201d<\/p>\n
The sixth song of\u00a0Das Lied von der Erde, Der Abschied\u00a0<\/em>(\u201cThe Farewell\u201d), is as long as the other five put together. For much of the song, the poet speaks of an atmosphere of expectant but doom-laden waiting. \u201cI stand here and await my friend for a final farewell,\u201d says the poet. There follows a long funeral march, after which the long awaited friend arrives. And it is here that the piece turns. The voice of the friend and that of the narrator quickly blur. \u201cFortune was not kind to me in this world! Where do I go? I walk, I wander in the mountains. I seek peace for my lonely heart. I go to my homeland, my abode.\u201d For a piece which has mostly existed in the realms of observation or emotional paralysis,\u00a0Das Lied von der Erde\u00a0<\/em>ends with a renewed sense of purpose, agency, and the beginning of a new, eternal journey.<\/p>\n \u201cFortune was not kind to me in this world,\u201d is a line which could have been autobiographical at the time Mahler set it. As most Mahlerians will know, Mahler had just experienced his famous \u201cthree blows of fate\u201d in the summer of 1907. He had been forced from his position at the Vienna Opera by anti-Semitic intrigues, he had lost his beloved daughter Maria to scarlet fever, and he had been diagnosed with a serious, potentially fatal heart condition. \u00a0This series of tragedies brought on a creative crisis, leaving Mahler temporarily unable to compose.<\/p>\n When he finally broke his silence, it was not without effort. \u201cI 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,\u201d he wrote to Bruno Walter. The first music he wrote after those three blows was the desolate second song of\u00a0Das Lied von der Erde, Der Einsame im Herbst\u00a0<\/em>(\u201cThe Lonely One in Autumn\u201d). However, much like the narrator of\u00a0Der Abschied<\/em>, once the new journey was begun, Mahler never looked back, and his final creative chapter, comprising\u00a0Das Lied<\/em>\u00a0and the Ninth and Tenth symphonies was to be his greatest. Das Lied von der Erde<\/em>\u00a0is on one level about loss and departure, but on another, it is about recovery and renewal.<\/p>\n Mahler was by no means alone among great composers in reaching a point of creative crisis before a final, late burst of inspiration and energy. Beethoven went through nearly 7 years of creative stasis between his middle and late periods. In Mahler\u2019s case, it was the discovery of Hans Bethge\u2019s translations of ancient Chinese poetry,\u00a0Die chinesische Fl\u00f6te<\/em>, somehow gave Mahler a much-needed source of poetic inspiration.<\/p>\n Of course, not all poetic inspiration comes from poetry. In 1890, Johannes Brahms wrote his String Quintet in G major, opus 111, and declared his intention to forever set down his pen. \u201cI have worked enough; now let the young ones take over,\u201d he said. Poetic inspiration came in the form of the clarinettist Richard M\u00fchlfeld, for whom Brahms wrote the Clarinet Quintet we perform on our Chamber music Concert this year. The inspiration of M\u00fchlfeld elicited from Brahms not only the four great works for clarinet (including the Clarinet Trio and the two Clarinet Sonatas), but a great, final flowering of autumnal masterpieces, including songs, piano works and an astonishing set of chorale preludes for organ. The composer Hans G\u00e1l wrote of the music of Brahms\u2019 last five years that \u201cImperceptibly the first day of winter had arrived; the sun was low over the horizon. In 1891 the music his last period began\u2026 what it may lack in gushing fullness is replaced by an indescribably noble, spiritual concentration of technique and expression.\u201d<\/p>\n Richard Strauss and Brahms were very different men, but G\u00e1l\u2019s touching description of Brahms\u2019 final period also provides a very apt description of the music of Strauss\u2019s last years. At his peak, Strauss was perhaps the most public musician in the world- a composer of gargantuan works for the concert hall and the opera house which attracted huge audiences and fed longstanding pubic debates. He was a conductor of international standard. Yet, in his later years, as the culture which had nourished him throughout his life collapsed into madness and catastrophe, Strauss turned inward. His final opera, Capriccio<\/em>, is a work of great wisdom and beauty, but hardly a natural piece for the theatre. It is an examination of the age old philosophical question, \u201cwhich is the greater art, poetry or music?\u201d Strauss no longer seemed to need or want his public, and his late works are touchingly introspective. It is no accident that his last opera begins not with a grand overture, but with a beautiful piece of pure chamber music, the Sextet which opens our annual Chamber Concert. Again, what G\u00e1l said of the aging Brahms could apply equally well to the elderly Strauss, \u201cThe man had calmed down and withdrawn into himself.\u201d<\/p>\n Die chinesische Fl\u00f6te<\/em>\u00a0was the last of many literary works, ranging from Goethe\u2019s\u00a0Faust<\/em>\u00a0to the folk poetry\u00a0of Des Knaben Wunderhorn<\/em>, which helped shape not only Mahler\u2019s vocal music but his symphonic output throughout his life. The British composer John McCabe was, like Mahler and Strauss, both a performer and a composer of genius. As a pianist he was not only a noted advocate for a huge range of 20th<\/sup>\u00a0C. works, but also the first artist to record the complete piano sonatas of Haydn. McCabe\u2019s 1998 work\u00a0Pilgrim<\/em>, given its North American premiere on our chamber concert this year, was inspired by John Bunyan\u2019s classic novel\u00a0Pilgrim\u2019s Progress<\/em>. Originally composed in the sextet version you will hear this week, McCabe later orchestrated it for double string orchestra, in the process giving us one of the very greatest works in the rich tradition of English string orchestra music, worthy of placement alongside Elgar\u2019s Introduction and Allegro and Vaughan Williams\u2019 Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. The themes McCabe found most inspiring in Pilgrim bear a remarkable similarity to those which make Das Lied von der Erde so rich. \u201cIt made a great impression,\u201d wrote McCabe, \u201cnot least because of its theme of a journey of self-discovery, and a recovery or renewal of faith. These are ideas which have a strong interest for me, not in religious terms but in their application to every aspect of human life (including great journeys), and this piece reflects my response in musical terms to this concern. One feature which, upon completion of the score, struck me with some force, which is that almost all the thematic material is essentially striving upwards \u2013 there is a constant upward movement (sometimes over a lengthy period) throughout the work.\u201d<\/p>\n Richard Strauss and Mahler were both friends and rivals. Zemlinsky and Mahler were probably more rivals than friends, at least where love was concerned. The glamorous Alma Schindler had been Zemlinsky\u2019s lover before dumping him in favor of Mahler, whom she considered clearly the greater talent. Zemlinsky was a major figure, however, and it is wonderful that we can hear his youthful Cello Sonata on this year\u2019s Afternoon Recital. Like Mahler, Strauss and McCabe, George Enescu was a multifaceted genius as both performer and composer. Hailed recently in Musical Opinion\u00a0 as \u201calmost certainly the greatest composer to have not yet been fully embraced in the pantheon of the giants,\u201d Enescu\u2019s musical gifts seem almost superhuman. He was said to be able to recall and write down every note of every piece Bach ever composed, and was equally proficient as both a violinist and pianist. As a child prodigy he found early inspiration in a meeting with his idol, Brahms. Just as Brahms had often turned to Gipsy and Hungarian folk music for inspiration, much of Enescu\u2019s music was inspired in part by the folk music of his native Romania, including his Violin Sonata no. 3, \u201cdans le caract\u00e8re populaire roumain.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Our Afternoon Recital also includes Phantasma by our 2018 visiting composer, Jesse Jones, perhaps the only composer I know of to be a virtuoso mandolin player as well as a conductor and pianist.<\/p>\n If Strauss and Mahler were the two dominant composer-conductors of their day, Sibelius and Mahler were certainly the dominant symphonists of their generation. The popular anecdote about their friendly debate over the nature of the symphony tells only part of the story of how their work as symphonists compares. Sibelius said of their discussion about the nature of the symphony that:<\/p>\n \u201cI admired its style and severity of form, and the profound logic that created an inner connection between all the motives. . . . Mahler\u2019s opinion was just the opposite. \u201cNo!\u201d he said, \u201cThe symphony must be like the world. It must be all-embracing.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, an examination of both composers output reveals that this supposedly antipodal approach was more a social misunderstanding than anything else. Although there are obvious differences in scale, language and orchestration, Mahler\u2019s music is every bit as rigorous and logical as Sibelius\u2019s.\u00a0Das Lied von der Erde<\/em>\u00a0is a perfect embodiment of a \u201cprofound logic that create(s) an inner connection between all the motives.\u201d<\/p>\n Likewise, Sibelius\u2019s music could, like Mahler\u2019s, be both simultaneously all-embracing and painfully personal. He was no stranger to the kinds of personal creative crises which gripped Mahler and Brahms before they entered their late periods. Sibelius had one of the most distinctive and instantly recognisable voices of any composer, but his refusal to repeat himself meant that most of his major works came at great personal cost. His wife, Aino, despaired at his dependence on alcohol as a compositional aid. But when inspiration came, the results were staggering. So it was when Sibelius composed his\u00a0Fantasia sinfonica\u00a0<\/em>in 1924. That year saw both Sibelius and his marriage to Aino in crisis. \u201cAino\u2026 is at the end of her tether\u2026I am on the wrong rails. Alcohol to calm my nerves and state of mind. How dreadful old age is for a composer! Things don\u2019t go as quickly as they used to, and self-criticism grows to impossible proportions.\u201d The texts of Mahler\u2019s two harrowing drinking songs in\u00a0Das Lied von der Erde<\/em>\u00a0could well have been autobiographical sketches of Sibelius\u2019 life at the time of the composition of the Seventh Symphony.<\/p>\n Aino, disgusted by his drunken state during a recent trip to Gothenburg, refused to accompany Sibelius to the triumphant premiere of the\u00a0Fantasia sinfonica<\/em>. In the end Sibelius found the strength to conduct a triumphant concert, and Sibelius quickly realised that the\u00a0Fantasia sinfonica<\/em>\u00a0was really meant to be his Seventh Symphony. We have here \u201can indescribably noble, spiritual concentration of technique and expression,\u201d but, as with Brahms \u201cwinter had arrived; the sun was low over the horizon.\u201d<\/p>\n Renewal came harder to Sibelius than to Mahler or even Brahms. In the end, he had two more masterpieces to give the world after the Seventh, his final tone poem, Tapiola and his music for The Tempest. Years of struggle on an Eighth Symphony ended when Sibelius is believed to have burned the incomplete manuscript in his dining room. Other than that, the last thirty years of Sibelius life seem to have been creatively barren. Was there somewhere an instrument of poetic inspiration that could have unleashed his genius once more as\u00a0Die chinesische Fl\u00f6te<\/em>\u00a0had for Mahler\u2019s?<\/p>\n Or was the cause of Sibelius\u2019 final silence simpler? \u201cIf I cannot write a better symphony than my Seventh,\u201d he told a friend, \u201cthen it shall be my last.\u201d To better Sibelius\u2019 last symphony is a harrowing benchmark, one I\u2019m not convinced any composer before or since has convincingly achieved. It is to every perceptive listener\u2019s great regret that Sibelius had \u201cwithdrawn into himself\u201d thirty years before his death, but the legacy he left us is more than worthy to stand beside that of his colleague and sometime antipode, Gustav Mahler.<\/p>\n Welcome to MahlerFest XXXI.<\/p>\n