Page 127 - GTMF 2024 Season Program

July 26 & 27
PROGRAM NOTES

connect the personal upheavals although Mahler exhibited a understand these works
of this period with the vast pervasive fear of death, he also properly would be to see my life
emotional scope of his Symphony found it subtly attractive. “I will transparently revealed in them.”
No. 5 in C-sharp minor, completed die, in order to live,” Mahler stated Nevertheless, in the Fifth Mahler
in 1902 but not performed until in a line he added to Klopstock’s sought a relatively abstract
two years later. poem in the Second Symphony’s approach to composition, in
In the Fifth Symphony Mahler finale. Of his 1901 hemorrhage, he which the working out of ideas
dispensed with his practice of wrote that “while I was hovering provides the underlying logic
incorporating his lieder into his on the border between life and from which all else springs.
symphonies. All but the First death, I wondered whether it Mahler was, after all, one of the
Symphony include vocal passages, would not be better to have done great conductors of history, an
while the First features an with it at once, since everyone expert on all matters orchestral.
instrumental take on “Die zwei must come to that in the end.” He was deeply familiar with
blauen Augen von meinen Schatz” Nostalgia also informs the Fifth, the works of his symphonic
from Lieder eines fahrenden particularly an ache for a past predecessors such as Beethoven,
Gesellen. Now in the Fifth that may not have actually existed. whose Fifth Symphony must have
Symphony he would avoid sung This idealized place of happy been on Mahler’s mind at least
text, focus on exclusively peasants dancing ländlers on to some extent in writing his own
instrumental writing and trust his the sunlit village green may well Fifth. (It can’t be a coincidence
listeners to draw their own have been drawn from Mahler’s that the opening figure of the
inferences without verbal clues. memories of his childhood, some Mahler Fifth closely resembles
Which isn’t to say that the Fifth blissful and others anguished. Beethoven’s four-note “fate”
is without programmatic “Composing is like playing with motif, nor that both symphonies
aspects. For Mahler, like most bricks, continually making new follow a trajectory that begins in
late Romantics, extra-musical buildings from the same old darkness and ends in light.)
associations were bedrock stones,” he wrote in 1899 to The Mahler Fifth is a gigantic
elements of everyday musicianship, confidant Natalie Bauer-Lechner. symphony, laid out in three
indispensable and pervasive. “But the stones have lain there fundamental parts that encompass
Intimations of death thread since one’s youth, which is the five separate movements. Part 1
through this symphony, much only time for gathering and consists of both first and second
as they do in much of Mahler’s hoarding them.” Those memories movements, starting with a
work. For Mahler, mortality was are often cited as fueling at Trauermarsch, or funeral march.
an idée fixe, excessive even least some of the discontinuities Mahler’s performance indication
in the context of the literary that are so common in Mahler’s is downright incisive, telegraphic
“death cult” so pervasive in music. Biographer Henri-Louis directives closed by periods:
turn-of-the-century Vienna. It de La Grange described “With measured pace. Strict. Like
likely stemmed from his own Mahler’s works as being filled a cortège.” That measured pace is
experiences: half of his siblings with intrusions, some of which not maintained throughout,
died before the age of three, might be quotations of music however, but is broken by a
three more died young, and his that Mahler heard in his youth. powerful passage of shattering
own daughter Maria died at the There is a substantial amount violence before resuming the
age of five. Thus the many dirges of autobiography in Mahler’s steady tread of the opening. In
in Mahler’s symphonies, not to compositions, far more than is keeping with the symphony’s roots
mention in song cycles such as encountered in most composers. in abstract music, the movement is
Kindertotenlieder; Das Knaben Mahler himself encouraged such structured in a blend of rondo and
Wunderhorn; his settings of thinking, as when he wrote to classic sonata-allegro form.
Rückert poems and even his first Bauer-Lechner in 1893 that Mahler described the second
major work, Das klagende Lied, “my two symphonies contain the movement (“Violently agitated.
which concerns fratricide. But inner aspect of my whole life… to

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