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RICHARD STRAUSS
Burleske, for piano and orchestra
Born: June 11, 1864, in Munich, Bavaria
Died: September 8, 1949, at Garmish-Partenkirchen, Bavaria
Work composed: 1885
World premiere: June 21, 1890, in the German city of Eisenach

What to Listen For:
In the opening measures, timpani present a motif that will recur throughout the piece as a unifying element. The piano part entails passages of dazzling virtuosity.

Richard Strauss is familiar to most concert-goers through the bold late-Romantic idiom of Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration and the other great tone poems of his maturity. Burleske, a composition for solo piano and orchestra, is a youthful work and closer in style to Brahms and Schumann than to Strauss’s own later music. Composed in 1885, this piece was intended as a tribute to Strauss’s mentor, the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow. But that eminent musician would have nothing to do with the piece. “It is unplayable,” he declared when Strauss showed him the score. As a result, the work was not premiered until 1890.

Nevertheless, this is perhaps the finest composition of Strauss’s early years. Its single movement uses a strongly rhythmic “motto” figure for the timpani to bind together its far-ranging developments. The piano writing is steely and brilliant in the opening, warm and lyrical in the presentation of the second theme. It is challenging fare for any pianist, but hardly unplayable, the estimable Herr von Bülow notwithstanding.

In its rapid 3/4 pulse and instances of sparkling passagework, the work has something of the character of a Lisztian scherzo. This evidently led Strauss to confer a somewhat misleading title on the piece. Although it contains moments of sardonic wit, Burleske is not a slight nor a humorous composition. Both its musical architecture and range of expression are greater than its title implies.

GUSTAV MAHLER
Symphony No. 6 in A Minor, “Tragic”
Born: July 7, 1860, in Kalist, Bohemia 1860
Died: May 18, 1911, in Vienna
Work composed: 1903-04
World premiere: May 27, 1906, in the Rhineland city of Essen

What to Listen For:
Like Strauss's Burkeske, this symphony features a “motto” theme for the timpani. Here it underscores harmonies that pass from major to minor, light to dark, hope to tragedy.

Mahler’s use of cowbells in his orchestration is a famously original stroke.

“Not one of his works came so directly from his inmost heart as this. ... The Sixth is the most completely personal of his works, and a prophetic one also.” — Alma Mahler, Memories

Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is one of this composer’s greatest works, but also one of the most puzzling. Indeed, it seems to be built on a foundation of paradox. Despite its tremendous scale, the extremely large orchestra it requires, and its overpowering emotional content, this is, from a formal standpoint, the most classical of Mahler’s symphonies. It is a work of deep pathos — Mahler himself appended the title “Tragic” — yet it was written during the happiest period of the composer’s life. And while it lacks the song material or narrative program that impart a larger meaning to his early symphonies, the Sixth may well be the most truly autobiographical of Mahler’s works.

This symphony was the fruit of vacations Mahler spent with his family in the Austrian Alps during the summers of 1903 and 1904. Better known as a conductor than as a composer, he was then enjoying the height of his fame as music director of the Vienna Opera, and his reputation was spreading throughout Europe. Happy domestic circumstances complemented his professional success. In 1902 Mahler had married Alma Schindler, who was proving a sympathetic and devoted companion. Late that year, the couple was blessed with the birth of a daughter. A second was born in the spring of 1904. Alma’s love and his young family proved a source of deep joy to Mahler, and his wife would recall this period as the most contented of their marriage.

The summer of 1904, when Mahler completed the Sixth Symphony, was particularly “beautiful, serene, and happy,” Alma remembered. Her husband divided his time between composing and playing with their daughters, and his ardor for “Almschi,” as Mahler called his wife, remained strong. In her memoirs, Alma states that she, the children, and Mahler himself all are represented in the symphony:

After he had drafted the first movement he came ... to tell me he had tried to express me in a theme. “Whether or not I’ve succeeded, I don’t know; but you’ll have to put up with it.

"This is the great soaring theme of the first movement of the Sixth Symphony. In the [Scherzo] he represented the arhythmic games of the two little children, tottering in zigzags over the sands. ... In the last movement he described himself and his downfall or, as he later said, that of his hero: “It is the hero, on whom fall three blows of fate, the last of which fells him as a tree is felled.” Those were his words."

Did Mahler leave a prophecy in his Sixth Symphony? If so, it proved both chilling and uncanny in its accuracy. Less than three years after he completed the work, the composer himself received “three blows of fate.” In the spring of 1907, Mahler’s enemies at the Vienna Opera succeeded in ousting him from the directorship he had held for ten years. Then, in July, his elder daughter contracted scarlet fever and died at the age of four. The third blow would indeed “fell the hero as a tree is felled.” Within days of his daughter’s death, doctors discovered the heart ailment that four years later would end Mahler’s own life.

The profound emotional content of the Sixth Symphony, as well as its autobiographical connotations, imply a strongly Romantic symphonic conception. Yet apart from the late Ninth Symphony, this is the only one of Mahler’s works that conforms to the classical model of a purely instrumental composition in four movements: two Allegros framing a slow movement and scherzo. (The First Symphony, usually presented in four movements, originally contained a fifth, the so-called Blumine movement, which has been restored in some recent performances.) Moreover, the first three movements may be heard as expanded versions of their counterparts in the symphonies of Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert, so closely do they adhere to traditional formal outlines.

The opening movement is built on two highly contrasting ideas. The first is a march-like subject of disturbing intensity. Mahler counters this with a soaring melody in a bright major tonality, the “Alma theme.” Linking these subjects is a “motto” figure that will recur throughout the symphony: a martial rhythm sounding in the timpani beneath a sustained chord that sinks from its major to minor form. Mahler’s development of these thematic materials is extensive, of course, and entails a remarkably original use of orchestral sound. It would hardly be practical here to note many of the striking sonorities the composer devises in this movement and throughout the symphony, but mention must be made of his use of cowbells, whose distinctive tone, imprecise pitch, and random rhythms impart an earthy, and yet almost unearthly, character to those passages in which they appear.

The second movement provides an interlude that gives no hint of the turmoil so intrinsic to the rest of the work. Contrasting instrumental colors help define two major theme groups, the first subject appearing in the violins, the second assigned chiefly to the horn, flutes, and English horn. Although the movement achieves some impassioned moments, its prevailing mood is one of contemplation and serenity.

By contrast, the third movement is one of Mahler’s “horror scherzos,” macabre and unsettling. Its diabolic atmosphere is relieved, however, by the innocent charm of two contrasting sections. Here the “tottering zigzags” of the playing children take the form of hesitant phrases and frequent changes of meter.

Thus far the symphony has presented a sense of spiritual crisis but no hint of how this will be resolved. The opening movement and Scherzo have included passages of demonic violence as well as others suggesting at least a promise of happiness. The finale again offers both dread and hope but does so on a far greater scale, and with palpably greater intensity. The emotional tide of the music flows constantly between terror and rapture, the outcome of their apparent struggle remaining uncertain until the symphony’s final measures. It is only with the third, fatal hammerstroke that all hope is extinguished, and a final appearance of the rhythmic timpani motto, with its despairing shift of harmony, seals the tragic conclusion of this great symphonic drama.

Alma Mahler clearly stated that her husband foretold his own fate in the Sixth Symphony. But like all great tragedies, this one moves us because it is somehow universal as well as particular. With this in mind, we might wonder whether the composer’s prescience extended beyond his own destiny. Within a decade of the symphony’s completion, not only Mahler but the refined fin de siècle world in which he lived would perish, as Europe plunged into the conflagration of the Great War. It may not be too much to hear the violent and fatalistic music of this composition as a vision of a society marching to its destruction.