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Asher Fisch conducts Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde and two works by George Walker, streaming February 10 on Seattle Symphony Live.

GEORGE WALKER
Lyric for Strings
BORN: June 27, 1922, Washington, D.C.
DIED: August 23, 2018, Montclair, NJ
COMPOSED: 1946
PREMIERE: 1946, in Philadelphia, with Seymour Lipkin and the Curtis Institute of Music Orchestra

When scanning George Walker’s career, you’ll find it is populated with several firsts: the first Black graduate of the Curtis Institute; first Black solo instrumentalist with the Philadelphia Orchestra; first Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. But that is only part of his story. Because like many other Black artistic “firsts” before and after him, Walker was less concerned with challenging the discriminations that made him a “first” in the first place: he wanted to make some music.

George Walker was born and raised in Washington D.C., one of several metropolitan areas with a Black community significant in size, diversity and artistic impact. His mother got him started with piano lessons at the age of 5 and his musical interests blossomed to include composing. After graduating from Oberlin College at 18, he enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music, studying composition with Samuel Barber and piano with Rudolf Serkin. Nearly a decade after his graduation in 1945, Walker studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the late 1950s.

Walker’s music straddles the line between American neo-romantic and modernist traditions through his embrace of lush textures, brittle timbres, non-linear direction, African American folk tonalities, jazz harmonies and tonal dissonance. Some of these materials are put to stunning use in his Lyric for Strings, a piece that is lush and bittersweet. A reworking of the second movement of his first-string quartet, Lyric is an elegy to Walker’s grandmother, Malvina King, a woman who was born enslaved, took her freedom and died free — and one of the most important figures in Walker’s life.

Lyric for Strings opens solemnly. Each section is layered upon the one that preceded it, a textural stable of Walker’s later works. The melody slowly unspools, set in a call-and-response texture that extends across and between each part (or section for the orchestral setting). The violins are shrill, the cellos and bass bellow, and the violas do both, taking full advantage of their ability to make rich and aching timbres. Lyric for Strings is a meditation on what is lost, what is shared, what is remembered and what is carried on; a piece that is gorgeous, tragic and hopeful all at once.

GEORGE WALKER
Folksongs for Orchestra
COMPOSED: 1990
PREMIERE: 1992, in Baltimore, with David Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

Composed in 1990 and premiered two years later, George Walker’s Folksongs for Orchestra is part of a significant tradition in African American concert music: arrangements of Negro spirituals.

The arrangement of popular and folk songs in “classical” genres was not uncommon in 19th century America. For Negro spirituals in particular, the arrangements of Fisk Jubilee Singer Ella Sheppard laid the foundation for the creation of a new genre — the concert spiritual — as well as instrumental arrangements and settings of Negro spirituals. This practice was further formalized by composers like Harry T. Burleigh, Florence Price and R. Nathaniel Dett, helping establish Black concert aesthetic.

Some saw this nationalist aim and modernist and post-modernist style as incompatible. But Walker and his compatriots Margaret Bonds, William Levi Dawson and Julia Perry showed time and time again that folk, modernist and post-modernist idioms could work together structurally, stylistically and artistically.

Such is the case with Walker’s Folksongs for Orchestra. Each movement quotes or is based on a Negro spiritual: Going to lay down my sword and shield, And they crucified my Lord, My Lord, what a morning, and O, Peter, go ring dem bells.

Going to lay down my sword and shield opens meditatively, the textures lush and clear. The spiritual theme is first heard clearly in the oboe, a prickly and upbeat polyphonic section that contrasts with the return to the meditative and solemn opening. And they crucified my Lord is shrill, painful; a solo trumpet blasting over brittle strings, laying bare the spiritual’s emotional roots. My Lord, what a morning is balm to the angst that preceded it. Again, woodwinds and brass are centralized; textures of a late-19th-century brass chorale, African American call-and-response; and Walker’s instrumental draw out the spiritual’s quotation to the point that it sounds like a brand-new theme. O, Peter, go ring dem bells opens with piano and strings, growing to glittering timbres and bittersweet harmonies. Walker transforms these staples of African American sacred music by placing them within an inventive and electrifying new context, building upon a 100-plus-year-old tradition in American composition.

GUSTAV MAHLER
Das Lied von der Erde
BORN: July 7, 1860, Kaliste, Bohemia
DIED: May 18, 1911, Vienna, Austria
COMPOSED: 1908-1909
PREMIERE: November 20, 1911, in Munich, Germany’s Tonhalle, sung by Sara Cahier and William Miller with Bruno Walter conducting.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Gustav Mahler was blurring the lines between vocal and instrumental genres. Known for his massive soundscapes and juxtaposition of emotional shifts, Mahler was and still is recognized as a composer for whom music was a method to articulate one’s deep emotional states.

His Das Lied von der Erde is no exception, a continuation of his inclusion of vocal movements in his symphonies. Scored for two voices and orchestra, described by him as “a symphony,” Mahler refused to give it a number, stemming from the looming impact of Beethoven’s Ninth and the perceived curse that no successive composer would (or should) surpass the German master’s achievement.

Mahler started and completed Das Lied von der Erde in the aftermath of a bleak period of life. Amid growing antisemitism, Mahler resigned from his post as Director of the Vienna Court in 1907, a bitter conclusion to a 10-year tenure. His eldest daughter, Maria, died from scarlet fever and diphtheria at only 5 years old. And he was diagnosed with a heart condition, requiring avoidance of all intense exercise.

Death and mortality were not rare topics in Mahler’s works before Das Lied von der Erde. But as is common with hindsight, the fact that the work was finished just two years prior to Mahler’s death and was premiered posthumously, magnifies these themes. Completed in 1908 and premiered in 1911, Das Lied von der Erde is divided into six movements for tenor and contralto (or mezzo-soprano or baritone) with orchestra. The text is drawn from Hans Bethge’s free adaptations of classical Chinese poetry. And while these attributions have been debated, the work of Tang Dynasty poets Li Bai, Qian Qi, Meng Haoran and Wang Wei have been cited as the specific source material engaged with by Bethge and Mahler. In addition to text from Haoran and Wei, the final movement, “Der Abschied” (“The Farewell”) features text from Mahler.

Clocking in at a little over an hour, Das Lied von der Erde is majestic and immersive; the opening of “Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde” (“The Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow”) immediately thrusts the listener into an emotional maelstrom: joyful lyricism; sorrowful descending phrases; a drinking song not in celebration, but in melancholic solidarity — a common theme in Li Bai’s poetry. “Der Einsame im Herbst” (“The Lonely One in Autumn”) opens with a repetitive murmur of strings and brass, supporting a wandering, lonesome oboe. In this movement, the mezzo-soprano/contralto is centralized, matching and enhancing the pathos of the oboe, which is answered in kind by the orchestra. But even in the proximity to mortality, joy and beauty can still be found, as espoused in “Von der Jugend” (“Of Youth”), full of dynamic swells, supportive layering between tenor and orchestral parts, and achingly beautiful lyricism.

References to the Chinese source material are communicated stereotypically through pentatonicism, which opens and undergirds “Von der Schönheit” (“Of Beauty”). In this movement, the mezzo-soprano/contralto takes center stage again, communicating with the orchestra a character so cheerful it is almost manic, with hints of the certainty that this rapturous state cannot be maintained forever. “Der Trunkene im Frühling” (“The Drunkard in Spring”) careens even further, with humorous swells, vertical articulations and a determined exuberance from the tenor. “Der Abschied” makes up the latter half of the work; the final lines are Mahler’s own. It is more than a half hour long, and the mortality that the previous movements have determinedly kept at bay has arrived. The drone of the lower strings, morose dissonance and resignation in the text takes the listener to a deep, dark and beautiful place.

Emotional reactions are fickle; they don’t always make sense. Mahler recognized this and made it an intrinsic part of his music. Das Lied von der Erde is a powerful expression of human life and mortality, Earth’s significantly longer life, and the beauty present in it all.

© 2022 A. Kori Hill