Program Notes: Xian Conducts Mahler 7

GUSTAV MAHLER 
Symphony No. 7 in B minor 
BORN: July 7 1860, in Kaliště, Bohemia (Czech Republic) 
DIED: May 18, 1911, in Vienna, Austria 
WORK COMPOSED: 1904–1905 
WORLD PREMIERE: September 19, 1908, in Prague with the Czech Philharmonic at the festival marking the Diamond Jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph. 

In 1904, within weeks of completing the Sixth Symphony, which concludes with the cataclysmic strokes of an axe and music of anguished disintegration, Gustav Mahler was busily sketching his new symphony, and had soon made what he called “architectural drawings” of the two Nachtmusik (night music) movements. Given his heavy conducting schedule in Vienna, Mahler had, as ever, to wait until the following summer’s vacation before he could return to serious composition. He then experienced a “composer’s block” that he tried to exorcise through vigorous physical activity such as hiking in the Dolomite mountains. As so often happens in the creative process, Mahler found that once he ceased concentrating on the work, the ideas started to flow: Mahler got into a boat on the lake near his holiday retreat at Maiernigg and, as he wrote to his wife, Alma, “at the first stroke of the oars, the theme (or rather the rhythm and character) of the introduction to the first movement came into my head — and in four weeks the first, third and fifth movements were written.” 

The even-numbered movements had to wait until the following summer, but, once they were complete, Mahler turned to orchestrating his longest and most detailed score. The instrumentation requires an expansion of the conventional orchestra, particularly the wind and percussion sections, which require a huge increase in personnel, and two very unusual instrumental visitors. 

Some critics have treated the work with suspicion, suggesting that the long gap between the composition of the two groups of movements have compromised the work’s unity. Moreover, after the existential bleakness of the Sixth, the Seventh seems to represent a retreat into a more conventional, and therefore unconvincing, optimism and, in doing so, resorts to gimmickry such as the inclusion of guitar and mandolin in the orchestra. But it could equally be seen as representing a spiritual recovery, a bridge from the pessimism and despair of the Sixth to the joyful paean to divine, and human, creativity in the Eighth. (Or it could just be music.) The work contains material that recalls the anguished mood of the Sixth, but its trajectory passes through various nocturnal worlds, finally to reach a world of light. And it is significant that Mahler’s description of that opening theme was “Here Nature roars!” In that respect, the Seventh Symphony forms one of two symmetrically placed pillars in Mahler’s completed symphonic output, the other being the Third Symphony (to which this symphony makes thematic allusion) with its sense of Pan, the nature God, awakening. 

The Seventh Symphony is in five movements (like the Fifth) and has a symmetrical design, with two massive outer movements, and the two Nachtmusik movements flanking a scherzo. 

Nature’s “roar” is given to solo tenor horn, which establishes a sense of expectation in the movement’s “official” tonic key, B-minor. (The symphony is, however, an example of “progressive tonality,” its movements being in B-minor, C-minor, D-minor, F-major and C-major, respectively.) The body of the movement is familiar Mahler, with its mixture of march-rhythms and impassioned, “Romantic” themes, and a massive climax undermined by a descent into darkness. The use of a slow introduction to generate suspense before a sonata-allegro is a practice perfected by Haydn; here, however, Mahler follows Beethoven’s lead in reintroducing the introductory music of the work at a structurally significant moment. The effect, as in the Pathétique Sonata, for instance, is to bring about the collapse of the tremendous momentum that the music has gained from its implacable march rhythms and those contrasting flights of breathtaking lyricism. The rupture brings it back to earth and signals the beginning of the recapitulation of the movement’s thematic material. The movement has, after all — for all its extremity of manner — a sonata-allegro design. 

British musicologist Deryck Cooke noted that the three central movements are “superbly poetic stylizations of romantic genre pieces, which draw continually on the style of the period’s popular music in the most subtly creative way ... opening magical windows on imagined worlds behind the visible world.” 

Michael Kennedy compares the first Nachtmusik to the “moonlit Romanticism of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Marriage of Figaro” and notes the use of a distinctly Spanish rhythm. But what is also striking is that way in which Mahler deploys small groups of instruments rather than marshalling the full force of his huge orchestra. The opening of this movement contains magical textures for solo winds, including the brilliant stroke of muted and unmuted horns for echo effect. Thanks to the over-interpretation of a remark of Mahler’s by Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg, the movement is sometimes said to represent Rembrandt’s masterpiece, The Night Watch, of which Mahler was certainly fond; the horn calls and cow bells, however, suggest, if anything, a more rustic scene. 

The “shadowy” scherzo has been described variously as “horrific” or an image of “a child’s fear of the dark”; there is certainly something slightly unnerving about its mechanical, and occasionally distorted dance rhythms (notably those of the waltz) that might suggest unnerving dreams or fairy tales. There is, however, some comfort in the slow waltz that forms the trio. This section occurs only once, a departure from Mahler’s usual practice of returning to the trio after an intervening statement of the thematic material. 

The second Nachtmusik (marked amoroso) overtly channels Mozart (specifically Don Giovanni, which the great philosopher Kierkegaard regarded as the most erotic music ever written) with the use of guitar and mandolin (backed up by a pair of harps), prominent lyrical solos from violin and horn, and what Theodor Adorno simply called its “Viennese tenderness.” 

However tender was the night, the final movement represents, in Mahler’s words, “broad daylight.” In rondo form, it breaks the nocturnal spell right away with a cannonade of timpani answered by artfully confused alarms from the brass. It then elaborates a series of eight episodes notable for their noisy extroversion and wide excursions through possible keys. The movement makes light-hearted references to Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, Lehár’s The Merry Widow, a venerable Lutheran chorale, and, as if to underline the eternal return of night and day, a march theme from the first movement. 

Several innovations balance the pastiche: the orchestration, as noted, provides a huge palette of new, delicate sounds, as well as moments of glowing splendor, and the harmony explores chords a third apart (a staple effect of sci-fi film scores) and chords based on the interval of the fourth, rather than the conventional thirds of diatonic harmony. The latter would inspire Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony a year later, and all that followed from it. 

Gordon Kerry © 2010, reprinted by permission of Symphony Services Australia