Franz Joseph Haydn: Symphony No. 99 in E flat Major
Franz Joseph Haydn's career as a composer was a gradual, sustained crescendo. By no means a prodigy, Haydn (1732-1809) was really just beginning his career by his thirty-sixth year, the age at which Mozart died. By his fifties, however, he was internationally famous, and with the death in 1790 of Prince Anton Esterhazy, his employer for nearly 30 years, he was scarcely ready to retire. Indeed, his greatest works had yet to be written; foremost among these would be the twelve symphonies written for England (Symphonies 93-104), six for each of his two highly successful trips to London. The second set opens with Symphony No. 99, in E-flat Major, composed in 1793, between the two trips; although not as well known as the more famous of the London Symphonies, which include the "Surprise," the Military, the "Clock," and the "Drumroll," No. 99 remains nevertheless one of his most original creations. All six symphonies in the second set are in the major mode; surprisingly, then, (or perhaps not so surprising - after all, this is Haydn!), the introduction to the first movement of No. 99 prepares two successive minor-mode keys (E minor and C minor) before deftly switching back to the correct key at the last possible moment, adding a touch of averted melodrama that is revisited with typically comic effect at various points in the symphony. A hallmark of the symphony is Haydn's imaginative use of the wind choir, used to particularly poignant effect in the slow movement, in which some have found an elegy to mark the passing of his dear friend Marianne von Genzinger. If this was indeed Haydn's intention, his unusual use of trumpets in a slow movement must seem all the more surprising.
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 4 in G Major
For his first four symphonies, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) drew upon a wide variety of musical, philosophical, and literary sources, including a collection of folk poetry from much earlier in the 19th century entitled Des knaben Wunderhorn ("From the Youth's Magic Horn"). Mahler had originally planned to end his Third Symphony with his orchestral setting of "The Heavenly Life," composed several years earlier from a poem in the collection; this song, subtitled, "What the child tells me," would have formed the climax of a Nietzschean progression from the first movement ("Summer marches in") through "Flowers," Beasts, "Man," "Angels," and "Love," to end (after seven movements!) with the voice of true innocence. Instead, Mahler built a new symphony around the song, making it the finale to his Fourth Symphony (1900), and opening the work with the sleighbells and blithe sentiment that set the tone for his musical vision of The Heavenly Life. But all is not innocence in the Fourth Symphony. At one point, he planned to include the tragic Earthly Life, another of his Wunderhorn songs, within a six-movement scheme. Moreover, according to Alma (Mahler's widow), the scherzo movement was inspired by the image of Death playing the fiddle in a self-portrait by Arthur Boecklin; thus, Mahler provides that the violin soloist play on a mis-tuned violin (scordatura). If the music of Death's fiddle provides one means of access to "the heavenly life," however, the dream-like third movement provides another, ultimately more in keeping with the innocent tone that frames the symphony as a whole.
--- Raymond Knapp
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