Program Notes: March 5, 2000
Mozart's Symphony No. 25 (1773), often called the "little" G-Minor Symphony to distinguish it from the more famous G-Minor Symphony he wrote during his final years, is probably the first of Mozart's works to have been inspired by his older colleague, Franz Joseph Haydn. Its anguished minor-mode opening, in particular, seems to derive directly from Haydn's Sturm und Drang ("storm and stress"), the style that colors many of his works from the early 1770s. Moreover, the symphony as a whole is decidedly more ambitious in all respects than Mozart's other symphonic music from this period, which probably speaks as well to Haydn's influence. Even so, it seems fairly astounding that such an anguished outcry should emerge from someone in his mid-teens -- not because Mozart was immune to adolescent trauma (for we know all too well that he was not), but because the "voice" of the symphony seems in every way to be an adult voice; no wonder then, that the makers of Amadeus began the action of the film with this work, setting Salieri's attempted suicide to the sharply edged throb of its opening unison passage and the explosive "rocket" theme that follows it. Within the first movement, Mozart balances the distraught opening tone with more cheerful episodes; over the course of the symphony, he continues to play these contrasting elements off each other, with the second movement and middle section of the minuet offering temporary relief from the prevailing angst, which returns, however, to dominate both the main part of the minuet and much of the finale.
Is Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde ("The Song of the Earth"; 1908) a song cycle or a symphony? And why does this frequently asked question continue to matter? While the first of these questions may well be unanswerable, we may perhaps find an answer to the second in the many ways Das Lied resembles Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Like the Ninth, it was written just three years before the composer's death, and would, in fact, have been numbered "No. 9" had Mahler called it a symphony. Like Beethoven's Ninth, it is reckoned by many as the composer's magnum opus. And, like the Ninth, it embodies any number of apparent contradictions, not only merging West with East (with an occasional Chinese musical accent substituting for the Ninth's Turkish march), but also the intimately personal with the monumental and bombastic, the individual voice with an aspiring universality, and the direct simplicity of song with the complexities of symphonic expression. Even our most common perceptions of this hard-to-classify work involve odd contradictions: thus, some see it as Mahler's leave-taking, the farewell of a man who knew he was dying, while others see it as a deliberate attempt on Mahler's part to cheat Death by refusing to number it among his symphonies (since by then the number nine had come to be seen as the metaphysical limit for composers of symphonies after Beethoven). And, while it ranks among his most accessible works, with its richly evocative settings of deeply affecting texts, Das Lied also stands as a particular symbol of Mahler's demanding profundities -- hence, Tom Lehrer's satirical summation of Mahler as the "composer of Das Lied von der Erde and other light classics." Yet, given the recurring themes of Das Lied, and Mahler's many earlier attempts to address Beethoven's Ninth in more direct terms (most obviously in his first four symphonies), the work may be more truly seen as an anti-Ninth Symphony, pessimistic in outlook, seeking lonely oblivion rather than salvation through human brotherhood. For Mahler's "Song" is truly "of the Earth," articulating human brokenness rather than divine aspirations and messages of restored wholeness.The inspiration for Das Lied came from Hans Bethge's German translation of Chinese poetry published as Die chinesische Flöte ("The Chinese Flute") in late 1907; from these, Mahler selected seven poems, two of which combine to form the sixth and final song. Within what amounts to a three-part structure of paired songs, the final two songs repeat the pattern of the first two -- a drinking song yielding to a song of profound loneliness -- while these, in turn, provide a frame for two inner songs of apparent optimism. The two drinking songs (1 and 5) cast drink and song as allies that offer rebellious escape from the stark inevitability of death while at the same time softening its grim finality; indeed, throughout the cycle, "song" offers the consolation of an exquisite beauty that would be impossible to conceive without the continuous presence of death. Songs three and four, the "soft center" of the cycle, are remarkable for how fully they acknowledge the falseness of the images they project; thus, the delectations of "Youth" are seen as an inversion, a reflection "standing on its head," while "Beauty" is seen to be extremely fragile, its strength but a pose. But it is in evoking the detached inwardness of isolation in the second and last songs, with their parallel images of fading warmth, that Das Lied most obviously attains a sublimity comparable to that of Beethoven's Ninth. Even the composite structure of the final song expresses a strange process of alienation by moving without comment from the "I" of the first part to the "He" of the second. Yet, however pessimistic it may be about human isolation, the final song nevertheless tells us -- and seems to show us, through its ravishing music -- that only through loneliness can we become fully aware of the eternal beauties of the earth, which grow still lovelier with each cycle of fading and re-blossoming.
So, is this a song cycle or a symphony? While Mahler's selection and shaping of texts argue strongly for the former, the massive finale and the profundity of expression can only be embraced by and conceived within a fundamentally symphonic sensibility. Arguably, though, how we choose to answer this question -- perhaps even how much importance we attach to it in the first place -- sheds rather more light on who we are than on what Das Lied is.
--- Raymond Knapp
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