Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Symphony No.7
- Langsam – Allegro risoluto, ma non troppo
- Nachtmusik (I): Allegro moderato. Molto moderato (Andante)
- Scherzo: Schattenhaft. Fließend aber nicht zu schnell (Shadowy. Flowing but not too fast)
- Nachtmusik (II): Andante amoroso
Mahler in Vienna
Concert
life in Vienna in the first decade of the 20th century was an exclusive
affair. The concerts at the Musikverein where the Vienna Philharmonic
performed were private occasions, and a second concert hall did not
exist until the construction of the Konzerthaus in 1913. Most people’s
experience of music making was through playing at home and through
dancing in the Dance Halls. This was not to say that events in the high
cultural life of the city were not of concern to the citizens. The
newspapers were a powerful force for debate, and reports on such matters
as Mahler’s appointment as director of the Vienna Court Opera in 1897
(and later sacking) were the fuel for many debates and arguments in
middle-class households, most of whom would never actually have attended
an opera or concert. For the emerging bourgeoisie, not having much
actual experience of High Art was no barrier to having an opinion about
it.
This
growing number of people whose experience of culture was based on
reading about it in the papers rather than experiencing it first-hand
(whether through attending concerts or playing at home) is reflected in
an innovation introduced by the Vienna Philharmonic in the 1890s -
programme notes. That the orchestra identified a need for explanatory
notes for its audience reflects the decline in a musical tradition and
literacy that would once have been taken for granted - but also a new
bourgeois audience who were keen to be seen as consumers of high
culture, but came from backgrounds lacking the kind of musical education
that Vienna’s elite classes took for granted.
Although
by now the empire had granted its Jewish population full citizenship,
old prejudices remained. Mahler converted to Catholicism in 1897 in
order to secure the post at the Vienna Opera: as a Jew he would
otherwise have been barred from taking the post. If Mahler's conversion
seems cynical to us, at the time it was not such a remarkable thing to
do. Viennese Jews were keen to integrate with Austrian society as fully
as possible, and for many their religion was more a matter of social
conventions than deeply held beliefs. Although Mahler’s tenure would
prove controversial, the most vocal opposition to him came from
antisemitic factions that still had a prominent influence in the city
(not least in necessitating Mahler's conversion in the first place).
In
his 10 years at the opera he introduced no fewer than 33 new operas to
the company’s repertoire. In 1905, as he completed the Seventh Symphony,
Mahler had hoped to secure the first performance of Richard Strauss’s
new opera Salome.
On this occasion he did not get his way. The Court Theatre’s
Censorship Board decided that on religious and moral grounds the
libretto was unacceptable, and banned it.
He
raised the standard of performance considerably, but not without
resistance. His flamboyant conducting style and his dictatorial manner
caused many ructions with his singers and musicians. It was said that he
treated the players “as a lion tamer treats his animals.” By the time
he resigned he had reached a level of celebrity that few could hope to
attain. His work as a composer was controversial, but even his severest
critics acknowledged his talent as a conductor and musician.
Vienna
at the turn of the twentieth century was a city of contradictions.
During the 1870s it was extensively rebuilt, and by the time Mahler
returned in 1897 had become one of the earliest examples of a modern
city. It had become a fertile breeding ground for new ideas, both
artistic and scientific. Sigmund Freud’s theories of the subconscious
mind and the significance of dreams influenced the development of
Expressionism, as seen in the work of the likes of Gustav Klimt, Arthur
Schnitzler, and Arnold Schönberg.
Yet
Vienna was also the centre of a large, declining empire. It was
therefore also host to a population filled with a complacent,
conservative mindset. The rise of a middle-class also meant the rise of
a middlebrow bourgeois culture. The undisputed king of Viennese music
in 1897 when Mahler arrived at the Opera was the waltz king, Johann
Strauss II. The only composer in the city with a comparable reputation
was Johannes Brahms, whose last public appearance barely a month before
his death that year was to attend a Strauss première. Strauss’s
nostalgic, cosy music reinforced Vienna’s idea of itself as a place
apart from the rest of the world. Mahler, a man of international
ambitions, was uncomfortable with this insular atmosphere and determined
to shake things up. Throughout the nineteenth century there developed a
trend for favouring old music over new. When Mahler was a student
there was already a visible trend for “historical” programming. By the
time he left Vienna for the second time in 1907 this had developed into a
chasm between composers and audiences, and the separation of “high” and
“low” culture was entrenched: on the one hand, Mahler and Richard
Strauss, on the other Lehár and Johann Strauss.
Mahler’s
own music reflects this heady mix of old and new, in its combination of
complex music following in the traditions laid down by Beethoven and
Brahms which nevertheless included “low” art, in the form of folk tunes,
popular music and other sounds that could be heard on the street. This
tended to result in the dismissal of his music on both sides of the
cultural divide. He found supporters in a younger generation of
Viennese composers determined to shake up the conservative city. Webern
professed Mahler’s Seventh Symphony to be his favourite, particularly
because of its highly original approach to orchestration which influence
can be seen in his own orchestral music. Webern’s teacher Schönberg was
initially a skeptic as far as Mahler’s music was concerned. However,
hearing an early performance of the Seventh Symphony transformed his
opinion, and he was thereafter a devoted acolyte.
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Mahler’s
composing routine was strict: he composed in the summer while on
holiday in Maiernigg, a small alpine hamlet on the shore of the
Wörthersee. He rose at 5.30am each day and swam in the lake before
retreating to his studio where he would work for seven hours. He would
begin work on a new symphony at the same time as he produced the final
score of the work he had sketched the previous summer. Thus as he put
the final touches to the score of his Sixth Symphony in 1904, he quickly
drafted two movements for a seventh - the two Nachtmusiken (“Night-Music”,
or nocturnes). However, when he returned the next year he found
himself devoid of inspiration as to how to continue. Unusually, he had
no clear overall plan for the shape of the new symphony, and struggled
to find a suitable context for the two movements. After two weeks of
getting nowhere, he broke his routine and went hiking in the Dolomites
instead, hoping that walking would inspire him as it had in the past.
Still no ideas came, and Mahler despondently marched back down to
Krumpendorf, the village on the opposite shore of the lake, where he
took a boat across the water back to Maiernigg. As he later related to
his wife, this was the turning point: “I got into the boat to be rowed
across. 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.” His writer’s block finally cleared, Mahler proceeded to sketch
out the rest of the symphony, completed the work in sketch by the end of
August, and the orchestration the next year. As was his way, he would
tinker with the details of the work on several occasions thereafter
until (and beyond) its first performance in 1908.
The
form of the Seventh Symphony harks back to the fifth in dividing into
three parts: the two large outer movements surrounding three short
character pieces in the middle. Moreover these three central pieces
display a further symmetry, with the central scherzo flanked on either
side by the two “Nachtmusiken”. The entire symphony thus forms a vast
arch. The “rowing” music that opens the symphony was the idea that
triggered Mahler’s imagination to complete the symphony, but the vast
opening movement itself was the last to be completed. Over the slow
tattoo a tenor horn (an instrument familiar to Mahler through military
bands rather than orchestras) declaims a haunting theme - “Here Nature
roars,” he described it. Mahler’s music frequently evokes nature, but
rarely as wildly as in this movement, which takes as its inspiration the
Carinthian Mountains where Mahler often walked.
The
central triptych of the symphony begins with the first “Nachtmusik”,
which Mahler composed after being entranced by Rembrandt’s painting “The
Night Watch”. The movement is not an attempt to portray the painting,
but merely seeks to create a similar atmosphere. The third movement is
marked “Schattenhaft” [shadowy], and is one of the spookiest of the
phantasmagorical scherzos in which Mahler specialised. wisps of dance
rhythms pass by, parodies of Viennese Ländler and waltzes loom out of
the darkness. Then follows the second Nachtmusik,
which is an altogether more romantic affair than its sibling. Here
Mahler celebrates the romantic view of night, the time when lovers
(perhaps illicitly) come together. It takes the character of a
serenade, its character defined by the presence of a guitar and
mandolin.
The
finale appears to begin straightforwardly enough as an explosion of
daylight after the three shadowy ones that preceded it, and soon
blossoms into a triumphalist mood reminiscent of a theme from Wagner’s
opera Die Meistersinger von Nürenburg.
This affinity was only emphasised by Mahler’s programming of the
overture from that opera alongside the Seventh Symphony at early
performances.
But suddenly this is cut off and the music heads down an entirely
different street. This sets the pattern for the entire movement; the
grand, solemn music returns again and again, but is never allowed to
establish itself, and comes to seem progressively more pompous than
majestic. Less important passages are given strident cadences, while
more substantial ideas peter out. The effect is profoundly disorienting
and unsettling. When the final peroration comes, Mahler deploys the
orchestra in such a way as to make it seem bombastic and empty: blaring
brass and timpani played with hard sticks to produce a harsh, brittle
sound. Just at the very end Mahler unleashes one more surprise which
leaves the final C major chord feeling less like a triumphant conclusion
than a punch in the face.
This
collision between Wagnerian grandeur and parodies of Leháresque
middlebrow Viennese kitsch may be Mahler’s portrait of the society he
moved in. Some commentators suggest that Mahler intended to write a
conventional, triumphal finale but failed. Perhaps though, the failure
of this model is exactly what Mahler intended: Die Meistersinger
is an opera about opera, so this is a symphony about symphonies, and
its finale a comment on the impossibility of returning to the naive
optimism of earlier ages. Mahler himself refused to provide any kind of
programme for it, despite repeated cajoling by friends, so there can be
no definitive answer as to its meaning. “Everything has its price!” was
all he would say. Perhaps the daylight represents not a triumph over
dark night thoughts, but the obliteration of profound, romantic ideals
by the banality of everyday life. Where
Mahler’s other symphonies are now so commonly played and so
unthinkingly accepted that they are in danger of losing their meaning,
the Seventh remains stubbornly resistant to easy assimilation. A
century after its creation it continues to puzzle, delight and frustrate
in equal measure, and remains enigmatic, complicated and problematic -
just like life, in fact.
