Symphony No. 4 GUSTAV MAHLER

09-20 Maazel-Murphy 9/13/06 12:19 PM Page 9 Symphony No. 4 GUSTAV MAHLER occupied him during concert season, forc- ing him to relegate his composing to the Born summer months, which he would spend as July 7, 1860, in Kalischt (Kalis˘te˘), a near hermit in the Austrian countryside. Bohemia, near the town of Humpolec When Mahler came to write his Fourth Symphony, principally during the sum- Died mers of 1899 and 1900, he was escaping a May 18, 1911, in Vienna, Austria Vienna that was becoming a source of inordinate stress. On April 1, 1901, he Work composed would be ousted from his position as June 1899–April 1901, drawing in the Director of the Vienna Philharmonic fol- finale on the composer’s song “Das lowing a three-year tenure in which the himmlische Leben,” penned in 1892; normal roller coaster of Viennese musical with revisions following through early politics was rendered more intense by the 1911 anti-Semitic sentiments that often dogged him. He was hanging on to his other prin- World premiere cipal position, as Director of the Vienna November 25, 1901, in Munich, by the Court Opera; however, that job was stress- composer conducting the Kaim Orchestra ful, too, and Mahler’s anxiety at work led and soprano Margarete Michalek; the to frequent medical problems. song “Das himmlische Leben” had been He spent the summer of 1899 at Bad premiered on October 27, 1893, in Aussee in the Salzkammergut, and during Hamburg his last ten days there he began to map out his Fourth Symphony. In August he filed New York Philharmonic premiere his sketches away and did not return to November 6, 1904, Walter Damrosch them until the following summer, this conducting the New York Symphony time at a new location. His getaway was (which would merge with the New York now the villa he was building at Philharmonic in 1928 to form today’s Maiernigg, a bump on the map on the New York Philharmonic) south shore of the Wörthersee (known Most recent New York Philharmonic sometimes as Lake Worth to English performance speakers, to the extent that English speak- March 9, 1999, Gisèle Ben-Dor, con- ers know it at all), a bucolic spot in the ductor, Amanda Roocroft, soprano region of Carinthia in southern Austria. At Maiernigg Mahler had constructed Estimated duration a tiny, sparsely furnished composing cot- ca. 58 minutes tage on the hill behind his villa; every morning he would meander up along a forest path to work there in splendid hroughout his career Gustav Mahler seclusion. When he returned to his com- balanced the competing demands of posing that summer he discovered, as he This dual vocation as a composer and reported to his amanuensis, Natalie conductor. Responsibilities on the podium Bauer-Lechner, that his work had pro- and in the administrative office completely gressed to SEPTEMBER 2006 30A 09-20 Maazel-Murphy 9/13/06 12:19 PM Page 10 a much more advanced stage than it following performances that he conducted, had reached in Aussee without my hav- through to his last one, with this New York ing given it a moment’s real attention Philharmonic, four months before he died. in the meantime.… That my second Mahler had a head start with this sym- self should have worked on the symphony. In 1892 he had written a song — phony throughout the ten months of first to a piano accompaniment, a few winter sleep (with all the frightful weeks later in an orchestral version — nightmares of the theater business) is titled “Das himmlische Leben” (“The unbelievable! Heavenly Life”) on a text drawn from the purported folk anthology Des Knaben By August 5 the Fourth Symphony was Wunderhorn. That collection furnished effectively completed, although Mahler texts for quite a few of his independent continued to revise it through the follow- songs as well as for movements of his ing April — and, indeed, to tweak it further Second and Third Symphonies. Mahler Listen for … Examining Mahler’s symphonies often reveals connections between them. Knowing that for a time he had intended to employ the song “Das himmlische Leben” (“The Heavenly Life”) as the finale for his Third Symphony, we should not be astonished to hear that orchestral song reflected in that vast composition. The tune is carefully woven into the fabric of the Fourth Symphony, too, most obviously through the recurrence of the sleighbell motif that begins the symphony as punctuation between verses in the finale. (Of course, it had existed in the song-finale first, and Mahler “lifted” what he had already written for the beginning of his eventual symphony.) The Fourth Symphony also reaches out to Mahler’s other symphonies in other ways. For example, in a passage two-thirds of the way through the first movement we find the trumpets engaging in some ominous sounding fanfares: Mahlerians will inevitably hear this as foreshadowing the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony, which the composer began before the Fourth had been premiered. In the Fifth a very similar fanfare is again assigned to the trumpet, in the same key, C-sharp minor: As many devoted Mahlerians have already realized, richness is gained by considering all of his symphonies as a whole: references emerge, recede, and are transformed even as one work cedes to the next. In this regard we might view Mahler’s nine symphonies as a sort of musical predecessor to the similarly imposing literary cycle of the early 20th century, Marcel Proust’s seven-novel sequence known as A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), begun during Mahler’s lifetime and published in stages between 1913 and 1927. 30B NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC 09-20 Maazel-Murphy 9/13/06 12:19 PM Page 11 contemplated using his setting of “Das Surely this ending succeeds far better himmlische Leben” to conclude his Third here than it would have in the Third Symphony but he discarded the idea — a Symphony, capping as it does an extensive, wise choice since that work was already incident-laden first movement, a wry scher- quite long and probably too massive for zo (Mahler indicated that he intended it as such a pared-down ending. a sort of danse macabre), and a supernal Instead, the song became the point of Adagio (which Mahler ranked as his finest departure for his new symphony. In his slow movement, although his oeuvre offers Fourth Symphony, Mahler worked back- several worthy competitors). Everything wards to some degree; knowing how it reaches its destination in one of Mahler’s would conclude, he crafted the first three simplest songs. Moreover, that song is movements to prepare for that song-finale, intoned by a soprano who, Mahler insisted which he once referred to as “the top of the (in a note he inserted in the first edition of Symphony’s pyramidal structure.” the score), should render her four verses From a Friend and Colleague Bruno Walter, who would follow in Mahler’s footsteps as the New York Philharmonic’s music director from 1947 to 1949, had been Mahler’s assistant in both Hamburg (1894–96) and Vienna (beginning in 1901). Given his connection to Mahler, his observations on the Fourth Symphony take on special resonance: Dream-like and unreal, indeed, is the atmosphere of the work — a mysterious smile and a strange humor cover the solemnity which so clearly had been manifested in the Third. In the fairy tale of the Fourth everything is floating and unburdened which, in his former works, had been mighty and pathetic — the mellow voice of an angel confirms what, in the Second and Third, a prophet had foreseen and pronounced in loud accents. The blissful feeling of exaltation and freedom from the world communicates itself to the character of the music — but, in contrast to the Third, from afar, as it were. … The first movement and “The Heavenly Life” are dominated by a droll humor which is in strange contrast to the beatific mood forming the keynote of the work. The scherzo is a sort of uncanny fairy-tale episode. Its demoniac violin solo and the graceful trio form an interesting counterpart to the other sections of the symphony without aban- doning the character of lightness and mystery. Referring to the profound quiet and clear beauty of the andante [sic], Mahler said to me that they were caused by his vision of one of the church sepulchers showing the recumbent stone image of the deceased with the arms crossed in eternal sleep. The poem whose setting to music forms the last movement depicts in words the atmosphere out of which the music of the Fourth grew. The childlike joys which it portrays are symbolic of heavenly bliss, and only when, at the very end, music is proclaimed the sublimest of joys is the humorous character gently changed into Gustav Mahler (left) and Bruno Walter in 1908 in one of exalted solemnity. Prague, at the premiere of Mahler's Seventh Symphony SEPTEMBER 2006 35 09-20 Maazel-Murphy 9/13/06 12:19 PM Page 12 “with childlike, cheerful expression; clarinet, another doubling bass clarinet), entirely without parody!” three bassoons (one doubling contrabas- soon), four horns, three trumpets, timpani, Instrumentation: four flutes (two doubling bass drum, triangle, sleigh bells, orchestra piccolo), three oboes (one doubling English bells, cymbals, tam-tam, harp, and strings; horn), three clarinets (one doubling E-flat also, in the finale, a solo soprano singer. The Song’s Symbolism “Das himmlische Leben” from Des Knaben Wunderhorn — which Mahler set first as an independent song and then in his Fourth Symphony — evokes a series of Christian symbols.

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