Brahms knew, and so did Mahler: Being a for-real functional artistic genius is (gosh!) really hard work

"Mahler's way of thinking in music did not easily conform to the rules of the symphonic scholars. He could not contain himself in the A B A divisions of symphonic form. In this unique first movement he adapted large-scale sonata form to his own power of improvisation. He believed that music should continually grow, phrase by phrase, one section balancing another, by laws not only of musical form as usually obeyed but also by psychological and organic growth and the logic of contrast. . . ."

-- Neville Cardus, in his "Appreciation of Mahler's Third"
[reproduced in part in the last post in this Mahler 3 series]

"This final published version [of the Andante sostenuto of Brahms's First Symphony] is clearly both tauter and richer, for there is less repetition and more diversity, and Brahms has cast fresh light on his themes by bringing them into new relationships. Altogether these changes provide a deeply fascinating insight into genius at work."

-- Robert Pascall, vice chair of the New Complete Brahms Edition (and editor of the symphonies), in his notes for the Mackerras-Teldec Brahms 1

REMEMBER THE VERY DIFFERENT VERSIONS WE'VE
HEARD OF THE ANDANTE SOSTENUTO OF BRAHMS 1?

BRAHMS: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68:
ii. Andante sostenuto

► A reconstruction of the "initial performing version":

► And this: the familiar published (i.e., final) version
(which we'll be hearing -- and thinking about -- a lot more!):

Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Sir Charles Mackerras, cond. Telarc, recorded in Usher Hall, Edinburgh, January 1997

WE'LL TALK ABOUT THEM, BUT FOR NOW MIGHT WE HAVE
MAESTRO M. PLAY US ANOTHER SYMPHONIC ANDANTE?

BBC Philharmonic, Sir Charles Mackerras, cond. BBC Music Magazine, recorded live in Bridgewater Hall, Manchester (England), Nov. 16, 2002 (published 2005)

by Ken

It's taken us a long time and a crazy path to get here, "here" being out-the-other-end of the first movement of the Mahler Third Symphony --

OUR CRAZY PATH TO WHEREVER WE ARE NOW:

► "Setting out to trace the lineage of Boston Symphony concert-masters back to 1962, we wind up trapped in the gigantic first movement of the Mahler Third Symphony," July 23

► "Coming momentarily (if not sooner): An adventure in musical metamorphosis -- presented in a pair of mutually accessible parts," Sept. 22

► "Part 1: Marching in anguish, or to triumph, or toward what? In the 1st movement of Mahler 3, we've sure left BrahmsWorld behind!," Sept 23

► "Part 2: Marching in anguish, or to triumph, or toward what? In the 1st movement of Mahler 3, we've sure left BrahmsWorld behind! (Then again, are we so sure?)," Sept. 27

► "Brahms knew, and so did Mahler: Being a for-real functional artistic genius is (gosh!) really hard work," today

BECAUSE THE ANDANTE SOSTENUTO IS SO DEAR TO ME,
THE SC ARCHIVE TEEMS WITH PERFORMANCES OF IT

While we've got another whole group of recordings coming up in this post, for immediate hearing I've plucked out two, from the Brahms symphony cycles I feel closest to, returning to them regularly with tingly expectation that's always rewarded. Kurt Masur's Andante sostenuto and Kurt Sanderling's are different; notably, though Masur sounds in no way rushed, Sanderling sets a still-more-spacious pace, which the Dresden players fill with glowing life. But both draw me back above all because the orchestras have achieved real identification with the music, playing not just with heart-enriching beauty and finesse but with a soul-stirring sense of really living the music, whether in melodic or accompanimental or ensemble writing -- all of it sounded and made to fit together with such fullness and depth and general "rightness" of expression.

(It sobers me to realize that I've been loving the Sandering-Dresden Brahms cycle for something like half a century now, especially enjoying, in the early decades, those beautiful Eurodisc LP pressings.)

Setting out to trace the lineage of Boston Symphony concertmasters back to 1962, we wind up trapped in the gigantic first movement of the Mahler Third Symphony

"It is well known that I cannot be without trivialities, but this time all permissible bounds have been passed, and 'one frequently feels he has landed in a tavern or a pigsty.' "

-- Gustav Mahler, writing to his 19-year-old assistant Bruno Walter
in July 1896 about his nearly completed Third Symphony, sarcastically
incorporating critical characterizations of his work as a composer

Joseph Silverstein, BSO concertmaster 1962-84,
talks about what it takes to be a concertmaster

From a December 2014 interview (Joseph S., age 82): "William Steinberg once said to me -- and he was certainly a marvelous conductor and a great man to work with -- said to me one day, 'You're playing everything louder, softer, longer, and shorter than everybody in the section.' And I said, 'I thought that was my job.' And he said, 'It is, but don't do it too well.' "

[NOTE: Eventually we'll have a fuller version of Joseph S.'s answer.]


We hear (sort of) Nathan C.'s two predecessors playing the lyrical
countersubject of the first movement of Mahler's Third Symphony

Joseph Silverstein, violin; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA, recorded in Symphony Hall, Oct. 10-11, 1966

Malcolm Lowe, violin; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Philips, recorded in Symphony Hall, April 1993

by Ken

I should look up the quote, but my recollection is that Bruno Walter expressed his diffidence about the Mahler Third Symphony in terms of a fear that somewhere in that gigantic first movement the devil had crept in.

Sorry, but for a change I haven't been able to piece together the post I was aiming for, a proper end to the series celebrating the accession of the Boston Symphony's new concertmaster, Nathan Cole. I hoped some of the fragments might stand on their own, and instead wandered into a trap. I'm sorry that my experiment with homing in on that lyrical second subject of the first movement of Mahler 3, as played by Nathan C.'s two immediate BSO predecessors, for whom he has expressed such admiration, didn't work out so well -- it just isn't so easy to hear either of our star fiddlers dispatching the solo.

But it's not a bad thing to make sure we all understand why I wanted to focus on the BSO concertmaster succession -- to appreciate by sight and especially sound the legacy that Nathan Cole is so aware of inheriting. It's also maybe a chance to linger a little over that gigantic first movement of Mahler 3 -- the movement where, Bruno Walter once wrote, he felt sure the devil had crept in. In his lifetime Bruno W. -- to whom the responsibility fell for conducting the premieres of Das Lied von der Erde and the Mahler Ninth Symphony, would remain probably the leading champion of Mahler's still-widely-patronized music, but even he turned his back on Mahler 3, 6, 7, and 8, which would have an even longer, more arduous path to repertorial daylight.


WOULD YOU BELIEVE WE HAD ONLY ONE RECORDING OF
THE FIRST MOVEMENT OF MAHLER 3 IN THE SC ARCHIVE?

Post tease: Well, why shouldn't we listen to the (at very rough guess) 8th- or 9th-best Suppé overture?

UPDATED with several additional performances,
including a fourth whole overture!
[Further updated to title the Järvi Fatinitza selection properly]

Don't ask me to dredge up from memory what's going on in Fatinitza as captured in this lithograph; we could all look it up. As to the lithograph itself, the photo viewed at full size tells us that it came from "H. A. Thomas, Lith. Studio, 865 Broadway, N.Y." -- in case you were wondering.

FRANZ VON SUPPÉ: Fatinitza: Overture


Hungarian State Orchestra, János Sándor, cond. Hungaroton

Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Charles Dutoit, cond. Decca
Boston Pops Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler, cond. RCA

MAX SCHÖNHERR (arr.): "Marziale" on themes from the operetta "Fatinitza"
Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Neeme Järvi, cond. Chandos

MONDAY EVENING UPDATE: There's a "post-tease afterthought" coming up that will ask (and answer) the question: "If you listened to the performances of Suppé's Fatinitza Overture in the official 'post tease,' did any particular word come to mind?" So, thoughts? That post should go up tomorrow (i.e., Tuesday). (Okay, a hint: I'm thinking "rhythm.")

UPDATE: Okay, the "post-tease afterthought" didn't come Tuesday, but it did come: " 'Post tease' afterthought: If you listened to the performances of Suppé's Fatinitza Overture in last week's 'post tease,' did any particular word come to mind?"

by Ken

Just to be clear, I didn't sit down and list Suppé overtures and arrive at a scientifically precise ranking. It's just that awhile ago we had a post that began with Suppé's Poet and Peasant Overture, and I think we can likely agree that it's either the 1st- or 2nd-best Suppé overtures, neck and neck with Light Cavalry (I think that's the correct one-two order, if only because Poet and Peasant just has higher artistic ambitions, but it could depend on which day you ask me, like if maybe I happen recently to have heard an especially upllifting performance of Light Cavalry), and beyond that there are up to a half-dozen that most of us would probably go to before we get to Fatinitza. Nevertheless, the Fatinitza Overture is still a darned nifty piece (how many composers would have loved to compose one such?), and maybe all the more welcome for not being heard as often as the other six or eight Suppé overtures.

So, although as it happens we do have a reason for visiting Fatinitza, we don't need a reason beyond the fact that it is, you know, a really nifty piece, do we? Oh yes, in case you were wondering, there is neither rhyme nor reason to the order of the above performances of Fatinitza. It's just the order in which I drug up the audio files -- with, for once, no particular thinking. We know how thinking tends to lead inexorably to trouble.


AS LONG AS WE'RE HERE, WHY NOT GIVE A FRESH
LISTEN TO POET AND PEASANT AND LIGHT CAVALRY?

Spun off from today's main post: All of Mahler 5!

Today's main post, "We hear the kinship between the Adagietto of Mahler 5 and 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,' right? How about the differences?," is here.




The legendary Adolf Herseth, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's trumpet principal for an amazing 53 years (1948-2001, plus three more in "emeritus" status!), launches the opening "Funeral March" of Mahler 5 in recordings made near the beginning and end of Georg Solti's 22-year tenure as music director -- the first in Chicago's Medinah Temple in March 1970, the second a CSO-on-tour performance recorded live in Vienna's Sofiensaal Nov. 30, 1990 (where you'll note that Sir Georg, as he'd been since 1972, is much more attentive to Mahler's dynamic marking of p [soft] for the first two bars, with sudden sf attacks just on the downbeats).

"Those closest to Mahler found the Fifth Symphony a particularly speaking likeness of his personality, and he too may therefore have wanted to make it as accurate as possible a self-portrait of himself in a particularly happy period of his life."

-- William Mann, from a booklet note on Mahler 5 (©1969)

by Ken

As I wrote in today's main post, "We hear the kinship between the Adagietto of Mahler 5 and 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,' right? How about the differences?":

DON'T TELL ANYONE, BUT REMEMBER HOW I SAID
THAT WE REALLY NEED TO HEAR ALL OF MAHLER 5?

I've already made up audio clips for two complete performances. I may yet spin this off into a separate post, or postlet, with some added comment. But for now, here it is.

No, here it is, all spun off!

We're not going to attempt anything fancy here. The idea is just to be able to hear the whole of Mahler 5. As I noted in today's main post, as quoted above, the audio clips were all made and ready to roll: of two performances, a 2002 live one by Lorin Maazel and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the 1947 recording by Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic that features in today's earlier post. We're just going to hear them part by part, each part prefaced by some helpful guidance from critic William Mann (from the same booklet note on the symphony which is quoted from above).


WE'LL START WITH A QUICK OVERVIEW FROM W.M.

Mahler's division of the Fifth Symphony into three parts but five movements is not one of convenience alone: the first and second movements are materially connected, and the finale takes some of its subordinate themes from the Adagietto; the central Scherzo stands alone, longer than the rest, effectively carrying the main symphonic weight of the piece. This Scherzo is in D major, so is the Finale, and it would be right, I think, to feel the whole symphony as being in D major. Part I of the symphony begins in C-sharp minor and ends in A minor: its two movements form a sort of prologue to the rest of the symphony, in which Mahler postulates a series of pessimistic ideas and argues them symphonically until they seem to be conquered by the bright, clean light of D major which is glimpsed in the second movement and emerges with the scherzo. -- W.M.

NOW LET'S HEAR THE SYMPHONY!

Special Thursday edition: Here's some music so beautiful that it almost doesn't matter whether it matters at all

Including a note from Kurt Vonnegut expounding
his "canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts"


"I was perplexed as to what the usefulness of any of the arts might be, with the possible exception of interior decoration. The most positive notion I could come up with was what I call the canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts."

-- K.V. (who else?), a full half-century ago -- see below, just a bit

ALL RIGHT, TIME TO GET TO WORK



Music Sample No. 1

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center: Wu Han, piano; Ani Kavafian and Arnaud Sussmann, violins; Paul Neubauer, viola; Fred Sherry, cello. CMS Studio Recordings, recorded in New York City, April 2007


NOW, EXCERPTED FROM MR. VONNEGUT'S "Address to
the American Physical Society, New York City, February 5, 1969":

Many of you are physics teachers. I have been a teacher, too. I have taught creative writing. I often wondered what I thought I was doing, teaching creative writing, since the demand for creative writers is very small in this vale of tears. I was perplexed as to what the usefulness of any of the arts might be, with the possible exception of interior decoration. The most positive notion I could come up with was what I call the canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts. This theory argues that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.

The most useful thing I could do before this meeting today is to keel over. On the other hand, artists are keeling over by the thousands every day and nobody seems to pay the least attention.

(appended in Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963-1973, Vol. 2 of Library of America's four-volume Kurt Vonnegut Edition)

by Ken

Okay, so I've missed yet another Sunday, in case it matters, which of course it doesn't -- and, oh yes, a Monday, Tuesday, and I guess Wednesday too, if you insist on counting every last gosh-darned day. But since I more or less had the components of this, er, post ready to go, or at least readyish, I've somehow summoned the determination to proceed, on the slim (slimmest?) chance that it might somehow matter, or come to matter. Somehow.

I'm pretty sure you don't want to go there, though. How 'bout instead we listen to more music? Perhaps a somewhat larger and sort-of-semi-self-contained chunk.

Ghost of Sunday Classics: "Baton Bunny" music with and without the Bunny, plus a treasure trove of overtures and, oh yes, "Gaudeamus igitur"

In which we watch part of a cartoon, then listen
to an overture, and then another overture, and then --
can you imagine? -- drift off into other, er, stuff


A nice chunk of Chuck Jones's Baton Bunny (1959) -- from the confident-looking start, things deteriorate pretty quickly.

by Ken

As I mentioned most recently Friday night, New York City's Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, is currently hosting a grand exhibition devoted to one of the giants of animated film, Chuck Jones. And as I mentioned Friday night, this afternoon I hope to get to MoMI for this week's "Chuck Jones Matinee" (each week the same hour-long program is offered on Saturday and Sunday), to see -- in 35mm, on a large screen -- Duck Amuck, which I've already declared the greatest cartoon ever made, and What's Opera, Doc?, the famous Bugs Bunny classical-music extravaganza.

On my last weekend visit to the museum, the CJM program included a different classical-Bugs enterprise, one I didn't remember: Baton Bunny, from 1959. In it Bugs attempts to conduct Suppé's A Morning, Noon, and Night in Vienna Overture, and you can see some of it above.

We've heard our fair share of Suppé, entirely in the form of overtures. Yes, occasional efforts are made to revive some of his numerous operettas, but they don't stick. A dozen or so of his overtures do, however, for the simple reason that they're utterly wonderful, utterly gorgeous music, and among them are a couple -- I mean Poet and Peasant and Light Cavalry -- that I would listen to as happily as anything in the orchestral repertory.

When the poster of our Baton Bunny clip posted it, a rash of commenters were frantic to know what the music was. The question was answered in due course, of course, but we're going to answer it in our own way -- with three distinctly different performances.


FRANZ VON SUPPÉ: A Morning, Noon, and Night in Vienna: Overture

Parting, though not without a struggle -- with "an increasingly calm acceptance of fate"

A symphonic finale in search of an ending

In the first not-quite-six minutes or so of this clip, Lenny B's comments are superimposed over a rehearsal, which gives way to the actual performance at about 5:55. We first saw this clip in the January 2012 post "At how bad a point did the cell-phone ring heard 'round the world interrupt the NY Phil's Mahler Ninth? Let's complete the symphony." (We also heard Lenny conducting the complete finale from a July 1979 Tanglewood performance with the Boston Symphony. Later we're going to hear the broadest of his recordings of the movement.)

by Ken

Well, when we attacked "Der Abschied" ("The Farewell"), the half-hour sixth and final song of the song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth (in a July 2009 Maureen Forrester remembrance post), we pretty much just plunged in (in August 2010 we followed up with the three tenor songs), and I'm afraid that's what we're going to do as well with the other completed work composed after Mahler's diagnosis of terminal heart disease, the Ninth Symphony.

I noted when we listened to Mahler's "most characteristic" and "least loved" symphony, the Seventh (in November -- first the three middle movements, then the outer movements), that the composer would use this basic plan again. In the Seventh it's a pair of enormous outer movements bracketing a core of "other" musics: the two "Night Music"s wrapped around a scherzo. This is very much the plan of the unfinished Tenth Symphony, with a core consisting of a pair of scherzos bracketing the little "Purgatorio" movement (we heard this core of the Tenth later in November) -- with the crucial difference that those gigantic outer movements are now slow rather than normal symphonic fast ones.

That switch, of course, had already been made in the Ninth Symphony (which, as I noted in Friday night's preview, should properly have been the Tenth, if Mahler had had the courage to tempt fate and give Das Lied the dangerous-for-symphony-composers number nine). It's hard to think of words to convey the scale and dimension of the opening Andante commodo and concluding Adago of the Ninth.


AS I MENTIONED IN FRIDAY NIGHT'S PREVIEW . . .

Most listeners are likely to agree that the prevailing subject matter of the Mahler Ninth is farewell, the final parting -- as we can surely divine from the clip we've seen again up top, with Leonard Bernstein providing voice-over commentary over the final 10½ minutes of the finale. But even in those majestic outer movements the tone is hardly singlemindedly elegiac, and in those "otherish" middle movements the parting journey covers some very different ground.

Sunday Classics: Is Mahler's Sixth Symphony any more "tragic" than life itself?

The conclusion of the 1976 Bernstein-Vienna Phil Andante -- we heard the first half in last night's preview post. The "climactic" section we heard Valery Gergiev whip into a frenzy begins at 3:05 of the clip.

by Ken

Do I have to have an ulterior motive for backing our way into the Mahler Sixth Symphony via the awesomely beautiful Andante we heard in last night's preview? (Just as a reminder, we started -- in Friday night's pre-preview, by listening to the radiant Andante sostenuto of the Brahms First Symphony, played by "Mahler's orchestra," the Vienna Philharmonic, under Sir John Barbirolli in 1967 and Leonard Bernstein in 1981.) Okay, I do have an ulterior motive, but do I have to? Goodness, there's so much I could, and want to, say about this symphony, but instead let me just explain how it came onto this week's Sunday Classics schedule.

It all started with the new 10-CD Sony BMG Classics compendium of 1974-80 Levine-RCA Mahler recordings I mentioned last week I had ordered. The set arrived, and I started listening through it, which was kind of enjoyable, though I can't say I much enjoyed the actual performances. I certainly understood why I'd hardly listened to them again since they were first issued -- and I actually liked some of them better then. It's kind of eerie how little audible concern there is here for how the music gets from one note to the next, which is, oh, about 98 percent of what matters in Mahler's music, and that of most any other composer of consequence, or at least 98 percent of what makes it music instead of just a bunch of notes.

Nevertheless, I was listening through happily enough. The performances contain a fair number of ideas -- no, I'd rather call them "performance choices," since they're really qualities slapped onto musical moments, which don't really rise to the level of "ideas." I got through Nos. 1, 10, 4, 7, and 5 before crashing with No. 6, which seemed to be so far from adding up to any sort of performance of the piece that I had to seek relief in various sorts of actual performances.

My original idea was that a good subject for a post might be the kind of phony-baloney issue that musical dim bulbs like to fixate on instead of trying to deal with the music: the question of the "correct" order of the middle movements of the Mahler Sixth. And that's still what we're going to be looking at. But since we're also going to be hearing the the much larger outer movements as well, as I thought about what to say to you about them, I realized that a different version of this same phony-baloney musical "issue" comes into play: Just how "tragic" is this symphony that Mahler himself dubbed, at least at the time of the premiere, Tragic?


HOW "TRAGIC" IS THE MAHLER SIXTH SYMPHONY?
TO JUDGE FOR YOURSELF, CONTINUE READING

Preview: The Andante of the Sixth Symphony -- the most beautiful movement Mahler ever composed?

If you think the climax of the slow movement of the Mahler Sixth needs to be made "exciting," I guess Valery Gergiev's your man -- here are the final four minutes (beginning at bar 138) of a November 2007 performance with the London Symphony. (Note that he's playing the Andante as the second movement -- i.e., before the Scherzo.)

by Ken

I can't prove to you that Mahler had the gorgeous Andante of the Brahms First Symphony (which we heard in last night's preview) in mind when he composed the Andante of his Sixth, but you'd have to go a long way to convince me that he didn't. Most composers, at least those with a modicum of sense, would shy away from such an exalted precedent; Mahler lived up to it.

The climactic section that we hear in the Gergiev clip above begins at 10:35 in this recording, Leonard Bernstein's first of the Mahler Sixth.

MAHLER: Symphony No. 6 in A minor:
iii. (or maybe ii.) Andante moderato


New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded May 1967


TO HEAR MORE OF THIS AMAZING MOVEMENT, READ ON

Preview: Do we need a reason to listen to the radiant Andante sostenuto of Brahms's First Symphony?

Theo Alcantara conducts the Andante sostenuto of the Brahms First Symphony at Festival Casals, San Juan, Puerto Rico, February 2005. (The whole performance is posted.)

by Ken

We've heard the radiant slow movement of Brahms's First Symphony, back in July 2009, though I see that that Karajan clip has been disappeared. Well, tonight we're hearing it again! I don't think we need a reason, but in fact we have one, which will become clear tomorrow night.


FOR MORE OF THIS GLOWING MOVEMENT, READ ON