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Madison Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
May 3-4-5, 2019
93rd Season / Subscription
Concert No.8
Michael Allsen
Our
final program this season is devoted to a single work,
Mahler’s titanic eighth symphony. Popularly known as the
“Symphony of a Thousand,” this is a work that explores the
themes of love, joy, and redemption on the grandest scale.
At these concerts we will feature over 500 musicians, both
on stage and off stage: an expanded Madison Symphony
Orchestra is joined by the Madison Symphony Chorus, the UW
Choral Union, and Madison Youth Choirs. We also welcome
eight fine vocal soloists: sopranos Alexandra LoBianco,
Emily Birsan, and Emily Pogorelc, mezzo-sopranos
Milena Kitic and Julie Miller, tenor Clay Hilley, baritone
Michael Redding, and
bass-baritone Morris Robinson.
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Symphony No.8
Mahler composed his
eighth symphony in 1906-1907. He conducted the first
performance in Munich, on September 12, 1910. We have
performed the work once previously in 2005. Duration 79:00.
“Gustav
is always on the telephone to God.”
-Alma
Mahler
The premiere of Mahler’s eighth symphony
was one of the great triumphs of his life. On September 12,
1910 he conducted a huge orchestra and chorus in the
newly-built International Exhibition Hall in Munich, to an
enthusiastic audience of over 3000. The response to this, the
most joyous of his symphonies—and the last of his symphonies
to be premiered during his lifetime—should have been
enormously gratifying, but Mahler apparently looked merely
drawn and worn out during the long applause. According to one
of the critics present, one young man said after the
performance: “Look at those eyes!
That’s not the expression of a triumphant general marching
towards new victories. It’s the expression of a man who
already feels the weight of death on his shoulders!” And
indeed, Mahler died just eight months later. This
last, sad phase in his career began with a trio of disasters
in 1907: losing his post as conductor of the Vienna State
Opera, diagnosis of a severe heart condition, and the death of
his daughter Maria. During years that followed, he had
satisfying but exhausting conducting appointments in New York
and elsewhere, but his last few years were marked by marital
problems, and a generally lukewarm reception to his music.
None of these troubles are apparent in the eighth, however.
The eighth begins the last phase in
Mahler’s symphonies, which includes Das Lied von de Erde
(a “song-symphony”) of 1908, the ninth symphony of 1909, and
the unfinished tenth. His first four symphonies are all linked
by a common reliance on vocal music, particularly on Mahler’s
own settings of folk-poetry from Des Knaben Wunderhorn
(“The Boy’s Magic Horn”)—and singers play an important role in
Nos. 2-4. These early works are all, to varying degrees
programmatic, and derive at least part of their form from
extra-musical ideas. The fifth through seventh were purely
instrumental in conception, rejecting, at least on the
surface, the programmatic ideal. With the eighth, he returns
confidently to vocal and dramatic inspiration—in fact, it
holds the distinction of being the first thoroughly choral
symphony. In earlier symphonies with chorus or solo voices,
from Beethoven’s ninth through Mahler’s own early works,
singing was reserved for the finale, but here the form and
style are dictated by text throughout. The Symphony No.8 has
been described variously as an oratorio, as a “cantata, and
even as “Mahler’s only opera,” but at heart, the conception of
this work remains symphonic, with an organic development of
musical themes throughout.
The inspiration for the eighth came as a
flash: while on his annual summer retreat in 1906, he came
across the text for the Latin Pentecost hymn Veni, creator spiritus,
and composed the first movement fairly quickly afterwards. He
later told Arnold Schoenberg: “It was as if it had been
dictated to me.” In fact, he seems to have composed this
enormous work with uncharacteristic speed: the score was
completed between June 21 and August 18, with orchestration
completed the following year. Veni, creator spiritus
took hold of him—so much so that the completed most of the
score for the first movement without having the whole text in
front of him. He asked his friend Fritz Löhr to send the text
by express mail, and when it arrived, he was delighted to see
that what he had written fit the meter and meaning of the text
perfectly.
von Goethe
The
original plan, sketched out in the first flush of inspiration,
was for a four-movement work with the following outline: “1.
Hymn: Veni creator
spiritus 2. Scherzo 3. Adagio 4. Hymn: the birth of
Eros.” However, he quickly decided that the proper
counterweight to the opening choral movement would be a
dramatic setting of the closing scene of Goethe’s Faust. Faust was familiar
ground: it among was Mahler’s favorite literary works, and it
was also one of the most important inspirations for Romantic
musicians. It was the source of countless art-songs from
Beethoven and Schubert onwards, the inspiration for
programmatic pieces by Berlioz, Liszt, and many others, and
received several full-scale operatic treatments, most famously
in Gounod’s Faust,
and Boito’s Mefistofele.
Faust is the story of a scholar who sells his soul to the
devil (Mefistopheles) in exchange for ultimate knowledge. In Part I (published
in its final version in 1829) Faust makes his fateful deal—its
primary story is Faust’s love and abandonment of Gretchen.
Part II is a series of fantastic episodes that culminates in
the rescue of Faust’s soul by the angels and the frustration
of Mefistopheles. The closing episode set by Mahler is a
lengthy scene in which the souls of both Faust and Gretchen
are ushered into heaven
The contrasts between the two movements are
numerous, above and beyond the difference in language, and on
the surface, they seem to be almost two completely independent
pieces. Part I reaches back to J.S. Bach and even further to
for its thoroughly contrapuntal texture. Donald Mitchell
suggests that Mahler was inspired by Bach’s motets,
particularly Singet den
Herrn, and parts of the movement look back a century or
more earlier yet, to the great polychoral composers of the
late Renaissance. Part I as a whole is one of the most
disciplined and tightly-organized movements in Mahler’s
symphonies, with his masterful contrapuntal writing worked
into an overall sonata form. Part II, not only more modern in
its harmony and melodic writing, is episodic, with musical
form determined largely by Mahler’s slightly edited and
rearranged version of Goethe. There is also a contrast in
mood: Part I is 25 minutes of almost unremitting jubilation,
while the joy in Part II appears much more gradually and comes
in a much more ethereal form. Several writers have even
pointed to a difference in gender, with the text and mood of
Part I being in a “masculine” voice. Part II, with its focus
on the Virgin Mary and the central solos by the four penitent
women, ends by invoking the “eternal feminine” (das Ewig-Weibliche).
The ties that bind these two halves
together are love and redemption. In Part I, Mahler invites
the creator spiritus
to abide within. One of the most personal sides of this
setting is the third stanza, where: the lines “Endow our weak
bodies with eternal strength.” are sung with great passion.
The answer, “Inflame our senses with light, pour love into our
hearts,” is the climax of the movement. In Part II, the soul
of Faust is saved by a much more human, even motherly sort of
love. In the long culmination of the movement, faithful
Gretchen, now transformed into “Una Poenitentium,” is redeemed
by three holy women, before she is reunited with Faust. In the
end it is the Mater Gloriosa herself who ushers Faust into
heaven with a sublime passage that makes the connection
between the movements obvious—the Latin Veni (“come”) and the
German Komm are
associated with the same musical theme.
It
is of course the scoring of the Symphony No.8 that
gets the most attention. In addition to parts for eight vocal
soloists, and large chorus and children’s chorus, he calls for
a large contingent of offstage brass, organ, and a vastly
expanded orchestra: quadrupled woodwinds, expanded brass
sections, and a huge percussion battery, with an enlarged
string section to balance. The Munich premiere of the eighth
featured the largest ensemble Mahler had ever conducted— vocal
soloists and a chorus of 850, with orchestra and offstage
musicians bringing the total to slightly over 1,000—but he
detested the title “Symphony of a Thousand.” The impresario Emil Gutmann had dreamed up the name as
part of his publicity campaign for the premiere, and Mahler
thought it worthy of only a Barnum & Bailey circus. This
was the heyday of enormous orchestras. Both Mahler and
Bruckner used enlarged orchestras in their symphonies and
some of Strauss’s tone poems (notably Also sprach Zarathustra,
Ein Heldenleben
and Eine
Alpensinfonie) use vastly expanded scoring. Strauss used an even larger
orchestra in his Festive
Prelude of 1913, and both this piece and the eighth
are dwarfed by Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder, completed in 1911. In the eighth
symphony, however, Mahler uses these huge forces for sheer
overwhelming effect only a few times in the course of nearly
80 minutes of music, instead using them as a richly diverse
palette, with which he paints the words that are the
symphony’s inspiration.
Though it is
choral throughout, Part I has the outlines, in vastly expanded
dimensions, of a traditional symphonic first movement. It
begins with the great invocation Veni, creator spiritus
(“Come, creator spirit”) in
an almost sacred style—an exclamation that is used to impose
order on the entire symphony. A
long passage carried by soloists, beginning with the line imple superna gratia (“fill with grace from above those whom
you have created”). An orchestral interlude leads to
the plea Infirma nostri
corporis (“Endow our weak
bodies with eternal
strength”). The development section, on the same
lines, is carried at first by the orchestra and chorus and
then by gradual entrance of the soloists. The climax of the
movement comes with the choral Accende lumen (“inflame our senses with light”)—a
recapitulation of the opening theme—and the densely scored
music that follows. There
is brief moment of reverent holding back at Qui Paraclitus (“You are known as the Comforter”)
before a glorious fugal coda on Gloria Patri (“Glory be to God the Father”).
Part II is a series of episodes that follow
Goethe’s drama. Mahler sets the stage, “mountain gorges, forest, cliff,
solitude,” with the longest purely orchestral
section in the symphony, alternating pensive music above a
long string tremolo with religious chorales from the brass. A
more agitated passage introduces the Holy Anchorites. The next
three panels create the wilderness scene for Faust’s
redemption, the Anchorites building upon the theme of the
introduction, and the Pater Ecstaticus (Ecstatic Father) and
Pater Profundis (Deep Father) singing from above and below.
(Goethe’s original also had a Pater Seraphicus, singing from
the “middle region.”) The second main section begins with
choirs of angels who carry Faust’s soul upwards, where he
finally meets with the last of the anchorites, Dr. Marianus
(The Marian Doctor), and his joyful statement that “Here, the
view is unobstructed.” Dr. Marianus and the chorus of angels
invoke the Virgin, Mater Gloriosa, who appears in a serene
passage for strings and harp. The next passage concerns the
redemption of Gretchen, who died at the end of Part I of Faust, insane and
hopeless after killing her own child. Here she is transformed
into the character “Una Poententium” (a penitent), and three
holy women intercede on her behalf: Magna Peccatrix (a great
sinner) and Mulier Samaritana (a Samaritan woman) from
episodes in the New Testament, and Maria Aegyptica from the Acts of the Saints.
The final act in this drama is the redemption of Faust
himself, heralded by a chorus of blessed boys and Una
Poententium. The dramatic peak—ironically, one of the most
moving moments in the “Symphony of a Thousand” is also one of
the most intimate— is the blessing sung by the Mater Gloriosa
(the Virgin Mary) herself: “Come! Raise yourself to the
highest spheres!” Her sentiment is echoed by Dr. Marianus and
the angels, before a quiet orchestral passage ushers in the
final Chorus Mysticus, a moment that clearly echoes the great
choral entrance in Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony. The
eighth ends with a grand brass transformation of the opening
theme.
________
program
notes ©2018 by J. Michael Allsen