18 O v ertur e |
{ program notes
eight in the morning.” Even the weather
wasn’t cooperating: it was freezing cold
and it rained day after day.
Somehow, a miserable Mahler found
his way out of all this and into another
world: the magical, childlike world of his
Fourth Symphony. The gateway to this
enchanted land was a poem from Des
Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Boy’s Magic
Horn”), a collection of folk poetry compiled by Clemens Brentano and Achim
von Arnim in the early 19th century. The
Bavarian poem “Der Himmel hängt voll
Geigen” (“Heaven Is Hung with Violins”)
had inspired Mahler in 1892 to compose
a song called “Das Himmlische Leben”
(“The Heavenly Life”). Since then, the
song with its fanciful, alluring imagery
of a child’s heaven — in which everyone
lives happily and the saints themselves are
gourmet cooks — had rolled around in
his creative imagination.
By the end of the disastrous summer of
1899, Mahler had sketched half the symphony. And he had also decided to secure
a proper environment for its completion
the following summer. He purchased a
plot of land on the shores of the beautiful
Wörtersee in the Austrian Tyrol and hired
an architect to build both a house for the
Mahler menage (he had not yet met his
wife, Alma) and, even more important,
a Häuschen or little cottage deep in the
woods for his composing.
When Mahler arrived there in 1900,
he found that, without much conscious
thought, the symphony had made great
progress in his subconscious imagination — what he called “the second Me.”
He described its overall mood to a friend:
“What I had in mind was extremely hard
to achieve; the uniform blue of the sky
being much more difficult to render than
all its changing and contrasting hues. Well,
that’s the general atmosphere of the piece.
Occasionally, however, it darkens and become phantasmagorical and terrifying: not
that the sky becomes overcast, for the sun
continues to shine eternally, but that one
suddenly takes fright; just as on the most
beautiful day in a sunlit forest, one can be
seized with terror or panic.”
The new symphony was largely finished
by August 6, 1900. Employing a smaller
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orchestra than Mahler’s previous symphonies and at about 50 minutes the shortest of them, the Fourth is a work of the
greatest subtlety and complexity in terms
of Mahler’s handling of form, thematic
material and orchestration. Seldom does
the whole orchestra play en masse; instead
Mahler has refined here his concertante
style of writing, in which small groups of
instruments engage in intimate, everchanging conversations. This constantly
shifting dialogue works hand-in-hand
with Mahler’s devotion to continual
thematic evolution: never does a theme
return exactly as it was before. Mahler’s
initial themes in the Fourth often seem
sweetly simple but his subsequent handling
of them is anything but.
[Mahler] found that, without
much conscious thought, the
symphony had made great
progress in his subconscious
imagination —what he called
“the second Me.”
Movement 1: The symphony as a whole
might be understood as a fantastic journey
to the Heaven of the last movement; along
the way, we’ll encounter some disturbing
episodes, but they will not deter us from
reaching the celestial goal. This magical
journey opens to the enchanting jingle of
sleigh bells and flutes. Three major themes
unfold. First, the violins’ naive, carefree
melody that, in Mahler’s words, “begins
as if it couldn’t count to three, but then
launches out into the full multiplication
table.” It is succeeded by a very schmaltzy
Viennese melody in the cellos. The folklike, puckish third theme is introduced by
the woodwinds.
The development section introduces yet
another important theme: a repeated-note
melody with a dotted-rhythm tail heard
high in the flutes. This theme seems to be
associated with the heavenly goal; it will
return at the climax of the third movement
as the gates of heaven open. As the development rampages forward, we suddenly hear
a trumpet call amid the tumult. Mahler: