Overture Magazine: 2016-2017 Season September - October 2016 | Page 48
{ program notes
Mahler Symphony No. 6
Music Center At Strathmore
Thursday, November 10, 2016— 8 p.m.
Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall
Friday, November 11, 2016 — 8 p.m.
Saturday, November 12, 2016 — 8 p.m.
Presenting Sponsor:
Marin Alsop, Conductor
Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 6 in A minor
Allegro energico, ma non troppo
Andante moderato
Scherzo
Finale
The concert will end at approximately 9:15 p.m. on Thursday,
and at approximately 9:15 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.
Marin Alsop
For Marin Alsop’s bio., please see pg. 12.
About the concert:
Symphony No. 6 in A minor
Gustav Mahler
Born in Kalischt, Bohemia, July 7, 1860;
died in Vienna, Austria, May 18, 1911
Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is the centerpiece — and many would claim the
46 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
greatest — of the three purely instrumental
symphonies (numbers 5, 6, and 7) he wrote
between 1901 and 1905. As his wife Alma
tells us, it was probably his most personal
and emotional work, and it uncannily
predicted the three tragedies that would
befall him in 1907: his forced resignation
from the music directorship of the Vienna
Court Opera, the death of his adored
eldest daughter Maria and the diagnosis of
a fatal heart condition that would end his
life prematurely at age 50. Unlike his other
symphonies, which battle their way out of
tragic circumstances to either joyous life
affirmation or calm philosophical acceptance, the Sixth ends in defeat and death.
Strangely, when Mahler wrote the Sixth
during the summers of 1903 and 1904,
he was experiencing the happiest days of
his life. Newly married to the bewitching
Alma, reveling in his role as father of two
small daughters, he was, as Alma wrote, “a
tree in full leaf and flower.” His composing summers were spent in a near-idyllic
retreat: a custom-built villa on the shores of
Lake Wörth in southern Austria’s Carinthian Alps, a picturesque area that had
earlier inspired Brahms. His health, as far
as he knew, was robust. His position at the
Court Opera seemed impregnable. Even
his reputation as a composer was finally
being established; his Third Symphony had
recently won a very favorable response at its
Viennese premiere.
And yet with everything going right
in his world, Mahler foresaw tragedy.
Alma recalled the first time he played the
newly completed Sixth to her in his little
composing cottage in the woods: “We
both wept that day. The music and what
it foretold touched us so deeply. … In the
last movement he described himself and
his downfall or, as he later said, that of his
hero: ‘It is the hero, on whom three blows
of fate fall, the last of which fells him as
a tree is felled.’ ” These are the mighty
hammer blows that rend the work’s finale;
a superstitious Mahler deleted the fatal
third hammer stroke before his first performance of the work.
The Sixth, however, is not totally a tragic
symphony. Its raw emotions are controlled
by the most classical four-movement
symphonic architecture Mahler ever used.
Until the last movement’s hammer blows
finally crush him, the hero/protagonist
wages a vigorous, virile fight that might
well have ended in victory. A secondary
theme running through the work is the
search for sanctuary in a remembered world
of peace and childlike innocence — often
expressed with the pastoral sounds of alpine
cowbells and a new instrument in Mahler’s
armory, the bell-like celesta. These visions
of a lost idyll infiltrate all the symphony’s
movements, including the brutal finale;
the third Andante moderato movement is