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