Mahler - Symphony nr. 6, Kindertotenlieder, Rückert-Lieder - Berliner Ph., Christa Ludwig, Herbert von Karajan
Changing reception history has unintentionally highlighted the historical character of Mahler's purely orchestral, ‘middle-period’ symphonies. The rehabilitation of his reputation after Wold War II, particularly in German-speaking countries was marked by a tendency to consider the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies his most successful and musically rewarding: as more traditional kinds of symphonic discourse, demonstrating the relevant signifiers of mastery. It would be equally appropriate to regard these two works as experiments in the new style to which Mahler himself referred in the case of the Fifth. The cumulative, heterodox structures of the earlier symphonies are replaced, in the Fifth, by a somewhat more uniform model. Its orchestral polyphony is also denser, more frequently mixed in timbre, in the manner of Richard Strauss, and less marked by simultaneously juxtaposed individual sonorities (Mahler experienced difficulty with the Fifth's orchestration and laboured on it in revisions). There is also a reduced reliance on explicitly characterized musical manners of intentionally ironic or naive effect. Instead, Mahler opted for a rhetoric that brings to the foreground a constructed musical subjectivity whose task is to control and unify the protean character changes that define its discourse. Symbolically projected voices and quasi-naturalistic scenarios are still present, but where formerly they were external to the alienated subject, such manners now tend to be presented more frequently as subjective modes, embraced and exploited with Nietzschean élan.[...]
The fragility of that self-confidence was starkly emphasized by the Sixth Symphony (1903–4). This was composed during the period of Mahler's closest contact with the younger Viennese modernists, to whose circle his uneasily progressing marriage to Alma Schindler gave him access. Conducted by Mahler with the subtitle ‘Tragic’ on at least one occasion, the Sixth displays an inverse relationship between symbolic subjective security and structural conciseness (it has four movements, the first with repeated exposition in the Classical manner). Specific biographical reasons for its cumulatively depressive and even suicidal manner are often sought, although Mahler explored as a logical proposal the insight that subjective authenticity and a positively constructed teleology (permitting a happy ending) might have no causal link.
The Sixth Symphony's first movement reverts to sharply characterized and opposed elements, like those of the first movement of the Second and Third Symphonies. A coercive A minor march is replaced by music of energetic lyricism which Mahler described as a representation of his young wife, although it, too, functions rhetorically as a subjective mode, urgently insistent upon its superior claim to authenticity. Other elements are added to the relentless succession of these two (in A minor and F major), most notably music that evokes an experience of high-mountain solitude: unrelated triads and 7th chords drift like mist (celesta and high tremolando strings) while offstage cowbells are heard. Mahler's last printed revision of 1906 somewhat contradictorily directs that these be played ‘so as to produce a realistic impression of a grazing herd of cattle … . Special emphasis is laid on the fact that this technical remark admits of no programmatic interpretation’. The fact that this unusually evoked site of experience is linked to an emergent lyrical idea recalling one of the resurrection motifs of the Second Symphony is significant, although the provisional nature of the first movement's resonantly positive conclusion is emphasized not only by the elegiac qualities of the Andante – originally presented as the third movement but subsequently relocated as the second – but also by the grotesque and almost surreal qualities of the Scherzo, whose insistent opening idea maintains both the key (A minor) and manner of the first movement's march (the changing time signatures of the ‘Altväterisch’ Trio may refer to an authentic Bohemian folkdance). Mahler's apparent intention to return to the original order of the two middle movements was not registered in a further printing.
The work's cumulative negativity focusses the philosophical and psychological implications of the new style, whose more intimate lyrical counterpart may be found in Mahler's settings of the early 19th-century poet Friedrich Rückert, dating from this period (1901–4). They fall into two groups: one an intended cycle, the Kindertotenlieder, the other a less formally related collection of five songs. Given Mahler's modernist connections at this time, Rückert represented a conservative choice of poet. While his settings flirt with consumable sentimentality, the Kindertotenlieder (begun in 1901) and independent songs like Ich atmet' einen linden Duft and Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen model a lyrical discourse of great subtlety, accompanied by modest, chamber-like forces (the addition of a piano to the harps in Um Mitternacht is not of proven authenticity).
Extracted from
The New Grove
The New Grove
Mahler
Symphony nr. 6 a-moll
Kindertotenlieder
Rückert-Lieder
(2 discs)
Berliner Philharmoniker
Christa Ludwig
Herbert von Karajan
Symphony nr. 6 a-moll
Kindertotenlieder
Rückert-Lieder
(2 discs)
Berliner Philharmoniker
Christa Ludwig
Herbert von Karajan
This entry was posted
on 4.7.09
at 23:20
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Berliner Philharmoniker,
Christa Ludwig,
Deutsche Grammophon,
Herbert von Karajan,
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Mahler,
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