Mahler 5 - Mariss Jansons, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks
The Fifth ranks today as one of Mahler's most popular symphonies. This is due in part to Luchino Visconti's 1971 film adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella "Death in Venice", which used the symphony’s world-famous ‘Adagietto’ to great effect: the movement enjoyed unanimous approval from the very start, and has now advanced to become Mahler's “greatest hit” and the most famous work in his entire oeuvre.
Read more…“A COMPLETELY NEW STYLE”
GUSTAV MAHLER‘S FIFTH SYMPHONY
“The Fifth is an accursed work. Nobody understands it” – noted Mahler in 1905 after conducting a performance of the symphony in Hamburg. It had been premiered just six months earlier in Cologne, on October 18, 1904, and we do not know why Mahler believed that his work would be so poorly understood – nor even if he regretted this, or whether he was deliberately toying with veiled musical clues that were not supposed to be deciphered at all. Whatever the case, the symphony was “accursed” not only for Mahler‘s contemporaries but also for the composer himself. It was more of a struggle for him to arrive at the final shape of his Fifth than it was for any other of his symphonies. There are three versions in print ,and Mahler revised the instrumentation for almost every performance. Even in the winter of 1910/1911, almost a decade after the work was composed, he subjected the score to a final revision, and then concluded:“I have finished the Fifth – actually, it had to be entirely re-orchestrated. It is inconceivable how I could have made such mistakes back then, like a complete beginner. (The routine I had acquired in the first four symphonies seems to have deserted me entirely – because a totally new style demands a totally new technique).” People agreed very early on that Mahler was entering entirely new territory with his Fifth. Even in the eyes of contemporaries such as the conductor Bruno Walter or the music critic Paul Bekker, author of the first great Mahler monograph, the symphony marked a definite turning-point.
In the spring and summer of 1901, just before and also during his initial work on the Fifth, Mahler devoted himself to an intensive study of the music of Bach. „There has never been greater polyphony! What Bach keeps teaching me cannot be expressed in words,” he said to his confidante Natalie Bauer-Lechner. By the summer of the following year, the very young Alma Schindler had made a sudden and dramatic appearance in Mahler’s life and become his wife, and she noted that “no sheet music apart from Bach” could be found in his ‘composing cabin’ at their summer villa in Maiernigg am Wörthersee. The profound change of style between the Fourth and Fifth Symphony does seem more likely to have been triggered by this encounter with Bach than, as Paul Bekker suspected, by a “profoundly harrowing crisis” for which there is scarcely any biographical evidence. What is certain, however, is that Mahler’s compositional technique had become more polyphonic than ever before, resulting in a significantly more complex texture and also a hitherto unknown “preference for harshness of sound and linear friction”(Constantin Floros). This new compositional style is evident not only in the lengthy ‘fugato’ passages in the final movement but throughout the symphony as a whole – apart from the dream-like ‘Adagietto’, which is an exceptional piece in every way. Mahler himself spoke of “kneading” the notes as a baker does his dough. This new contrapuntal structure, and the simultaneity of very different thematic processes were also among the reasons why Mahler struggled so relentlessly to find the optimal instrumentation for his Fifth, since he felt this was the only way in which he could make the complex and interwoven texture transparently audible.
A further new feature of the Fifth is that Mahler leaves out any references to already-existing lieder in the symphony, such as the ‘Wunderhorn-Lieder’ (Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies) or the ‘Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen’ (‘Songs of a Wayfarer’, First Symphony). He also dispenses with the human voice, which played such an important role from the Second to the Fourth Symphony. Instead, “the instrumental character of the symphony as an orchestral form comes more sharply to the fore” (Bekker), with a new significance accorded to the brass ensemble above all. “Mahler’s inspiration now plays with these heavy, brilliant, metallic sounds“ (Bekker), which are responsible for the often biting, painfully aggressive tone (especially in the first two movements), but also for the overwhelming radiance of the chorale outbursts in the second and last movements. And with the Fifth, as he had already done with the Fourth, Mahler refrained from giving the public an explanatory programme. Language – not only in the form of vocal passages but also explanatory texts – had thus become expendable for him. “Words are not required, everything is expressed in purely musical terms,” he told Natalie Bauer-Lechner. Mahler was of course far too much of a committed musician and musical creator for a work like the Fifth to be heard without semantic associations. “But to me, ‘symphony’ means building a world with all the resources of the available techniques” was how he described one of his central tenets. This meant no less than the fact that with each of his symphonies, Mahler designed an entirely self-contained cosmos in miniature that always contained everything conceivable it terms of fundamental human experience - ranging from pain to consolation, despair to promise, nightmares to euphoria, and passionate eruptions to blissful rapture.
Like all of Mahler’s symphonies, the Fifth is a finale symphony – that is, the thought processes within it are geared towards the final movement in a vast and compelling manner. Here, Mahler divides the five movements of the symphony into three sections. Starting with the lament of the first movement (‘Trauermarsch’, “Funeral March”), we reach the agonised outcry of the second movement (‘Stürmisch bewegt’, “moving stormily”), then we enter a world of absolute peace (fourth movement, ‘Adagietto’) and, finally, arrive at the redeeming chorale apotheosis of the ‘Rondo Finale’. In between, as the third movement and the central axis, there is an unusually long ‘Scherzo’, laden with lengthy development sections; this represents the entire second section and separates the minor sphere (first section: movements 1 and 2) from the major sphere (third section: movements 4 and 5). Of this ‘Scherzo’, alternating as it does between Ländler-like cheerfulness and grotesque distortions, sentimental waltzes and profound melancholy, Mahler wrote: “Oh heavens, what are they [the audience] to make of this chaos from which new worlds are forever being engendered, only to crumble into ruins a few moments later? How will they react to this primeval music, this foaming, roaring, raging sea of sound, to these dancing stars, to these breathtaking, iridescent, flashing breakers?” At the end of the second and probably weightiest movement, there is a crucial development in the finale-based dramaturgy .Amid the atmosphere of fear and anguish, and as if in anticipation of the ending and the ultimate objective of the symphony, a chorale apotheosis breaks through with hymn-like jubilation – here, Mahler writes the word ‘Höhepunkt’ (climax) in the score. After only a few bars, however, the chorale collapses, its power extinguished, and the stormy motifs of the first movement return. What turns out to be illusory here will achieve fulfilment later on, at the end of the last movement. But does the return of the chorale in the Rondo-Finale actually bring about the utopia that appeared briefly during the second movement? This time it does not collapse, but starts to move ever faster, and, on the verge of spinning out of control, finally plunges down through a whole-tone scale across three octaves, abruptly resolving the solemn tone. Could the whole thing have been just a joke? This conclusion also shows how difficult it is to get any clear readings from Mahler‘s Fifth. The wealth of motivic allusions, the immense complexity of the processes within the individual movements, and also the subtle connections and transformations that go beyond the boundaries of those movements certainly all call for caution where simple interpretations are concerned. The symphony seems too enormous in its conception to admit any kind of exhaustive analysis, and perhaps the very greatness of a work such as the Fifth lies in the fact that it can never be fully comprehended.
With one of the five movements, however, Mahler does seem to have sent a clear message. The ‘Adagietto’, written in November 1901, was a wordless declaration of love to Alma. “Instead of a letter, he sent her this in manuscript form; no other words accompanied it. She understood and wrote to him: He should come!!!” That was the credible account given by the Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg, a close friend of the family. With its homogeneous and directly intelligible structure, and as an island of bliss and rapture in the midst of a highly complex, often broken and torn work, the ‘Adagietto’ enjoyed undivided approval from the very start, later becoming Mahler‘s “greatest hit” and the single most famous work in his oeuvre.
Text: Vera Baur
Translation: David Ingram
Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks
Mariss Jansons, conductor
Live recording: München, Philharmonie im Gasteig, 10.-11.03.2016
Recording Producer: Wilhelm Meister
Balance Engineer: Peter Urban
Editing: Leonie Wagner
Mastering Engineer: Christoph Stickel
Publisher: C. F. PETERS Leipzig London New York