La Grenouille dans le Fauteuil

My thoughts, explorations and opinions about Music, Philosophy, Science, Family life; whatever happens. Shorter items than on my web site. The name of the blog? My two favorite French words. I just love those modulating vowels.

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Sunday, January 16, 2005

The Sixth: Mahler’s Poem of Ecstasy.

The dangerous power of Words. Mahler’s 6th Symphony has come to be known as “Tragic” for reasons that are neither clear nor important. Artists and commentators tend to like “tragic” things because it makes them seem “deep.” Mahler almost always used programmatic ideas as part of his method of composing, as a way of getting the juices flowing, yet he usually wanted those crutches thrown away once the piece existed. He often asked that explanations of the “meaning” of movements be jettisoned, suppressed, or rejected. The titles for the movements of the third symphony are always spelled out in program books, even though Mahler asked that they should not be. It is all part of the word-mining in scores I was just arguing against.

In the case of the 6th Symphony, the misconception, I humbly submit, has misled people terribly. Since it is called “Tragic” (which, by Mahler it usually wasn’t) it is interpreted as being simply and consistently that; tragic. Writers and conductors speak of it as a deeply pessimistic work.

Well, to my ears, this just isn’t a tragic symphony at all. Not if by tragic we mean pessimistic, defeatist, melancholy, grief-filled. Sure, it ends badly, but we all do. Death awaits us all, and eventually snuffs us out. This symphony certainly confronts that fact. And some people spend their lives in misery because of it. But most of us don’t, and even the most admired, envied, and desired lives still end in death. All optimism, aspiration, striving, and, yes, ecstasy, occurs in the context of eventual extinction. That, in a sense, is the true tragedy of life, and we don’t have to make everything miserable to make the point.

The final stroke at the end of the 6th Symphony is a stunning, stunningly loud, bleak A minor chord with drumbeats. It means death and it means the end. There can be no doubt of that. But that is only the last few seconds of a magnificent piece lasting well over an hour, and all the music leading up to that moment is a striving to avoid it, to get close to that particularly intense joy we call ecstasy. Realize that, and then the final chord is an astounding shock, not just an “I told you so” from the conductor.

In fact, a bizarre circular argument has compounded the damage. The order of the middle movements is a famous riddle. Mahler always performed First- Andante- Scherzo- Finale, but over the last few decades almost everyone has performed First- Scherzo- Andante- Finale, just because the critical edition says you should. The reasons for this have recently been revealed as fraudulent, by the way.

One of the rationalizations most often used for putting the scherzo as the second movement (which, you will recall, is something Mahler never did in performance) is that it makes the symphony more tragic. The argument goes like this. The first movement seems to end optimistically, but the scherzo begins as a sarcastic, negative parody of the first movement, so by putting the scherzo immediately after it, the optimism of the first movement is cancelled out. Putting the scherzo second makes the symphony more tragic. And why should we want to do that? Why, because it is a “tragic” symphony. The argument is circular and worthless. And it isn’t what Mahler did.

But I am not even trying to make an argument from authority here, I am just asking people to open their ears. This is a joyous, wonderful, life-affirming, ecstatic symphony, in which the many approaches to joy are, in the end, defeated.

Mahler famously said “My sixth will propound riddles the solution of which may be attempted only by a generation which has absorbed and truly digested my first five symphonies.” Perhaps there is a fairly simple point behind this gnomic remark, which is that this is the first symphony of Mahler’s which contains not just alternating moods and qualities, but moods and destinies which are fighting it out simultaneously.

A quick over-simplistic review of his symphonies:

1 Nature – morphing into – bombastic triumphalism.
2 A re-write of Beethoven’s 9th
3 Simple moods: joyous, gentle, mysterious, loving.
4 Beauty, innocence and calm, with an undercurrent of doubt.
5 This is the tragic symphony, disguised by having a joyous ending.
6 The Poem of Ecstasy, that ends fatalistically.

Six therefore seems to be the inverse of five. The difference is that the 6th, particularly in the last movement, shows aspiration and doom struggling while bound together. There are the three famous hammer blows of course, but there are several more places where a “hammer-blow” seems to hit the music, whether or not an actual hammer is hit.

The first hammer blow with a real hammer strikes while the music is riding high, and hardly has much effect. The “hero” freaks a little, but soon is energized into an almost military counter-attack. The second hammer blow is more damaging. The hero is already weaker now, and this blow causes him to struggle mightily, quickly to collapse. Near the very end of the symphony, the hero tries to gain a little bit of strength once more, but collapses from his own frailty. It is just after this uncaused collapse that the third hammer blow strikes. He is already on the floor, and so it seems less effective, less necessary. Finally, even in the funereal aspirations of the brass choir, the music seems to want to aspire, and is finally cut off by the closing chord – the ultimate hammer-blow.

These three hammer blows, and the final coup de grace, are all the more shocking and effective if we realize that everything else about this symphony is striving for, and expecting, ecstatic fulfillment. In this sense, it is indeed quite close to the Aristotelian idea of tragedy. But this is no “poor me” symphony.

How people can think this whole Symphony bears a message of doom is puzzling to me. Apart from anything else, whenever I have had a chance to conduct it, the players and I always seem to have terrific fun. It is a great piece that we all love. That may seem like an irrelevant and superficial piece of reportage, but we don’t usually feel that way about the Mozart Requiem or the War Requiem, the St. John Passion or the Tchaikowsky 6th, or the Sibelius 4th. Now there is a tragic, afflicted, symphony. For the Mahler, just rip off that word “tragic” and throw it away, forget about it. Then listen to his Poem of Ecstasy, and be blindsided by the stunning finality of its closing seconds.
©2005 AJM
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