Earlier this month in Glasgow, Scotland, I heard the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra performing Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, whose initial falling motive in G minor, known the world over, is termed the “fate theme,” its urgency suffusing the entire work. The program writers billed the Fifth as “a pulse-pounding struggle between hope and despair.” For me, the evening was much closer to “pulse-pounding” because I had a pulse and it pounded a lot during the music and, as such, had scant recourse to hope or despair.
It’s well known that adding abstract linguistic descriptions to the abstract nature of music, albeit musically meaningless, sells tickets. And yet symphonic complexity cannot ticket our subjective responses to what any particular musical pattern is “emoting ”— because, as the Swedish composer Allan Pettersson notes, music has “a lot to say but it’s not about anything.”
So why tag it with feeling-full opposites? It’s a convention Romantic-era composers sometimes used to answer a question they often couldn’t dodge: What’s your symphony mean? It would help if you explained it. Even Tchaikovsky obliged. Of his Fifth, he said the symphony contained “a complete resignation before fate . . . the same as the inscrutable predestination of fate,” “huh?” went they collective eyebrow. Did that mystification in any way make the music any clearer?
This past weekend, our reliably electrifying San Diego Symphony has for the second time this season outfitted the new Jacobs Music Center with another early Gustav Mahler colossus, the Austrian’s longest and most multilayered Third Symphony, under Rafael Payare’s elastic conducting. Like Tchiakovsky in the late 1880s, Mahler was wrestling with its immensity; its length, like a mini-Lord of the Rings, he knew, would require a unifying plan. Though ambivalent about narrative keys, having withdrawn his directives for the First Symphony, his wife, Alma, insisted he attach some play-by-play to the massive Third when it premiered in 1902.
Its Olympian journey lasts between 95 and 110 minutes; that journey, musically speaking, Mahler said catalogued our “evolution,” no less, mind you, than the history of the world — earth, humankind, religion, homeland, God, plus a touch of Nietzschean confusion. Six movements divide into two parts, at times, Bacchanal like a German beer hall, at times, as commanding as the pyramids at Giza.
Part one, the massive first movement (clock time: 35 minutes), shows “Pan awakening” to summer, his bold leap to life suddenly quelled by the mystery of Nature’s slow-to-boil explosion, then let loose in furies galore.
Part two’s five stages reveal what nature and the emotional world, across time, have “told” the composer. That is, a purpose to their condition and accumulating presence as the world: Mahler hears all — the flowers in the meadows, the animals, humankind (embodied in a poem Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra in which pain and joy contend, sung by an alto), angels (a choir of women and girls), and the 25-minute finale, a majestic Alpine-climbing adagio, that divulges “love and peace” from on high. Perhaps it’s evident that if the symphony needs any précis, it’s easier for an audience to follow the eonic evolution of life under His eye than an analysis of keys, tempi, instrumentation, musical character, and so on.
For those who know the symphony and have now heard it bookend the SDSO season with last October’s Mahler Second, the pair share a grand time span, musical ideas needing an indulgently long workout. At journey’s end, our overstimulated ears are exhausted, worn out by Mahler’s demand for attention. The takeaway, nonetheless, is triumphal; summary claims of resurrection, heroism, catharsis, salvation, and knocking on Heaven’s door feel apt. All of it unfetters our emotions but it’s hard to classify with any precision (like love and despair) what those emotions are. One is, if you were there and were not overtopped by Mahler’s attention-surplus, you were not there.
Often Mahler was miffed to see the audience reading his notes while the music unfolded, betraying the composer-listener pact. He said “programs lead to misrepresentation of the direst sort.” That word — dire: serious to the point of dreadful, summed up his pique. He regretted pretending there was a story, though he was attracted to literary reference. Indeed, lyrical settings of songs for soloists and choirs appear in more than half his nine finished symphonies. But a patron’s replacing her immersive soaking in the music’s healthful waters with mere lexical reportage was, for this genius, a bridge too far.
For me, what’s evolutionary in the Third is its assemblage of musical forms: the symphony is a kind of Germanic/Austrian medley, a sober Oktoberfest that keeps us humble and seated to appreciate the formal oomph and splendor and invention. In part, we hear in his early work, the so-called Wunderhorn period, quotations from old German folk music — fanfares, waltzes (landler and minuet), military marches, toy-soldier parades, reveille (!), festive band tunes, romances and laments, from the satiric and the light-hearted to the eerily nocturnal and the wanderingly melancholic.
In effect, he Germanizes the symphony with the beloved tunes of his people’s homeland, their character revealed and transformed in new, complex, and moody settings. (His contemporary, Charles Ives, did the same with folk music in his very American symphonies.) All that in the Third is built out like an oceangoing ark. With Mahler, the bow, the sails, and the hold are much bigger than the stern.
My hope for Sunday’s performance was that the foot-on-the-gas of our unsentimental baton-man would mean we’d clock in under the usual 110 minutes — which, true to form, Payare did: a crisp 102 minutes. Not easy to keep such a treasure-laden vessel moving. Mahler’s trick of “going long” is to present, roughly in the first third of any movement, enough material whose beauty and spirit begs to be reheard — which Mahler does — so the audience participates knowing where it’s been as it keeps going. If there’s a sleight of hand for the romantic composer, it’s to stamp us with impressive themes then repeat them a lot (I think of the other master, Richard Strauss) with all sorts of wry and wicked twists.
The Third’s opening unison French horn theme returns throughout the “Pan” section. The horns announce the memorable theme, following by hushed quiet, the texture turning eerie as if a fog’s descended: quick trumpet peels, some shaking in the strings and glissandi in the brass, a few rattling fanfares — the Jacobs Center’s walls absorb huge tuttis or, better, allow sudden silence for a tiny bass note to thump. On the heels of the two-tone opening, the principal trombonist Kyle Covington soloed several times, his tone breathlessly strong, dignified and solemn, unhurried as well despite the music’s agitation around him.
Moving on, Mahler’s strange crawling motion often just stops and obbligati from trombone, trumpet (Christopher Smith), violin (Jeff Thayer), and clarinet (Sheryl Renk) color the path. Mahler loves these interruptions in which a riderless horse trots through, its presence noted, is then commandeered into noisy marches and wind-up frivolity, letting go, as if the circus-y growth of summer cannot contain its enthusiasm. Part one’s end recalls a Beethovenian final, and the audience release is palpable.
Sarah Skuster teases out a minuet to laze into the second movement (the flowers turn to tell) with an elegant grazioso. This floats across to the clarinet, the violin, the flute, and then gets caught up in Mahler’s echoey thematic net, a woodwind picnic, violins invited. The music is jolted with up tempi and speeds away, frenetic, madcap. Again, the untidiness stops and returns to placidity, a flip-flop that is unpredictably predictable. My sense is that the courtly dances give way to their inchoate side, a kind of sap-spewing pleasure. Burst, it must, and the orchestra sounds more inebriated than a Jane Austen cotillion.
More mystery enters the fray with the scherzando third part as Mahler’s upbeat, martial music, bouncing between 2/4 to 6/8, making space for trumpeter Smith to sneak off-stage for movement-long solo. (It would have been nice to have him in silhouette along the side, instead of “not there,” though the walled distance worked.) The triadic song Smith plays is a Mahler original; it trades on the call of a “post horn,” a small coiled brass instrument, and a tune that shepherds in the hills might have soothed themselves and their keep with. By here it’s clear: Mahler is both symphonic renegade and folksong mime; he’ll add anything that musically adorns planetary and human evolution on its Yellow Brick Road to love, peace, and harmony.
Movements four and five are intertwined vocally — an alto soloist (Karen Cargill) and an ensemble of local young and professional female singers. As noted, the alto sings a tortured confession by Nietzsche, its expressed hope that humankind’s pain passes so our eternal joy will reign in its place. Glissandi in the oboe illustrate the sorrow, a wounded bird at night. The strings play 7 quarter notes in a 4/4 bar, a nifty trick, to add an unsteadiness to the alto’s half-step tilting tune. It’s weird but effective.
It gets weirder with the intrusive dings of the females — bell chimes and hum’s and a jolly good tune. But the biblical text, sung now by the alto, clashes with Nietzsche’s bitterness: a couple verses of Paul confessing to Jesus at the Last Supper that he’s sinned, broken the Ten Commandments, and Jesus berating him for not loving God sufficiently because only through love, so answers the cherubs in the choir, can Paul attain the JOY of Heaven. It’s all way too pretty to be believable. I’m not the first to argue that these two sections sour the earth-time journey Mahler has been arduously erecting with this propagandistic Christian message. What does evolution have to with sin?
Never mind because it’s time for the cleansing of the sixth movement, the 25-minute adagio. Yes, the word sublime covers it but Mahler must still manipulate the material in surprising, mostly satisfying ways. He displays moods happy and sad, turbulent and serene, falsely landing on serenity near the end but delaying its coming revelation twice with loud eruptions — as if to tell the audience, “You think love and peace is easy to portray, let alone reach?”
Such symphonic structure is one way of leading the audience to bliss. The other way is simpler, more obvious, and purely musical. The sixth movement begins with the strings stating like a creed this tonal theme: A-D-C#-B-A. A fourth up to the tonic and a scale wise drop down a fourth, which then climbs back up and, eventually, ranges higher. It’s as pristine as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. That one extended motive allows every player and instrument to add its color to the palette with a short or long, high or low iteration.
All that accumulating rising and falling on long repeat does the job. Sure, love’s one outcome, but the Third, I think, outlines more of what’s modestly possible — conditional love and peace-as-cessation granted via the will of the artist. Maybe that’s enough. And yes, ending up piloting a canoe along the most languid waterway in Heaven, all anxieties fled, has been Mahler’s goal all along. Indeed, he gets us there in fine fettle — just in time as we exit the hall for our plight as evolution’s submissives to restart yet again.
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