Luogo e data di registrazione		Masonic Auditorium, Cleveland (USA) - novembre 1994
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Executive Producer		Roger Wright
	Recording Producer		Karl-August Naegler
	Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)		Rainer Maillard
	Recording Engineers		Klaus Behrens / Stephan Flock
	Editing		Stephan Flock
	Prima Edizione LP		nessuna
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon - 447 756-2 - (1 CD) - durata 74' 53" - (p) 1996 - 4D DDD
	Note		Cover: Oskar Schlemmer, "Vierzehner Gruppe in Imaginärer Architektur", 1930, Öl auf Leinwand, 91,5 x 120,5 cm, Museum Ludwig, Köln.

Of the three instrumental symphonies that constitute a trilogy between the vocal Fourth and the choral Eighth, the Seventh represents a special or extreme case, inasmuch as it marks the furthest point to which Mahler advanced on the road to musical modernism. At first sight. it is hard to discover a single common feature or unity of intent that could justify his bringing together five such disparate movements. If the Seventh Symphony is less unified than the others, it is perhaps because the secondary movements - the two Nachtmusiken - were written before the other three. In 1904 Mahler set himself the task of completing the Sixth Symphony during his summer vacation, but, as so often happened when he left Vienna and his life as a performing musician, he spent several days in utter torment searching for the inspiration that he needed. Despairing in himself and in his destiny as a creative artist, he abandoned his desk and, as he usually did on such occasions, set off on a short excursion to Toblach, in South Tyrol. It may have been there, while he was searching in vain for the inspiration for his final movement, that he wrote down the themes for his two nocturnes among the countless other “parasitical” ideas that he made a habit of jotting down in a small notebook if they were not to be used in the work currently in hand. We know very little about the work that he did during the summer of 1904. except that by the end of August he had not only completed the Sixth Symphony but also sketched out the whole of the two Nachtmusiken. In 1905 Mahler returned to Maiernigg after another exhausting season at the Vienna Court Opera, and once again there followed ten days of torment: "I plagued myself for two weeks until I sank into gloom, as you well remember," he wrote to his wife, Alma, several years later; "then I tore off to the Dolomites. There I was led the same dance, and at last gave it up and returned home, convinced that the whole summer was lost. You were not at Krumpendorf to meet me, because I had not let you know the time of my arrival. I got into the boat to be rowed across. At the first stroke of the oars the theme (or rather the rhythm and character) of the introduction to the first movement came into my head - and in tour weeks the first, third and fifth movements were done." In this invaluable letter of 8 June 1910 Mahler wanted to remind his wife that he was incapable of writing music to order. In 1905 it had been the boatsman’s magic oarstroke that had exorcized his annual curse and allowed him to return to the Seventh Symphony. By 15 August 1905 he was able to write to his friends and announce the completion of the Seventh. As for the publication and first performance, he declared that he would wait as long as was necessary, but in the event the wait was dictated not so much by Mahler’s own resolve as by outward circumstances. Only weeks before the planned première of the Seventh on 1 September 1908, Mahler was still without a publisher and the full score was only published during the course of 1909. In Prague, where the Seventh was first performed in September 1908, the applause was respectful rather than warm, but the atmosphere of an International Exhibition celebrating the birthday of the emperor was hardly the ideal setting for the première of a work so long, so bold and so new in style. Very little evidence is at hand to help us hazard a guess at the Seventh’s "inner programme". First and foremost, of course, there is the title Nachtmusik with which Mahler headed the second and fourth movements, a title which, at first sight, seems to suggest a period remote from our own, when music was often performed in the open air. Their common title notwithstanding, the two movements are in fact utterly dissimilar. The first, on its own, is something of a paradox since, although its military character is very pronounced, it is difficult to imagine a battalion driving back night’s dusky cohorts with a military band at its head. Two of Mahler’s Dutch friends, Willem Mengelberg and Alfons Diepenbrock, confirmed that it was Rembrandt's celebrated Night Watch (a work that Mahler had admired when he saw it in the Rijksmuseum) that inspired this nocturne, but that he later insisted he had merely imagined a “patrol” advancing through a "fantastic chiaroscuro". References to the military world of Mahler’s childhood and to Des Knaben Wunderhorn are especially striking here, so that one might well consider this movement a Wunderhorn lied without words. In the case of the second Nachtmusik, Alma reveals that, while he was writing it, Mahler was haunted by the “murmuring springs” of Eichendorff’s poems and by the poet’s "German Romanticism". However disparate the individual movements may seem, the symphony’s overall structure is none the less striking in its symmetry, a symmetry that was to be repeated, with minor modifications, in both Das Lied von der Erde and the Tenth Symphony. In broad outline, it consists of two fast movements (a sonata and a rondo) framing three movements that are freer in form. As noted above, Mahler uses a more modern musical language in the Seventh Symphony than in any of his earlier works, with implacable dissonances, sudden modulations, chord progressions exploring remote tonalities, and a surfeit of notes which, at odds with harmonic theory, can none the less be justified in terms of the individual part-writing. The first movement is preceded by a slow introduction. We are immediately drawn into an atmosphere of darkness and mystery. Three sections follow: an initial march of almost funerary grandeur (I), a second march (I1), quicker and lighter, on winds supported by pizzicato strings, that will play an essential role in the succeeding Allegro and, third, a much-modified repeat of the opening section introduced by a new version of the initial theme on the trombones. The instrumental solo that launches the work is entrusted to a tenor horn - a member of the saxhorn family - with a dark, penetrating timbre. A sense of malaise and instability is engendered from the outset by the use of the unusual interval of a diminished fifth and by the fact that the theme is accented in such a way that the strong beat twice falls on a tied note. According to Mengelberg, this introduction describes night, death and the shadowy forces with which the swaggering first subject will shortly have to contend. The least that can be said is that this swagger is short-breathed: the lyrical episodes, and the second subject in particular, are so numerous and extensive that one ultimately has the impression of being confronted not by a symphonic Allegro but by a slow movement with parenthetical interpolations at a faster tempo. Closely related to the theme of the introduction, the initial subject (A) of the movement proper (Allegro risoluto, ma non troppo) owes its headstrong and somewhat misshapen character to successions of melodic fourths, which look forward to those of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony and anticipate the future collapse of the tonal system. The second subject (B) is in C major, a long, ecstatic melody still reminiscent of the world of the Kindertotenlieder and the Andante from the Sixth Symphony while also related to the extended family of ascending themes which throughout Mahler’s works symbolize his metaphysical optimism. The little march from the introduction (I1) now serves as a transition to the development section. Following a varied recapitulation of the introductions swaggering theme, the latter gradually allows itself to be subsumed by the expansive lyricism of the second subject (B). The tempo quickens, only to give way once more to a long and dreamily motionless episode, the chorale motif of which, heard on the strings and lower woodwinds, is none other than a new version of I1. Birdsong and distant fanfares reply. The second subject, B, now ushers in a new sense of ecstasy, bringing with it a return of the introductions tempo and rhythm and itself reappearing before long, thus preparing the reprise. The first Nachtmusik is also preceded by a slightly quicker introduction, after which the movement itself maintains a stability of tempo rare in Mahler’s music. A spatial effect is created by having the second of two horns playing with a mute and recalls the dialogue of the cor anglais (english horn) and offstage oboe at the beginning of the “Scène aux champs” in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. The major chord that modulates to the minor is a simple quotation of the harmonic motif from the Sixth Symphony but is here wrested of its “pessimistic” significance. The general mood of this first Nachtmusik has nothing tragic about it, in spite of the march's fateful rhythm, with its reminiscences of the Wunderhorn settings of Mahler’s Hamburg period, and a “military” dactylic rhythm borrowed from the sinister song Revelge and heard on col legno violins. There are two alternating sections, the first on the first horn (with imitative writing in the lower strings) and the second on the double basses. Like the first, this second movement also contains passages in which the musical argument comes to a halt, with fanfares and birdsong mingled at times with the cowbells from the Sixth Symphony. (Mahler gives instructions for the sound to be now closer, now more distant.) In the end the listener is disturbed by the surfeit of “symbolic” elements borrowed from such different worlds. The cello melody of the first Trio, with its brass accompaniment of chordal triplets, is one of the most blatantly “vulgar” of all Mahler’s tunes, but a more detailed examination reveals asymmetries and subtleties of every kind. In the second Trio, marked Poco meno mosso, the tender duet for the two oboes seems to herald a total change of atmosphere, but the march rhythm gains the upper hand after only a few bars. The structure is harmoniously rounded off by the return of the two initial episodes freely reworked. From the first bars of the Scherzo a feeling of disquiet is manifest, on account of the curious rhythmic instability of the opening bars, with timpani strokes on the third (weak) beat and unstressed double-bass pizzicati on the strong beat. Mechanical-sounding triplets gyrate in an icy void, almost without harmonic support. A waltz episode briefly clears the atmosphere, but its initial gracefulness soon degenerates into wild and popular merrymaking (Berlioz's Witches’ Sabbath is not far away), in which the triple rhythm is heavily, almost brutally, punched out on the brass. In the Trio, the lyrical and somewhat plaintive strains of the flute and oboe seem to re-establish a sense of calm, but scurrying quavers (eighth-notes) almost at once destroy it. A second Nachtmusik then follows. Mahler knew what he was doing when he gave a crucial role not only to the harp but also to the guitar and mandolin - three instruments which rarely play such a prominent part within a symphonic context. The insistent presence of plucked strings and their rhythmic regularity invest the movement with the character of a serenade, or rather that of a distant recollection of a serenade, slightly distorted - perhaps - by memory. It is easy to understand why Schoenberg was so fascinated by this enigmatic movement, to the extent of taking over Mahler’s guitar into his own Serenade op. 24 of 1923. Indeed, such is its ambiguity, false innocence, remote sense of nostalgia and absence of all subjectivity that it reselnbles no other movement by Mahler. The opening bars serve as an introduction, suggesting the serenader tuning his instrument. The same obsessive refrain returns between each episode, giving the form an air of simplicity and obviousness that is in every other way belied. The general tone and atmosphere remain impersonal and profoundly ambiguous, while the movement as a whole defies any clear-cut definition. A few brief passages suggest a more subjective emotion but on each occasion they are interrupted by the return of the movement’s regular rhythm and archaic-sounding accompanying figures. As to the Rondo-Finale, it is without doubt the strangest, wildest, most disconcerting and, certainly, the least popular of Mahler’s symphonic movements. He claimed that in writing it he wanted to depict “the broad light of day” and dazzling midday sun, but a streak of irony constantly transforms the merrymaking into mockery. In consequence, its outbursts of factitious good humour affirm nothing but the impossibility of frank rejoicing. The first thematic element to be heard is played on the least melodic of instruments - the timpani - and played, moreover, in a key (E minor) that is not even that of the movement as a whole. The principal theme proclaims its origins in the overture of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. After so exuberant an opening, one might expect the movement to pursue an equally boisterous course, with a divertimento or a fugato, but, instead, an abrupt change of tone (and tonality) ushers in a curious tune in A flat in which certain commentators have detected an allusion to the famous waltz from The Merry Widow. Its false innocence is out of place in such a context and confirms the sense of ambiguity familiar from Die Meistersinger, in which the learned and the comic are held in precarious balance. The listener is left permanently wondering on what level to approach the music. The most striking aspects are the sense of discontinuity in which Mahler seems on this occasion to delight, the abrupt ruptures between the different sections and what might be termed the “polyphony” of the various styles and moods, a polyphony that ultimately seems to be the movement`s essential raison d'être. At all events, the retum of the Allegro’s swaggering theme at the end of this final movement is far from consummating the definitive triumph of some symphonic hero. To fathom the meaning of this enigmatic Rondo, we need, perhaps, to refer to more recent music in which quotations, borrowings and allusions to the past constitute the principal aim. And in spite of everything, in spite of all these abrupt changes of mood, these challenges and provocations - and perhaps even because of them - the listener may become convinced, in the course of these final pages, that Mahler never wrote anything as original or as prophetic as this unloved and disconcerting Rondo. Henry-Louis de La Grange