Luogo e data di registrazione		No. 1 Studio, Abbey Road, London (Inghilterra): - ottobre 1977 (Symphony No. 1) - maggio & giugno 1978 (Symphony No. 5) - ottobre 1978 (Symphony No. 10) - maggio 1979 (Symphony No. 9) - ottobre 1980 (Symphony No. 7) Kingsway Hall, London (Inghilterra): - ottobre 1979 (Symphony No. 3) - maggio 1981 (Symphony No. 2) - maggio 1982 (Symphony No. 4) - aprile & maggio 1983 (Symphony No. 6) Walthamstow Hall & Westminster Cathedral, London (Inghilterra): - aprile & ottobre 1986 (Symphony No. 8)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producers		John Willian (Nos. 2-7, 9 & 10) David Mottley (No. 1) James MAllinson (No. 8)
	Balance Engineers		Neville Boyling (Nos. 1-5, 7, 9 & 10) John Kurlander (Nos. 6 & 8) Tony FAulkner (No. 8)
	Prime Edizione LP		EMI - ASD 3541 - (1 LP) - durata 53' 47" - (p) 1978 - ADD - (No. 1) EMI - SLS 5243 - (2 LP's) - durata 46' 30" & 42' 07" - (p) 1982 - DDD - (No. 2) EMI - SLS 5195 - (2 LP's) - durata 43' 44" & 53' 34" - (p) 1980 - DDD - (No. 3) EMI - ASD 4344 - (1 LP) - durata 54' 55" - (p) 1983 - DDD - (No. 4) EMI - SLS 5169 - (2 LP's) - durata 46' 58" & 56' 15" - (p) 1982 - ADD - (Nos. 5 & 10) EMI - SLS 1435743 - (2 LP's) - durata 36' 40" & 50' 18" - (p) 1983 - DDD - (No. 6) EMI - SLS 5238 - (2 LP's) - durata 49' 21" & 33' 05" - (p) 1981 - DDD - (No. 7) EMI - EX 27 0474 3 - (2 LP's) - durata 48' 20" & 34' 10" - (p) 1987 - DDD - (No. 8) EMI - SLS 5188 - (2 LP's) - durata 47' 05" & 38' 29" - (p) 1980 - DDD - (No. 9)
	Edizione CD		EMI Classics - 5 72941 2 - (11 CD's) - (c) 1998 - ADD/DDD
	Note		-

MAHLER - The Complete Symphonies Symphony Nos. 1-4 While almost all of Mahler’s music may be considered to some extent ‘autobiographical`, in that its emotional content relates quite directly to episodes in his life, nowhere does his personality shine forth more clearly than in the first two symphonies. The composer himself acknowledged this in a famous statement on them: ‘My whole life is contained within them: there I have set down my experience and my suffering... to anyone who knows how to listen, my whole life is illuminated, for my creativity and my very existence are so closely intertwined that I believe that were my life to flow as serenely as a brook through a meadow I would no longer be capable of composing.' Thus, while in later years he was to play down the importance of such autobiographical reference, there can be no doubt that at the time of their composition, Mahler’s first two symphonies were intended as expressions of his deepest personal feelings. Work on the First Symphony began as early as 1884, but Mahler’s activities as a conductor in Kassel, Prague, and Leipzig left him so little time for composition that it was not completed until 1888. By this time he had been appointed director of the Budapest Opera and it was here that its premiere took place the following year. However, the new work, described on the programme as a ‘Symphonic Poem in Two Parts', was not well received, and in an effort to make his intentions clearer, for its next performance in Hamburg Mahler provided a more detailed programme. It was on this occasion that the title ‘Titan' (after the novel by Jean Paul) was added, as well as programmatic descriptions for the individual movements; these were further grouped into ‘From the Days of Youth’ (movements 1-3) and ‘Commedia humane’ (movements 4 & 5). In this version, the first movement and scherzo were separated by a slow Andante movement entitled ‘Blumine’, later discarded, possibly because Mahler considered it too insubstantial to balance the other movements. When revising the score for further performances in Weimar and Vienna, Mahler took the opportunity to refine his programme, elaborating on several points. However, its details are less important than its overall theme, that of the ardent hero, whose romantic affair is charted from youthful idealism, through tragic reality, to final triumph in the face of adversity. The immediate inspiration for the symphony, as for the Lieder eines fanrenden Gesellen from which some musical material is derived, was the composer's passionate involvement with the singer Johanna Richter, though he was later to claim that ‘the symphony begins at a point beyond the love affair on which it is based'. Equally important perhaps was the stimulus which Mahler found in Nature and which he expressed not only in the pastoralism of the first movement's opening and in the bucolic stolidity of the scherzo, but also in the sinister funeral march, prompted by his recollection of an illustration familiar from Austrian fairy-tale books, ‘The Hunter’s Burial'. The violent opening to the finale of the First Symphony was characterised by the romposer as ‘the sudden outburst of despair from a heart most deeply wounded’, representing ‘the hero completely abandoned and in fearful struggle with the world’. At the beginning of the Second Symphony, in a movement entitled ‘Funeral Rites’, we encounter our hero once again, now being conveyed to the grave while his life, with all its hopes and ambitions, trials and tribulations, is reviewed for the last time. Though separated from the First Symphony by some six years, the Second thus shares many of the same emotional impulses, and its programme was likewise redefined by the composer during the course of its early performances. In all of its formulations, however, the same central questions dominate: what is the purpose of life? why do we suffer? is life anything more than one huge, terrifying joke? And, most importantly, ‘is all this only a desolate dream, or does this life and this death have any meaning? Having explored these questions fully in the weighty first movement, Mahler treats the second as a kind of contrasting intermezzo. Thus we are presented with an echo of long-past days, with a vision of the loved one from beyond the grave, recalled as in the time ‘when the sun still shone on him'. However, the apparent senselessness of mortal existence is brought home in chilling fashion in the scherzo, explained by the composer thus: ‘When you see a dance from a long distance away... and without being able to hear the music, because you lack its rhythmic "key", the movements of the couples seem confused and meaningless. Thus must you imagine how, for someone who has lost himself and his happiness, the world turns into a concave mirror and appears insane. The scherzo ends with the fearful outcry of a soul martyred in this fashion.' In the last two movements a reconciliation between Man and his creator is effected and the despair and nihilism of the scherzo countered by the hope of salvation. The fourth movement sets a poem from the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn expressing the ancient longing for mystic union with God: ‘the questioning and wrestling of the soul concerning God and its own eternal existence'. This theme is further developed in the finale, for which Mahler turned to the Auferstehungsode (Resurrection Ode) of the eighteenth-century poet Klopstock, the duality of whose religious poetry has justly earned him the epithet of the ‘German Milton’. At first, it is the terrifying vision of the Day of Judgement which is presented: the end of all living 'things is upon us and the full horror of the Apocalypse has come to pass. But gradually the cry for mercy and forgiveness prevails, all senses desert us, and we lose consciousness at the approach of the eternal spirit. Both in its time-scale and through the huge orchestral resoures which it demanded (including ten horns, eight trumpets, and a battery of percussion), the Second Symphony represented a notable advance on the proportions of the First Symphony. Although Mahler reduced slightly the size of the orchestra for his Third Symphony, he continued the process of expansion by making it longer than the Second Symphony and employing the vocal resources at his command yet more imaginatively. Composed during his years as director of the municipal theatre in Hamburg, it was not performed until 1902, by which time he had reached the peak of his fame as a conductor, occupying the prestigious position of director of the Court Opera in Vienna. Despite its enormous scale, it is a uniquely personal testament and in its way just as 'autobiographical’ as the first two symphonies. Mahler‘s years at Hamburg had been arduous, leaving him no time for composition during the winter: hence all his composing was done during the summer months, when he retreated to the small village of Steinbach am Attersee in Austria. It is thus not surprising that the essential character of the Third Symphony should be that of a paean to Nature, though one conceived in peculiarly Mahlerian terms. Writing in August 1895 to his friend Fritz Löhr he said, ‘My new symphony will last about an hour and a half... the emphasis on my own personal feelings about life accords with the particular ideas contained in it’. Shortly before its completion he offered further thoughts to the famous soprano Anna von Mildenburg: ‘Just imagine a work of such magnitude that it actually mirrors the whole world - one is, so to speak, only an instrument upon which the universe plays... my symphony will be something whose like the world has never heard before!.., in it, the whole of Nature finds a voice.' Once again, Mahler provided a variety of programmatic descriptions for the individual movements, prefacing the whole with the title ‘Die fröhliche Wissenschaft’ (The Joyful Knowledge), a deliberate reference to the philosophical tract of Nietzsche whose similarly optimistic outlook on the purpose of earthly existence it shares. In the first movement, ‘Summer marches in', it is the awakening of Pan and the creation of Life from inanimate, primitive matter which is described, a process mirrored in the music by the building up of ideas from mere thematic scraps. The following four movements are all concerned with the revelations of various aspects of Nature to the composer: ‘What the flowers tell me’ (a quaint minuet); ‘What the animals tell me' (a lively scherzo); ‘What the night tells me’ (a setting for contralto of Nietzsche’s ‘Midnight Song’) and ‘What the morning bells tell me' (a setting of the poem ‘Three Angels' from Des Knaben Wunderhorn). But it is for the finale, and for his depiction of ‘What love tells me’, that Mahler reserves his most original stroke: ‘this collects together my feelings about all [love’s] conditions; it does not progress without deeply painful episodes, but these are gradually resolved into a blissful confidence, or Joyful Knowledge'. Adumbrating the valedictory threnody of his Ninth Symphony, Mahler chose to finish with a sonorous, heart-felt Adagio movement in which the glory of Nature is celebrated and revered. Originally, it was also intended that there should be a seventh movement to the Third Symphony, to be entitled ‘What the child tells me’. For this Mahler planned to re-work a setting he had begun as early as 1892 of ‘Heavenly Life', one of the longest poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. However, this plan was soon dropped, and the song was instead re-used as the finale to the Fourth Symphony, whose premiere actually took place a year before that of the Third Symphony, in Munich in 1901. Although linked in many ways to the works which preceded it, not least by its setting of texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn and its use of voices, the Fourth Symphony, with its reduced scale and textural clarity, marks a watershed in Mahler's career as a symphonist, and the effective end of his ‘first period’ as a composer. Significantly, it was shortly before the completion of the Fourth Symphony that Mahler took the drastic step of rescinding the programmes to all of his earlier works, arguing that they should now be interpreted and evaluated more abstractly. However, when asked in 1901 by Ludwig Schiedermair to give some explanation of the basic concepts behind the Fourth Symphony, Mahler was not slow to respond, authorising his assistant, Bruno Walter, to outline a brief synopsis: this also suggests, incidentally, some relationship between the inspiration for the Fourth Symphony and the ideas behind the earlier works. ‘The first three movements... could be seen to represent a heavenly life: in the first... Man becomes acquainted with it; here unprecedented serenity reigns... a remarkable light and a remarkable mirth. The second movement could carry the description "Friend Hein strikes up for the dance". Death scrapes his fiddle in a really unusual manner and plays us up to heaven, while the third movement could be called “Saint Ursula herself laughs along with it": so cheerful is this celestial realm that even the most serious of the saints laughs. When Man, now amazed, asks what all this means, he is answered by a child in the fourth, final movement: that is the Heavenly Life’. Despite its serious message, and the deep religiosity - if somewhat sentimental - of its finale, the Fourth Symphony is often considered as being markedly less weighty in its conception than the two symphonies which precede it. This view is especially strengthened, it is suggested, by the exploitation of a strong pastoral element, seen at its most effective in the jingling sleigh-bells at the beginning of the first movement and the rustic fiddling of the scherzo. Yet to describe the Fourth Symphony as a ‘light’ work fundamentally misunderstands the nature of Mahler’s talent. No composer was better able to mask profound thoughts behind apparently unsophisticated gestures and it is in the Fourth Symphony that this quality, soon to become one of the quintessential hallmarks of Mahler’s style, is developed to the full for the first time. © Ewan West, 1992 Symphony No.5 Mahler began work on his Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1901. He was forty-one and newly married, and a remarkable sea-change had clearly taken place since the completion of the Fourth Symphony the year before. Perhaps his new responsibilities drove him at last to face up to Life. Whatever it was, the second-hand influences that had hitherto served as his creative fuel - Schopenhauer’s pessimism, Klopstock’s salvation ethic, Nietzsche’s pantheism, and the child-like imaginings of ‘Wunderhorn' - were ruthlessly jettisoned in favour of uncompromising reality. Alma Mahler said of the symphony: ‘I heard in it the relation of adult man to everything that lives, heard him cry to mankind out of his loneliness, cry to man, to home, to God, saw him lying prostrate, heard him laugh his defiance and felt his calm triumph.' Certainly those who knew Mahler swore that the symphony was a ‘speaking likeness', which may be why he revised it so conscientiously after the first rehearsals in 1904 right up to 1909, refining it and shedding anything that may have obscured his vision of himself. The finished portrait, however, is of a man deeply divided, in whom tragedy and joy remain for ever separate and apparently irreconcilable. The five movements fall naturally into three groups (I-II; III; IV-V) and the tonality progresses from C sharp minor to D major; from foreboding to confidence perhaps? The first is a dark and fearful funeral march beginning with one of those menacing trumpet calls remembered from an unhappy childhood near the barracks at Iglau (Jihlava). Against this and its accompanying sombre tread a long string melody unwinds, closely related to ‘Der Tambourg'sell', a contemporary song about a drummer boy being marched to execution for desertion. The trio section, heard first in B flat minor as a wild, distraught outcry, returns in A minor, in sad and tortured anticipation of the next movement. The march comes to a forceful climax in which a three-note phrase, first heard early in the movement, begins to assume importance and eventually to become a pivotal element in Mahler’s symphonic argument. The march then dies away in muted echoes of the opening trumpet call. In the second movement, Stürmisch bewegt, mit grösster Vehemenz (Stormy, with utmost vehemence), all the elements of the first movement return in a mood of violent outrage. Fragments of the march recur in the slower sections but, more significantly, the three-note phrase reemerges, first allied to a consoling quotation from the funeral march, then in one of those trite march-like tunes Mahler used to such ironic effect, and finally as a noble chorale in D major, the key which will dominate the remainder of the symphony. But this optimistic mood quickly subsides, and Part One ends with a despairing final quotation of the phrase, now in A minor. This, though, signals the end of tragedy. Part Two, a long central Ländler with an important horn solo, is a complete volteface. The phrase from the Adagio, translated from its sad A minor, returns in glowing, confident D major. In contrast to earlier preoccupations with death and protest, this is life-affirming - an all-embracing dance of joy punctuated by reflective and nostalgic episodes, and culminating in exuberant exchanges of horns echoing across the landscape. Part Three, consisting of the two final movements, begins with the famous Adagietto. Visconti, in his film Death in Venice, appears to have seen it as ‘death' music. In the context of the symphony, however, it suggests a different kind of withdrawal, a contemplative interval of reconstruction in the midst of a turbulent life. Scored for strings and harp only, it is the most popular of all Mahler’s works. The by now familiar phrase, heard three times, provides the climax which translates the music from its serene tonic key of F major to a new, ecstatic G flat major. The Adagietto merges directly into the Rondo-Finale, a buoyant, confident sonata rondo with three episodes. Its main theme, announced by the horns, is prefaced by an introduction played by solo oboe (alternating with clarinet), horn, bassoon, and violin. This little piece of chamber music serves to remind us of Mahler’s fastidiousness as an orchestrator and of his peculiar sensitivity to colour and texture. The first episode (Grazioso, in A major) appears on the strings; the second, again in A major, is a robust horn tune later treated contrapuntally, and the last a quotation from the Adagietto, speeded up and knitted into an increasingly triumphant coda crowned by a great brass chorale. The symphony ends in an exultant mêlée made up of all the most important elements of the movement. © Kenneth Dommett, 1992 Symphonies Nos.6-8 Mahler’s symphonies can be grouped in a number of ways, but it is illuminating to regard the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth as an ensemble, without suggesting that they were in any way conceived by the composer as a triptych. On the contrary, the composition of each of Mahler’s symphonies was such a draining spiritual experience that it seems to have demanded a philosophical reappraisal at each turn. The sixth symphony, composed in 1903-04, depicts a titanic struggle with death; originally designated the 'Tragic' by the composer, it is a pessimistic representation of humanity’s futile battle against fate. The Seventh, composed in 1904-05, has no programme, and its weird, otherworldly atmosphere presents an inscrutable, unapproachable front, as though its composer could not yet bear to look the world in the face again after unleashing such catastrophic forces in his previous symphony. Having regained his equilibrium, Mahler embarked on one of his mightiest symphonies of all, a work whose monumentality matched that of the Second and Third. Utterly different from its immediate predecessors in its essential optimism, the Eighth, composed in 1906 can be seen as a comprehensive response to the nihilism of the Sixth, left unresolved by the ambivalence of the Seventh. The confrontation with death represented by the Sixth is both personal and universal. The three mighty hammerblows in the finale seemed, to MahIer and his wife Alma, a fearful prognostication of tragedies to come. And, indeed, in the year following the premiere in 1906, fate did strike three major blows: Mahler’s enforced resignation from the Vienna Opera, the death of his four-year-old daughter Maria, and, finally, the diagnosis of his own fatal heart condition. l\/lahler superstitiously removed the final hammerblow from his score, though it is restored by some conductors. This is no morbid self-pity or wallowing in grief, however. Rather, Mahler is railing against the harsh fate that awaits us all, against the ‘dying of the light’. An imagined ‘hero’ does battle against Death on our behalf. But the Grim Reaper can only be defied, not ultimately defeated: the hero struggles fiercely for us but is vanquished. The symphony opens with one of those dark, foreboding marches in which Mahler specializes, but the second subject, when it eventually arrives, is a passionate, soaring theme which, according to the composer, represented Alma. Each subject in turn reaches a climax, and the march returns in the development section with grotesque woodwind trills and xylophone. In an extraordinary passage of calm, visionary music that seems to depict an imagined existence far beyond the tribulations of this world, distant cowbells - ‘the last terrestrial sounds penetrating into the remote solitude of mountain peaks', as Mahler called them - are heard. The order of the next two movements is a matter of some dispute, reflecting Mahler’s own uncertainty on the issue. The first published edition of the symphony placed the scherzo before the Andante, as in the present recording. But Mahler reversed the order, placing the Andante first, for the premiere given under his direction. Moreover, the work was subsequently published twice during Mahler’s lifetime with the movements in that order. Later, however Mahler returned to his original conception. The more traditional placing of the slow movement (i.e. before the scherzo) allows a greater variety of dynamics and temperament between the movements. On the other hand, the alternative ordering has a preferable tonal scheme in its favour and when the more tranquil Andante is deferred until after the two vigorous fast movements the build-up of intensity is undeniably powerful. A further reason for placing the scherzo before the Andante is that it is, in a sense, a continuation of the first movement. After the epic life-and-death battle of the massive Allegro, the scherzo takes up the cudgels in a spirit of dogged determination and snarling defiance: insidious woodwind trills and rasping brass interjections delineate a scenario of turmoil and horror. A contrasting, childlike trio alternates twice with the scherzo. According to Alma’s reminiscence, this was a depiction of ‘the unrhythmical games of the two little children, tottering in zigzags over the sand. Ominously the childish voices became more and more tragic, and at the end died out in a whirnper'. The chronology suggests that the two little children observed by Mahler were not his own - one was unborn in the summer of 1903, when the scherzo was composed, and the other scarcely even at the tottering age - but the image is none the less poignant for that. The Andante is a gentle movement, rustic in mood and providing a long-sought, if only temporary, haven from the turbulence of the previous movements. It is in rondo form, and the first episode brings back the cowbells (they reappear in the finale too) in a further intimation of heavenly peace. The grim battle is joined once again in the finale, which begins with a sombre introduction. The main Allegro is another march, a forced march undertaken with iron will and gritted teeth. Any slender hope of a victorious outcome is crushed by the fearful hammerblows, and the work ends in doom and despair. The Seventh has never enjoyed the popularity of Mahler’s other symphonies and it is not difficult to see why. It generally lacks the lyrical warmth and lush textures of the other works, and at times its eccentricities seem forbidding and perverse. Nevertheless, the Seventh has a stylistic integrity of sorts, and, with the arguable exception of the last movement, a consistency of mood. The world inhabited by the Seventh is an unearthly, nightmarish one, a world of phantoms and eerie apparitions. The first movement has an Adagio introduction featuring a funerary tattoo rhythm, against which various thematic ideas of importance later in the movement are expounded. The main section of the movement is launched with powerful, thrusting march rhythms, generating an energy which is to sustain the movement as a whole. The second subject is more ingratiating, more effusive in characteristically Mahlerian vein. But it is the strident first subject that dominates the development section, at least until the flow is interrupted by one of Mahler’s visionary episodes, in which high string tremolos, chorale and fanfare fragments combine to evoke a sphere of celestial bliss. The final, recapitulatory section is a bracing resolution of the conflicts set up earlier. The agonies and traumas of the Sixth Symphony are no longer in evidence, though the final E major victory gesture is hard-won. One of the most striking things about this movement is its wildly original scoring, sometimes bordering on the bizarre. That, taken together with the rebarbative nature of the thematic material, raises the curtain on a macabre world to be explored more fully in the three middle movements. The second movement (which, like the fourth, is entitled Nachtmusik) conjures up a supernatural atmosphere. The spirits that stalk abroad in this ‘Night Music' are neither particularly friendly, nor especially malevolent - more mysterious, elusive. At the opening, horn calls answer one another from near and far, followed by rippling trills and arpeggios. An idiosyncratic marching tune is announced on horns and cellos, later giving way to a more lyrlcally expansive theme also introduced by the cellos. These ideas are all developed and combined - the reappearance of the horn calls enhanced by the sound of distant cowbells - until, after long trills on flutes and violins, the music mysteriously peters out. In the third-movement scherzo we are evidently still in a nocturnal spirit world: the scene could be that of Walpurgis Night. The first theme heard is on muted strings - a weird effect - and one can almost see the leering grins on the faces of the spirits as they flash by. The other principal theme is a hectic waltz: not the elegant ballroom model, but an uncouth parody of it. The second Nachtmusik (fourth movement) is marked Andante amoroso and opens with warbling clarinets against a gentle guitar and harp accompaniment (later a mandolin too is heard). It is a movement of typically Mahlerian effusiveness, though occasional dissonant jabs and eerie timbres remind one of what has gone before. The Rondo-Finale begins in breezy outdoor mood with fanfare flourishes. Principal and subsidiary ideas follow in somewhat chaotic profusion, with more than one reminiscence of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. Occasional elements of the grotesque obtrude - ironic woodwind trills and so forth - but for the most part the progress is one of driving, relentless vigour, with perhaps a sense of desperation about the rejoicing. The mood is sustained right to the end, though a spectral shadow haunts the penultimate bar - a sharp diminuendo on a brass chord - before the final crash. The Eighth Symphony, nicknamed the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ on account of the gigantic forces employed (there were indeed over a thousand participants in the first performance under Mahler), sweeps away the dark forebodings of the Sixth and the demonic ambiguities of the Seventh with a magniloquent setting of the medieval Catholic hymn Veni creator spiritus forming Part 1 of the work, followed by a setting of the final scene of Goethe’s Faust forming Part 2. Part 1 is a huge symphonic first movement that includes a double fugue; Part 2 comprises, in effect, the traditional Adagio, scherzo and finale. The first part opens with an exuberant choral outburst of devout enthusiasm, and then further thematic ideas are introduced by the soloists, led by the soprano. The development section gets under way unobtrusively, but an unmissable event occurs at ‘Accende lumen sensibus’, when soloists and chorus together make an impassioned plea for illumination and love. The section is launched by a palpable lurch up a semitone into E major - the symphony as a whole is firmly rooted in E flat major - and leads directly into a march and a double fugue, a passage that is thrilling and invigorating throughout. A further lurch into D flat major marks the beginning of the coda, where the Gloria is sung by the boys' choir, joined by the full choral forces. The final pages bring the hymn to a gloriously triumphant conclusion. Although based on the same thematic material as Part 1, the second part is immediately striking for its contrast in mood and idiom. Where Part 1 was reverential and affirmative, Part 2 opens mysteriously: an atmospheric orchestral introduction giving way to the fragmented utterances of holy anchorites, high in the mountains. Pater ecstaticus and Pater profundus develop and complete this section, which is followed by the ‘scherzo’, in which angels, (women's and boys’ voices) bear Faust's soul upwards (‘Gerettet ist das edle Glied’). Doctor Marianus joins in, initially over the chorus of angels, singing the praises of the ‘Queen of Heaven” (Mater Gloriosa or the Virgin Mary). The finale is begun (without a break) in hushed tones by an equally awestruck chorus. A penitent (solo soprano) is heard with the chorus and is followed by three further penitents, each in turn making her supplication. Now Gretchen is heard, supplicating the Virgin on Faust’s behalf. Mater Gloriosa summons Gretchen to the higher spheres, whither Faust may follow. A further ecstatic eulogy from Doctor Marianus leads to the final sublime chorus: a setting of Goethe's resonant lines describing how the ‘everwomanly’ leads us to the higher spheres where all imperfections are corrected, all mysteries revealed. The chorus begins in an expectant whisper and builds steadily to a stupendous climax: a statement of blazing intensity and conviction, expressing Mahler’s new-found confidence after the uncertainties of the previous two symphonies. © Barry Millington, 1992 Symphonies Nos.9 & 10 A series of personal disasters in 1907 felled Mahler ‘as a tree is felled’. The Eighth Symphony promised assuagement, but the period of regeneration was brief and Mahler’s remaining years were haunted by depression and superstition. A morbid preoccupation with the fatal associations of a ninth symphony (Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner) drove the ailing composer to try to cheat Fate by pretending that Das Lied von der Erde was really his Ninth and that the Ninth Symphony was actually the Tenth. In both, disillusionment, irony and a degree of nihilism new even to Mahler expunged the sublimity of the Eighth; and the unfinished Tenth Symphony, left as sketches at the composer's death in 1911, seemed to continue this Virgilian descent into a personal purgatory. But when the late Deryck Cooke reconstructed the work it was seen to be the beginning of another upward curve on the anguished graph of the composer's life. In 1907, his ‘annus diabolicus', Mahler was driven to resign from the Vienna Opera by the machinations of an anti-Semitic cabal, his favourite child, Maria (‘Putzi'), died, his wife suffered a breakdown, and he was found to have an incurable heart disease. Not surprisingly, these disasters plunged him once again into despair from which even the fervent aspiration of the Eighth Symphony could not arouse him. By the subterfuge already referred to Mahler persuaded himself that he had circumvented the influence of the malign number, so the purely instrumental symphony begun in 1909 was, as far as he was concerned, his Tenth. It was completed at Toblach in the summer of 1910 but was not performed until 1912 when Bruno Walter played it in Vienna. Outwardly it is an almost conventionally planned symphony in four movements for a large but not excessive orchestra. Mahler again employs the progressive tonality that he used in the Fifth, but this time the ‘key-colour’ changes from light to dark, from D major to D flat major, though here ‘light’ is a decidedly relative term. For as long as the full scope of the uncompleted Tenth Symphony remained unsuspected the Ninth was understandably regarded as the epilogue to Mahler’s career. But with the publication of Deryck Cooke’s reconstruction of the Tenth in 1964, the Ninth was seen to be the centrepiece ofa new trilogy beginning with Das Lied von der Erde; a pilgrim’s progress from Life’s fickle pleasures, through the Valley of Death and Purgatory to the calm acceptance of the Divine Will. It is the Ninth Symphony which chronicles Mahler’s encounter with Death. After the premiere Alban Berg observed that the first movement was ‘permeated by premonitions of death’, but it is in the two central movements, in music of unparalleled cynicism, bitterness and despair, that premonitions become awful fact. This is the symphony in which Mahler’s influence on his successors is most clearly discernible. His unflinching view of Man adrift in an uncaring world seems to distil the unhappy spirit of the twentieth century, and it has inspired composers as diverse as Webern and Shostakovich, Honegger and Britten, Hindemith and Schoenberg, who have all drawn on his unique, and sometimes bizarre, conjunction of the tragic and the grotesque, no less than on his brilliant use of the orchestra. The first movement, Andante comodo, is one of the most impressive Mahler ever wrote. It occupies about a third of the entire symphony and opens with a short introduction, a slow, plangent tolling of harps echoing the end of Das Lied von der Erde. There are two principal ideas, both introduced on the first violins. The first, in D major, is linked to the ‘Farewell’ motif from Beethoven’s ‘Les Adieux' sonata, and recurs - the movement being a sonata-rondo - as a slow, sad parody of Johann Strauss’s Freut euch des Lebens (Enjoy Life). The second, in D minor, emerges hesitantly from a background derived from the introduction, but grows in importance, and the movement resolves into a series of encounters between the two, a kaleidoscope of anguish, dissonant menace and exhausted despair. A final climax Mit höchster Gewalt (With greatest force), leads to a funereal march with a limping gait which Bruno Walter said represented Mahler’s own. The D major theme returns in a distorted form, and the movement ends with fragments of themes dying away, inconsolably. The second movement, in C, is a scherzo in the form of a Ländler with two trios. Mahler often used this dance form as a vehicle for ironic or sardonic comment, but here it has become a deranged mockery of itself; the rhythm stumbles about, the themes are simple to the point of banality, and the hollow orchestration, curiously suggestive of the gaunt models of Egon Schiele, emphasises the sense of futility. The first trio section, in E major, is a parody waltz; the second, in F major, begins by evoking a mood of nostalgia recalling happier times but is soon overwhelmed by the return of the Ländler. The third movement, Rondo-Burleske, is a vicious - and bewildering - satire. Mahler said he dedicated it to ‘his brothers in Apollo', a contemptuous reference to those who claimed he could not write true counterpoint. The key is A minor, the form a masterly double fugue. Mahler’s handling of thematic fragmentation here was clearly not lost on Webern either, but it is the frantic mood that excites comment. The short stabbing phrases, acrid dissonances and manic tempo combine to induce an overwhelming feeling of chaos and dementia, an impression heightened by a short interlude in D major, a brief calm in the eye of this emotional hurricane. The Adagio finale concludes the downward trend of tonality, moving a semitone away from the opening D major to D flat. It is based on a long, hymn-like melody fashioned from transmuted material from the previous movement. All passion spent, the mood is quiet resignation. Inevitably this Adagio invites comparison with the ‘Abschied' of Das Lied von der Erde. That looks back longingly to a mystic past; this, on the contrary, looks with sad acceptance forward beyond the abyss to the Adagio which opens the Tenth Symphony. This, the only movement of the work Mahler completed before his death, is in F sharp major/minor. It begins where the Adagio of the Ninth leaves off, but as it unfolds a new, more positive mood emerges. There are some dissonant passages, but the bleak despair and manic posturings of the previous symphony have been vanquished, and a progressively triumphant progress leads from darkness back to light, a progress confirmed, admittedly at second hand, by the reconstructed four movements which make up the rest of Gustav Mahler’s last symphony. © Kenneth Dommett, 1992