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Violin Concerto Albano Maria Johannes Berg was born in Vienna on February 9, 1885,
and died there on December 24, 1935. Berg began composing his Violin Concerto in late April of 1935, substantially
completed it by the middle of July, and finished writing out the complete
score on August 11. The first public performance was given by violinist Louis Krasner
with the Orquesta Pau Casals, conducted by Hermann Scherchen (substituting
at the last minute for Anton Webern), at the International Society for
Contemporary Music Festival in Barcelona. Berg's score calls for an orchestra of two flutes (both doubling piccolo),
two oboes (second doubling English horn), three clarinets (third doubling
alto saxophone) and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four
horns, two trumpets, two trombones (tenor and bass), tuba, timpani, bass
drum, cymbals, snare drum, low tam-tam, high gong, triangle, and stings. Joseph Szigeti was the first to play the work with the San Francisco Symphony, with Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting, in May 1949.
That spring, the composer received word that on April 22 Manon Gropius,
the eighteen-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler-Werfel (widow of Gustav)
and the well-known architect Walter Gropius, had died of polio. Berg had
adored the girl since her earliest childhood, and, harnessing the creative
energy that tragedy can inspire, he resolved to compose a musical memorial.
"Before this terrible year has passed," he wrote in a letter
to Alma, "you and Franz [Werfel, her current husband] will be able
to hear, in the form of a score which I shall dedicate 'to the memory
of an angel,' that which I feel and today cannot express." He immediately
turned his entire focus on the violin concerto, left off work on the final
act of Lulu (which would remain incomplete), and moved to a summer
cottage on the Wörthersee. It was at the Wörthersee that Mahler
had built a summer getaway-at Maiernigg, on the lake's southern shore.
And, as Berg was delighted to point out, it was at the Wörthersee
that Brahms had written much of his Violin Concerto, while staying
at a hotel in Pörtschach, on the northern side. Letters to friends make it clear that Berg worked feverishly on the concerto,
so much so that he substantially finished it within two and a half months,
though he would take another month to finish writing out the full score.
Normally Berg required two years to write a large-scale work; the Violin
Concerto was completed in less than four months. At the head of the manuscript
he inscribed "To the Memory of an Angel," just as he had promised.
The name of Louis Krasner was also appended to the score as dedicatee. This piece, Berg's only solo concerto, evolved according to the twelve-tone
principles that the composer had learned from Arnold Schoenberg and championed
as only a great composer could-which is to say, by using those principles
as a means towards articulating a unique world of expression. Within his
tone row (that is, the series of twelve pitches on which a composition
is based), Berg chooses to emphasize those pitches that correspond to
the open strings of the violin, yielding a harmonic basis that makes perfect
sense in terms of the forces involved. These are intoned at the very outset
of the concerto. In fact, many nineteenth-century violin concertos, including
those of Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky, had settled their tonic on
the note D, a note at the heart of the instrument's tuning-not such a
different tactic from Berg's. The concerto's most astonishing section is doubtless its conclusion: a set of variations on the Lutheran chorale "Es ist genug! Herr wenn es Dir gefällt" ("It is enough! Lord, if it pleases You"). After the piece was already well along, Berg discovered that the opening notes of that chorale, which he knew through its harmonization in Bach's Cantata No. 60, corresponded exactly to the final four notes of his tone row. The chorale melody is striking in that it begins with a succession of three whole tones, which together describe a tritone (the interval of the augmented fourth), anciently forbidden as the "devil in music." As such, it is not a particularly "comfortable" melody in the context of traditional tonic-centered tonality, and even Bach's harmonization had to reach in unaccustomed directions to harness it. Berg quickly realized that his current project enjoyed not just a musical connection to the chorale, but a poetic one as well, since the text of the chorale supremely expressed an emotion he was wanting to express about Manon Gropius's inevitable resignation to untimely death:
The concerto occupies two movements, each in two parts, in the overall
sequence of Andante-Allegretto / Allegro-Adagio (or, as Berg described
it in a letter to Schoenberg two weeks after the piece was completed,
Preludium-Scherzo / Cadenza-Chorale Variations). Berg told his biographer
Willi Reich that in the Andante-Allegretto movement he "had tried
to translate the young girl's characteristics into musical characters."
A nostalgic, dreamy quality pervades the first section, whose improvisational
spirit belies its rigid musical organization. The ensuing Allegretto recalls
a more cheerful aspect of Manon, even to the point of Berg's introducing
a Carinthian folk melody, played by solo horn. Following this pastoral reverie, the second movement seems macabre and
nightmarish. It begins in energetic, rhapsodic phrases that lead to a
musical climax. This introduces the chorale melody, which sounds almost
shocking in its twelve-tone context, followed by two variations on the
melody. Berg quotes it in Bach's own harmonization, with clarinets mimicking
a Bachian organ, though with a filigree of dissonance wafting over it.
In the score, Berg instructs the soloist to assume leadership over the
violin and viola sections "audibly and visibly" as the movement
progresses, and asks those orchestral string players to successively join
and resist the soloist "in just as demonstrative a manner,"
eventually dropping away so that only the soloist is playing. Following
this musical and dramatic struggle, a metaphor for the struggle of the
living soul against the insistence of death, the Carinthian folk song
wafts through again, this time as if from a distance, and then the chorale
appears one last time. In the final bars, the solo violin, as if solving
the puzzle presented by the two disparate approaches to harmony, articulates
the entire twelve-tone row simple and unadorned, from its lowest note
to its highest, three octaves above. As the violin ascends in this ultimate
gesture, the other instruments of the orchestra descend to their lowest
registers, a world away from the soloist. In a tragic turn that Berg could not have foreseen, the Violin Concerto
was to be his last completed work. Shortly after composing it, the composer
was annoyed by an abscess on his back, presumably the result of an insect
bite. Treatment proved ineffective and blood poisoning ensued. Berg died
at the end of the year in which he composed his concerto, a day before
Christmas. Years later, Krasner, who had gone on to play the work's premiere in 1936, recalled how he had visited Berg as the composer was engrossed in the project. "A short time later," Krasner reported, "Berg sent me all the pages of his manuscript. It was in a roll, neatly addressed by him and marked: Value, 50 francs." Succeeding generations would dispute that modest valuation. Berg's Violin Concerto cuts deep into the human psyche, and it stands near the summit of its genre. The philosopher Theodor Adorno, a one-time Berg pupil and a critical but appreciative listener to his teacher's music, pondered his own reaction to this work: "In some of its simplest, intellectually most irritating passages, for instance the two-fold quotation of the Carinthian folk song, the Violin Concerto acquires an almost heartbreaking emotive power unlike almost anything else Berg ever wrote. He was granted something accorded only the very greatest artists: access to that sphere, most comparable with Balzac, in which the lower realm, the not quite fully formed, suddenly becomes the highest. . . . The way, however, in which the imagerie of the nineteenth century stirs within Berg is forward-looking. Nowhere in this music is it a matter of restoring a familiar idiom or of alluding to a childhood to which he seeks a return. Berg's memory embraced death. Only in the sense that the past is retrieved as something irretrievable, through its own death, does it become part of the present."
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Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor Gustav Mahler was born at Kalischt, near Humpolec, Bohemia, on July
7, 1860, and died in Vienna on May 18, 1911. Mahler composed the Symphony No. 5 in 1901 02 and led the first performance
with the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne on October 18, 1904, having
conducted a read through with the Vienna Philharmonic earlier that year.
Frank van der Stucken conducted the first American performance with the
Cincinnati Symphony on March 25, 1905. The score calls for four flutes (two doubling piccolo), three oboes
and English horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and
contrabassoon, six horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani,
cymbals, bass drum, bass drum with cymbals attached, snare drum, triangle,
glockenspiel, tam-tam, slapstick, harp, and strings. The San Francisco Symphony first played the work, with Josef Krips conducting, in May 1970. IN THE FIRST MOVEMENT of Mahler's Fourth Symphony (1899 1901), a sunny
exposition leads to a surprisingly shadowed development. Its explosive
climax is quickly stifled, and, across the still unsettled muttering and
ticking of a few instruments, a trumpet calls the orchestra to order with
a quietly insistent fanfare. It is a variant of that fanfare-at the same
pitch even-that opens the Symphony No. 5. There is no obvious explanation
for this link, but to contend that no explanation is needed will not do.
The fanfare, though it comes so close to being a commonplace, is too arresting,
and it is too critically placed in both symphonies. Let us speculate.
In 1901, at the juncture of completing the Fourth Symphony and beginning
the Fifth, Mahler was acutely conscious of taking a new path (as Beethoven
had put it just a hundred years before). Perhaps, as he set out, he wanted
to show that the seed for the new was to be found in the old. In what sense is the Fifth Symphony new? After a run of eccentric symphonies,
Mahler comes back to a more "normal" design, one that could
be described as concentric as well as symmetrical. In the First Symphony,
the orchestra plays long passages from Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer,
and the Second, Third, and Fourth symphonies actually include singing.
While the Fifth also alludes to three of Mahler's songs, it is essentially
an instrumental conception. This movement toward the purely orchestral
is tied to another change in Mahler's work. Except for a few brief departures,
Mahler for thirteen years had set only texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
But in July 1901, he composed his last Wunderhorn song and turned
to the writings of Friedrich Rückert, setting six of his poems that
month and next. With that change of literary inspiration, a certain kind of "open"
Wunderhorn lyricism disappears from Mahler's symphonies. The music
becomes leaner and harder. About this time Mahler acquired the complete
edition of Bach and, at least partly in consequence of his excited discovery
of what was in those volumes, his textures become more polyphonic. But
this new "intensified polyphony," as Bruno Walter called it,
demanded a new orchestral style, and this did not come easily. Mahler
was always a pragmatist in orchestration, tending to revise in response
to his experience conducting his own works or hearing them under a trusted
colleague like Willem Mengelberg in Amsterdam, but never did he find he
had so thoroughly miscalculated a sound as in the first version of the
Fifth, with its apparently deafening barrage of percussion. He made alterations
until at least 1907 (his final version, which is what you hear at this
concert, was published for the first time in 1964 by the International
Gustav Mahler Society, Vienna), and in 1911, looking back at the beginnings
of a work that had proved refractory even with such good conductors as
Leo Blech and Arthur Nikisch, Mahler wrote: "I cannot understand
how I could have written so much like a beginner. . . . Clearly the routine
I had acquired in the first four symphonies had deserted me altogether,
as though a totally new message demanded a new technique." Mahler's wife, Alma, was ill and could not accompany him to Cologne for
the premiere, and to that unhappy circumstance we owe one of the composer's
most remarkable and delightful letters, written just after the first rehearsal.
Of the symphony he wrote: "Heavens, what is the public to make of
this chaos in which new worlds are forever being engendered, only to crumble
into ruin the next moment? What are they to say to this primeval music,
this foaming, roaring, raging sea of sound, to these dancing stars, to
these breathtaking, iridescent, and flashing breakers?" For the composer Ernst Krenek, the Fifth Symphony is the work with which
Mahler enters "upon the territory of the 'new' music of the twentieth
century." And to return for a moment to Mahler's report from Cologne:
"Oh that I might give my symphony its first performance fifty years
after my death! . . . Oh that I were a Cologne town councilor with a box
at the Municipal Theater and at the Gürzenich Hall and could look
down upon all modern music!" Mahler casts the work in five movements, but some large Roman numerals
in the score indicate a more basic division into three sections, consisting
respectively of the first two, the third, and the last two movements.
At the center stands the Scherzo, with which Mahler actually began his
work on the symphony, and its place in the design is pleasingly ambiguous
in that it is framed between larger structural units (Sections I and III)
but is itself longer than any other single movement. Mahler begins with funeral music. He starts here with the summons of
the single trumpet. Most of the orchestra is drawn into this darkly sonorous
exordium, whose purpose, we soon discover, is to prepare a lament sung
by violins and cellos. At least that is how it is sung to begin with,
but it is characteristic of Mahler's scoring that colors and textures,
weights and balances, degrees of light and shade shift from moment to
moment. Something else that changes is the melody itself. Ask six friends
who know this symphony to sing this dirge for you and you may well get
six versions, no two of them identical but all of them correct. It is
a wonderful play of perpetual variation. The opening music comes back; indeed, it is almost as though the cellos'
insistent triplets will the return of the fanfare. Again these
summons lead to the inspired threnody, unfolded this time at greater breadth
and with more intense grieving. Yet again the trumpet recalls the symphony's
first bars, but this time, suddenly, with utmost violence and across a
brutally simple accompaniment, violins fling forth a whipping downward
scale and the trumpet is pushed to scream its anguish. Theodor W. Adorno
with grim humor refers to this passage as "pogrom music." An
attempt to introduce a loftier strain is quickly swept aside in the turmoil.
Gradually Mahler returns to the original slow tempo and to the cortege
we have come to associate with it, and it is here that he alludes for
a moment to one of the songs of that rich summer of 1901: It is the first
of the Rückert Kindertotenlieder, and the line is the poet's
bitter greeting to the first sunrise after the death of his child, "Hail
to the world's joyous light!" When the whipping violin scale returns
it is in the context of the slow tempo, and the movement disintegrates
in ghostly reminders of the fanfare and a savagely final punctuation mark.
What we have heard so far is a slow movement with a fast interruption.
There follows its inversion, a quick movement that returns several times
to the tempo of the funeral march. These two parts of Section I actually
share thematic material. Adorno's remark that the two movements stand
in the relation of exposition and development simplifies the situation
too drastically, but it is an undeniably suggestive way of pointing to
their interdependence. Still more variants of the great threnody appear,
and the grieving commentary that accompanied the melody in the first movement
moves more insistently into the foreground, to the point even of transforming
itself for a moment into a march of unseemly jauntiness. Now trumpets
and trombones intone a chorale, the symphony's first extended music in
a major key. But it is too soon for victory. The grand proclamation vanishes,
and this movement, too, dematerializes in a passage of the most astounding
orchestral fantasy. As we reach the middle member of Mahler's symphonic triptych, four horns
in unison legitimize D major by declaring it to be the key of the Scherzo.
The voice of a single horn detaches itself from that call, the beginning
of a challenging obbligato for the principal player. This is country music,
by turns ebullient, nostalgic, and a mite parodistic. There is room even
for awe as horns speak and echo across deep mountain gorges. It is exuberantly
inventive too, its energies fed by the bold ingenuity of Mahler's polyphony,
and it is brilliantly set for the orchestra. The diminutive in the title of the famous fourth movement refers to its
brevity and is not meant as a qualification of its adagio ness; indeed,
in the first three measures alone Mahler tells the conductor three times
and in two languages that he wants it "very slow." If any single
movement can convey the essence of Mahler's heartache, the Adagietto is
it. The orchestra is reduced to strings with harp, and one could go on
learning forever from the uncanny sense of detail with which Mahler moves
those few strands of sound. If the harp part were lost and one had to
reconstruct it, figuring out the right harmonies would be easy, but nobody
could ever guess Mahler's hesitating rhythm or his sensitive spacing of
those chords. The Adagietto is cousin to one of Mahler's first Rückert songs,
"Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" - "I am Lost
to the World." It is not so much a matter of quotation or allusion
as of drawing twice from the same well. Adagietto and song share characteristic
features of contour, harmony, and texture, and our knowledge of the song,
which ends with the lines "I live alone in my heaven, in my loving,
in my song," confirms our sense of what Mahler wishes to tell us
in this page of his symphony. After the brightness of the Scherzo, Mahler sets the Adagietto in a darker key. Then, in a most delicately imagined passage, he finds his way back to the light. A single horn reintroduces the winds and takes us back to the territory of the horn dominated Scherzo, to music before the Adagietto brought time to a stop. As abruptly as he had moved from the tragedy of the first two movements into the joyous vitality of the Scherzo, Mahler now leaves behind the hesitations and cries of his Adagietto to dive into the radiant, abundant finale. It is, most of it, superb comedy, so vigorous that it can even include the melody of the Adagietto-in quick tempo-as one of its themes. The brass chorale from the second movement comes back, this time in its full extension, as a gesture of triumph and as a bridge across the symphony's great span. When all is done, though, no one is in the mood for an exalted close, and the symphony ends on a shout of laughter. - Michael Steinberg © 2004 San Francisco Symphony |
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