CONCERT

Carnegie Hall
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

International Festival of Orchestras

Mahler - Symphony No. 7

"Mahler’s five-movement Symphony No. 7 has its share of shadows, especially in its two mysterious “night music” movements, but all is not gloom. The massively scored symphony—it includes cowbells, mandolin, and guitar—culminates in a wildly exuberant finale where snippets of operetta, a reference to the opening of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, and a Turkish march joyously swirl together."

GUSTAV MAHLER 
Symphony No. 7 in E Minor

A Unique Doubleness

In Carnegie Hall’s 2009 traversal of the complete Mahler symphonies, Pierre Boulez commented in these pages on this composer’s unique doubleness: Mahler walks a treacherous border between “sentimentality and irony,” “nostalgia and criticism,” “meticulousness of detail,” and “grandeur of design,” demanding that we listen in a “manner more varied, more ambiguous, and richer” than we ordinarily do. No Mahler symphony makes this demand more emphatically than the Seventh, in many ways the most daring of his nine symphonies. It is meticulous but grandiose, parodic but sentimental, constantly shifting and re-shifting ideas and tonal centers. Mahler believed the Seventh to be his “best work,” but it is his least performed and understood.

Even more than other Mahler symphonies, the Seventh juxtaposes wildly disparate materials, from cartoonish ditties to Wagnerian eruptions. His need to do this was deeply rooted in childhood experience. One of the earliest artists to take advantage of psychotherapy, he told Sigmund Freud that after escaping into the street from a traumatic fight between his parents, he heard a hurdy-gurdy playing a popular Viennese tune; forever afterward, tragedy and banality were fused in his imagination, forging an aesthetic he could not escape. The high and the low were inextricably united. This conjunction was perhaps more shocking to Mahler’s contemporaries—who regarded it as a basic lack of taste—than any aspect of his work. To 21st-century audiences, accustomed to “post-modern” mash-ups, it is one of his most attractive signatures.

The Death of Tonality?

Arnold Schoenberg seized upon the harmonic instability of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony as proof that the tonal system was finally dead. His timing was perfect: The symphony was premiered to a baffled audience by Mahler and the Czech Philharmonic in 1908, the year of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, a signal work in Schoenberg’s atonal revolution. Yet, one can argue that rather than abolishing tonality, Mahler’s constant shifting to new keys affirms and reaffirms it. The Seventh Symphony is not so much atonal as multi-tonal.

About the Work

With its massive tutti, idiosyncratic timbres, and delicate chamber combinations, the Seventh Symphony is a sensational orchestral showpiece. The instrumentation is inventive even for Mahler, and some of the complex percussion sounds, including guitar, mandolin, piano, gongs, cowbells, and much else.

Mahler’s Seventh Symphony is not a forbidding work—not a “tragic” symphony like the Sixth (which also had a hard time entering the repertory), nor a death-haunted piece like the Ninth. Like the Fifth, it is a comedy, moving from darkness to light, from a lugubrious funeral march through the nachtmusik episodes toward the mischievous wit of the Rondo-Finale. Mahler himself called the finale “bright day” bursting in after “night music,” declaring that the symphony was “predominantly of a cheerful character.” The Seventh also resembles the Fifth in having a major theme from the first movement appear in the chaotic skirmish of the finale, providing a semblance of classical symmetry.

A Closer Listen

The epic first movement opens with a pensive funeral march (a “song of nature,” in Mahler’s description) that seems to start in the middle. This languid procession alternates with a frantic Allegro driven by the harmonic disintegration that caught Schoenberg’s ear. The development section offers a lyrical episode full of harps, birdcalls, and strings—a moment of innocence recalling earlier Mahler. Coming out of nowhere, it vanishes as quickly as it appears, with a lonely trombone dragging us back into the world of shadowy marches and anxious gallops.The Scherzo and two “night music” movements sustain a remarkable unity of mood. Normally, Mahler would disperse his ghostlike nocturnes and slithery scherzos throughout a symphony, not put them on top of each other. Hearing three of them in a row creates a uniquely spectral ambiance, earning the work’s popular subtitle, “Song of the Night.” The swinging main tune in the Nachtmusik I has a street-music ambiance. Mahler plays with its possibilities—tugging and pulling before dissipating with a harp ping. The Scherzo, labeled Schattenhaft (“like a shadow”), combines diablerie and jauntiness. Most vivid of all is the Andante amoroso, a ghostly serenade where mandolin, guitar, solo violin, and other soloists produce dreamlike sounds.

The spell is broken by orgiastic timpani pounding in for the finale, bringing dazzling sunlight, but also a constant shuffling of moods and styles. The movement continually reinvents itself, constructing and deconstructing ideas, from folk and Wagnerian motifs to variations on the symphony’s opening march, until it unleashes a surprise ending that emerges from a short diminuendo rather than a Mahlerian crescendo. It’s an effect that Haydn, music’s supreme jokester, might have created had he lived in the 20th century.