CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The Philadelphia Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

The Philadelphia Orchestra
Christoph Eschenbach, Conductor

MAHLER Symphony No. 7

Program is approximately 1 hour, 25 minutes, and will be performed without intermission

Program Notes:

THE PROGRAM

GUSTAV MAHLER (1860–1911)
Symphony No. 7 in E Minor

Performance Time:
approximately 90 minutes

The Symphony

It is inevitable that among the works of the great symphonic masters there are some that, for one reason or another, are ignored or problematic. With a total of a 106, Haydn, the so-called father of the symphony, occasionally produced fairly routine ones to please his employer. Truth be told, Mozart’s first 20 or so symphonies, written when he was a teenager (and earlier) would probably scarcely be remembered at all today had he not written his magnificent mature essays. Even among Beethoven’s mighty nine, there are some odd ones out—or, more accurately, even ones out: The Second and Fourth most often turn up as part of cycles for the sake of completeness. Schubert apparently viewed all but his last symphony (the “Great” C-Major) as student efforts, and he left many unfinished (not just the “Unfinished”).

Over the course of the 19th century, there was a marked decline in the total number of symphonies composers produced. The glib answer as to which is the best of Brahms’s four may be “the last one I heard”; nevertheless, the Third, with its subdued ending, is the least-often presented. Bruckner endlessly revised his symphonies, causing performers all sorts of problems. Dvoøák thought his First Symphony was lost and published other ones out of order, which led to considerable confusion in their numbering. Then there are the one-hit wonders: Georges Bizet with his teenage Symphony in C and César Franck with his old-age one in D minor.

In this respect Mahler proves an unusually interesting case, well worth setting against the symphonic tradition that he inherited. On the one hand, each of his symphonies has a special character, unique musical profile, and considered dramatic trajectory. As he commented while writing the Fourth Symphony: “It is so utterly different from my other symphonies. But that must be; I could never repeat a state of mind, and as life progresses I follow new paths in each new work.” This individuality has elicited an enormous amount of critical commentary, beginning in the composer’s own time. On the other hand, one could argue that Mahler ultimately created just one vast symphonic universe and that all the symphonies (and songs) are interconnected. His famous remark to Sibelius seems relevant: “A symphony is like the world, it must embrace everything.”


A Problem Symphony?

The Seventh has traditionally been viewed as Mahler’s “problem” symphony, although not for any of the reasons previously mentioned. It is a mature work, not significantly revised, not disowned or in any way rejected. Indeed, Mahler wrote in a letter: “It is my best work and predominantly of a cheerful character.” Yet it is probably the least frequently performed of his symphonies, even though others, most notably the Third and Eighth, place far greater practical demands on the performing forces. The Seventh was the last of Mahler’s symphonies to enter the repertory of The Philadelphia Orchestra, coming only in 1978, a delay of more than 70 years. Commentators, including some of Mahler’s most sympathetic and passionate advocates, have often been at a loss to explain the work, especially its final movement.

We can gain some perspective on the piece by looking at its genesis. Mahler’s position as music director of the Wiener Hofoper, arguably the most powerful post in Europe, relegated most of his composing to the summer months. The summer of 1904 proved to be unusually fruitful. He wrote three of his haunting Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), completed his Sixth Symphony, and started work on the Seventh, for which he composed two Nachtmusiken (Night Music), eventually the second and fourth of the five movements.

It appears that Mahler, unlike his customary practice, did not have a clear vision of the entire piece when he began writing it in 1904 and was seriously blocked when he tried to resume work the following summer. After a couple of frustrating weeks in which, by his own admission, he “sank into gloom,” he decided to take a break to recharge by going hiking in the Dolomite mountains. It was on his return to the house he had built in Maiernigg, on Lake Wörthersee, that the solution came to him. As he later recounted in a letter to his wife, Alma: “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 four weeks the first, third, and fifth movements were done.” By mid-August he could write to his friend Guido Adler: “My Seventh is finished. I believe it has been well conceived and born under favorable auspices.” This still meant that much of orchestration and revision would continue during the season.


First Impressions

Mahler held off the premiere of the Seventh Symphony for more than three years. For one thing, the Sixth had yet to be unveiled, which happened in May 1906 at the Essen Festival of Contemporary Music. The official critical response there, as well as in Berlin and Munich later that year, was largely negative. These disappointments only compounded the critical reaction that had greeted the Cologne premiere of the Fifth Symphony in 1904. Mahler remarked that he had given up “reading the reviews … These little people are always the same. Now all at once they like my first five symphonies. The Sixth must just wait until my Seventh appears.”

Mahler premiered the Seventh in Prague in September 1908 during celebrations honoring the 60th year of Emperor Franz Joseph’s reign. Although that concert is often portrayed as yet another critical failure, various reviews suggest that audience response was extremely positive. Critic Felix Adler reported in a German language Prague newspaper:

A surprise: Yesterday, after the final notes of his Seventh had faded, Gustav Mahler was celebrated with all imaginable signs of sincere, honest, and unfeigned admiration. Frankly, not even his greatest supporters and friends expected this. The history of Mahler premieres has a great abundance of failures and embarrassing errors; each symphony precipitated a “clash” between his advocates and his enemies. Anyone who understands the nature of Mahler’s creative works cannot be surprised by this aspect of their reception: It lies in the nature of true novelty to evoke negative first impressions. Philistines are always offended by what they do not understand.

Mahler conducted the work four more times over the next 13 months in Munich, the Hague, and Amsterdam. He also considered presenting it in New York, but decided against it, saying, “For an audience that does not yet know anything I have written, the work is too complicated.” This remark points to another of the work’s challenges: It is a decidedly more Modernist piece than most of his earlier late-Romantic music. As such, the symphony proved particularly attractive to Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and other younger Modernists, all of whom revered Mahler and especially valued this composition.


New Influences

By the time Mahler composed the Seventh, he had decisively moved away from explicit programs, from giving listeners “crutches,” as he once dismissively called them, to guide their hearing. He had based his first four symphonies partly on his own earlier songs—or had actually incorporated songs and choruses within them, for the most part drawn from the folk poetry collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (From the Youth’s Magic Horn). Symphonies Five, Six, and Seven are a trilogy of purely instrumental works that mark his ostensible retreat from explicit programs. During this time, he stopped using the folk Wunderhorn poetry and began writing songs based on the more elevated poetry of Friedrich Rückert. Even though songs are no longer boldly sung or plainly quoted in his middle symphonies, they go “underground,” as Mahler scholar Donald Mitchell has put it, and nonetheless leave traces.

The change in Mahler’s compositional strategies coincided with crucial developments in his personal life. A medical crisis in early 1901 brought him close to death. Soon thereafter he resigned his position with the Wiener Philharmoniker, and by the end of the year was engaged to be married and starting his own family—another kind of bid for immortality, as psychoanalyst Stuart Feder has observed. The range of emotions in the Fifth Symphony, beginning with the opening funeral march, to the “love song” of the famous Adagietto, to the blazing triumph of the last movement, may give some indication of Mahler’s hopes. The Sixth Symphony, which briefly carried the title “Tragic,” charts a very different course. The Seventh, like the Fifth, seems a journey from darkness to light, but the work is more poetic and eclectic in mood, and has proved more baffling. The Seventh does not have the relatively clear narrative scheme found in earlier Mahler symphonies, let alone in ones by Beethoven, Berlioz, and Tchaikovsky.

Mahler’s own comments about the Seventh in his letters are rare and not very revealing, which leaves us with conflicting reports from Alma, friends, colleagues, and various commentators. Alma says he found inspiration from the great German Romantic writer Josef von Frieherr Eichendorff, whose poems had earlier inspired Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and others. Conductor Willem Mengelberg states that Rembrandt’s The Night Watch inspired Mahler, while another colleague says the composer “cited the painting only as a point of comparison.”

There are intriguing musical emblems within the Seventh itself. The preeminent Mahler biographer Henri-Louis de La Grange comments: “The various symbolic sounds—cowbells (pastoral), deep bells (religious), birdsong, military signals—are puzzling because they appear at random, out of context, and thus apparently devoid of any symbolic meaning. Even the main ‘themes’ of the work, nature, day, and night, are far more complex and ambiguous than they appear at first sight.” These ambiguities posed challenges from the start. Felix Adler’s sympathetic review noted: “The value and significance of the symphony lie in the purely musical. The work does not describe, narrate, or illustrate; nor is it written merely for the sake of combining sonorities. Rather, it harkens back to the original purpose of music—to express moods, feelings, and emotions for which there are no words.” Yet exactly these qualities frustrated others in 1908, as it has some listeners since. Critic Richard Batka, writing in another Prague German newspaper, remarked of the premiere:

Mahler unfortunately pays tribute to the principle of hidden programs, so we do not know why the march-like night music of the second movement is followed by a somber Scherzo-capriccio, which is in turn succeeded by a night music with the character of a serenade. We must guess why or mindlessly accept these facts. Likewise, we do not know why in the second and last movement cowbells suddenly ring, etc. I understand that an artist like Mahler objects to the excessively literal use that the public often makes of detailed programs. But his opposition—avoiding even the briefest of hints that could point to the work’s overall sense and coherence—only pushes us from an erroneous understanding into a complete lack of one.

This has proved a challenge for 101 years, one that is ultimately best addressed by returning to the music itself.


A Closer Listen

The rhythm of the oars on the boat trip that broke Mahler’s creative block mark the opening of the work (Langsam), against which the tenor horn—an instrument associated more with military bands than symphony orchestras—intones an angular, disjointed melody. A funereal and spectral mood eventually gives way to a fast tempo (Allegro risoluto) and to a more lyrical and yearning theme in the strings. The lengthy movement masterfully alternates between the deathly and the celebratory, traversing other states as well.

The form of this symphony is symmetrical—two large framing movements enclose the two “Night Music” movements that in turn surround the central Scherzo. At one point Mahler referred to all three of the middle movements as “night music,” one reason the work has been called the “Song of the Night.” The first of these movements (Nachtmusik I: Allegro moderato) opens with a distinctive horn solo that is answered by a muted horn—their dialogue is interrupted by sounds of nature, such as the trilling of bird calls and later the sound of cowbells. The central Scherzo, marked Schattenhaft (“shadow-like”), introduces a more sinister and grotesque element, one into which Mahler mixed the kind of popular gestures that so baffled many of his contemporaries. The second Nachtmusik (Andante amoroso) is scored for reduced orchestra. As Mahler was well aware, the idea of “night music” was historically associated with the genre of the serenade, and that spirit is brought out in this movement with the distinctive use of the harp and two less common orchestral instruments: mandolin and guitar.

The triumphant C major of the Rondo-Finale (Allegro ordinario) harkens back to the victorious finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and even more to Wagner’s lone mature comic opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. (He programmed the Prelude to Wagner’s opera together with this symphony at an Amsterdam concert in 1909, as if to highlight the connection.) Like the first movement, this finale juggles a wide variety of moods, allusions, and musical symbols, including a grazioso section and one that seems to evoke Turkish music, as Beethoven had done in his Ninth. Mahler ends the work by bringing back the opening theme of the first movement, together with orchestral bells and a final appearance of the cowbells.

—Christopher H. Gibbs

Program notes © 2009. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association.

More Information:

This symphony deserves to stand by itself on a concert program. The music takes the listener on a tumultuous journey, from a dark, mysterious opening—said to have been inspired by an oarsman’s rhythmic rowing on the lake at Mahler’s summer home—to a sunlit finale punctuated by thrilling brass fanfares and explosive timpani.

The Philadelphia Orchestra
Christoph Eschenbach, Conductor
THE ARTISTS

CHRISTOPH ESCHENBACH

Music Director Designate of the National Symphony as well as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, Christoph Eschenbach is in demand as a guest conductor with the finest orchestras and opera houses throughout the world. Now in his 10th and final season as Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris, he was music director of The Philadelphia Orchestra from 2003 to 2008.

Highlights of Mr. Eschenbach’s current season include his first concerts with the National Symphony as Music Director Designate; tours with the London Philharmonic, the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival Orchestra, and the Staatskapelle Dresden; and engagements with the Wiener Philharmoniker, the Filarmonica della Scala, the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Münchner Philharmoniker, the Orchestra Sinfonica dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and the NDR Symphony, where he served as music director from 1998 to 2004. As a pianist, Mr. Eschenbach continues his collaboration with baritone Matthias Goerne, with whom he is recording Schubert’s three song cycles for the Harmonia Mundi label.

A prolific recording artist over five decades, Mr. Eschenbach has recorded as both a conductor and a pianist on labels including Deutsche Grammophon, Sony/BMG, Decca, Ondine, Warner, and Koch. His recent Ondine recording of the music of Kaija Saariaho with the Orchestre de Paris and soprano Karita Mattila won the 2009 MIDEM Classical Award in Contemporary Music.

Mentored by George Szell and Herbert von Karajan, Mr. Eschenbach held the posts of chief conductor and artistic director of the Tonhalle-Orchester from 1982 to 1986; music director of the Houston Symphony from 1988 to 1999; music director of the Ravinia Festival from 1994 to 2003; and artistic director of the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival from 1999 to 2002. His many honors include the Légion d’honneur, Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Officer’s Cross with Star and Ribbon of the German Order of Merit, and the Commander’s Cross of the German Order of Merit. He also received the Leonard Bernstein Award from the Pacific Music Festival, where he was co-artistic director from 1992 to 1998.