CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Staatskapelle Berlin

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 2:00 PM

PROMOTIONAL TEXT

“subtle orchestral colors and thrilling nuances”—Observer

Mahler’s final years were overshadowed by three events during 1907: the death of his four-year-old daughter, his unhappy departure from the Vienna Court Opera, and the diagnosis of a fatal heart condition. His last complete symphony is open to many interpretations, including either hard-won acceptance or nostalgic farewell to life’s joys and sorrows. With its tonality-at-the-brink harmonies, bravura nods to Bach, and bittersweet final Adagio, this extraordinary music defies easy analysis.

Staatskapelle Berlin
Daniel Barenboim, Music Director and Conductor

MAHLER Symphony No. 9 in D Major

Perspectives: Daniel Barenboim

Program is approximately 1 hour, 20 minutes, and will be performed without intermission.

Program Notes:

Mahler wrote his last three works during the time he was working as a conductor in New York, at the old Metropolitan Opera and with the Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall. As had long been his habit, he kept creative work for the long summers, and the three final vacations of his life—those giving him respite from his stints in New York—he spent in the South Tirol, producing in turn Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth Symphony, and the Tenth. Having begun the Ninth in June 1909, using some ideas from the year before, by early September he had sketched out the entire work. He took the draft with him when he left for New York the next month and worked during the concert season on the orchestration, which he finished shortly before sailing back to Europe at the start of April 1910.

By this time, the enormous Eighth Symphony had still not been performed: that happened in September 1910, leaving Mahler no time to introduce the Ninth. The posthumous premiere, as with Das Lied von der Erde, can only have enhanced the sense of a great adieu, for here was a composer speaking from beyond the grave. However, the tone of farewell is very much written into the music—indeed, the word itself is inscribed there. Mahler took the motif of a falling whole step from Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” sonata, and marked the word “Leb’wohl” (Farewell) over its appearances late in the first movement. Moreover, this same motif had appeared, with a different rhythm, in the finale of Das Lied von der Erde, setting the word “Ewig” (Always), which the singer repeats through the long dissolve that brings that work to a close.

The “farewell” motif appears in the opening measures, where the music is brought into being from wisps that sound as if hanging in the air from something already disintegrated: a single note reverberating between cellos and horn, the harp like a tolling bell, another horn giving out what seems to be the echo of a fanfare. As the violins enter to carry the music forward, the rhythm becomes established as a slow rowing. The music is singing “farewell” in almost every measure, and yet it is also singing “always,” for, though we are clearly in D major, the melody largely avoids falling onto the keynote. With a darkening of harmony comes a move into the minor, and the rhythm gathers in urgency, accruing tones of military march: hence the dichotomy, not so much of themes as of atmospheres (drifting away against staying put, endless regret against vigorous engagement in the world), that is developed through the first movement.

Antagonistic, the two kinds of material work against each other, which entails some degree of interpenetration. Whatever the tumult or the pressure of events—the pressure to experience—“farewell” will always intervene and bring us back to the deathly rowboat. But, equally, the “always” of that rowing cannot be accepted for long by a consciousness that is still alive and questing.

Alban Berg, playing this first movement through on the piano, heard as much: “The whole movement is based on a premonition of death, which is constantly recurring. All earthly dreams end here; that is why the tenderest passages are followed by tremendous climaxes like new eruptions of a volcano. This, of course, is most obvious of all in the place where the premonition of death becomes certain knowledge, where, in the most profound and anguished love of life, death appears ‘with greatest force;’ then the ghostly solos of violin and viola, and those sounds of chivalry: death in armor.”

What follows, violently grotesque, is a dance medley in absurd C major. A Ländler (one of those country dances that in Mahler seem to represent at once the health and the vacuity of everyday life) is followed by a slightly faster and more emphatic waltz. These two mingle and alternate with a third dance, a slower Ländler. All three dances feature the falling whole step that was so momentous in the first movement. Here it is not, except in the slower number. Questions of life and death are masked. Still, they show through.

After this frantic dance comes a frantic march, whose main theme drives headlong through crowds of variants in brilliant and dynamic polyphony. The key is A minor, that of the deathward Sixth Symphony, but, in the middle, the snarls and ferociousness clear for an episode in D major that looks back to the first movement—with a new interpenetration of the “farewell” motif as a turning figure—and forward to the finale. The new figure is subjected to ironic distortion leeching through from its surroundings here, but it survives.

It survives to become the mainstay of the concluding, culminating adagio, in D-flat, which begins as a resolute hymn for strings, but which soon, under warning first from a low bassoon, starts to fray. A tendency to break down—present from the beginning of the work and obviated only by sarcasm in the middle movements—bears the music toward highly attenuated but also intensely beautiful textures. A middle section in the minor (notated as C-sharp minor) offers some final Alpine images. The last page, marked adagissimo, pianissimo and with all but the first violins muted, is the sound of everything ebbing away.

—Paul Griffiths
© The Carnegie Hall Corporation

More Information:

GENERAL NOTES

Staatskapelle Berlin
Daniel Barenboim, Music Director and Conductor
With almost 450 years of tradition, Staatskapelle Berlin is one of the oldest orchestras in the world. Originally founded in 1570 as a court orchestra by Prince-Elector Joachim II Hector of Brandenburg, and at first solely dedicated to carrying out musical services for the court, the ensemble expanded its activities with the founding of the Royal Court Opera in 1742 by Frederick the Great. Ever since, the orchestra has been closely tied to Staatsoper Unter den Linden.

Many important musicians have conducted the orchestra: Gaspare Spontini, Felix Mendelssohn, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Felix von Weingartner, Richard Strauss, Erich Kleiber, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, Franz Konwitschny, and Otmar Suitner are just a few of the conductors who have decidedly influenced the instrumental and interpretive culture of Staatskapelle Berlin. The works of Richard Wagner—who himself conducted the Königlich Preußische Hofkapelle in 1844 at the premiere of his Flying Dutchman and in 1876 during the preparations for the Berlin premiere of Tristan und Isolde—has represented a pillar of the repertoire of the Staatsoper and its orchestra for some time.

Since 1992, Daniel Barenboim has served as the orchestra’s general music director; in 2000 the orchestra named him “Conductor for Life.” He has led the orchestra throughout Europe, Israel, Japan, and China, as well as North and South America. Performances of Beethoven’s complete symphonies and piano concertos in Vienna, Paris, London, New York, and Tokyo; the symphony cycles of Schumann and Brahms, respectively; and the three-part performance of Wagner’s Ring cycle in Japan are some of the most outstanding events of recent years. As part of the Staatsoper’s Festtage 2007, the symphonies and orchestral songs of Gustav Mahler were performed under the batons of Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez at Berlin’s Philharmonie.

Staatskapelle Berlin was named Orchestra of the Year in 2000, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2008 by the journal Opernwelt; in 2003 the orchestra was awarded the Furtwängler Prize. A constantly growing number of recordings in both the operatic and symphonic repertoires document the work of the orchestra: The 2002 recording of Beethoven symphonies was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque, the 2003 recording of Wagner’s Tannhäuser was awarded a Grammy, and the 2007 live recording of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony was awarded an Echo Prize.

In the Orchesterakademie, founded in 1997, young musicians gather professional experience in both opera and concert performance, mentored by members of the Staatskapelle. Furthermore, many Staatskapelle musicians volunteer at Musikkindergarten Berlin, an initiative founded by Daniel Barenboim. Staatskapelle members also dedicate themselves to working in chamber music formations, as well as in the ensemble Preußens Hofmusik, focusing on the Berlin music tradition from the 18th century. This rich musical activity can be experienced in several concert series held at the Staatsoper’s Apollo-Saal.