26-27 Classics 4 – Program Notes: Mahler Symphony No. 4
7:30 PM | Santander Preforming Arts Center
Andrew Constantine Conductor
Reading Symphony Orchestra
Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Op. 24
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Composed in 1947-1948
Premiered on April 9, 1948 in Boston, with Eleanor Steber as soloist and Sergei Koussevitzky conducting.
In 1947, the American soprano Eleanor Steber commissioned a work from Samuel Barber she could perform with Sergei Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Barber’s father was terminally ill at the time, and the composer had recently been moved by a collection of prose and poetry by James Agee that recalled to him his youth and the happy times with his family in years gone by. Barber selected excerpts from Agee’s anthology as the basis for his commissioned piece, and set them as Knoxville: Summer of 1915. The work was dedicated to the “memory of my father.” At the head of the score appears the poignant phrase, “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.” Knoxville: Summer of 1915 vividly captures the bittersweet nostalgia associated with the recall of the warm, simple, loving moments of youth.
©2015 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
The Chairman Dances (Foxtrot for Orchestra)
John Adams (b. 1947)
Quick Notes: The Chairman Dances, composed in 1985, is orchestral music that was reworked in Adams’ opera Nixon in China. This orchestral piece was performed before the opera as whole was complete: it was premiered by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra on January 31, 1986. The opera was first performed a year later by the Houston Grand Opera.
Duration 12:30.
Context: Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China was among the greatest diplomatic coups of his presidency. The staunchly anti-Communist Nixon surprised the world by visiting a then-closed and isolated China, and meeting both with Premiere Zhou Enlai and Chairman Mao. Though the actual results of the visit were limited, it was a powerfully symbolic opening in what had been a hostile relationship. Some 15 years later, John Adams wrote Nixon in China––his first grand opera––on the events of the visit.
What You'll Hear: The work begins with persistently pulsing music, which gradually evolves, giving way to more lush music, and eventually to a foxtrot. The original rhythmic energy returns––now with a lyrical overlay––before the piece winds quietly to close.
"The myths of our time are not Cupid and Psyche, or Orpheus, or Ulysses, but characters like Mao and Nixon."
-John Adams
Listen
John Adams is one of several composers whose music is frequently described as "minimalist." The characteristics of this music include constant repetition of rhythmic and melodic patterns, and long, static harmonies. (What is commonly known as the minimalist "school" also includes composers such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, LaMonte Young, Tom Johnson, and others) Like many critical terms, the designation "minimalist' has become somewhat obsolete by the time it has reached general acceptance. Reich, Glass, and Adams have moved far beyond the original minimalist idiom of the 1960s and early 1970s, in which simple additive musical processes are carried out very gradually over a long period of time. Adams is perhaps the least minimalist of the lot. (He himself applies the term only to a few of his early works.) While much of his music utilizes pulsating rhythms and repetitive melodic figures, it is also through-composed and harmonically active, with a lyricism that lies directly on the surface.
Adams's "docu-opera" Nixon in China was the end result of three-year collaboration with director Peter Sellars, and librettist Alice Goodman. The work, a musical treatment of the three-day presidential visit to Peking in 1972, is notable for its intense character development, and for its innovative use of operatic conventions. The Chairman Dances, music which appeared in the third act, was premiered while the rest of the opera was still in progress. Adams describes its composition as follows:
"The Chairman Dances was an 'out-take' of Act Ill of Nixon in China. Neither an 'excerpt' nor a 'fantasy on themes from,' it was in fact a kind of warmup for embarking on the creation of the full opera. At the time, 1985, I was obliged to fulfill a long-delayed commission for the Milwaukee Symphony, but having already seen the scenario to Act Ill of Nixon in China, I couldn't wait to begin work on that piece. So The Chairman Dances began as a 'foxtrot' for Chairman Mao and his bride, Chiang Ch'ing, the fabled ‘Madame Mao,’ firebrand, revolutionary executioner, architect of China’s calamitous Cultural Revolution, and (a fact not universally realized) a former Shanghai movie actress.”
This music would eventually be reworked for the final scene of the opera, a formal banquet for the Nixons, hosted by Mao, who looks down from an enormous portrait. Adams describes the action:
“Chiang Ch’ing, a.k.a. Madame Mao, has gatecrashed the Presidential Banquet. She is first seen standing where she is almost in the way of the waiters. After a few minutes, she brings out a box of paper lanterns and hangs them around the hall, then strips down to a cheongsam, skin-tight from neck to ankle and slit up the hip. She signals the orchestra to play and begins dancing by herself. Mao is becoming excited. He steps down from his portrait on the wall, and they begin to foxtrot together. They are back in Yenan, dancing to the gramophone..."
According to Adams, the final act is about love and aging. Chairman Mao, Chiang Ch'ing, and the Nixons, powerful and very public people, reminisce about the simple days gone by: Nixon about his tour of duty in World War II, and the Maos about the months before the Revolution, when they spent quiet times together in the caves at Yenan. These reminiscences are treated with a great deal of humor in The Chairman Dances––contrast the chugging opening music associated with Mao with Chiang Ch'ing's sexy "bump and grind!" But the end result is sweet and melancholy.
© 2010 Dr. J. Michael Allsen
Symphony No.4 in G Major
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Quick Note: Mahler composed the opening three movements of his Symphony No.4 during the summers of 1899 and 1900. The fourth movement was completed in 1892. The premiere took place in Munich, on November 23, 1901, with Mahler conducting the Kaim Orchestra.
Duration 57:00
Context: Das Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Boy's Magic Horn") was published between 1805 and 1808 by the German poets Achim vom Arnim and Clemens Brentano. This was a large collection of German folk-poetry, collected and heavily edited by Arnim and Brentano—and included some of their own poems. These texts, filled with folk-religion and fairy-tale imagery––an idealized version of country life––were hugely popular among the German Romantics. Several composers—Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms among them—set Wunderhorn texts to music. But the collection was a particularly potent source of inspiration for Mahler, generating several song-settings and playing a role in the creation of his first four symphonies, three of which include solo settings of Wunderhorn poems. These texts seem to have had a special significance for Mahler, who viewed these simple, sometimes naïve poems as symbolic of events in his own life.
What You'll Hear: The lengthy opening movement is dominated by pastoral and largely joyous music, with sleigh bells used to mark off the larger sections. The scherzo that follows has darker shadings—inspired by a creepy figure from German legend—led by the solo violin, but there are several contrasting lighter moments as well. The Adagio is glorious simplicity: a pair of themes developed in an unhurried way. The soprano joins for the final movement, singing four stanzas of poetry with an orchestral background that responds playfully to her imagery.
Mahler's fourth symphony represents a kind of peaceful interlude in his series of works: not only is it something of a miniature by Mahler's standards (a work of less than an hour's duration, scored for a relatively modest orchestra), it is almost completely upbeat and joyful. This is not the fierce, triumphant joy that closes the second symphony, nor is it the exaltation that ends the third-here, it is a simple, childlike joy that pervades most of the symphony and reaches its purest expression in the fourth movement's song.
The joy of this symphony does not reflect the stress of Mahler's life at the time. In 1898, he accepted the post of Music Director for the Vienna Philharmonic, at that time the best orchestra in the world. Mahler's authoritarian style did not please the musicians, and his unorthodox and highly personal interpretations drew fire from conservative Viennese critics. (The up-side of all this controversy was that ticket revenues soared, and that management loved him!) But he eventually resigned his post in 1901. Mahler's output as composer fell in 1898, even during his preciously-guarded summer holiday. In the summer holiday of 1899, however, he experienced a burst of creativity and sketched out much of the opening three movements, finishing them the following summer.
The three movements written in 1899-1900 were composed to complement a work written some eight years earlier. In 1892, Mahler wrote an orchestral setting of the poem Das himmlische Leben ("The Heavenly Life")—a text drawn from the Wunderhorn collection. His setting of this poem went through two different incarnations before it found a home in the Symphony No.4. It was originally an independent song for soprano and orchestra, but then in 1896, Mahler included the piece as the seventh movement of his enormous Symphony No.3, with the title "What the Child Tells Me." He abandoned this plan and set the movement aside. It eventually found a home as the core of Symphony No.4. The opening three movements serve as preparation for this sublime song—according to Mahler: "In the first three movements, there reigns the serenity of a higher realm, a realm strange to us, oddly frightening, even terrifying. In the finale, the child, who in his previous existence belonged to this higher realm, tells us what it all means ... "
The opening movement is set in a highly complex sonata form. The opening bars set a pastoral mood with a chirping combination of flutes and sleighbells—a motto that serves to mark off the sections of this form, and which will reoccur in the finale. The exposition continues in perfectly Classical form, as two main ideas are introduced. The first of these is a lilting melody introduced by the strings and picked up by the solo horn and woodwinds. The second, much more sonorous and flowing, is heard in the cellos. A wry little episode for oboe, bassoon, and clarinet rounds off the exposition, and the sleigh bells begin a lengthy development section which works out the material laid out previously and moves gradually towards one of the few forceful moments in the symphony, led by the trumpets-a moment that quickly subsides. The recapitulation, also signaled subtly by the motto, brings back the main thematic material, but out of order and in transformed fashion. The clearest statement of the opening theme is reserved for the very end, just before a brief, sparkling coda.
Mahler's original title for the second movement was Freund Hein spielt auf ("Friend Hein plays"). "Hein," a figure from Austrian folk mythology, was a demonic fiddler who led people into Hell with his playing. Also in the background of this deliberately spooky movement is a self-portrait by the Romantic painter, Arnold Böcklin—a picture that shows the artist listening as the figure of Death fiddles just behind his shoulder. True to the subject-matter, much of the scherzo is carried by fiddling from a solo violin. (Mahler directs that the violinist tune all strings a whole step higher, and play "like a country fiddler," creating an uncommonly shrill effect.) This brilliantly orchestrated movement is a series of contrasts between the slightly macabre music of the scherzo and contrasting episodes of lighter character.
In comparing the second and third movements, Mahler wrote in a letter: "The scherzo is so uncanny, almost sinister, that your hair may stand on end. Yet in the following Adagio, where all complications are dissolved, you will feel that it really wasn't all that sinister ... " This quiet and serene movement is a pair of interlocked theme-and-variations forms, one dominated by string sonorities and the other by woodwinds. The movement explodes briefly with trumpets and horns at the end but is quickly hushed. The fourth movement follows a brief pause.
The culmination of this work, Mahler's setting of Das himmlische Leben, is simplicity itself—the stanzas of the poem are set in an uncomplicated strophic form—essentially the same music with some variation for each stanza of poetry. This poem seems to call for a very direct setting, with its innocent images of a heaven populated by friendly saints, where the tables are overflowing with the best food (a Romantic German take on The Big Rock Candy Mountain!), and where heavenly music resounds. The movement begins with a clarinet solo, which introduces the tune sung by the soprano.
After the opening stanzas, the orchestra enters with a frantic-sounding version of the first movement's motto. The next stanzas, dealing with the death of St. John's "little lamb" (Christ), are set in a minor key and again set off by a statement of the motto. Major tonality returns again for the stanzas detailing the heavenly feast, which are punctuated by woodwind motives. After a brief moment, the motto returns, but the orchestra continues with a quiet passage, that leads into the final stanzas, now in a luminous E Major—this serene mood remains until the final chord quietly dies away.
©2011 Dr. J. Michael Allsen