Today I'm sliding a bit away from my normal field for this blog and commenting on a piece that is actually fairly well-known. My bad. But I was listening to this piece the last few days, and felt moved to play it several times over. The more I played it, the more I appreciated the special form of genius at work in this music, a genius which I feel is not often appreciated for what it truly is.
Among Mahler's symphonies, the longest without question is the Third. It's a remarkable symphonic fresco or panorama of the layers of life on earth and beyond. In Mahler's original programme for the work, the final movement was entitled "What Love Tells Me". Coming after the angel song of the penultimate fifth movement, it's pretty obvious that Mahler intended to make a reference to the Love of God for humanity. That, by the way, is reinforced by several letters he wrote at the time he composed the work.
How can you, in music, depict the Love of God? Many composers have evaded this supreme challenge. Mahler tackled it head-on, and the result is a most unusual symphonic movement. One of the greatest rarities in all of music is a symphony that ends with a slow movement. But Mahler actually did just that twice in his career -- here in the Third Symphony, and again in the Ninth. In both cases, the music is dominated by the sound of the strings.
This is easy to understand. When you choose to move in a slow tempo, the strings can convey a long singing legato line far more easily than the winds or brasses. But there's more to it than just technical ease. When the strings are played quietly, with sordines, and high in their range, they can produce the most gentle, unearthly sounds, filled with a sensation of peace and serenity. And that's just what happens in this finale.
All this is beautiful, and easy to understand. What amazes me is that no commentator I have ever read has drawn attention to Mahler's truly unique achievement in this music. The movement opens with a rising fourth followed by a descending and ascending melody which spans four bars of music. This much will recur. But after the first four bars, the music never traces the same path twice. Without haste, and in an atmosphere of true calm and peace, the melody continues to unfold in 4-bar phrases, no two alike. The only exception is the four-bar opening. That's remarkable enough evidence of pure creativity at work in itself. Even more remarkable is the length of the melody which Mahler continues to spin from this simple beginning. At the six-minute mark, a new melody played high up in the violins takes matters into a new direction. Finally, at about eight minutes in, the music rises to the first of several loud passages and then dies back down to a repeat of the opening.
Put that in perspective. Most popular songs last for 3-4 minutes. Many symphonic movements, even in Mahler, are over in seven minutes or less. Here, Mahler has taken eight minutes just to unfold the first stream of continuous, uninterrupted melody. It's truly amazing -- as well as being one of the most purely beautiful pieces of music ever written, in my humble opinion.
As the movement continues to unfold, it rises to two Bruckneresque climaxes which Jack Diether so memorably described as "evocative of burning pain." The second is the anguished, tortured height of the entire movement, and dies slowly away into a silence which is finally broken by what I can only describe as a gentle, quiet voice of blessing intoned by a solo flute.
Then the main melody returns, now played quietly in a high register by a solo trumpet. This sound in context is so unearthly beautiful that one senses Mahler must have been putting his own personal gloss on the Christian tradition of the "Last Trumpet" which will sound at the end of the world -- notably, a totally different gloss from the one he used in the Second "Resurrection" Symphony.
The feeling that this huge slow finale is perfectly balanced arises not least from the fact that the long final statement of the melody and the majestic coda together last almost exactly as long as the sustained opening where the melody unfolded without any significant repetition for eight minutes.
Perhaps it was an unsolvable problem, but I have to confess that the lengthy final chord with slow timpani open fifths played beneath doesn't quite crown this movement or complete it as convincingly as I would like. But never mind. The entire movement, the final pages apart, stands as one of the most extraordinary sustained outpourings of melody in the entire musical repertoire. For that reason, if for no other, it certainly deserves to ranks as a masterpiece.
No comments:
Post a Comment