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Philadelphia Orchestra plays Mahler's Second
Robert Zaller
The resurrection of Mahler (Eschenbach, too)
ROBERT ZALLER
The upper strings begin with a trill. Then the cellos dig in with a tearing, jagged phrase. Some primal force is being released, as in Wagner’s Siegfried, something not heard before in a concert hall.
Thus does Gustav Mahler begin his Second Symphony, the sole work on the program of last week’s Philadelphia Orchestra concerts.
The concentrated energy of the Second’s opening bars and the striding theme they engender suggests a headlong inevitability, as if the work must have been ready to spring full-blown from its composer’s brow. That’s not the way art works, of course— not, at least, since Mahler. Mahler means difficulty, neurosis, modernity. The Second was composed in fits and starts over nearly seven years. It began as a tone poem called Todtenfeier, itself a kind of homage to Wagner’s Ring (as its title suggests), but also partly inspired by Mickiewicz’s famous poem Forefathers’ Eve, and partly too as an epitaph for the “titan” notionally depicted in Mahler’s First Symphony.
The Jewish outsider and the artist-hero
Mahler’s work in extending Todtenfeier into a full-scale symphonic structure— he’d sketched out some ideas for what became the andante second movement— was delayed by his burgeoning career as a conductor, but also perhaps by the nature of his project. The doomed Siegfried of Wagner’s Ring haunted late Romanticism, with its urgent question: Could the tragic hero avoid, not final defeat (the fate of all mortal flesh), but extinction itself? Wagner answered that with a consoling Christian myth in Parsifal, but this only drew the angry riposte of his erstwhile disciple Nietzsche, whose Superman spurned all ready-made morality and any suggestion of an afterlife. The modern hero would be beyond good and evil, ready to embrace the Darwinian void.
For Mahler, a secularized Jew in the agnostic (and also anti-Semitic) atmosphere of late 19th-Century Vienna, the question of the hero— inevitably, the artist-hero—posed itself with particular force. Barely initiated into the mainstream society of Europe and barely tolerated by it, the Jew was still the quintessential outsider, and could even approach the question of heroism only with circumspection and irony. For the deeply ambitious Mahler, however, the desire for social acceptance fused with metaphysical quest. His contemporary Richard Strauss could, perhaps, afford to treat the subject of the hero with a lighter hand. Mahler could not.
All of Mahler’s symphonies can be seen in this light; each, in its own way, is a portrait of the hero. The Second, however, takes resurrection as its subject. It is not a Jewish theme, and Mahler could hardly treat it as a Christian one. He found the words he needed in the 18th Century poet Klopstock, turned them to his own use, and crafted music around them that, from the premiere of the Second in 1895 to the present day, has represented the modern Paradiso.
Eschenbach slowly builds his case
I have rarely heard the Philadelphia Orchestra in better voice. Choirs were beautifully balanced, and the sound was ravishing. Yet, to this listener at least, Christoph Eschenbach appeared to be holding something back. The first movements seemed bucolic, almost gemutlich. But our soon-to-be former music director was building his case, and in the choral fourth and fifth movements his argument fully unfolded itself, backed thrillingly by the Philadelphia Singers Chorale and soloists Simona Saturova and Yvonne Naef.
As a conductor, Eschenbach is both deliberate and deliberative, and the advertised 80-minute playing time (the usual length of the Second) stretched out to nearly 90. Yet nothing dragged, and the patiently assembled architecture of the work came to glorious fruition.
There are other ways to play this symphony, and other virtues to be found in it. What one asks is not the perfect argument— that, as in all interpretation, is an illusion— but a cogent one, clearly articulated and fully engaging the talents and energies of a great orchestra. That is what Eschenbach offered in this penultimate concert of his penultimate season.
Remind me, please, why are we getting rid of this guy?
To read responses, click here.
ROBERT ZALLER
The upper strings begin with a trill. Then the cellos dig in with a tearing, jagged phrase. Some primal force is being released, as in Wagner’s Siegfried, something not heard before in a concert hall.
Thus does Gustav Mahler begin his Second Symphony, the sole work on the program of last week’s Philadelphia Orchestra concerts.
The concentrated energy of the Second’s opening bars and the striding theme they engender suggests a headlong inevitability, as if the work must have been ready to spring full-blown from its composer’s brow. That’s not the way art works, of course— not, at least, since Mahler. Mahler means difficulty, neurosis, modernity. The Second was composed in fits and starts over nearly seven years. It began as a tone poem called Todtenfeier, itself a kind of homage to Wagner’s Ring (as its title suggests), but also partly inspired by Mickiewicz’s famous poem Forefathers’ Eve, and partly too as an epitaph for the “titan” notionally depicted in Mahler’s First Symphony.
The Jewish outsider and the artist-hero
Mahler’s work in extending Todtenfeier into a full-scale symphonic structure— he’d sketched out some ideas for what became the andante second movement— was delayed by his burgeoning career as a conductor, but also perhaps by the nature of his project. The doomed Siegfried of Wagner’s Ring haunted late Romanticism, with its urgent question: Could the tragic hero avoid, not final defeat (the fate of all mortal flesh), but extinction itself? Wagner answered that with a consoling Christian myth in Parsifal, but this only drew the angry riposte of his erstwhile disciple Nietzsche, whose Superman spurned all ready-made morality and any suggestion of an afterlife. The modern hero would be beyond good and evil, ready to embrace the Darwinian void.
For Mahler, a secularized Jew in the agnostic (and also anti-Semitic) atmosphere of late 19th-Century Vienna, the question of the hero— inevitably, the artist-hero—posed itself with particular force. Barely initiated into the mainstream society of Europe and barely tolerated by it, the Jew was still the quintessential outsider, and could even approach the question of heroism only with circumspection and irony. For the deeply ambitious Mahler, however, the desire for social acceptance fused with metaphysical quest. His contemporary Richard Strauss could, perhaps, afford to treat the subject of the hero with a lighter hand. Mahler could not.
All of Mahler’s symphonies can be seen in this light; each, in its own way, is a portrait of the hero. The Second, however, takes resurrection as its subject. It is not a Jewish theme, and Mahler could hardly treat it as a Christian one. He found the words he needed in the 18th Century poet Klopstock, turned them to his own use, and crafted music around them that, from the premiere of the Second in 1895 to the present day, has represented the modern Paradiso.
Eschenbach slowly builds his case
I have rarely heard the Philadelphia Orchestra in better voice. Choirs were beautifully balanced, and the sound was ravishing. Yet, to this listener at least, Christoph Eschenbach appeared to be holding something back. The first movements seemed bucolic, almost gemutlich. But our soon-to-be former music director was building his case, and in the choral fourth and fifth movements his argument fully unfolded itself, backed thrillingly by the Philadelphia Singers Chorale and soloists Simona Saturova and Yvonne Naef.
As a conductor, Eschenbach is both deliberate and deliberative, and the advertised 80-minute playing time (the usual length of the Second) stretched out to nearly 90. Yet nothing dragged, and the patiently assembled architecture of the work came to glorious fruition.
There are other ways to play this symphony, and other virtues to be found in it. What one asks is not the perfect argument— that, as in all interpretation, is an illusion— but a cogent one, clearly articulated and fully engaging the talents and energies of a great orchestra. That is what Eschenbach offered in this penultimate concert of his penultimate season.
Remind me, please, why are we getting rid of this guy?
To read responses, click here.
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