Andante comodo Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers Rondo - Burleske Adagio. There will be no intermission at these performances.

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1 A E G I S S C I E N C E S FOUNDATION EST Classical Series Friday, February 27, at 8 pm Saturday, February 28, at 8 pm MAHLER S NINTH CLASSICAL SERIES Nashville Symphony Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor GUSTAV MAHLER Symphony No. 9 in D major Andante comodo Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers Rondo - Burleske Adagio There will be no intermission at these performances. Performances of Mahler s Symphony No. 9 underwritten in part by Lillian Bradford, in memory of James C. Bradford Jr. This weekend s performances of Mahler s Symphony No. 9 are dedicated to the memory of Dorothy Margaret Wendzel. Weekend Associate Concert Sponsor Carter Haston Real Estate Services Media Partner Official Partner 35

2 CLASSICAL SERIES GUSTAV MAHLER From the very beginning of his career, Gustav Mahler incorporated images of death and transcendence into his music. The rhetoric of the funeral march recurs frequently in his symphonies and in strikingly varied guises. In the First Symphony, for example, it takes on an ironically grotesque aspect, while in the opening movement of the composer s next symphony it becomes grandiloquently tragic, setting the stage for a work that will go on to grapple with no less a subject than resurrection. Mahler s symphonic cycle also depicts a range of celestial visions, of Paradise glimpsed and even momentarily captured whether in the childlike heaven that ends the Fourth Symphony, or in the Eighth Symphony s setting of beatific imagery from Goethe s Faust. This preoccupation with mortality is in keeping with Mahler s philosophical ambitions for the symphonic genre. Even more, it has roots in the legacy of Romanticism, with its conflation of love and death of desire and yearning so extreme that only quietus can bring fulfillment. Certainly, these ideas were were shared across the arts in Vienna during the early 20th century. Yet Mahler s music expresses the fundamental vulnerability of mortality above all, our human awareness of it with a moving authenticity that has made his music stand apart for later generations. The Ninth Symphony in particular addresses this vulnerability with all the eloquence and intensity of Mahler s most mature musical thought. During the time that he was working on Born on July 7, 1860, in Kalischt, Bohemia (present-day Czech Republic); died on May 18, 1911, in Vienna Symphony No. 9 in D major Composed: First performance: June 26, 1912, with Bruno Walter conducting the Vienna Philharmonic First Nashville Symphony performance: February 24 & 25, 1995, with Music Director Kenneth Schermerhorn Estimated length: 90 minutes, with no intermission this piece, he referred to his own psychological challenges in a letter to protégé Bruno Walter, who would conduct the Ninth s posthumous premiere in Vienna in June 1912: I ll just tell you that at a blow I have simply lost all the clarity and quietude I ever achieved and that I stood vis-àvis de rien, and now at the end of life am again a beginner who must find his feet. Acceptance of the impermanence of life itself emerges as the emotional core of the work. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NUMBER NINE That the Ninth was the last symphony Mahler completed before his own death in May 1911 has saddled the work with considerable mystique. To some extent this has to do with events from the composer s personal life, to which he alluded in his letter to Walter. In 1907, two years before composing the Ninth, his beloved older daughter Maria had died as a result of scarlet fever. The family crisis drove a wedge between Mahler and his wife Alma. Meanwhile, his own health was found to be precarious when he received a diagnosis of a grave heart condition with orders to abstain from his beloved walks and exercise. Mahler took this as a death sentence. This tragic backdrop sometimes conjures a misleading image of Mahler composing the Ninth from his deathbed. On the contrary, as biographer Henry-Louis de La Grange emphasizes, Mahler was more actively engaged than ever when he composed the Ninth in the summer of His love-hate relationship with the Vienna Opera 36 FEBRUARY 2015

3 JUNE/JULY 2014 came to an end in that fateful year of 1907, but Mahler had replaced it with a prestigious (and lucrative) assignment at the Metropolitan Opera that brought him fascinating new experiences in America. Indeed, Mahler enjoyed a fresh creative outburst beginning with Das Lied von der Erde in 1908 the work immediately preceding the Ninth. It introduced some of the musical language the Ninth would continue to explore. Mahler completed his draft of the Ninth s complex score in a single summer; this required superconcentrated effort, as his normal pattern was to spend two or even more summers breaking the back of a new symphony. For all the portents of death, Mahler who was only 49 when he wrote this music seemed to be benefiting from a resurgence of vitality. Also feeding into the Ninth s mystique is the superstition around the number nine for orchestral composers one to which Mahler himself subscribed. The paradigm established by Beethoven with his nine symphonies, so this train of thought went, made nine a terminal number for one s symphonic legacy. No significant composer had managed to surpass it since Beethoven. Bruckner had died only a dozen years before and had left his Ninth incomplete after its third movement, an Adagio he even titled Farewell to Life. As if to underscore the superstition, Mahler didn t survive to hear his own Ninth performed. Yet his work was far from done, and he lived long enough to draft out his Tenth Symphony. It is true that gestures of leave-taking permeate the Ninth s musical landscape. Yet it would be an oversimplification to perceive these merely as expressing the composer s brand of world-weariness. The score of the Ninth contains far more depth and variety, for in it Mahler distills his accumulated musical wisdom. Highly imaginative and coherent in its architectural plan and endlessly fascinating in its details, the Ninth is a masterpiece of organic musical creativity that benefits from the composer s most refined art of orchestration. Advertise in the Performing Arts Magazines... We have a captive advertising audience at every live performance. CLASSICAL SERIES July 2 Nashville s All-American holiday tradition adapted by Phillip Grecian based on the motion picture by Jean Shepherd, Leigh Brown, and Bob Clark Production Sponsor Nov Dec. 22 Preview: Nov. 29 Johnson Theater, TPAC For advertising information please call: Season René D. Copeland Producing Artistic Director 37

4 CLASSICAL SERIES In his study of Mahler, Walter astutely points out that the Ninth marries the technical advances of the composer s purely instrumental middleperiod symphonies with the deeply subjective and emotional mood of his early Wunderhorn symphonies (which draw inspiration from the folk poetry collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn). It s even possible to discern aspects of Mahler s entire life work woven into this symphony. For example, the Ninth seems to revert to the darkness of his previous four-movement symphony (the Sixth), yet eventually it transcends that darkness. The composer himself pointed to a key parallel with the trajectory of his Fourth Symphony: both works embark from a sense of innocence that by the end is regained, albeit in dramatically different ways. Moreover, the Ninth encodes references to musical history that held significance for Mahler, from the polyphony of Bach and Beethoven s spiritually intense lateperiod music to the love-death of Wagner s Tristan und Isolde. WHAT TO LISTEN FOR One more possible reference is another symphony associated with final things: the Sixth Symphony (Pathétique) of Tchaikovsky, his last. Both works defy convention by ending with a weighty slow movement, and both feature inner movements that suggest certain conceptual parallels. But Mahler sets himself an extraordinary challenge by writing a vast opening movement (Andante comodo) perhaps his most perfect in design, and one of great emotional complexity. The Ninth s Adagio finale, of similar proportions, serves as its counterweight. The two middle movements are relatively shorter and introduce critical elements of irony and parody, giving the work an overall arch-like symmetry. Mahler begins with a montage of three brief motifs: a three-note halting rhythm, a fournote bell-like knell on harp, and a five-note call on stopped horn. Then there emerges the first theme proper, breathtaking in its beauty, which unfolds from a simple two-note cell that forms a descending cadence. Like Beethoven, Mahler proceeds to reveal unfathomable depths in this unassuming material, which suggests a theme of farewell. But the sense of leave-taking is only one strand of the musical thought that generates the entire movement. Switching from D major to minor, a new theme voiced by the violins strives upward; its sound is as angular and passionate as the first theme was serene. The rest of this enormous movement builds from the opening motifs and the two longer themes, transforming and recombining them into numerous complexes. The composer Alban Berg made one of the most perceptive observations about the Ninth when he wrote that the first movement expresses an extraordinary love of this earth, for Nature; the longing to live on it in peace, to enjoy it completely, to the very heart of one s being, before death comes, as irresistibly it does. The premonition of death recurs in the three large climaxes that structure the movement, while Mahler s metamorphosis of his material mirrors the essential process of life and continual change. Following the final climax, Mahler foreshadows the Adagio as he introduces a remarkable sense of spaciousness, or expanded time, in the solo-centered writing of the coda. The musical fabric gently dissolves into thin strands, at last concluding the descending cadence of the first theme. We have yet to abandon the earthly realm, however. This returns with a vengeance in the three dance-based musical ideas that form the second movement, albeit in mockingly exaggerated terms. First comes a lumpy ländler country dance, followed by a fast-paced, funhouse waltz. Last is a gentler ländler that echoes the first movement s farewell theme but is overshadowed by the first two dances. After this the Ninth makes a foray into darkly savage irony in the Rondo Burleske, which Mahler dedicates to my brothers in Apollo (i.e., the critics who attempted to humiliate him throughout his career). The music manages to feel both frantically busy and sardonic. A prolonged episode at the center of the third movement unexpectedly opens onto a new dimension, warding off the parody for a spell. This visionary idyll a kind of remembered innocence focuses on the unassuming motif of a melodic turn a note around which neighboring notes are sounded quickly in a 38 FEBRUARY 2015

5 decorative pattern. The same motif, which had been sounded in passing in the first movement, emerges as the signature gesture of the closing Adagio. Like the opening Andante, the Adagio contrasts two distinctive thematic ideas that seem to contradict each other: the first is a full-voiced chorale hymned by the strings, while the second is an eerily hollow ascending phrase on the bassoon. The premonition of death returns in one of the most movingly sustained meditations ever conveyed through music. Mahler revisits the essential conflict of the Andante the pull toward love of life and the knowledge of death s inevitability but now from a more distanced perspective. Even the tonic reference point has lowered a half-step, to D-flat, though the harmonies slide in ways that deny easy reassurance. In the Symphony s final pages, the music steadily dissolves, becoming even slower, thinning out in texture to the strings alone, and growing soft to the point of inaudibility. The melodic turn an ornament from the musical past transfigured into something far beyond its normally decorative function expires in a last breath. There is no more irony, no sarcasm, no resentment whatever, Mahler said of this music. There is only the majesty of death. The Ninth Symphony is scored for piccolo, 4 flutes, 4 oboes (4th doubling English horn), E-flat clarinet, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 4 bassoons (4th doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani (2 players), percussion, 2 harps and strings. Thomas May, the Nashville Symphony s program annotator, is a writer and translator who covers classical and contemporary music. He blogs at memeteria.com. C L A S S I C A L S E R I E S SUPPORT THE ARTS WITH A SPECIALTY LICENSE PLATE If you love the arts, show your support with Tennessee s new specialty license plate! Designed by Nashville graphic artist Leslie Haines, these arts specialty license plates look great, and 90 percent of sales goes directly to supporting the Tennessee Arts Commission. across this great state. Last year alone, the Tennessee Arts Commission distributed $6.3 million to 377 schools, 246 nonprofit organizations and 69 individual artists across the state and $4.5 million of that was generated by Tennessee s Specialty License Plate Program. Interested in a different specialty license plate design? You can feel good knowing that sales from all specialty license plates are a direct source of funding for the Tennessee Arts Commission. Nashville Symphony is just one of more than 800 organizations that benefit from the Tennessee Arts Commission s grant programs, which help to improve the quality of life in cities and rural communities Pick up the new arts plate at your local county clerk's office today! 39