Copley Symphony Hall (San Diego, CA)
Born from a time of personal calamity, Gustav Mahler's "Song of the Earth" is his supreme reflection on the beauty of life and the inevitability of death. The concert features violinist Karen Gomyo, English mezzo soprano Jane Irwin, and, fresh from his San Diego Opera triumph in the title role of Peter Grimes, tenor Anthony Dean Griffey. The concert also includes Barber's Violin Concerto, Op. 14.
Event summary prepared by the Goldstar Editorial Team.
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The historic Copley Symphony Hall, home of the San Diego Symphony, is regarded as one of the finest classical music venues on the West Coast. Originally built in 1929 as a premiere movie house (Fox Theater), this lush, French Rococo style hall was conferred to the Symphony in 1984. The beauty and majesty of this historic hall has added to the stature and artistic growth of San Diego Symphony.
Website: http://www.sandiegosymphony.com/concert_detail.php?indexid=312
To learn more about this music, meet in the concert hall for "What's The Score?," a stimulating talk by Nuvi Mehta given 45 minutes before the concert.
Program
BARBER Violin Concerto, Op. 14
Allegro
Andante
Presto in moto perpetuo
INTERMISSION
MAHLER Das Lied von der Erde
Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde
Der Einsame im Herbst
Von der Jugend
Von der Schönheit
Der Trunkene im Frühling
Der Abschied
A note from Nuvi Mehta: Mahler poured his search for the meaning of life into his music. After, 1907, a year of “sorrow and dread", in which Mahler’s eldest daughter died, he was fired from the Vienna Opera, and diagnosed with a heart condition, which would soon end his life, he turned to Chinese poems for understanding.
In a world, in which all is transient, we may choose to drink to forget, bathe ourselves in melancholy, recall (with envy?) the joys of youth and beauty, fall in love with nature, which persists, or simply, with nostalgia, say goodbye!
These are the songs of Mahler’s symphony – The Song Of The Earth – a composer's search for a way to say goodbye.
Program notes
Violin Concerto, Op. 14
SAMUEL BARBER
Born March 9, 1910, West Chester, Pennsylvania
Died January 23, 1981, Mt. Kisco, New York
Samuel Barber began composing his Violin Concerto in the summer of 1939 while living in a small village in Switzerland. He moved to Paris later that summer and then–as war broke out–returned to the United States, where he completed the concerto. That completion, however, brought problems. The concerto had been commissioned by the wealthy American businessman Samuel Fels (of Fels Naphtha fame), who intended it for the use of a young violinist he was promoting. That violinist, however, was dissatisfied with the concerto and apparently complained that the first two movements were not brilliant enough. Barber tried to rectify this by writing a virtuoso finale, but the young violinist now complained that this movement was too difficult. Barber brought in another violinist to demonstrate that the movement was playable, but at this point Fels wanted his money back and Barber had to explain that it had already been spent. This awkward situation was resolved when the young violinist renounced his right to the first performance and Barber repaid half the money he had received. Albert Spalding gave the premiere on February 7, 1941, with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy.
Fels would have been wise to pay the entire fee. Barber's Violin Concerto has become the most popular violin concerto by an American composer–there are presently thirteen different performances available on compact disc, five of them recorded in Europe. The source of this popularity is no mystery: the concerto shows off Barber’s considerable melodic gift, particularly over the first two movements, while the finale–difficult as it may be–is a breathless virtuoso piece. The concerto has some unusual features, especially in its scoring. Barber writes for Mozart’s orchestra (pairs of winds, plus timpani and strings) as well as two unusual instruments: a “military” drum, used only in the finale, and a piano, used here as a chordal instrument. The choice of piano can seem a curious one, and Barber’s decision to arpeggiate its chords gives the instrument a continuo-like plangency, a sound somewhat unusual in the concerto’s generally romantic sonority.
While the opening movement is marked Allegro, its actual pace feels somewhat restrained, so that this concerto seems to open with two slow movements, followed by a fast finale. The opening movement is notable for its continuous lyricism. Solo violin has the long opening melody, and the triplet that recurs during this theme will figure importantly throughout the development. Solo clarinet has the perky second idea, full of rhythmic snap, and the violin has a dancing subordinate figure, marked grazioso e scherzando. There is no cadenza as such, but in the first two movements Barber gives the solo violin extended cadenza-like passages over deep orchestral pedals. The coda of the first movement is built on its two main themes, and the movement concludes quietly on the triplet rhythms that have shaped so much of it.
The Andante is very much in the manner of the opening movement. Over muted strings, solo oboe sings the long main theme; the violin’s entrance is delayed, and Barber marks its appearance senza affretare: “without hurrying.” The music rises to an expansive, soaring climax before the quiet close.
The finale–Presto in moto perpetuo–brings a sharp change of character. Gone is the lyricism of the first two movements, and in its place comes a gritty, acerbic, driven quality. It is not surprising that the young violinist found this movement so difficult: except for two brief interludes, the soloist is playing constantly, and the part is full of driving triplets, awkward stringcrossings, and endless accidentals–Barber was apparently paying the young virtuoso back for his charge that this concerto was too easy. In the coda, the pulse of triplets suddenly gives way to racing sixteenths, and the concerto concludes as the soloist rips upward to the very top of the violin’s range.
Das Lied von der Erde
GUSTAV MAHLER
Born July 7, 1860, Kalischt, Bohemia
Died May 18, 1911, Vienna
In 1907, Gustav Mahler’s world shattered around him. After ten brilliant years as director of the Vienna Staatsoper–the most powerful position in the musical world, but one that had brought him enmity, intrigue, and bitter criticism–Mahler resigned. On a family vacation that June, his five-year-old daughter Maria contracted scarlet fever and–after two agonizing weeks– died in front of the family. Mahler’s young wife collapsed, and the doctor brought in to care for her had a look at the composer and made a deadly discovery: Mahler had a serious heart lesion, the symptom of heart disease that would almost surely prove fatal. In the space of a few weeks, Mahler lost nearly everything: his position, a daughter, and his own future.
At this moment of annihilation, Mahler struggled to regain a hold on life. To the young conductor Bruno Walter, he wrote: “Let me tell you . . . that I found myself face to face with nothingness and now at the end of my life I am having to learn from the beginning how to walk and stand up.” Looking for consolation that numb summer, Mahler turned to a book he had been given called The Chinese Flute, an anthology of 83 ancient Chinese poems freely rendered in German by Hans Bethge. Mahler was entranced by these poems (all from the eighth century A.D.) and their fusion of a sharp pleasure in life with a keen sense of loss and farewell. Late that summer he began to sketch songs based on some of these poems.
Mahler’s doctors had warned that unless he slowed down the frantic pace of his life and worked to conserve his strength, he would surely die. Now Mahler made a characteristic decision: he plunged ahead with his work, assuming the directorship of the Metropolitan Opera in January 1908 and conducting that season. He then returned to Europe to guest-conduct orchestras in Germany, Austria, and France. His wife found the family a vacation house (actually a rented farmhouse) in Toblach, high in the Dolomites. There, during the summer of 1908, in a high mountain valley thick with forests and ringed by rocky peaks, Mahler returned to his cycle of songs on ancient Chinese texts. He worked very fast: the cycle of six songs, scored for two singers and a huge orchestra and lasting nearly an hour, was completely sketched by September 1, a few weeks before he left for New York and his second season at the Met.
Mahler was unsure what to call his new work. At first he thought of calling it The Jade Flute, a title derived from Bethge’s anthology, and then considered a title that sprang directly from his own experience: The Song of the Earth’s Sorrow. Finally he chose a more neutral–and more encompassing–title, Das Lied von der Erde: “The Song of the Earth.” Several themes run through this cycle of six songs: mortality and the imminence of annihilating death; the beauty of the earth, which will bloom on forever, no matter what happens to individual men and women; the sensual pleasures–however fleeting–of life on that earth; and a mood of bittersweet farewell, which climaxes in the long final song, Der Abschied.
Das Lied von der Erde opens with a drinking song, but this is a bitter one: The Drinking Song of the Earth’s Sorrow. The music leaps to life with powerful horn fanfares, but these are instantly answered with jeering laughter, and the tone for the first song is set. The singer declaims what will be a central theme: the earth will live on forever, but each man’s moment is very brief. This is a strophic song, and it has a bitter refrain, repeated three times: “Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod” (“Dark is life, dark is death”). The song drives to its climax as the singer is assaulted by an ugly image of mortality–an ape crawling over tombstones in the moonlight– and the opening fanfares return to drive the song to its emphatic close on a blast of dark sound.
The second song, Der Einsame im Herbst (“The Lonely One in Spring”), introduces a second theme–loneliness–and the lean textures of the orchestra’s haunting prelude (lonely winds above a bare string line) mirror this musically. The song is full of images of loneliness and death–mists over a lake, petals falling from a flower, a guttering lamp–before swelling to an appeal for love and human contact; the orchestra’s postlude draws the song to a quiet close.
The next three songs are all briefer and more relaxed. Von der Jugend (“Of Youth”) sings of sensual pleasures. Young men sit in a sunny pavilion, drinking, talking, laughing, writing verse; beneath them, the pond inverts the image of their pavilion on its still surface. Mahler casts this song in stylized “Chinese” style, full of pentatonic melodies and the delicate ring of the triangle.
Von der Schönheit (“Of Beauty”) is a sort of companion piece to the previous song, but now told from the women’s point of view. The events are simple: young women gather blossoms in the golden sunlight by a pond and talk happily; suddenly a group of young men ride up, their horses’ hooves trampling the flowers as they pass, and the poem closes with a flash of sexual passion. This is one of the finest songs in the cycle, moving from the delicacy of the young women’s music to the swagger of the young men as they thunder past and on to the breathless response of one of the women, which is cut off in mid-air. The delicacy of the opening returns, and the song glides to its elegant and graceful conclusion.
The fifth song, Der Trunkene im Frühling (“The Drunk in Spring”) is a sort of comic counterpart to the grim opening song. Here is another drinking song, but this drinker finds happiness in the glass rather than bitter philosophy and chooses to stay drunk rather than think. The sound of the chirping bird draws him back to the glass one more time, and the song drives to ringing close.
Out of this sunny sound, Mahler launches the concluding song, Der Abschied (“The Farewell”), which is as long as the first five songs combined. It is a superb transition: we move from a shining A Major chord at the close of the fifth song to the deep, tolling sound of C minor at the beginning of Der Abschied, and instantly we are back in the cold mists that blew through the second song. This song, which combines two poems, brings together the themes of loneliness, beauty, and farewell. It is also a “symphonic” movement in the best sense of that term: Mahler introduces bits of theme–the oboe solo at the beginning, a falling motif in a pair of clarinets, others–at the very beginning, and these evolve across the half-hour span of Der Abschied, which includes a long symphonic interlude–almost a funeral march–at its center. Images of loneliness, travel, and farewell pervade this climactic song, which–in its content–often seems like Schubert’s songs about lonely and unfulfilled travelers. At the close, Mahler adds a few lines of his own: “The beloved earth everywhere blossoms and greens in springtime anew. Everywhere and forever the distances brighten blue . . . forever . . . forever . . . ,” and Der Abschied fades into silence on the word “ewig” and silvery brushes of celesta sound.
Das Lied von der Erde is Mahler’s masterpiece: “face to face with nothingness,” he did indeed find a way “to walk and stand up.” Certainly he was aware the he had written music of overwhelming impact. Showing Bruno Walter the score, he asked: “Can this be endured at all? Won’t people kill themselves afterward?” Yet Mahler himself never heard a note of Das Lied. He died of heart failure in May 1911, three years after composing it and a few weeks short of his 51st birthday. Bruno Walter led the first performance six months later in November 1911.
Program notes by Eric Bromberger
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