Local Gentry

[Leo K]

Alma Mahler

The 6th obviously sounds dark and tragic, but I’ve always felt it has more subtlety than the tragic ‘thumping’ usually associated with its sound.

There are moments of arresting lyrical, pastoral beauty that hasn’t been discussed enough IMO. In the first and last movements, Mahler’s use of cowbells (a really inspired touch) evokes his hikes up the sides of the Austrian mountains. The third movement (sometimes switched into the 2nd movement spot—more on this later) holds the most tender melodic colorization I’ve ever heard in phrasing and instrumental imagination. Even the wild finale shows an optimistic confidence most of the way, which is effective contrast to the dark coda.

In my mind, Mahler found the right balance between the tragic and the ‘happy’, and he plays out this out realistic by highlighting the happy corners we all find within the dirty ‘city’ of life. He does takes happiness into account, rather than over dramatize the bleak disillusionment.


From Henry-Louis de la Grange, we have a good commentary on the composition of the 6th, which concludes with a consideration of the work’s apparent ‘tragic’ drama:

Unfortunately, very little information is available on the actual composition of the Sixth Symphony since, unlike Natalie Bauer-Lechner [a close and devoted friend of Mahler], Alma Mahler was never a particularly scrupulous observer of her husband's creative life. Through cross-checking, however, it can be established that Mahler—newly married and the father of a little daughter—arrived at Maiernigg on 10 June 1903 and set to work without delay. Alma recalls that he returned from his Häuschen [Mahler’s composing hut] one day and told her that he had tried to evoke her in a theme. 'Whether I've succeeded, I don't know; but you'll have to put up with it'. The theme in question is one of the few 'positive' gestures in the work: it is the second subject of the opening movement, an ascending and descending line in the major, energetic and willful, over which Mahler has written the word 'Schwungvoll' (con brio) in the full score. Whenever he had completed a section of his work, Mahler habitually felt the need to distance himself from it, and his work on the Sixth Symphony was no exception: on 20 July he left Maiernigg for a short train journey to the Dolomites, taking his bicycle with him. Five weeks later, when he returned to Vienna, he had already completed the two middle movements in short score and had undoubtedly sketched the first.

At the beginning of the following summer (1904), Alma's arrival in Maiernigg was delayed by more than two weeks because she had still not recovered from the birth of her second daughter, Anna (known as 'Gucki'). Throughout the month of June, heaven and earth seemed to conspire to prevent Mahler from resuming work on the score. The weather on the Wörthersee was appalling during these long days of solitude and forced inactivity: the sky was overcast, with frequent storms and torrential rain. Mahler read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Tolstoy's grim Confessions. He desultorily played Brahms and Bruckner at the piano, but all the music he looked at left him disillusioned. It was his own lack of creativity, however, that weighed most heavily on him. When he finally returned to his work, it was to complete the Kindertotenlieder. Time passed, and the Sixth Symphony had still not advanced by a single bar, consciously at least. The anxious feeling that so often assailed him—namely, that the well-spring of his art had run dry—continued to obsess him, although he attempted to 'pick up the pieces of his inner self'. By early July, the weather had improved, but suddenly the heat became unbearable. Incapable of enduring it a moment longer, Mahler rewarded himself for the completion of his song cycle and treated himself to a lightning tour of the Dolomites to last until Alma arrived. And it was among the ragged peaks of the Sextener Dolomiten around Sesto that he finally found the inner drive and inspiration that allowed him to finish his new symphony.

By the end of August, when he was preparing to return to Vienna, Mahler was able to announce the completion of the Sixth Symphony to his friends Guido Adler and Bruno Walter. However brief his remarks, they were heavy with evident pride. Yet he had no illusions about the fate that lay in store for his latest symphony, which he knew would have just as much difficulty as its predecessors in establishing a place for itself in the repertory: 'My Sixth will pose conundrums that only a generation that has absorbed and digested my first five symphonies may hope to solve'. Immediately after completing it, he took Alma's arm and solemnly led her to his Häuschen to play the work through for her. By her own admission she was moved to the very depths of her being by the score: 'The Sixth is the most profoundly personal of his works. [...] Not one of them came so directly from his inmost heart as this'.

A young female friend of Alma's has left a highly detailed account of life at Maiernigg during the summer of 1904. Within his family circle, Mahler played Bach at the piano, quoted Goethe and went boating on the lake. To all appearances this was the most peaceful of all the summers that he spent in Carinthia. How, then, can we explain the fact that it was at precisely this time that he wrote the most tragic of all his works? According to Alma, he later recognised in the three hammer blows of the final movement a premonition of the three blows of fate that were to fall on him in 1907: the death of his elder daughter, the diagnosis of a potentially dangerous heart condition and his departure from Vienna.
Be that as it may, none of these catastrophes had struck by May 1906 when Mahler travelled to Essen in the Ruhr to conduct the first performance of his new symphony at the annual festival of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein. Yet Alma describes his almost pathological state during the rehearsals, his anxiousness, nervousness, instability and the doubts that never ceased to beset and torment him. All the young musicians in his entourage did what they could to rally round and to offer him their advice and support during the rehearsal period. Even more than usual, he kept on polishing and correcting details of the orchestration. If we believe Alma, he 'was so afraid that his agitation might get the better of him that out of shame and anxiety he did not conduct the symphony well'. After the concert, the Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg expressed concern about his state of health. All in all, it seems as though the fateful work terrified even its creator.

Up next, an alternative view to the idea this work is ‘tragic’…
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[Leo K]

Conductor Benjamin Zander has always said there are perhaps two versions of the 6th:

--The one that Mahler composed.

--And the one that Mahler performed.


This is a controversal view in Mahler scholarship. Mahler once wrote that his 6th would be pose "conundrums" and would be a "hard nut" to crack for future generations. Little did he know that the conundrum would lay in the confusion over the 'correct 'order of the two inner movements...the scherzo and andante. This is sad, in a way, since Mahler was pretty clear about the movement order he wanted, and published his preferred order in the 2nd edition of the score. How the confusion started is an interesting story, and now a part of the work's history and performing tradition.

Okay, lets go over the version Mahler wrote first...the original version...the Symphony as it existed before he tested it out with an orchestra and made his famous changes...
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[Leo K]

The first person to hear the 6th Symphony was Mahler's wife Alma. In August of 1904, he played the whole work for her at the piano. According to Alma, they both "wept that day."

Mahler finshed orchestrating the work during the winter, and by May of 1905, he was ready to send his autograph score to a copyist. Mahler scholar Jerry Bruck writes:

It is here, in the autograph score, that Mahler’s concern about the inner-movement order of the Sixth becomes apparent. The title page of each of these movements bears an Arabic numeral to indicate its position in the symphony—e.g., “Scherzo (2)” and “Andante (3).” Mahler overwrote these numerals, renumbering these pages “Scherzo (3)” and “Andante (2)... It is not clear when he undertook to reorder these inner movements, for in the copyist’s score the Roman numerals indicating the positions of these movements correspond to their original S-A order in the autograph. But these Roman numerals are entered in pencil, not ink, leading us to wonder if that indicates some last-minute hesitation. In any case, Mahler’s decision to alter his original sequence of movements to A-S must have come too late to affect Kahnt’s publication of the Sixth.

In the autumn of that year, Mahler sent the "fair copy" of the score to his publisher, C.F. Kahnt, who published the first edition in three formats: a large folio-format conducting score, a smaller quarto-size “study score” and a full-size four-hand piano reduction. Kahnt also commissed musicologist Richard Sprecht to write a guide, a "thematic analyses" to accompany the three scores for students and concert goers encountering the 6th for the first time.

At this stage, the Symphony was in this form:

Allegro energico
Scherzo
Andante moderato
Finale (with the 3 hammer blows intact)

Presumably, this was the order that Alma heard at the piano back in 1904.

Jerry Bruck continues the story:

All three scores...were ready in time for the premiere.
That event was to be the concluding concert of a weeklong music
festival of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (German Music
Association) held in Essen in May 1906. Previously Mahler, who for
several years had been Principal Conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic
until his near-fatal hemorrhage in 1901, had asked that orchestra
as a favor to read through the symphony. On May 1, a year to the day
after completing his autograph score, Mahler at last got to experience
his Sixth in full orchestral garb. A fortnight later he left for Essen to
begin rehearsals for the premiere.

Mahler’s chosen assistant during the rehearsals was Klaus Pringsheim,
already at 23 a vocal coach at the Vienna Opera. Pringsheim greatly
admired Mahler and was thrilled to be asked to accompany him to
Essen. He later recalled Mahler’s feverish efforts to refine the symphony’s
orchestration in the course of the week of intensive rehearsals with the
festival orchestra. At last Mahler’s doubts about the order of the
Sixth’s inner movements would have to be resolved. Possibly he had
experimented during that initial read-through in Vienna, although the
renumbering of those movements in the autograph score suggests that
Mahler might have entertained doubts as much as a year earlier. In any
case the matter came to a head while rehearsing for the premiere in
Essen.

Mahler’s initial indecision is evidenced by the reversed timings
of these movements scrawled in blue pencil in a corner of the title
page of his conducting score. Here, the A-S timings of
the inner movements are overwritten with those corresponding to S-A.

These timings, radically different from those reported of the Essen premiere,
also differ from those given in Specht’s “Thematic Analysis”
and elsewhere. This suggests that they were taken during the
rehearsals in Essen, since we know Mahler never again conducted from
this score, which he revised and sent off to Kahnt a few months later.

Following the final rehearsal Mahler at last made the decision to
exchange the positions of the Sixth’s inner movements: The Andante
would now precede the Scherzo. He reportedly requested that slips of
paper be inserted into the printed programs to advise concertgoers
that the order shown there (and in the three scores published thus far)
had been changed.

Meanwhile, Alma had arrived in Essen, just in time
for the last rehearsals. She describes in her biography of Mahler his
agitation preceding the performance, which she attributes to his intuiting
the “dark omen” underlying the “three great blows of fate” in the
Finale. However, she makes no mention of his reversal of the order of
the inner movements.

So, why is the order of the inner movements, the scherzo and andante, so important? The order does make an emotional and structural difference on the work. This will be addressed later.


Coming next...The "public" version of the 6th...the version that gets performed in Mahler's time...
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[Leo K]

Mahler conducted the 6th Symphony on May 27, 1906. This was first time the public got to hear this radical, new work. The movements of the 6th were performed in the new revised order:

Allegro energico
Andante moderato
Scherzo
Finale (with the 3 hammer blows still intact)


After the performance, Mahler wanted to make sure those buying the score knew about his recent revision regarding the andante-scherzo. He had his publisher place erratum slips in all the unsold 1st edition copies of the conductor, study, and piano reduction scores. Obviously, Mahler had made up his mind about the structure.

During the summer after the premiere, Mahler set about to revise the score for a 2nd edition. Jerry Bruck continues:

By August of 1906 Mahler was ready to send his revised conducting score
to Kahnt to serve as the engraver’s model for the publication of a new
full score of the Sixth. Curiously, when referring to the Sixth in her
memoirs, Alma seems to have been unaware not only of the reversal of
its inner movements, but that Mahler had also deleted the last of the
three fate-forecasting Hammerschläge (hammer-blows).

Did Mahler quietly make this revision without telling his wife? I’m not sure, but we do know that Alma witnessed his anxiety at the premiere, which she attributed to the “’dark omen’ underlying the ‘three great blows of fate’ in the finale.”

Mahler’s revision here reminds me of Dylan’s lyrical revisions for some of his songs on Blood On The Tracks. Dylan’s revised songs were wonderful, but they aren’t as personal, or naked. In my opinion, the 6th has more bite and fear with the scherzo played before the andante, and with the third hammer blow left in. The first version of the 6th is as intimate as Mahler and Alma alone together…crying at the piano in their house, or on an outing with their children, who laugh but also cry, and play in the sun.

At the same time, I can appreciate Mahler’s revision…the emotional impact of the work takes on another story when the andante is played before the Scherzo. When the andante is played right after the 1st movement (when ends in a major key), it can be heard as a tender interlude, a daydream, perhaps an illusion of happiness, especially if the conductor shortens the length (by speeding up the tempo) and doesn’t exaggerate the swells, upheaval and romance of the strings. I’ve read opinions that suggest the best interpretation of the andante (played before the scherzo) is one that acts like a entr’acte, or lyrical break avoiding a dramatic swell of emotion…plays it subtler. I tend to agree with this.

If the andante is played after the Scherzo, it sounds better to let loose and really play up the cliché romantic swells and turn it into a real journey, like Bernstein and Karajan does. Here the andante is an ocean of bliss…a love that is killing the hero…binding him to existence with no mercy…an existence of physical and emotional attraction he can’t turn from, can’t escape, yet still so beautiful. Placed third, the andante is a perfect introduction to the final curtain of the finale.

Next…Mahler premieres the 6th in Vienna…
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[Leo K]

Interlude

Sir John’s Barbirolli’s famous recording of the 6th from 1968.



Barbirolli…famous for his Mahler interpretations

I was listening to this tonight, and was again blown away by its majestic ‘deep chasm’ muscle. It is bleak to the extreme, and glorious in the darkness. It is considered one of the most unique recordings of the 6th…a kind of mutant. It has none of the panic and hysteria heard in the Bernstein Vienna philharmonic Orchestra account (on DG). This interpretation is depression itself, and serious as a heart attack. Even the pastoral sections are heavy with a large burden, sinking with the heaviness of the hero. Yet Barbirolli seems so obsessed (you can hear him humming a lot as he conducts)! He makes the work earn its money by pulling out all the stops, and pulling the threads that should hold everything together…yet in this work, there is something wonderful about hearing existence fall apart emotionally…the grief, the sadness, the disillusionment.

The power of this interpretation just cannot be denied. Even listeners who hate it agree this should be in everyone’s collection…at least to provide contrast from other recordings.

I’m discussing it here because Barbirolli always played the Andante before the Scherzo. He believed in Mahler’s final thoughts about the structure. Now you can hear a great interpretation of the andante-scherzo version.
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[Leo K]

Mahler conducts the 6th for the Vienna premiere...

Mahler's publisher (Kahnt) prepared a new 2nd edition to the 6th Symphony (to reflect Mahler's revisions), and sent out the erratum slips to be placed in all the unsold 1st edition copies. It took alot of work, time and expense to engrave the new revisions for the conducter, study, and four-hand piano scores. By November of 1906 the new scores were published. Mahler sent the score to various colleagues, such as conducter Willem Mengelberg in Amsterdam. Mahler's colleague Oskar Fried premiered the work in Berlin and Mahler himself conducted the Munich premiere. Jerry Bruck notes that all of these performances used the new movement order of Allergo-Andante-Scherzo-Finale.

Jerry Bruck writes about the Vienna premiere:

With Kahnt’s three revised scores now available, Mahler finally
presented the Sixth to the Viennese on January 4, 1907.
Mounting criticism of what were perceived as Mahler’s autocratic
demands as Director of the Hofoper, coupled with his frequent
absences from Vienna to conduct his own works, had primed the pens
of those critics already less than sympathetic to Mahler as man and
musician. Nor would Mahler’s seemingly capricious last-minute
switch of the Sixth’s inner movements escape the notice of an increasingly
hostile press.

A total of 14 reviewers covered the event, their press notices mirroring
the reactions of a divided and demonstrative audience.Two of the
reviewers claimed that Mahler had switched the inner movements
from the order printed in the program. Heinrich Reinhardt (Neues
Wiener Journal, January 5, 1907) gave free rein to a sarcastic and
openly savage attack on Mahler personally and as Director of the
Hofoper. Although Reinhardt claimed that the Scherzo was played as
the second movement, his description is so garbled that one is tempted
to wonder if he was actually present at the concert. The other S-A [scherzo-andante]
reviewer, Carl Lafite (Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, January 7, 1907),
does describe the music more recognizably, though not more charitably.

In any case, their reports are at odds with those of a dozen other
critics, who identified the movement order as agreeing with the concert
program. Writers who seize upon these two reviews as proof of Mahler’s
continued uncertainty about the order of the Sixth’s inner movements
either are unaware of or choose to ignore the overwhelming number of
reports from the bulk of the critics, as well as the order of movements
shown in the concert program.

It is clear that Mahler once again—and, as it happened, for the last
time—did conduct his Sixth Symphony still with its Andante preceding
its Scherzo.However, the stage was now set for later confusion and
misunderstanding. The disagreement among reviewers reflected and
further compounded the disagreement between the two sets of scores
by then in circulation, for Kahnt’s original and subsequent publications
were unfortunately identical in outward appearance. All were
dated 1906, with no indication of which one had superseded the other.
Both sets of orchestral scores bore the same plate number, 4162, and
both scores of Zemlinsky’s piano reduction had plate number 4649.


As Bruck says, the stage is now set for the future controversy regarding the Andante-Scherzo order, and the later critical edition (from the 60's) that will change the performance history of this work.

Before we continue this story...I'd like to consider a possible weakness in the work that may have influenced Mahler's decision to reverse his original Scerzo-Andante concept...

Next...Stephen Chakwin's interesting consideration regarding Mahler's 6th...
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[Leo K]

The following article is a strong case for the integrity of Mahler's original plan to have the scherzo played after the 1st movement.

In this article, you will read a few items I have already brought up, regarding the composition history and performance history of the 6th...other items will be new, such as Alma's famous telegram to conductor Willem Mengelberg...I will cover these in more detail later.

Before you read this, it is helpful to remember the first movement of the 6th ends in a major key (which is rather rare for a 1st movement written in a minor key).

The Scherzo is in the same key (A Minor) as the first movement, so if Mahler would have left it as the second movement, he would have had two movements in A Minor next to each other, pretty much unheard of in any Symphony. A weakness? Or a stength?

Okay, lets consider this article...

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony in Context: What
the History of Minor-Key Symphonies Can Tell Us about Mahler’s Decision about
Movement Order

by Stephen D. Chakwin, Jr.

“How can an artist expect that what he
has felt intuitively should be perfectly understood by other people, since he
himself feels in the presence of his work, if it is genuine art, that he is
faced by a riddle about which he too may have illusions, just as another person
may?” Richard Wagner, letter dated 25 January 1854 to August

Introduction:

This article explores some aspects of the unusual form of
Mahler’s Sixth Symphony as a way of gaining insight into his decision to switch
the order of the middle movements from Scherzo-Andante, the order he chose for
the first published version of the score and that he seems to have envisioned
during the composition process itself, to Andante-Scherzo, the order he adopted
at the Symphony’s first performance in Essen in 1906 and that he maintained for
the handful of times that he conducted the piece during his lifetime. It
postulates that the reason that Mahler changed the movement order may have been
his realization of the structural problem he created for himself with the way he
ended his first movement as well as the ongoing problem he had with critical
opinion in his lifetime. What Mahler did by this expedient was conceal his
Symphony’s structural problem at the expense of undermining the greater
coherence of the work and the carefully built transitions between the movements.
It is, of course, impossible to know with absolute certainty why Mahler did
this: he left no written explanation of his decision.

In addition, it is impossible to know for sure whether he later changed his mind and decided that his original plan for the order of movements should be reinstated. We know that Alma sent a famous telegram to Willem Mengelberg stating that the Scherzo should be second and know of no reason why Alma would wish the movements to be played in
an incorrect order or would lie about what the correct order should be. The
question remains an open one, although musically Scherzo-first seems to present
a much stronger piece.



Background:
The story of the Sixth leading up to the famous
movement switch is a familiar one, but it’s worth reexamining briefly. As far as
can be told from the existing evidence, Mahler’s composition scheme
was originally for the movement order to have the first movement followed by the
scherzo followed in turn by Andante followed by the Finale. This sequence with
its resulting transitions is one that the Sixth’s structure seems to dictate in
many ways. The loud A major ending of the first movement is followed by the loud
A- minor opening of second, immediately contradicting the resolution and
stability implied by the major key ending, carrying that movement’s
major-to-minor theme forward in a daring way (which composer before Mahler used
the sheer tonality of two adjacent movements as either a reflection or an actual
statement of a theme common to both of them; and, of course, taking the A-minor
first theme, F-major second theme-world of the first movement and turning it
upside down into a very different A minor first theme F major second-theme place.

The Scherzo is a kind of decompensation of the first movement. The odd opening
rhythm with accents on both the third and the first beats of the 3/8 rhythm
suggests a mockery of the stride of the opening of first movement and the first
theme itself seems to mock the F major second theme of the first movement (which
was, of course, the basis for its joyful coda). The second theme also mocks
elements of the first movement, but these
seem to be primarily elements of the first movement’s first theme, the marching
tread, garlanded with simpering interjections and measures of the falling fourths
that powered the coda of the first movement to its triumph, here pointlessly repeated
like liquidations in a Baroque or Classical piece. The repetitions contribute to
heightening tension of his structure, just as such figures function in a
symphony work by Haydn or Beethoven. The transition from the Scherzo to the
Andante movement is equally well crafted. After the diabolical machine of the
Scherzo has built itself up to a climax that is the last of Mahler’s “shrieks of
horror,” the movement seems to run out of power. Its energy is dissipated
into fragments of its themes. The 3/8 rhythm has lost its third beat accent and
cannot even stay in a steady triple rhythm any more (it keeps straying into the
quadruple rhythm of 2/4) and the melodic elements sink deeper and deeper into
the bass register against a background of the major to minor “eclipse” until all
energy is spent and only a quiet, sluggish evocation of the minor third that
defines A minor is left. After this, there is nothing more to say about – or in
–A minor, at least for a while.

So Mahler takes us to the remote key of E-flat
and to the seemingly remote musical territory of an interlude based on “The Last
Rose of Summer.” “Seemingly” is an important word here because much of this
movement is actually based on material familiar from the first movement and
Scherzo lightly disguised by inversion, transposition, or fragmentation. The
dynamic transition from Scherzo to the Andante movement is perfect: the Andante
movement’s pianissimo opening is a soothing response to the grim piano of the
Scherzo’s ending and the remote key is a palpable relief after all that A
minor/Fmajor33. Unless you listen carefully, you may not be aware of the hint
at the fourth full measure of a transition from E-flat minor to E-flat major, but
it is an important (and, at least subliminally comforting) contradiction of the
major-to-minor sequence that dominated both the first movement and the Scherzo
and the transition between them. The opening “puff of smoke”34of the final
movement is again perfectly set up. The transition from the peaceful quiet of E
flat major to the sinister quiet of C minor is not only dynamically convincing
and harmonically coherent, but it is also carefully prepared. The notes of the
opening chord of the fourth movement – C, E-flat, G-flat, and A-flat – are all
prominent in the last eight measures or so of the Andante. Planted in the ear, as
it were, for the quite different context in which they are about to emerge.
Mahler may very well not have been consciously aware of all of these links and
transitions (see the incipit to this article), but he created them and, unless we
are prepared to accept that artistic creation is more the product of chance than
of craft, would have been aware of them on some level. How is it that he came to
abandon the structure that made them all work and replace it with a very
different and seemingly more random one? We know that the Scherzo-first design
was set forth in the first printed score and lasted through Mahler’s reading of
the Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic.

De La Grange reports that the
Andante-first order was adopted by Mahler during the 1906 rehearsals for the
Essen premiere. Or to be more specific, it occurred after ongoing
Uncertainty about the orchestration and, finally, the movement order of the
work. According to Klaus Pringsheim, who was present in Essen:

Those close to him were well aware of Mahler’s
"uncertainty". Even after the final rehearsal he was still not sure whether or
not he had found the right tempo for the Scherzo, and he wondered whether he
should invert the order of the second and third movements (which he subsequently
did). He kept on making changes and improvements. After each rehearsal he asked
everyone around him, musicians and friends, for their impressions, trying to
determine down to the smallest technical detail, to what extent, in their
impression on the listener, he had achieved what he intended.

De La Grange suggests that Mahler’s movement-order change in Essen may be attributed to his documented insecurity at the time, specifically to comments about the resemblance
between the openings of the first and second movements. My own suspicion is
slightly different. It is a near certainty that Mahler was told by listeners that
the openings of the first two movements were very, perhaps too, similar to each
other, but I suspect that he realized a deeper weakness in his work, one that
came from one of his most imaginative strokes. To understand this, we have to
digress and take a look at the history of the classical minor-key symphony.

Next...Chakwin's discusses the classic minor key symphonies...
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[Leo K]

Chakwin's article continued...

Classical Minor-Key Symphonies:

It seems best to leave aside the pre-Classical
symphonies and sinfonias of Johan Sebastian Bach’s children and their
contemporaries, along with the works of composers such as the Stamitzes,
Boccherini, Cherubini, and others, since Mahler in all probability did not
Know those works and hardly would have relied on them as models, Table 1 contains
an overview of minor-key symphonies over the roughly 130 years preceding Mahler’s
Sixth.

Table I. An Overview of Selected Minor-Key Symphonies from Haydn to Bruckner


Haydn:
no. 26 D minor/1st movement ends in Major
no. 34 D minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 39 G minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 44 E minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 45 F# minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 49 F minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 52 C minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 78 C minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 80 D minor/1st movement ends in Major
no. 83 G minor/1st movement ends in Major
no. 95 C minor/1st movement ends in Major

Mozart:
no. 25 G minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 40 G minor/1st movement ends in Minor

Beethoven:
no. 5 C minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 9 D minor/1st movement ends in Minor

Schubert:
no. 4 C minor/1st movement ends in Major
no. 8 B minor/1st movement ends in Minor

Mendelssohn:
no. 1 C minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 3 A minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 5 D minor/1st movement ends in Minor

Schumann:
no. 4 D minor/1st movement ends in Minor

Brahms:
no. 1 C minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no.4 E minor/1st movement ends in Minor

Dvorak:
no. 1 C minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 4 D minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 7 D minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 9 E minor/Minor

Tchaikovsky:
no. 1 G minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 2 C minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 4 F minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 5 E minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 6 B minor/1st movement ends in Major

Bruckner:
no. 1 C minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 2 C minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 3 D minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 8 C minor/1st movement ends in Minor
no. 9 D minor/1st movement ends in Minor


continued...
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Chakwin's article continued...

The Table lists 37 minor-key symphonies by the ten major symphonic
composers before Mahler, ranging from Haydn to Bruckner. Of these symphonies,
all but six have first movements ending in the minor key and each of these six
is a kind of aberration.

As we shall see, the closest thing to a
structural antecedent to Mahler’s work was actually none of these, but the 1887
version of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, which was almost certainly unknown to
Mahler and was rewritten by the composer after the conductor Hermann Levi
refused to perform it.

The general model of a minor-key symphony was more or
less established by Haydn with his Symphony no. 44 (1772): the first movement
has a first theme in the minor and a contrasting second theme in a major key,
with the movement ending in the minor; he follows with a minuet, usually minor
with contrasting major key trio; slow movement; and Finale, in the tonic minor,
which takes up the undischarged minor key discourse of the first movement (at
least in tonality and sometimes in actual thematic material) and works it to a
resolution. Variants of that structure appear in all of the symphonies listed
in the Table. For a composer attempting to create a through-composed
symphony, this is a useful plan.

In Western “classical” music, at least from the
recognition of tonality onward, the minor key has been traditionally perceived as
unstable and implying a need for further resolution. The Picardy third probably
developed in performance and composition as a result of perception: it was a way
of allowing the listener to know that the piece had ended, despite the minor-key
conclusion. In the context of a symphony, the unresolved nature of a minor-key
first-movement conclusion is a powerful unifying device. Nobody could listen to
the ending of the first movements of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or Schumann’s
Fourth – to take two obvious examples – and not know that there is more to come.
Using the tonic minor for the dance movement, whether it is a minuet or a
scherzo, reinforces that anticipation and the Finale, at least in a successful
symphony, satisfies it.


Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

The six symphonies, four of which are by Haydn, with major-key
first-movement endings fall outside this pattern. Haydn’s Symphony no. 26,which
dates from before 1770, is one of his earliest experiments with a minor-key
symphony and is in three short movements. His Symphony no. 80 has an opening
movement similar in structure and brevity to that of Symphony no. 26 and does not
fall into the pattern: not only does the first movement end in the major key of
the second subject, but the Finale doesn’t attempt to pick up any minor key
energy from the first movement or the minuet: it is in the tonic major. Haydn’s
Symphony no. 83 is also not a standard minor-key symphony: the stormy opening is
a set-up promptly undercut by the clucking major-key theme that gives this work
its nickname, “The Hen.”

Finally, the minor-key tonality of his Symphony no. 95
is only a gesture that appears only in the first movement’s introduction (and
its reappearance later in the movement)and functions more as a call to attention
than as an anchor to the work’s tonality. The work as a whole really much closer
in spirit and form to the other London Symphonies that are in major keys
with minor-key first movement introductions. Schubert’s “little” C-minor
Symphony, subtitled, like Mahler’s, “Tragic,” has a first movement which
resembles those of Haydn’s Symphonies nos. 26 and 80: the minor tonality is most
prominent in the exposition but even there is outweighed by the major-key second
theme that sets the stage for the sunny conclusion of the movement.
Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 6 in B-minor is yet another special case. We know
from all but one of his other symphonies that he was fond of minor tonalities and
had no hesitation about ending a first movement
the tonic minor.

Continued...
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[Leo K]

Peter Illich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

In his [Tchaikovsky’s] Symphony no. 6, he chose to end
the first movement with a kind of eulogy in B major. No triumph there. None of
these works appears to have been a candidate for a model of Mahler’s Sixth
Symphony. Would he have even known these half-dozen pieces? He could have known
Schubert’s Symphony in C minor, which was published in 1884-85 as part of the
critical edition edited by Brahms, but there is no record that he ever performed
it, let alone evidence to suggest that he studied it. Mahler was familiar with
the Tchaikovsky’s Symphony as of at least 1901, when he dismissed it in a
discussion with Guido Adler as empty and lacking inspiration. There is no
indication that this major-key first movement ending was an inspiration for the
very different one in Mahler’s Sixth (although the work itself was very likely an
inspiration for the structure of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony). It is also unlikely
that the failed first version of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony was a structural
model for Mahler. Although Mahler knew Bruckner well from his studies in Vienna,
we have no indication that he would have seen or even known about the Eighth
when it was completed in 1887. (Mahler served as second conductor at the Neues
Stadttheater, Leipzig, from July 1886, when his appointment took effect, until
his resignation in May 1888.)


Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)

Bruckner’s C-minor Symphony, though, is worth
looking at a little more closely, if only as an example of parallel invention. We
don’t know details about why Levi rejected it, but it is hard to imagine that the
tonal full-stop brought about by the triumphant C-major coda to the
C-minor opening movement was not a major factor, if not the major factor, in this
decision. With the tensions of the first movement gathered and resolved in this
coda, the listener is in effect not invited to stay tuned to the Symphony, but to
start all over again. Levi would likely have been as puzzled by this as anyone
else steeped in the symphonic culture of the time and could well have thought
the result structurally unworkable, like a tone poem followed by a
three-movement symphony.

Continued...
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[Leo K]

Conclusion of Chakwin's article...

Mahler’s Sixth in Context:

The coda of the first movement
of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is one of those minor-to-major key trouble spots, akin
to the corresponding sections in the Finales of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D
minor, K. 466, and the Piano Quartet in G minor, K. 478, in which the
major-key sections can all too easily sound “tacked on” and unconvincing. While
some commentators have suggested that Mahler wanted his coda to sound
unconvincing, the writing itself suggests otherwise: it is consistent with the
triumphant codas in his other works and there is nothing in the 37 bars that it
consists of that explicitly undercuts it.

So what was Mahler trying to do in the
coda? I suggest that he was attempting several things: first, to bring contrast
in the form of a triumphant major-key movement ending into a symphony that
he already knew was going to end in the minor; second to expand on his dramatic
innovation in the first movement by using tonality itself as a theme by using
this “tonality theme” to link movements in a way that had never been done before
– with a theme actually spanning the break between them; and finally, to use
whatever unarticulated program he may have had for the piece as a guide to its
structure. In doing this, Mahler must have realized the trap he was setting
himself. Unlike virtually all the previous minor-key symphonies he would have
known, his would resolve the first movement in the tonic major.
How would he get out of Bruckner’s “full stop” trap?

Very simply, the thematic relationship between the first and
second movements would propel the listener forward. The eclipse theme would span
the movements and pull the listener into the Scherzo. Once into the Scherzo, the
listener would be drawn forward by its energy and the resolution of the first
movement would be no problem. What went wrong? My speculation is that Mahler did
not make the change because of the resemblance between the opening material of
his first two movements. As Brahms would have observed “any ass could see that”.

That Mahler would have realized this only in the dress rehearsals in Essen after
writing the music, proofing it for publication, and reading through it with the
Vienna Philharmonic strains credibility . I suggest that Mahler realized more
and more clearly, perhaps with the aid of feedback from the Essen listeners that
his first-movement coda was going to seem, not like a triumphant though
temporary, conclusion, like a journey to nowhere, placed gratuitously at the end
of his first movement and undercut by the second.

This was undoubtedly the
reason for his great concern for the tempo of the Scherzo: How could he pace the
music so that its parody of the first movement was clear, but it didn’t seem to
be simply a return to the world of first movement after a pointless digression?
We know from de La Grange’s account of the Sixth’s Vienna performances that the
critics there were perceptive and merciless. Could Mahler get his coda past
their scrutiny?

I suggest that he reluctantly decided that he could not. Faced
with that decision, what was he to do? A longer, more worked-out coda could have
anchored the end of the first movement more firmly in A major, but there was no
time to write one and no assurance that moving from such an ending to the
scherzo would be any more convincing. Reworking the Scherzo was similarly
impracticable. Mahler’s solution was to conceal the problem by moving the
components of it away from each other.

With the Andante thrust between the
opening movement and the Scherzo, the A major coda became a journey to
somewhere, even if a somewhere that makes much less dramatic sense in context
(The bittersweet tone of the Andante and its passionate climax seem so much more
powerful and appropriate after the grim struggles of the first movement and the
nihilistic mocking of the Scherzo With only the first movement behind it, the
huge emotion of the Andante – if it is allowed to speak – seems overblown:
What in the first movement led to this?

On the other hand, if the emotion is
toned down and the movement played as a kind of light interlude – perhaps like
the second Nachtmusik movement in Symphony no. 7 – it seems pointless and even
vapid and Mahler’s great climax at the end, with the huge buildup and soaring
descants of his most earnest lyrical moments, provokes only puzzlement instead
of the deep emotion he usually meant such moments to convey. Perhaps
under Mahler’s own baton the circle was somehow squared, but I doubt it).
And the immediate problem was solved, at least for the time being.

Unfortunately, the time being was all the time that Mahler had.
He never had the chance in the five eventful years of life that
remained to him to do more structural work on
the Sixth. So the interim solution was what was left. Or was it? Where Are We
Now? The story of the confusion involving movement order in the preparation for
the 1920 Mahler Festival in Amsterdam and Alma’s telegram is too well-known to
require retelling here.

While it is impossible to know for sure where Alma got
her information, it is beyond dispute that she had no motive to intentionally
misrepresent or second-guess Mahler’s wishes for the final order of the
movements in the work and equally beyond dispute that both Mengelbergs, Willem, the
conductor, and Rudolf, the musicologist, found the solution she suggested
convincing. So have most of the conductors who have performed the work since the
publication of the 1963 critical edition. We are now left with two plausible
performing options for this symphony. One being the product of careful planning
and deep structural thinking, the other, I suggest, the product of fear under
pressure. The strongest argument in favor of Scherzo-first is that of the music
itself. The strongest in favor of Andante-first is that Mahler chose it. Neither
is a negligible argument, but in my view, ultimately the music speaks louder than
its creator on this subject.


Next...Alma sends a telegram...
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[Leo K]

interlude...

[Leo K]

[Leo K]

[Leo K]