# Understanding Mahler, Part 4



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Understanding Mahler

*Part 4: The Content of Mahler's Works*

*The Popular and the Noble*

At the beginning of the third movement of Mahler's first symphony, a lone timpanist beats a slow rhythm. It is shortly joined by a single double bass playing a funereal rendition of Frere Jaques (a tune Mahler would have known as Bruder Martin). With the utmost solemnity, the orchestra grows steadily, but without raising in volume. The procession soon halts its inexorable march, turning into a dance band led by oboes and trumpets. When the procession resumes after a lyrical interlude, we have slipped into the "wrong key" of E-flat minor, a half step above where we began. The music soon finds its way back to D minor, but the dance band imposes itself onto the funeral march, and the two kinds of music briefly merge for one bizarre moment. The band having passed or been subsumed into the cortege, the march comes slowly to a halt, interrupted by the cymbal crash and diminished seventh chord of the finale's beginning.

This movement puzzled and infuriated contemporary critics. What could they make of this intrusion of "popular" elements into an "elevated" form like the symphony? Was it a joke? If so, was the composer's target his audience or his predecessors? Was it following some program? At the symphony's first performance, the movement was marked "A la pompes funebres". The performance was a disaster. At the next performance, the same movement was marked with the following explanation: "Stranded! A funeral march in the manner of Callot. For this movement, the following explanation will help: the basic inspiration for it was found by the author in a humorous engraving, well known to all Austrian children: 'The Huntsman's Funeral,' from an old book of fairy tales. The forest animals accompany the dead hunter's coffin to the grave. Hares carry the banner, in front of them a group of Bohemian musicians, accompanied by singing cats, toads, crows, etc. Stags, deer, foxes, and other four-legged and feathered animals follow the funeral procession in all kinds of farcical positions. The mood expressed is sometimes ironic and merry, sometimes gloomy and uncanny, then suddenly..."*

This is a lengthy explanation, and it stands out all the more as the other movements merit no more than a few words each in Mahler's program. For the eventual publication of the symphony, Mahler removed all titles, and permitted no program to be published with any further performances. Contemporary critics claimed that the music was incomprehensible apart from any program that might justify its idiosyncrasies, but Mahler persisted, and audiences today can appreciate this and other Mahler movements as they are intended, with irony.

Humor in music flourished in the Classical era, but languished in the Romantic. It depends on the substitution of an unexpected element for an expected one, such as a false start or an interruption disrupting the music's momentum. As the Romantic era depended more on the unexpected than the expected for its natural mode, it would have been more difficult to inject humor without quickly degenerating into farce. Irony works differently from wit. Irony requires one to put up a duplicitous face in order to reveal the actual meaning. A funeral march is a symbol of tragedy, but combined with a popular tune and a dance band, it takes on a lighter appearance that simultaneously masks its darker undercurrents and exposes them all the more by contrast.

The march elements that underpin much of Mahler's music are treated similarly. Of particular note here is the second theme of the 3rd symphony's massive opening movement, which again seems to transplant its popular material directly into the elevated rhetoric of the movement's solemn opening. The irony lies in the fact that the stoic horn theme and the frivolous march music are one and the same melody. Similarly, all of the horn calls and drum tattoos that were merely picturesque in Beethoven and Berlioz are treated thematically by Mahler, developed like any other motif would be.

These popular elements (and one can include in this the ländler that Mahler uses in some of his scherzos) were one of the main points of contention among early critics of Mahler's music, leading to charges of banality. Certain of the themes or motifs are perhaps banal or commonplace, but Mahler's treatment of them is always utterly individual and recognizably personal. Especially today, after Modernists such as Stravinsky and Ives took the mixture of popular and elevated materials to an even further extreme than Mahler ever did, it seems far less disturbing than it did to contemporary audiences.

*Song and Symphony*

All of Mahler's mature works fall into one of two genres, song or symphony. Following his cantata _Das Klagende Lied_ (The Song of Lamentation), finished at the age of 20, but not premiered for over two decades after its completion, his first major work was a song cycle entitled _Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen_ (Songs of a Wayfarer), setting poems written by the composer himself in response to an unhappy love affair. Unusually but presciently, each of the songs finishes in a different key than the one in which it begins. His next large-scale work, the First Symphony in D major, is intimately connected with this cycle, and uses two of its themes. The first of these is the first theme of the first movement, which originates in the second song of the cycle, "Ging heut morgen übers Feld". The second appears in the trio of the aforementioned third movement funeral march, and it comes from the last stanza of the last song of the cycle, set to the words "Auf der Straße steht ein Lindenbaum".

It is interesting to note how easily these melodies work both as sung and as orchestrated, but Mahler's music is essentially lyrical, and his instrumental themes often have song-like qualities. In contrast to Beethoven, who wrote instrumental melodies to be sung, Mahler seemingly wrote vocal melodies to be played. Unsurprisingly, this led Mahler, like Beethoven and Mendelssohn before him, to integrate the human voice into his symphonic works. In the second, this takes the form of a choral finale to an instrumental symphony, preceded by a brief song setting which is not very dissimilar in function from the recitative in the finale of Beethoven's 9th. Here as there the human voice is an element that intrudes and reshapes the direction of the whole. In the 3rd and 4th symphonies, the voice functions as commentary, integrated into the whole. In the 8th symphony, voices are treated as another instrumental component throughout, an integrated part of the symphonic argument, neither opposing nor augmenting it.

The ultimate product of this fusion is perhaps the song cycle _Das Lied von der Erde_ (The Song of the Earth), which is subtitled "Symphony". Although it is not in symphonic form, it is certainly of symphonic proportions, and it has the same weight as any other of Mahler's symphonies. Its six movements alternate between tenor and alto (or baritone, although this option is only rarely taken), and they are, despite their length and complexity, individual songs, in more or less stanza form. Here as in Mahler's numbered symphonic works, though, the instrumental component is just as important as the vocal, and occasionally more lyrical. In the final song, _Das Abschied_ (The Farewell), the alto's recitative-like first lines are to be delivered "without expression", against the expressive cantilena of the flute.

The next entry will deal with Mahler's unique and influential treatment of the orchestra.

*[Translation from La Grange's excellent biography of the composer, to which I owe an enormous debt.]

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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Mahler's 1st is the only symphony I've explored in any depth so far on my Mahler journey. Weirdly that Frere Jaques movement is the one that speaks to me the most, though I'm afraid I did not notice the E flat minor modulation. I will now! I did however notice a sudden unexpected and and climactic shift almost exactly halfway through the fourth movement (Valery Gergiev / LSO live 2012 recording). That stunned me. 

I am curious what the critics made of his inclusion of themes inspired by popular pub music in the first movement as well, if I'm remembering correctly. Would this not have been as eyebrow raising as the 3rd? Or would the listening audience have been accustomed to including folk influences by then? It is hard for a 21st century listener to tell the difference between these influences.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

You're referring to the 2nd movement scherzo. What bothered critics at the time was not as much the fact that Mahler used folk/popular material, but that he (supposedly) did not elevate it. When Brahms used drinking songs in his Academic Festival Overture, for instance, they were "softened" to fit his classically-oriented style, but Mahler plays up the roughness, so to speak.

This actually aligns far more with 20th century practice, via Bartok and others who found folk music's rougher edges perfectly amenable to the new modernist style. So, in a very roundabout way, yes, it's harder for a 21st century audience to have the perspective that Mahler's critics had.


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