 | No. 163 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast163 |
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Today is
our first new Friday Blog and Podcast since last June, and we embark in a new
thematic arc, considering ninth symphonies. Today’s instalment has its
peculiarities…
The Curse of the Ninth
A “ninth” symphony
seems to have a curse around it. Beethoven, Vaughan Williams, Dvorak, Schubert and Bruckner (the latter three being featured this month) didn’t compose
(or, at least, publish) symphonies past their ninth. Mozart composed at least
41, Haydn 104, and Shostakovich 15 but there seems to be this stigma associated
with a ninth symphony that didn’t go unnoticed by Gustav Mahler.
After
writing his Eighth symphony (the mammoth Symphony of A Thousand), Mahler chose
not to call his next large symphonic work, Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of
the Earth) a symphony, thus avoiding the need to call it “his ninth”.
Now, maybe
thinking the curse of the ninth had been avoided, Mahler did compose a tenth
major symphonic work, which he proceeded to number as his ninth symphony, and
started on a tenth and then – you guessed ir – Mahler died and so the Curse
struck again.
Because
Mahler was a working man with a day job (at the time, he was the music director
of the New-York Philharmonic), summers were the opportunity for Mahler to
compose at his lakeside retreat at Maiernigg in the Carinthian Mountains. His
usual gestation period for a major work was two years – one summer sketching
out the work, and the following summer completing the orchestration. The ninth
followed the same ritual, over the summers of 1908 and 1909. Had Mahler
survived, he probably would have programmed the work for performance sometime
in the 1910-11 season, which of course was plagued by his health problems.
The work
was premiered posthumously by his close collaborator Bruno Walter on June 26,
1912, at the Vienna Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic.
Although
the symphony follows the usual four-movement form, it is unusual in that the
first and last are slow rather than fast. As is often the case with Mahler, one
of the middle movements is a ländler. Though the work is often described as
being in the key of D major, the tonal scheme of the symphony as a whole is
progressive; while the opening movement is in D major, the finale is in D-flat
major. As is the
case with his latter symphonies, the work not only requires a large orchestra
(including clarinets in A, B-Flat and E-Flat, two harps, and a large array of
percussion instruments), it lasts well over an hour.
The
performance I retained is by the late great German conductor Kurt Sanderling
who has the distinction of having had a storied career both East and West of
the Iron Curtain. Fleeing Nazism at the onset of the Second World War, he chose
to go to the Soviet Union, where he was co-music director of the Leningrad
Philharmonic (with Evgeny Mravinsky) and led the (East-) Berlin Symphony
Orchestra, which is featured in today’s podcast.
Sanderling
died in 2011, two days shy of his 99th birthday.
This is an
inspired performance of this great Mahler symphony.
I think you will love this music too!
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