Stravinsky. Mahler

Work on the piano parts in the Piano Concerto and in Les Noces roused the composer’s instrument in this instrument. And his highly successful appearances as a soloist in his own concerto, performed over forty times in Europe and America, also increased Stravinsky’s taste for piano performance. In spending many hours at the piano, he played Czerny’s etudes with the greatest pleasure, perfecting his pianism. Invitations to perform continued to come, and the composer decided to write a new concert work – yet again on the basis of his performing skills.
The name “Capriccio” was given by Stravinsky as it best matched the capricious, unpredictable character of the music in the piece with its succession of episodes that vary in their mood. As in his other neoclassical works, the composer refers to the music of predecessors he admired. The melodic sophistication and the rhythmical refinement of the Capriccio link it with the ballet Le Baiser de la fée, which had been completed shortly before that, based on works by Tchaikovsky. But Stravinsky stated that the principal sources of his inspiration were Weber and Mendelssohn – “the kings of music” whose intonations and techniques are unexpectedly blended with elements of jazz.

Nadezhda Kulygina

Comparing his Ninth Symphony with Beethoven’s “eponymous” Ninth Symphony in D Minor, Mahler said to his friends “It, too, is in D! But in Major key!” The composer wrote it knowing that he was doomed: doctors had found an incurable heart disease. Out of superstition, fearing that the Ninth – as with Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner – would be his last, Mahler didn’t give his preceding symphony a number, calling it Das Lied von der Erde – a symphony for tenor, contralto and orchestra to texts by Chinese poets. It was impossible to cheat Fate: Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, written one year after, confirmed the composer’s fears. Mahler left the score of his subsequent Tenth Symphony unfinished, in sketches.
The unfinished trilogy of Mahler’s late work (Das Lied von der Erde – the Ninth – the Tenth) is united by one thought, one emotion – the farewell to life and one’s endless, ever-increasing love of it. The late symphonies do not contradict one another, they introduce no new concepts, philosophically or aesthetically. The stand closely together as a small group, as if contiguous with one another. And the links in the chain of their ideas are the last bars of the finale of the symphony just finished and the first bars of the new one, between them moments of silence, of a deep breath, and the “thread of life” quietly unfolds. The new work literally begins with the thought on which the previous one ended... It is as if the first sounds of the Ninth Symphony flow out from the final movement of Das Lied von der Erde, entitled Der Abschied by Mahler.

This annotation includes extracts from texts by Inna Barsova