Beethoven. Mahler

Not a single one of Ludwig van Beethoven’s “academies” (as concerts given by composers were called at the time) passed without a performance of the composer’s piano concerti. The greatest academy, lasting three hours, on 22 December 1808 included, in addition to the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, highlights from his Mass in C Major, the Fourth Piano Concerto in G Major and, as indicated by the playbill, an “Improvisation for piano with subsequent gradual inclusion of the entire orchestra and joining of a chorus in the finale”.
In preparing for the “academy”, Beethoven had not planned to perform the new concerto himself (his diminishing hearing was a source of disappointing perfidy to the musician while playing in an ensemble). But the pianists Beethoven turned to could not learn the complex solo part in the few days remaining before the premiere, and the composer was compelled to present his new work to the public himself. At Beethoven’s very last appearance as a pianist, one critic noted the “surprising perfection and utmost virtuosity … he truly sang on the instrument with a sensation of deepest melancholy” (in particular this remark was aimed at the Andante – in terms of depth an incredibly beautiful dramatic dialogue between the soloist and the strings). The Fourth Concerto, and after it the Fantasia too, breaking with indisputable tradition opened not with an orchestral tutti, but rather with the soloist. This “quiet” beginning in itself predetermined the essential mood of the Fourth Concerto – a unique “lyrical intermezzo” between the bleak, courageous Third and the heroic Fifth Concerti. The Fourth Concerto, performed by the composer, was never again heard during Beethoven’s lifetime (one of those highly striking examples of the general deafness of the public and the musicians!). It was only a quarter of a century later that the Concerto was once again “discovered” by Felix Mendelssohn, a hunter of musical treasures, who performed it in 1832 in Paris.

The Fifth Symphony contains, in concentrated form, everything that can generally be characterised by the epithet of “Mahlerian”. There is the fearlessness with which Gustav Mahler threw himself into the depths of banal intonations, into the embrace of the widely differing formulae of grief or joy – from street funeral processions to the Viennese waltz. And the stormy seething of passions in the soul of the romantic artist living at the turn of the century when a cruel world bid farewell to romantic dreams. And moments of lofty love of beauty. And the pathos of heroically overcoming life’s misery, and victorious triumph... The premiere of the symphony took place in Cologne on 18 October 1904.
Following the premiere, Arnold Schoenberg, staggered by the music of the symphony, wrote to Mahler that “... I saw your naked soul, completely naked. It stretched out before me like some wild, mysterious landscape with its frightening depths and narrows, with its wonderful, joyful meadows and peaceful, idyllic corners. I saw it as a natural storm with its terrors and perils as well as its enlightening and calming rainbow... I sensed the struggle for illusions, I saw how good and evil forces admonished each other, I saw how man worked himself into agonising anxiety in order to attain inner harmony; I sensed the man, the drama, the truth, the merciless truth” (from a letter to Gustav Mahler dated 12 December 1904). It is difficult to convey in just a few words the depth of meaning of the symphony better than Schoenberg himself did, telling Mahler in his own words “not as a musician to a musician but as a man to a man.”
The five movements of the symphony are consequential phases in the struggle that unfolds not on the battlefield but rather in the human heart (à la Dostoevsky!) between Good and Evil. The prologue of the drama is a funeral march in which there intrudes an episode full of infinite despair (in the score there is the remark “With passion. Wildly”). The tense second movement in complex sonata form is an undoubted culminating point of symphonic narrative (the composer himself prefaces the second movement with the comment “Stürmisch bewegt” (“Moving stormily”). The scherzo is a grandiose symphonic waltz in which, Mahler said, “ostensible disorder should become supreme order and harmony, as in a gothic cathedral.” The divine Adagietto leads to the ecstatic Rondo-finale which foretells the overcoming of suffering and completes the symphony with a radiant apotheosis.
Iosif Raiskin