Mahler

Mahler’s “Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” “Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen”: A Ghostly Nocturnal Vision

by

Songs gave rise to symphonies during Gustav Mahler’s “Wunderhorn years.” This was the period from 1887 to 1904 when Mahler composed his first four symphonies, all of which are rooted in nature and song. In some cases, songs provided the seeds for symphonic movements. The texts for Mahler’s twelve-song cycle, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Boy’s Magic Horn”) were based on a collection of anonymous German folk poems of the same title, compiled and …

Read more

Remembering Seiji Ozawa

by

Seiji Ozawa, the internationally renowned Japanese conductor, passed away in Tokyo last week (February 6, 2024) as a result of heart failure. He was 88. Ozawa’s 29-year tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra began in 1973. Prior to the appointment, he served as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (1965-1969) and the San Francisco Symphony (1970-1977). In 1984, he founded the Saito Kinen Orchestra in Matsumoto, Japan. In …

Read more

Mahler’s “Erinnerung”: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Leonard Bernstein

by

Composed in the 1880s, prior to the First Symphony, Erinnerung (“Remembrance”) is one of the early songs of Gustav Mahler. It is the second in a collection of fourteen Lieder und Gesänge (“Songs and Airs”) published in 1892. The text, by the German poet, Richard Leander (1830-1889), reflects on the intermingling of love and song. Mahler’s setting is shrouded in dreamy melancholy and quiet anguish. The lamenting melody drifts over a hypnotic stream of …

Read more

Mahler’s First Symphony: The Titan

by

Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major is music rooted in nature and song. It is the work of a 28-year-old composer who was rapidly rising as one of Europe’s premier conductors, and who was coming out of a stormy love affair with Marion von Weber, the wife of the grandson of composer, Carl Maria von Weber. It is music which synthesizes the Romantic influences of Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Liszt, and Bruckner, …

Read more

Mahler Meets Schnittke: The Unfinished Piano Quartet in A Minor

by

Gustav Mahler was fifteen or sixteen years old and a student at the Vienna Conservatory when, in 1876, he composed the Piano Quartet in A minor. The work exists as a single movement, cast in sonata form and marked Nicht zu schnell (not too fast). Conceived as the opening movement of a larger abandoned project, it is followed by a thirty-two measure fragment of an unfinished scherzo. This is the only surviving …

Read more

Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony: Music from Another World

by

With his Symphony No. 2 in C minor, composed between 1888 and 1894, Gustav Mahler grappled with the most fundamental metaphysical questions. In a letter, he wrote, “Why have you lived? Why have you suffered? Is it all some huge, awful joke? – We have to answer these questions somehow if we are to go on living – indeed, even if we are only to go on dying!” The person in whose …

Read more

Remembering Dale Clevenger

by

Dale Clevenger, the legendary principal horn player for the Chicago Symphony from 1966 to 2013, passed away on January 5. He was 81. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Clevenger began playing the horn at the age of 13. Before joining the Chicago Symphony, he was a member of Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra and the Symphony of the Air. His discography included the Grammy-winning 1968 album, The Antiphonal Music of Gabrieli, featuring the brass sections …

Read more