2 LP's - SET 471-2 - (p) 1970
1 CD - 414 321-2 - (c) 1984

GUSTAV MAHLER (1860-1911)






Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor
66' 11"
Long Playing 1 - SET.471

42' 39"

- 1. Trauermarsch. In gemessenem Schritt 11' 57"

- 2. Stürmisch bewegt, mit grosster Vehemenz 13' 58"

- 3. Scherzo. Kräftig, nicht zu schnell 16' 44"

Long Playing 2 - SET.472

39' 22"

- 4. Adagietto. Sehr langsam 9' 51"

- 5. Rondo-Finale. Allegro 13' 41"

Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn
15' 50"
- a) Das irdische Leben 2' 39"

- b) Verlor' ne Müh 2' 57"

- c) Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen 6' 58"

- d) Rheinlegendchen 3' 16"





 
Yvonne Minton, contralto (a-d)

Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Georg Solti, conductor
 






Luogo e data di registrazione
Medinah Temple, Chicago (USA) - marzo 1970 (Symphony) / aprile 1970 (Lieder)


Registrazione: live / studio
studio

Producer
David Harvey

Recording engineers
Gordon Parry


Prima Edizione LP
Decca ffss | SET 471-2 (stereo) | (2 LP's) | durata 42' 39" - 39' 22" | (p) 1970 | Analogico


Edizione CD
Decca | 414 321-2 | (1 CD) | durata 65' 53" | (c) 1984 | AAD

Note
The Decca Record Company Limited, London













GEORG SOLTI & THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Fifteen years were destined to separate Georg Solti’s debut as a guest leader of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra - at summer concerts of the Ravinia Festival - and his first Orchestra hall appearance, downtown, as music director in the autumn of 1969 The first encounter, however, in 1954, was instantaneously productive of a mutual respect and rapport that deepened with each subsequent interim meeting. No matter who was resident conductor in Chicago, or what traditions variously prevailed whenever Solti would return as a guest, the orchestra each time became his ally-as such the mirror of a singular aesthetic temperament in our time. The precision that Solti has always demanded in musical performance (as an essential for musical expression) has been his to command in whatever capacity, under whatever circumstances, at whatever time.
With his appointment as music director, thereby continuing an artistic heritage hand-fashioned by Artur Rodzinski (1947-48) and Fritz Reiner (1953-63), the alliance of conductor and orchestra has produced a synchronous artistry without parallel in Chicago’s musical history. By no means is this said to underestimate the achievements of Solti’s predecessors, without the finest of them he would not now have the superlative assembly at his summons. But none before him in memory - and some before him possessed awesome powers - could quite persuade the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to give so eloquently of themselves at the same time as they sustained such a high level of discipline. Early on this interaction of a great conductor and a great orchestra surpassed such essentially irrelevant concerns as love for one another.
Respect and rapport are the rudiments of Georg Solti’s astounding achievement to date in Chicago, as documented on these discs for the first (but surely not for the last) time. To some persons, as the years lengthened into a decade, and beyond, it may have seemed that the eventual union of Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was not meant to be. But to others of us, the long wait served instead to whet the appetite further for what promised, on each visit, to be an artistic inevitability - and has indeed proved to be, altogether beyond expectations.

notes by DERYCK COOKE
Mahler’s whole life-work as a symphonist can be described as a search for an identity - which is no doubt why his music makes such a strong appeal to us today, and especially to the young.
Symphonic music before Mahler was written by composers who felt themselves part of a stable environment - men able to take for granted the basic assumptions of their society, if only to rebel against them. Even Mozart, who had to struggle so desperately against the musical conditions of eighteenth-century Austria, did at least have this immovable wall to beat his head against in vain. But in Mahler we find the first symphonist who represents that typical modern figure, the man who is uprooted and out of his element. As an Austrian Jew born in Bohemia, he was technically a member of the Germanic civilisation, but he often used to say, according to his wife’s memoir of him: ‘I am three times homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian amongst Germans, and as a Jew throughout all the world: everywhere an intruder, never welcomed’.
In consequence, there was nothing stable for him in any of his environments, and his work became an unremitting quest to discover some stable attitude with which to identify himself. This involved a good deal of chopping and changing, even in his everyday life, as another quotation from his wife’s memoir shows: ‘It was ... out of the question for me to say “But Gustav, you said the very opposite yesterday” (as he often did), because he reserved for himself the privilege of inconsequence. This characteristic of his was often a great shock to me. I could never be sure what he thought and felt’. No doubt Mahler himself couldn’t always be sure himself, either.
It is this which explains that strange and often-criticised element of theatricality in Mahler’s music. Frequently, when he expresses a certain state of mind, it is not out of permanent conviction, but out of an unconscious need to identify himself with that state of mind, to believe in it passionately for the moment, in the hope that it may prove a valuable one to cling to, and remain an abiding acquisition; yet there is always his acute intellect, unable not to look on from outside, and weigh up the situation, and consider whether the state of mind is in fact as valuable and fruitful as it seems. He struggled with this situation for long: only from The Song of the Earth onwards, when he was faced with certain premature death, did he begin to find his way out of it, in resigned reconciliation with the inescapable transience of human life. Before that work, each spiritual world that he built up over a period, and embodied in a symphony, afterwards vanished, as if it had never been: each new symphony till then was a fresh start, a start from scratch. As Bruno Walter said: ‘No spiritual experience, however hardly won, was ever his secure possession’.
Aaron Copland - who admires Mahler’s music - has taken a more critical view. ‘The difference between Beethoven and Mahler’, he says, ‘is the difference between watching a great man walk down the street and watching a great actor act the part of a great man walking down the street’. It is easy to see what Gopland is driving at - the manifest element of impersonation in much of Mahler’s music - but he does not go deep enough to explain why this should be. There is nothing superficial or insincere about Mahler, but only an underlying psychological instability. The real difference between Beethoven and him is that between watching a great man walk down a street in which he feels himself secure, and is therefore perfectly at ease with his greatness, and watching a great man walk down a street in which he feels himself totally insecure, and is therefore obliged to act out his greatness, self-consciously and defiantly - because he is scarcely able to credit it in his heart of hearts, uncertain whether the street will not suddenly cease to be a reassuring background and become hostile territory in which he will be an outcast.
Mahler had to walk down so many streets, and felt at home in none of them; and this is the fundamental origin of the almost disruptive contrasts in his music. With each new symphony - and sometimes with each new movement inside a symphony - we are taken into a different world. In each case there is a passionate, even desperate identification with a certain attitude - but only, in the last resort, for what it is worth, suddenly the scene changes, and another attitude is being identified with - but again only for what it is worth. In the first four symphonies we find Mahler striving to identify hirnself with four different kinds of idealism: The power of the will against fate in the first, the Christian belief in resurrection in the second, a dionysiac pantheism based on Nietzsche in the third, the indestructibility of innocence in the fourth. Into all these symphonies the youthful lyricism of Mahler’s early songs enters, either in instrumental arrangements or else actually sung by voices - the voices of children, or of adults possessed of a childlike, trusting faith.
None of these idealistic worlds proved a haven to rest in, and the Fifth Symphony, completed in 1902 at the age of forty-two, brought a more than usually determined wiping of the slate. It marks the beginning of Mahler’s full maturity, being the first of a trilogy of ‘realistic', purely instrumental symphonies - Nos. 5, 6 and 7 - which occupied him during his middle period. Gone are the programmes, the voices, the songs, and the movements based on songs, and the delicate or warm harmonic sonorities which formerly brought relief from pain have been largely replaced by a new type of naked contrapuntal texture, already foreshadowed in parts of the Fourth Symphony, but now given a hard edge by the starkest possible use of the woodwind and brass.
In the Fifth Symphony, although it has no actual programme, there are two manifest and utterly opposed attitudes which are set side by side, with so little reconciliation between them as to threaten the work with disunity. The Symphony might almost be described as schizophrenic, in that the most tragic and the most joyful worlds of feeling are separated off from one another, and only bound together by Mahler’s unmistakable musical personality, and his extraordinary command of large-scale symphonic construction and unification.
The first of the work’s three parts consists of the two opening movements: linked emotionally and thematically, they explore to the full the tragic view of life, and give only a late and fleeting glimpse of the opposite view - that of triumphant life-affirmation. The first movement is a black funeral march in C sharp minor, beginning with a hollow trumpet fanfare in the minor mode, which is to strike in at various focal points as a kind of iron refrain. Curiously enough, this beginning stems from a passage in the Fourth Symphony, as though Mahler wanted to preserve at least a thread of continuity between his new ‘realistic’ world and the world of naive innocence he had just left behind. The minor-mode trumpet fanfare had already appeared at the one really bitter juncture of the Fourth - the nightmarish collapse of the development section of its first movement - and at the same pitch of C sharp minor, far removed from the movement’s main tonality of G major:

The opening movement of the Fifth alternates its main slow funeral-march music with ferocious outbursts of grievous protest in a faster tempo; and the first of these starts with a three-note phrase (marked   which is to be the chief means of unifying the two opening movements:

The phrase becomes pervasive, and towards the end of the movement it appears in a new accompanying form, in the key of A minor which is to be that of the second movement:


And this form of the phrase also pervades the opening allegm material of the second movement, eventually acting as the starting point-point of its main theme:

The A minor second movement is frenetic, and it reverses the situation of the first: the ferocious mood of protest is basic, and there are slower sections which are related to the funeral-march music of the first movement - not only in mood, but in some of the actual thematic material. It is, however, the phrase X which is the chief unifying factor, and at four separate points it turns to the major mode which is to dominate the remaining three movements of the Symphony. The first time (Ex. 5a), it introduces one of the reminiscences of the first movement, bringing back the consoling secondary idea of the funeral-march music; a little later (Ex. 5b), it introduces a cheerful popular-type march-tune of deliberate, sarcastic triviality, a little later still (Ex. 5c), it flashes through the prevailing darkness a vivid blaze of light which is immediately eclipsed; and finally, a good deal later (Ex. 5d), it brings the climax of the movement - a noble chorale-like passage in the actual key of D major in which the Symphony will settle from the third movement onwards.


It will be noticed that, from 5b onwards, figure X rises higher all the time: F and E flat in 5b, F sharp and E natural; followed by G sharp and F sharp in 5c; and finally, reaching a peak in D major, A and G in 5d. And this last passage culminates in a chorale-like theme, which looks out across the rest of the Symphony to the finale, of which it is to be the final climax:
For the time being, however, this too is eclipsed, and the movement eventually dies away shadowily in A minor, the despairing last word being with its main theme, based on the figure X:
So ends the tragic first part of the Symphony. The second part consists of the third movement only - the big Scherzo - and the moment it begins, the schizophrenic character of the work emerges. It completely contradicts the nihilistic mood and minor tonality of practically everything that has gone before, by switching to the brilliant key of D major, and to an exploration of the joyfully affirmative view of life, both of which are to occupy the rest of the Symphony. Thus the dark world of Part I is not gradually dispelled by a process of spiritual development: it is abruptly rejected in favour of a completely different attitude. The tragic view of life is one way of looking at things, the Symphony seems to say, and this is another: the two different attitudes are always there, and either or both may be right - but it is impossible to reconcile them.
Nevertheless, since they are being presented in a work of art - a symphony - they are provided with the necessary musical unification: not only through the eventual reappearance of the chorale-theme of Ex. 6 near the end of the finale, but also at the very outset of this third movement. Part I of the Symphony, as we have seen, ended with a despairing reference to the main theme of the second movement (Ex. 7), based on the chief unifying figure, X; and if we transpose this reference from A minor to the new key of D major (Ex. 8a), it stands clearly as the basis of the joyous opening horn-theme of the new movement which is Part 2 (Ex. 8b - see asterisks).



This Scherzo is a symphonic Ländler, with an ebullient obbligato part for the first horn-player of the orchestra. Admittedly, the waltz-like trio-section brings a mood of nostalgia; and there is an awesome climax with horns echoing and re-echoing across mountain distances, which leads to haunting music full of sadness and loneliness. But these passages have nothing emotionally in common with the despairing laments of the first part of the work; and in any case, they are subsidiary to the excited Ländler music, which returns all the time, in rondo fashion, and eventually brings the movement to a jubilant ending. The Scherzo is really a dance of life, evoking all the bustle of a vital existence, as opposed to the concentration on the inevitability of death in the funeral marches and ferocious protests of Part I.
The third and final part of the Symphony consists of the last two movements. First comes the famous Adagietto for strings and harp only, which is a quiet haven of peace in F major between the strenuous activity of the D major Scherzo and the equally strenuous activity of the D major Finale. Pervaded with the familiar romantic mood of withdrawal from the strain and tension of life into the quietude of the inner self, the Adagietto has much in common with Mahler’s great song Ich bin der welt abhanden gekommen (I am lost to the world), which ends with the words ‘I live alone, in my own heaven, in my love, in my singing’. And this movement too is related symphonically to all that has gone before, by its use of the chief unifying figure, X. Its main theme can be shown to be based on the figure, but more striking is the threefold quotation of it at the crucial point when the movement switches suddenly to the new and ecstatic key of G flat major:

Out of this movement’s quiet retreat, the Finale emerges immediately - and magically. A single horn-note, like a call to awake, is answered by a drowsy echo on the violins, which is in fact a repetition of their last, long-drawn, peaceful note in the Adagietto: the Symphony is unwilling to turn from meditation to action. The note is A, the third degree of the Adagietto key of F major; but it now stands as the dominant (fifth degree) of D major, switching the Finale back to that main key of the last two parts of the Symphony. Various fragments of cheerful folk-like melody are given out straight away by unaccompanied woodwind instruments and horn, providing much of the thematic material of the movement. The first quick one on the bassoon was taken by Mahler from his satirical Wunderhorn song Lob des hohen Verstandes about the singing-contest in which the cuckoo beat the nightingale because the donkey acted as the judge; but the second and third, on clarinet and bassoon respectively, may sound even more familiar in the present context. They are in fact speeded-up versions of the two separate segments of the big chorale-theme of the second movement - as becomes clearer when, after the horn has introduced another idea, the clarinet plays both segments continuously (cf. Ex. 6, figures Y and Z):

The last four notes of this theme immediately become the starting-point of the Finale’s main rondo tune, given out by horns and strings: the mood is again joyful and exuberant, but this Finale - like that of Beethoven’s Eroica - brings the symphony to a vital culmination which is concerned, not so much with the expression of particular life-attitudes, as with the composer’s artistic joy in symphonic creation, of building up a large musical structure. It thus follows naturally on the Adagietto, the haven of recuperation from life’s turmoil; and this is further emphasised by the use of an actual theme from the Adagietto, at a quicker tempo, as the Finale’s second subject. Mahler’s structure is a huge one, combining sonata and rondo, and including, as part of the opening group of themes, a fugal exposition on a bustling subject. The final climax, before the Symphony races away to its cock-a-hoop conclusion, is a full restatement of the big brass chorale introduced so fleetingly towards the end of the second movement (Ex. 7, via Ex. 10). Ultimately - and notwithstanding the subtle unifying power of the ubiquitous figure X - it is this explicit cross-reference between the most anguished movement in Part I and the most joyous movement of Part 3 which is the main cross-beam holding together the dangerously disparate elements of total darkness and total light at either end of the Symphony.
Mahler’s use of a phrase from his song Lob des hohen Verstandes as a motive in the Symphony’s finale, mentioned above, was the last (and least) quotation of this kind that he made. Earlier, he had drawn on other songs from the same collection - the settings of poems from the German folk-anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn) - for whole movements, or sections of movements, in his second, third and fourth symphonies. The songs on the fourth side of the present issue, also from this collection, were not drawn on for the early symphonies; though curiously enough, two of them were to have faint repercussions in the Tenth (much as a phrase from the last of the Kindertotenlieder, is hinted at in the finale of the Sixth). The voice’s initial yodelling phrase in Verlorne Müh’ - in the form it takes at the opening of the second verse - is identical with the initial phrase of the Ländler-like trio-section of the Tenth’s first scherzo; and the sinister ostinato accompaniment of Das irdische Leben has something in common with the sinister ostinato accompaniment of the symphony’s ‘Purgatorio’ movement.