DG - 2 CDs - 445 817-2 - (p) 1995

Gustav MAHLER (1860-1911)





Symphonie No. 9
82' 39"
Compact Disc 1
43' 25"
- 1. Andante comodo 28' 09"

- 2. Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers. Etwas täppisch und sehr derb 15' 15"

Compact Disc 2
39' 14"
- 3. Rondo-Burleske. Allegro assai. Sehr trotzig 13' 16"

- 4. Adagio. Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend 25' 54"





 
PHILHARMONIA ORCHESTRA
Giuseppe SINOPOLI
 





Luogo e data di registrazione
All Saints' Church, Tooting, London (Gran Bretagna) - dicembre 1993

Registrazione: live / studio
studio

Executive Producer
Wolfgang Stengel

Recording Producer
Wolfgang Stengel

Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)
Klaus Hiemann

Recording Engineer
Hans-Rudolf Müller

Editing
Mark Buecker

Prima Edizione LP
-

Prima Edizione CD
Deutsche Grammophon | 445 817-2 | LC 0173 | 2 CDs - 43' 25" & 39' 14" | (p) 1995 | 4D DDD

Note
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Although the Ninth was the last of Mahler’s symphonies to be completed in fully orchestrated fair copy, the period of its composition overlapped with that of Das Lied von der Erde, which preceded it, and the sketched but unfinished Tenth Symphony. Following the exhumation and reconstruction of the latter, the three works have come to be regarded almost as a trilogy, for understandable reasons. All are elegiac; all are marked by emotional pain and the ill-health to which Mahler’s busy winter conducting-schedule in America contributed. Behind the events and preoccupations of his later years lay a fateful chain of events that had begun in 1907. Mahler had resigned his directorship of the Vienna Court Opera; his eldest daughter had died; he had been diagnosed as suffering from a heart-condition. Their house on the Wörthersee had been sold and from 1908 he and his wife, Alma, with their remaining daughter, spent their summers in Toblach, in the Tyrol. It was mostly there that the last three works were composed. It was also there that Mahler confronted the fact not only of his own mortality, but also of his much younger wife’s increasing estrangement from him. Whatever meaning he attributed to the Ninth Symphony, it is perhaps significant that he appears to have regarded it as a peculiarly private work. While he played the whole of Das Lied von der Erde to Alma and had shown the score to Bruno Walter, neither of them saw very much of the Ninth. He alluded to its composition in letters to Walter, but only once did he say anything very specific about it. What he said was cryptic:

You did guess the real reason for my silence. I have been working very hard and am just putting the finishing touches to a new symphony ... In it something is said that I have had on the tip of my tongue for some time - perhaps (as a whole) to be ranked beside the Fourth, if anything (but quite different). As a result of working in mad haste and agitation the score is rather a scrawl and probably quite illegible to anyone but myself. And so I dearly hope it will be granted to me to make a fair copy this winter.

Dark and distressing though the personal circumstances surrounding its composition may have been, the Ninth is as rich and complex in emotional range as any Mahler symphony. Even in the slow movements with which it begins and ends, lamentation and the mood of leave-taking are defined by the energetic aspiration and anger that they constantly inspire. We may hear the symphony as a subjective confrontation with despair, but that confrontation, as always with Mahler, is presented as a creative project: a series of problems about how and why a symphony might unfold when the very point of the genre, whose roots lay in 19th-century optimism and romantic heroics, seemed called into question by knowledge that was as much cultural and historical as subjectively personal. It is for this reason that the Ninth Symphony, like Mahler’s other late works, seems to mark the end of a tradition in a way that is, however, extraordinarily modern in its self-awareness and expressive immediacy.
*****
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno once movingly suggested that “Mahler’s music passes a maternal hand over the hair of those to whom it turns.” Certainly the opening theme of the Ninth’s first movement, emerging in D major against a background of fragmentary rhythmic and motivic elements, is profoundly consoling, almost a lullaby. Its recurring statements, always in D major, are nevertheless increasingly burdened by knowledge of what and why they need to console. The melody seems to grow older, wiser, perhaps sadder as the movement progresses, propelled by the angry momentum of the dissonantly aspiring second theme. Its climax is marked by a powerful fanfare-like motif. It aims for the heights of Mahler’s earlier and more visionary symphonies only to hurl us back down to earth where the D major theme resumes its now more agonized task of consolation. The movement progresses in recurring cycles of these three elements, sometimes still more sharply contrasted, sometimes identified and almost conflated with each other. Their discourse is intruded upon by darkly insistent statements of the opening rhythmic figure which takes on the character of a “Fate” motif. “Like a ponderous funeral-cortüge” reads one of the score’s later annotations. Mahler’s manuscript had included others. Over one of the most delicate restatements of the D major theme, on solo violin, he had written “O youth! Disappeared! O love! Blown away!” As the music fades into silence at the end, he had added (again over the solo violin) “Farewell! Farewell!"
The two central movements explore more physically energetic ways of dealing with troublesome consciousness. The second movement is a long scherzo that typically (for Mahler) encompasses the three main dance forms of its Austrian heritage: Minuet, Ländler and Waltz. In the manuscript, however, its title was “Menuetto infinito”, suggesting a dance whose component parts return in unending succession, each dispelling the reveries of recollection and self-quotation into which the previous episode may have fallen. The third movement is really a bitterly ironic finale, placed deliberately in the wrong place. This Rondo is a “burlesque” in which the energetic fury of the second movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony sets off a firework display of contrapuntal ingenuity. Its cumulative effect, however, is of a kind of “anti-music”: a whirl of ceaseless and ultimately senseless activity from which escape seems to be promised only by the long central episode. Heavenward ascent, however, is met with scornful woodwind statements of what will become the opening motif of the closing Adagio. Escape thwarted, the Rondo material returns with renewed vehemence. Its deafening crudity puts paid to beatific visions.
As a result, the final Adagio is from the outset burdened by tragic awareness. The temperature of its chorale-like theme is raised by “espressivo” partwriting that constantly threatens to destroy the music from within. Overlapping vocal "turns", urgent chromatic inflections and eloquent harmonic sidestepping into unexpected regions characterize a music that musters its strength against all odds. A quite other world is explored by the subsidiary idea: high violins set against a deep bass-line and marked "without feeling". This music of otherworldly strangeness opens mysterious spaces between successive variants of the ever more urgently engaged adagio theme. At the end the exprcssive consciousness of the music itself seems gradually to slip into that realm of otherness. On the last page of the score, the first violin line quotes from the fourth of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder: "It will be a fine day on those heights". The previous line in the song had insisted: “We will catch up with them”. At the end there is no consolation, however; neither are we crushed with the melodramatic negation of the Sixth Symphony. The music, like the subjective awareness it had symbolized, simply dies away into silence.
Mahler never heard the Ninth Symphony in performance. It received its posthumous première in Vienna, conducted by Bruno Walter, on 26 June 1912.
Peter Franklin