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Notes on the Program György Kurtág (b. 1926) György Kurtág was born in Lugoj, Romania, on February 19, 1926. He composed Stele for the Berlin Philharmonic in 1993; Claudio Abbado conducted the orchestra in the world premiere the following year. The score calls for large orchestra. Duration is about 15 minutes. Though he had not produced an orchestral work since his student days (his graduation piece from the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest was his Viola Concerto, a work strongly influenced by Bartók), György Kurtág was invited to be composer-in-residence of the Berlin Philharmonic in the early 1990s. For much of his career he had been known as the slow and painstaking composer of scores made up of many short—sometimes extremely short—movements grouped into a longer cycle, including seven such works for soprano with small ensembles; each microcomposition extraordinarily intense and expressive, and often as different as possible from the next one in the set. After 1985, he began to compose more steadily, and, though he continued to feature solo instruments or small groups, he began to place the performer around the audience, far from the main soloist or group, thus beginning to approximate the ensemble of an orchestra. Thus the appointment in Berlin motivated him to create his first full-scale orchestral piece in forty years. The word stele refers to an ancient tablet or pillar erected as a monument to a deceased person. The three movements of Stele are thus probably intended as memorial tributes (Kurtág’s earlier work is filled with many brief memorial tributes in music on a miniature scale; this one is simply a macro-memorial.). Possibly the main (or only) recipient of Kurtág’s tribute is his piano teacher, András Mihály, since the last movement of Stele is an enlarged version of a miniature piece Kurtág had written as a memorial tribute to his piano teacher András Mihály. We are not given the identities of any other memorial figures. The three movements of Stele are filled with echoes of modern masterpieces like the “Farben” movement of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, passages from Webern (who, as might be expected from Kurtág’s passion for tiny, exquisite miniatures, is one of his favorite composers), and the “Lake of tears” passage from Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle in the last movement. At the same time, he employs traditional expressive devices like the octave Gs the open the score—not unlike the summons to a work of Beethoven—and moves from that with a series of descending semitones, a centuries old emblem of lamentation. The very slow first movement melts into a series of sighs in semitones from the Beethovenesque call to attention. The middle movement, marked both “lamenting” and “desperate,” begins with a violent outburst of buzzing semitones, moving both upward and downward, though it eventually fades out in a changing kaleidoscope of instrumental families. The finale is based on the short piano piece written in memory of Mihály; the shuddering sound of the chord eventually becomes a low-pitched ostinato dying away. Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) Gustav Mahler was born in Kalischt (Kalište) near the Moravian border of Bohemia on July 7, 1860, and died in Vienna on May 18, 1911. He composed Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) in the summer of 1908, giving it the subtitle “A Symphony for Tenor and Contralto (or Baritone) and Orchestra, after Hans Bethge’s ‘The Chinese Flute’.” The premiere did not take place until six months after the composer’s death, when Bruno Walter conducted it in Munich, with William Miller and Mme. Charles Cahier as soloists. The orchestral part calls for three flutes and two piccolos, three oboes and English horn, three clarinets, E-flat clarinet, and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, two harps, timpani, glockenspiel, triangle, cymbals, tam-tam, tambourine, bass drum, celesta, mandolin, and strings. Das Lied von der Erde is Mahler’s most perfect work, and one of the most poignantly expressive compositions in the entire literature of music. It is music of farewell from a man who knows that he has but a short time to live. Yet there is nothing dismal or dreary about the piece. Mahler was a man who loved life, who had reveled in it actively. His leave-taking is that of one who still recalls the pleasures and the beauties that he is soon no more to enjoy. Moreover, it is among his most beautifully crafted scores, delicate and rich in color, evocative in every detail. Like all of the greatest masterpieces, it seems to be inventing itself afresh at every performance, to be unfolding for the very first time. And, like most of the greatest musical settings of a text, its rhythms and contours, once heard, never leave the memory, but return to it whenever the words come to mind. In 1906, Mahler had completed his largest work, the grandly affirmative Symphony No. 8, during his summer vacation at Maiernigg, on the Wörthersee in Styria. When he returned to the same place the following summer, tragedy struck. The composer’s two young daughters contracted scarlet fever, and the elder one died. Mahler and his wife Alma were shattered. Soon afterward, Alma’s mother, who came to help during this sad period, suffered a heart attack. The doctor who examined her also found that the strain had affected Alma’s heart. The composer, an athletic swimmer and ardent mountain-climber, joked, “You might as well examine me, too.” Having done so, the doctor told him, “I would not be proud of a heart like that.” And thus he heard his medical sentence of death, under which he lived for nearly four years. Already in the summer of 1907, Mahler began to sketch some settings of eighty-three Chinese poems in a German rendering by Hans Bethge. Bethge’s book The Chinese Flute, a collection of translations of poems already a thousand years old, had been a gift from Theobald Pollak—a fateful gift, as it happened, because Mahler turned to it at a moment when he was particularly aware of his own mortality, and found poems that spoke directly to his condition. Mahler chose seven texts from Bethge’s collection, making a number of changes that emphasize the nostalgia of the whole, and set them as six movements (the last movement is a setting of two poems separated by an orchestral interlude). The texts for movements 1, 3, 4, and 5 are from poems by Li-Tai-Po (702-763); movement 2 sets a text by Tschang-Tsi (c. 800). The sixth poem combines eighth-century texts from Mong-Kao-Jen and Wang-Sei. The composition that resulted from Mahler’s discovery of these poems is symphonic in scope, though filled throughout with the character of song, for which reason it is sometimes referred to as a “song-symphony.” Alma Mahler recounted that her husband, superstitiously aware that no composer from Beethoven onward had completed more than nine symphonies, chose to give no number at all to this work, which could have been regarded as his ninth. Then, feeling that he had outsmarted the Grim Reaper, he gave the number 9 to his next symphony, which he jokingly referred to as his tenth. In the end, though, he did not live to hear either of his “Ninths”—the official or the unofficial one—and he never completed his Tenth. The title is slightly misleading: there is no intimation that the earth itself is singing here; a fuller and more accurate title might have been “The Song of Life on This Earth,” for the six movements deal with human beings, their actions, and their perceptions in a world in which all is transient. One may deal with the inevitable passing of all things by choosing to drink and forget, by swathing oneself in sadness, by recalling (or envying) the joys of youth, by concentrating on the doleful fact that even beauty passes away, by developing a particularly acute sensitivity to natural beauty (which seems eternal, though it changes from day to day), or by means of a poignant and nostalgic leave-taking. All of these responses are to be found in the individual songs of the work, sometimes intertwined in the same text. As in the Ninth Symphony, which is the companion piece of Das Lied von der Erde, Mahler’s textures are clear and transparently scored, but essentially polyphonic, with intertwining melodic lines that carry the progress of the music forward. The sound of the score—varied throughout in shades of light and dark, though it is the light that lingers in the ear—often suggests a chamber ensemble, but one of enormous size. Often only a handful of instruments are playing, but many are at hand to lend a special tint to a given passage. The thematic kernels are, for the most part, the same that Mahler has used before for his expressive purposes—the assertive fourth, rising or falling (as at the opening in the horns—a summons challenging the singer’s mortality), the rising minor third, and—most eloquent of all—the descending second, a single downward step, which becomes utterly unforgettable in its yearning at the very end of the score. In addition, Mahler has sprinkled his score tastefully with the most delicate chinoiserie, pentatonic figures that provide color without ever seeming mere stage-painting. Mahler arranges the numbers so that tenor and contralto alternate throughout, the former generally having the more “assertive” music and moods, the latter having the most “internalized” expression. (Mahler specified the alternative of baritone, but with very rare exceptions the low-voice role is almost always taken by a woman.). 1. Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (A minor) A horn fanfare and an outburst of orchestral laughter set the scene in some drinking resort, where the wine flows freely to drive off nagging thoughts of impending death. The solo line, with this powerful orchestration, requires a Heldentenor of Wagnerian stamina. The singer furiously defies his grief and mortality with more wine, and still more wine. Only when the text turns briefly to the blue firmament and spring’s eternal renewal does Mahler allow him a moment of yearning peace—but to no avail: “You, o Man—how long will you live?” Each stage of the opening song ends with the refrain “Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod” (“Dark is life, dark is death”), each time appearing a semitone higher (G minor, A-flat minor, A minor) until achieving the home key. Schon winkt der Wein im gold’nen Pokale, The wine already glimmers in the golden goblets. II. Der Einsame im Herbst (The Lonely One in Autumn) (D minor) Autumn, of course, has always suggested not only the closing of the year but also the autumn of life. Over a gentle muted scale figure in the violins, the oboe sings its yearning melody and the contralto, in weary sustained lines, sings of the mists and the frosts. All is world-weariness, yearning for repose, though with enough energy left for a single outburst: “O Sun of love, will you never shine again to dry my bitter tears?” Herbstnebel wallen bläulich überm See, Ich weine viel in meinen Einsamkeiten. Autumn mists roll in over the lake, The sweet fragrance of the flowers is gone; My heart is weary. My little lamp I weep much in my loneliness. III. Von der Jugend (Of Youth) (B-flat major.) The poem depicts a scene of young people thoughtlessly enjoying their youth in a porcelain pavilion in the middle of a carp pond, a scene familiar from much Chinese art (and imitations thereof). It is a simple miniature, with the music of the opening stanza returning for the close. Mitten in dem kleinen Teiche In the middle of the little pond IV. Von der Schönheit (Of Beauty) (G major.) This, too, is a delicate translation into music of a scene familiar from Chinese painting: young women pick flowers on the riverbank, a group of horsemen gallops past, inspiring longing glances from the maidens. Junge Mädchen pflücken Blumen, Young maidens gather flowers, V. Der Trunkene im Frühling (The Drunken Man in Spring) (A major.) The poem praises drinking for its own sake, to excess, and Mahler’s music suggests that the tenor has been taking his own advice: it begins in the home key of A, but the tenor’s entrance, just three short measures later, lurches into B-flat. The inspired orchestration is filled with special effects suggesting the consequences of this overindulgence, while the tenor is by turns assertive and sentimental, finally declaring his full intention of staying drunk. Wenn nur ein Traum das Leben ist, If life is but a dream, VI. Abschied (Farewell) (C minor/major.) The sixth and most profound of the songs in Das Lied von der Erde lasts nearly a half hour, as much as the previous five put together. Here, with the most delicate and restrained of orchestral treatments, Mahler intertwines thematic ideas that have been heard throughout the work. The text is filled with images of departure—the setting sun, the moon’s light, the sound of the brook at night, birds huddling for sleep, and the poet/singer longing to take a last farewell. All of this Mahler treats with the most exquisite delicacy—totally without sentimentality or dramatic posturing. An extended orchestral interlude functions as a quiet funeral march. As this builds to its climax and suddenly dies away, the final poem begins: a friend is saying farewell forever. It is not clear where he is going or why he has to go, but he must. In a hushed recitative over a sustained low C in the double basses, the singer sets the scene. The friend’s reply becomes warmer, more sustained, more richly accompanied by the orchestra until it blossoms into a softly shimmering C major with harps and violins as the singer evokes the endless rebirth of spring. Perhaps Mahler’s single most expressive stroke in the whole work is the final page for the contralto, who four times repeats “ewig ... ewig ....” (“forever ... and forever ....”) with a two-note melodic figure that moves from E to D but never completes the final step to the closing C; only the instruments of the orchestra, representing the endless blossoming of nature, are able to bring that final repose. For many years, listeners and scholars accepted at face value the depiction of Mahler in Alma’s memoirs as a man who was obsessed with death, an emotional cripple. Yet any open-minded and openhearted listening to Das Lied von der Erde forces us to challenge this view. The music is, without question, valedictory. But it is, in John Donne’s phrase, a “valediction forbidding mourning,” a farewell from one who loved life and celebrated it in music that reminds us all how very precious it is. Der Sonne scheidet hinter dem Gebirge. The sun departs behinds the mountains. © Steven Ledbetter; www.stevenledbetter.com; English translations by S.L. |
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