Yesterday evening I went to Carnegie Hall to hear Michael Tilson Thomas lead the San Francisco Symphony in a performance of works by Schubert and and Mahler. I'd been looking forward to this concert for some time. I consider Tilson Thomas, who has been the orchestra's music director for more than two decades, to be one of the foremost American conductors now active and I've found his interpretations of Mahler, in particular, to be extremely insightful.
The program opened with Schubert's Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 (1822), commonly referred to as the "Unfinished" Symphony. Although Schubert did die tragically young at only age 31, the Eighth was not, contrary to what one might suppose, left incomplete due to the composer's early demise but rather because Schubert chose to abandon it after having composed only the first two movements. He then passed it on to his friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner. The young Hüttenbrenner, instead of completing the work for a premiere at the Graz Music Society as Schubert had intended, locked the manuscript away and kept its existence secret for more than forty years. Since the two existing movements prove the work to be by any standard a major symphony, there have been any number of theories put forth over the years to explain why Schubert failed to follow through with its composition (including the unlikely scenario that Hüttenbrenner absentmindedly lost the two final movements on his way home); but I don't think it's necessary to entertain any conspiracy theories to account for it. To an incredible degree, music simply poured from Schubert's pen as he produced, seemingly without effort, one masterpiece after another. He may have felt that what he had already written was too radically inventive to be appreciated by the Viennese audiences of his day and so decided to put the piece aside and move on to the next. After all, even when it was first premiered in 1865 the symphony was considerably ahead of its time in its form. Or Schubert, meditating on his own mortality, may have felt the work was too personal a statement to be shared. Certainly the symphony is so pervaded with a sense of overwhelming tragedy that the listener cannot but help find in it a prefiguration of the composer's untimely end.
After intermission, the program concluded with the work I'd been most interested in hearing, Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde ("The Song of the Earth") (1908-1909). For the performance of this work, the orchestra was joined onstage by Sasha Cooke, mezzo-soprano, and Simon O'Neill, tenor. This choral work is in effect Mahler's Ninth Symphony and would have been so designated had not the superstitious composer feared that any work so labeled would prove to be his swan song just as it had been for both Beethoven and Schubert. (And ironically, so it was - Mahler died before having completed the orchestration of his Tenth Symphony and thus ended with only nine to his credit.) The most noteworthy feature of this intensely personal work is the fear of death that permeates it from beginning to end. Mahler was so conscious of already having suffered the three hammer blows of fate (i.e., his forced resignation from the Vienna Opera, the death of his young daughter, and the diagnosis of his terminal heart condition) that he left off the final stroke when conducting his Sixth Symphony. In light of this, the shift in texts from German folklore to adaptations of Chinese verse is particularly significant. While it's true that Japonisme and Orientalism were prevalent in fin de siècle Europe, there is much more involved here. Chinese philosophy - at least insofar as Mahler understood it - represented a different outlook on life and death. While Western thought since the advent of Romanticism had exalted the individual and saw only tragedy in his fall, Chinese philosophy viewed man as only a part of a larger social entity. Hence the emphasis placed in Confucianism on filial respect and the proper rules of conduct toward those above and below oneself in society. In this sense, Das Lied von der Erde can be seen as an attempt of the part of the composer to come to terms with death by adopting a new outlook in which his own mortality was not so much a personal issue as part of the ongoing life cycle in which birth and death are but two sides of the same coin. The fact that Mahler never conducted this work during his own lifetime - the posthumous 1911 premiere was led by Bruno Walter - is an indication of the privacy with which he sought to shroud his fears.
The performance of both works was extremely accomplished. All involved worked seamlessly together to give an exemplary reading of these two great symphonies. It was obvious that Tilson Thomas had given a great deal of thought to the composers' intentions and had carefully sought to realize them in performance. This was especially evident in the final movement of Das Lied von der Erde; it was finely phrased and truly rewarding to those with a love of Mahler's music.
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