Mahler & Franck

French romanticism by César Franck, German heartbreak by Gustav Mahler and tender compositions by Angela Elizabeth Slater.

What are you going to listen to?

It's little things that lead to impressive music. Slater hears the birds sing when man is of necessity silent. Wolfram muses on a twinkling point of light in the endless sky. Mahler feels like an insignificant composer with heartache, and Franck has enough of a tiny motif to create an entire symphony.

Birds in the silence

The inspiration for the work The Louder the Birds Sing was a phenomenon that composer Angela Elizabeth Slater discovered during the darkest early days of the corona pandemic. In the silence of the lockdown, she discovered that the birds around her seemed to sing much louder. But it turned out that the birds were not making more noise as much as the sharp decrease in human noise pollution made the birds suddenly much more audible. It produced an uneasy double feeling. On the one hand, the vulnerability of humans being isolated by a virus and, on the other, the birds continuing to sing their song freely. That conflicting emotion is the basis of this orchestral work. You hear the outbursts of helpless rage over the oppressive pandemic, but in the silence also the birds that show with their song that life goes on as usual.

Twice the love

Head over heels in love was Gustav Mahler in 1884, at that time conductor of the Opera in Kassel, with singer Johanna Richter. But it came to nothing and he soothed his heartbreak by writing the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen about the wanderings of a craftsman who, migrating from one master to another, muses on his unhappy love. As such, the play is doubly autobiographical. On the one hand, the hopeless passion for Johanna Richter; on the other, his feeling that as a young composer he had not yet reached the years of discernment and still felt himself to be a "companion. He initially wrote the songs for voice and piano and only much later turned them into a version for orchestra. Not entirely coincidentally because two of the songs already found a place in an instrumental version in his 1888 Symphony No. 1 .

More vocal musings on love in Wagner's Tannhäuser. There it is the opera's dubious hero who has indulged in sensual lust for years in a cave with the goddess Venus and must seek forgiveness from the pope in Rome in order to be allowed to embrace his beloved Elisabeth. Wolfram is Tannhäuser's loyal friend who tries to set him straight. In the famous aria O du holder Abendstern, he sings about the planet Venus who, unlike the sensual goddess, watches over sinful man as the evening star.

Symphony with Leitmotif

César Franck was one of the few French composers of the nineteenth century who devoted himself to the symphony, and even that he did only once. He was a great admirer of Wagner, and this can be well heard in that single symphony. Like his great example, he plays to the extreme with harmonic innovations without coming too close to the limit of the atonal. But even more exciting is the use of melody and motif. Whereas Wagner uses a multitude of Leitmotifs to give depth to his operatic narrative, Franck in his "storyless" symphony uses only one motif that recurs in all movements. What is special in this is that that motif is not an end in itself but a means of arriving at the most diverse melodies. At least as innovative is the structure that Franck gives his symphony in three movements, rather than the usual four. The opening and closing movements are more or less traditional, but the middle movement is a subtle summary of the slow movement and the scherzo that comprise the usual four-movement symphony. The tempo is slow but the form is that of a scherzo complete with two contrasting sections. With all this, this symphony belongs with Berlioz's Fantastique and his contemporary Saint-Saëns's Organ Symphony among the best that France has produced in terms of symphonies in this century.

Kees Wisse