Mahler's Symphony No. 4

What are you going to listen to?

Opening tonight is young Dutch composition student Thomas Wenas. He chose as the subject for his One Minute Symphony the bombing of the Bezuidenhout, eighty years ago. "This was a bombing by the Allies meant for the Hague forest. It was thought that the Germans' V2 rockets were located there. Unfortunately, it was not the Hague forest that was hit, but the residential area next to it and also the Korte Voorhout. I had the opportunity to meet Frank Kuipers of the March 3, '45 Foundation for this project. I also walked a lot through the neighborhood and it is special to see that here and there a single old house still stands among the post-war houses. It is a unique place where old and new go together."

Summer Course

In the summer of 1931, Bartók was working as a composition teacher at a summer course in Mondsee, Austria. That course must have been quite a fiasco because upon Bartók's arrival there turned out to be only one student for him. Fortunately, two more showed up the following week and the organizing committee of two elderly ladies also decided to take his lessons. That was apparently enough for Bartók, and in addition to being able to enjoy walking there in the wonderful nature, he also found time to orchestrate some of his piano works. Thus were born the Hungarian Sketches: five short works for orchestra, which Bartók - in his own words - arranged mainly for commercial reasons. Like no other, the composer knows how to transform his own piano pieces from 1908-1911, based on Eastern European folk music, into delightful orchestral music. We hear children playing in a village, a circus in town with a dancing bear, a plaintive melody and a movement that seems to go in all directions, as if the music no longer knows exactly what to do. Finally, there is a part full of temperament in which lithe pig herders dance to collapse exhausted at the end.

Bartók's epilogue

Although composing a piece of music is quite an individualistic job, unfortunately sometimes it is necessary to have a second person on the work. For example, when the original composer in question dies before having completed the work. Béla Bartók, who suffered from leukemia, must have known than he did not have much time left when he worked feverishly on one of his two Last works, the Viola Concerto, in Saranac Lake, New York in July 1945.

Bartók was a composer who never assumed a first piano version - he thought purely orchestral and the reason he also liked to arrange piano works for orchestra. This made it partly very easy for Bartók's student Tibor Serly, who was finishing his Viola Concerto at the time, but at the same time frustratingly complicated. After all, the work was as good as finished, was terribly close to how Bartók would have wanted it to be, but nevertheless was really still an outline. He never indicated which instruments played what and was not very generous with other indications. Deciphering this sketch was no easy task, but the way in which Serly eventually managed to do it would undoubtedly have pleased his teacher.
The work, which was commissioned by the Scottish violinist William Primrose and begun in 1945, was not premiered until 1949. Primrose had specifically asked Bartók for this concerto because he believed it was within Bartók's abilities to compose a challenging piece for him despite "the technical limitations of the instrument the viola." The arrangement for cello performed today is by Jean-Guihen Queyras himself.

In the three movements that make up the work, in addition to the classical sonata form in miniature, the characteristic Bartók dance rhythms emerge, illustrating the folklore and simplicity so characteristic of his earlier style. In honor of his patron's lineage, Bartók drew inspiration from hearing "Gin a Body Meet a Body, Colmin' Thro' the Rye," a song set to a poem by Scotland's pride, poet Robert Burns.

Heavenly afterlife

If the romantic song and the orchestra have had a happy marriage anywhere, it is in Gustav Mahler's oeuvre. With his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Kindertotenlieder and Rückert-Lieder , the Austrian composer not only stood at the cradle of orchestral song, he also frequently siphoned his songs into his symphonic scores.

Take Mahler's Fourth Symphony, written between 1899 and 1900. With its small instrumentation for the time, transparent orchestrations and traditional four-movement form, it has often been labeled Mahler's most classicist. And yet, Mahler's Fourth does not exactly have a classicist ending. In fact, for the final movement, the composer turned to a song he composed in 1892 to a text from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the voluminous collection of folk poetry compiled in the early nineteenth century by the Romantic poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. At least that is what the poets pretended. In reality, the pair paraphrased and corrected freely to give the whole a more antique and authentic sound.

Mahler based "Das himmlische Leben" on the lyrics of a Bavarian folk tune, Der Himmel hängt voll Geigen. The song gives a childishly naive description of heavenly paradise. Wine flows profusely there, plump angels bake bread in abundance and St. Peter gingerly keeps a watchful eye at heaven's gate. In his orchestration, Mahler aptly captures that idyllic atmosphere in silvery timbres of harp and sleigh bells.

Whereas in his Second symphony Mahler contemplated immortality as justification for tragic earthly existence, and in his Third he focused on divine nature, there in the Fourth a comforting afterlife beckons. A first glimpse sounds in the opening bars of the first movement with its tinkling bells and airy-folk main theme in the violins. Sounded serenity also marks the first minutes of the slow third movement, set up according to a classist form par excellence: a theme with variations. According to Mahler himself, this Adagio was the most serene music he ever composed. And yet, the sequel reveals that with Mahler the abyss is never far away, and one must first look death in the eye to reach heaven.

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