Gustav Mahler · Kindertotenlieder
‘Kindertotenlieder’ is a song cycle based on the collection of poems that Friedrich Rückert wrote in response to the death of two of his children. Mahler selected five of these poems and set them to music between 1901 and 1904. The cycle is often seen as a premonition of the grief that would strike Mahler four years later, when his own daughter died of scarlet fever. The composer himself remarked that, had he written the songs after her death, he would never have been able to complete them.
With this song cycle, Mahler anticipated the stylistic transformation that would mark his final two symphonies. His once-dense textures and grand orchestral sonorities gave way to a more restrained and transparent musical language. He turned his attention to counterpoint rather than to the post-Wagnerian chromatic harmony that had previously dominated his work. In doing so, Mahler achieved a miraculous musical expression of the serene and transcendent atmosphere of the cycle’s final poem.
Johannes Brahms · Double Concerto for Violin, Cello and Orchestra
Brahms referred to his Double Concerto with words like “funny,” “amusing,” “folly,” and “prank,” not descriptions that come to mind while hearing the piece. The Double Concerto is a titanic work, seemingly hewn from musical granite. The passages for orchestra are scored with an almost Spartan severity, and the writing for the soloists is rugged, almost gruff in places. The work is among the final entries in the great repertory of 19th-century concertos stretching back to Beethoven, who built on the classical concerto tradition of Mozart.
Despite Brahms’ characterizations, the reasons behind the Double Concerto are serious. Brahms had broken with his longtime friend and collaborator, the violinist Joseph Joachim, in 1880. Joachim suspected his wife of having an affair with the composer’s publisher Fritz Simrock. But Brahms believed Frau Joachim’s protestations of innocence, causing a split between composer and violinist. Though Joachim’s name comes up in letters Brahms wrote during the Double Concerto’s composition, the two were not yet back on speaking terms. Brahms’ contemporaries confirmed that the concerto was an overture to Joachim. Clara Schumann noted in her journal, “This concerto is a work of reconciliation—Joachim and Brahms have spoken to each other again for the first time in years.”
Brahms, Joachim, Clara Schumann, and the cellist Robert Hausmann, another artist with whom Brahms had worked, descended on the resort town of Baden-Baden in September 1887 to rehearse the concerto. It premiered in October 1887 in Cologne at the Gürzenich Concerts, with Brahms conducting and Joachim and Hausmann as soloists. The Double Concerto was warmly though not rapturously received, and some of Brahms’ closest friends were vicious in their criticism. Clara Schumann wrote, again in her journal, that it lacked “the warmth and freshness which are so often found to be in his works,” and Theodor Billroth, an amateur musician and friend of the composer, described it as “tedious and wearisome, a really senile production.” But others admired the work, and none more so than Joachim. Brahms gave him the manuscript of the work, with the handwritten dedication “to him for whom it was written.”
Commentators have discussed Brahms’ fairly dismissive references to the work as a defense mechanism—a “keep everyone’s expectations low and maybe they’ll be pleasantly surprised” strategy. His equivocal attitude toward the work and the different opinions it elicited from his friends have meant that the Double Concerto has never occupied the kind of place in the repertory as Brahms’ other concertante works. But the Double Concerto occupies a unique place in Brahms’ output as the only orchestral work he wrote in his leaner late style.
excerpt from the program note by John Mangum (source: LA Phil)
Claude Debussy · La Mer
The power of suggestion
With La Mer, Claude Debussy (1862–1918) resolutely goes for the power of suggestion and the creation of atmosphere. ‘It tells you no facts, it is not a realistic description, but instead it's all colour and movement and suggestion’, is how conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein described impressionism in one of his Young People’s Concerts.
Debussy wrote La Mer between 1903 and 1905 based on ‘countless memories’ of the sea and inspired by Monet’s seascapes and Japanese woodcuts like The Great Wave by Hokusai. In three consecutive symphonic scenes – De l’aube à midi sur la mer, Jeux de vagues and Dialogue du vent et de la mer – he expresses the play of the waves and the wind. By means of unusual sound combinations and by avoiding the traditional minor or major keys, he creates a harmonic fluidity and shimmering textures that flow and shift through the orchestra – like an endless play of colours and nuances.
Aleksander Skrjabin · Le Poème du feu
The messenger of light
Scriabin takes the imagination even further in his Fifth Symphony: Prometheus, The Poem of Fire. It was no coincidence that he based the composition on the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give it to mankind. The work is the culmination of Scriabin’s eccentric musical vision, inspired by the philosophical works of Nietzsche, Kant and theosophists such as Blavatsky. He saw music as the means of interpreting his mystical ideas and raising humanity to a higher consciousness.
The Poem of Fire is written for a huge orchestra with solo piano, a large mixed choir that sings vocalises at the end of the composition, and a real colour organ. Scriabin set this composition up as a synesthetic total experience in which the music could not only be heard, but also seen. A specially designed keyboard was to change the colours of the light in line with the content of the music, although Scriabin did not explain exactly how this was to be done. The work was never performed in this way during his lifetime. Mysticism also inspired Scriabin to a new order of sounds, beyond the limits of functional tonality. From this he derived the so-called mystic chord – a dissonant six-tone sequence from which he drew the chords and melodies for the entire composition, like a cosmos from which everything takes shape. The Poem of Fire gradually builds towards an explicitly tonal and overwhelming final fortissimo chord in F-sharp major, symbolic of the transcendental union of man and cosmos.
text by Aurélie Walschaert
