Like The Art of Fugue, Bach’s Musical Offering was written late in the composer’s life and was created as a kind of testament to the myriad abilities and techniques he had mastered throughout his decades of composition. A staggering display of counterpoint, Bach left the Musical Offering in open score, meaning that instrumentation and dynamics were not specified. Webern’s orchestration of the intricate six-part Ricercata, then, is not so much an arrangement (which implies a re-orchestration) as simply one of the infinite possible realizations of Bach’s original. Though Webern’s version calls for a large modern orchestra, he insisted that his intent was to get closer to the spirit of Bach rather than the opposite. The textures are for the most part light and clear, emphasizing rather than clouding the ornate interplay of melodic lines, and different instruments frequently pass melodies on to one another after playing only a few notes, in a technique known as Klangfarbenmelodie (“tone-color melody”), which further contributes to the sense of depth and three-dimensionality. “My orchestration is intended … to reveal the motivic coherence,” Webern wrote. “Beyond that, of course, it is to set the character of the piece as I feel it. What music it is!”
In May 1849, after a brief tenure as music director of the Royal Saxon Court in Dresden, Wagner fled the city when the military crushed a leftist uprising, which the composer actively supported, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Forced into exile, Wagner and his first wife, Minna, left Germany for Paris and eventually settled in Zurich. Stranded in Switzerland with no financial resources to speak of, Wagner was lucky in 1852 to befriend the successful textile merchant Otto Wesendonck—and his striking young wife, Mathilde, an amateur poet—who extended the composer generous loans and, beginning in 1857, provided Wagner and his wife with lodging in a small house on his estate.
The nature of the relationship that eventually developed between Richard and Mathilde has become the subject of much presumption and debate, but what is certain is that the two became infatuated with one another, and their friendship/affair provided inspiration for some of the composer’s greatest music. The relationship likewise stimulated Mathilde’s creative juices, one result of which was the text for the Wesendonck Lieder of late 1857 and early 1858.
In the melodramatic, all-devouring emotion of their text and the yearning, chromatic intensity of their musical language, these five songs point directly toward Wagner’s ultimate paean to forbidden and transformative love, Tristan und Isolde. Indeed, at the same time the composer was working on the Wesendonck Lieder, struggling with his own feelings for Mathilde, and taking intellectual refuge in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, he temporarily put aside his ongoing work on Der Ring des Nibelungen and threw himself into Tristan, which consumed the next two years of his life. Wagner even went so far as to call two of the Wesendonck Lieder—“Im Treibhaus” and “Träume”—“studies for Tristan und Isolde.” (They can be heard in the opera in the Prelude to Act III and the beginning of Tristan’s dying monologue, and in the great love duet at the end of Act II, respectively.)
Leaving aside their relationship to the composer’s dramatic work, however, perhaps the most profound effect the Wesendonck Lieder leave on the listener is regret that Wagner left us nothing else in this genre. For these are powerful, technically accomplished, and beautiful songs, displaying the full measure of Wagner’s tremendous gifts of melody, harmony, and seamless text setting, as well as his unmatched ability to channel human emotion through music.
Though they are most often performed today with orchestral accompaniment, the Wesendonck Lieder were originally written for voice and piano. Wagner supplied an orchestration only for “Träume”; the other four songs were orchestrated with the composer’s approval by Austrian conductor Felix Mottl.
With his Fifth Symphony, Mahler set out to free his music from the bonds of extramusical narrative content. After his four previous symphonies, all of which possessed programmatic elements and either included sung text (nos. 2, 3, and 4) or contained overt allusions to music and verse previously used in a song cycle (No. 1), the Fifth is a long stride toward the Romantic concept of absolute music, or music that attempts to convey nothing but itself. Mahler struggled with these two opposed paradigms of composition throughout his career, and after the completion of the Fifth, he worried about the reception of such a vast, turbulent score without the aid of a program to help the audience make sense of it all. In a letter sent to his wife, Alma, while preparing for the symphony’s premiere in 1904, Mahler wrote: “And the public—heavens!—how should they react to this chaos, which is constantly giving birth to new worlds and promptly destroying them again? What should they make of these primeval noises, this rushing, roaring, raging sea, these dancing stars, these ebbing, shimmering, gleaming waves?”
Mahler’s “primeval noises” are broken into five movements, which the composer then grouped more broadly into three basic segments, with the Scherzo standing alone in the middle and the pairs of movements on either side acting together to form one section each. From the outset, musical themes constantly recur and are transformed, creating a sense of unity and fluid forward motion despite the drastic differences in style and mood between the three sections. The mournful theme following the trumpet fanfare in the opening funeral march, for example, also permeates the second movement; the main melody from the Adagietto is accelerated and used as a theme in the final movement; and the brass chorale from the second movement makes a curtain call in the coda of the finale, just before the very end. Despite the movements’ thematic interdependence, however, this symphony is ultimately a work of contrast, of darkness and light.
That Mahler opens the symphony with a funeral march is not particularly shocking. Funeral marches, in style if not always in name, are so abundant in Mahler’s work that they could be considered a morbid trademark. Neither is it surprising autobiographically. In February 1901, the year Mahler began work on the Fifth, he suffered an internal abdominal hemorrhage and nearly died after losing a third of his blood. It would not be a stretch to imagine that the composer likely had his own mortality in mind for some time afterward. This particular funeral march, introduced by a trumpet fanfare that stands as one of the most unmistakable symphonic openings in music history, is a savage beast, merciless in its pessimism. The militant atmosphere present from the outset is interrupted only by a recurring, anguished dirge in the strings. The second movement, very similar in atmosphere and outlook, is even more manic, sometimes surging forward with violent brass and pounding timpani, sometimes softly weeping with strings and woodwinds. Just before the end, the music suddenly veers into the major mode, and we catch a glimpse of the triumphant brass chorale that will eventually bring the symphony to a close. Then, as quickly as it appeared, the chorale is gone, dissolving into a formless mass of wispy instrumental lines that haltingly bring the movement, and the first part of the symphony, to a close.
Mahler himself recognized the strangeness of the Scherzo at the heart of the Fifth Symphony and fretted that it would be misunderstood. In the same letter previously mentioned, he wrote to Alma: “That scherzo is an accursed movement! It will have a long tale of woe! For the next 50 years, conductors will take it too fast and make nonsense of it.” It belongs neither to the despair that has preceded it nor to the tranquility and triumph that will follow—it seems instead like a fever dream, a hallucinogenic journey through a world apart from our own. Lurching in triple time, it sounds like something between a deranged waltz and a whirling carnival ride. It stops and starts, sputters and roars, and one never knows whether to be excited or alarmed. Virtuosic in the extreme, it contains some of Mahler’s most brilliant flights of orchestral fancy, scintillating with color and throbbing with life.
What follows is something entirely different. The Adagietto, at first inspection, would appear to be completely out of place, a page from a different piece of music that fell into this score by mistake. In the midst of a symphony for massive orchestra, it calls only for strings and harp. Situated between two enormously long movements, it comes and goes in just 103 measures. Most of all, amid furor and frenzy, the Adagietto jolts the listener with quiet, understated elegance. The surreal, trance-inducing sense of the otherworldly achieved here is matched in only two other places in Mahler’s work: the “Urlicht” movement of the Second Symphony, and the closing pages of the Ninth. How to explain this brief, sheltering tranquility in the eye of such a storm? To understand the Adagietto, one must remember Alma. The young, gorgeous, and musically talented Alma Schindler, whom Mahler married in 1902 while in the midst of writing the Fifth, became the composer’s muse and occasional assistant, even helping with the orchestration and copying of this symphony while on retreat at Mahler’s villa in Maiernigg, Austria, during their first summer together in 1902. And if, against Mahler’s stated desire to the contrary, there are any nonmusical messages to be found in this symphony, the influence of the composer’s feelings for his new wife are the place to look. Gilbert Kaplan—the late businessman, amateur conductor, and Mahler scholar—assembled a convincing argument that the Adagietto, which was written during the short, secretive courtship and engagement between the 41-year-old Gustav and the 22-year-old Alma, was intended by the composer as a musical love letter to his new bride. Into Mahler’s taxing, tempestuous life came the beauty and charm of Alma; into the Fifth Symphony came the Adagietto.
Emerging without pause from the barely audible final chord of the Adagietto comes the poke of a single note for principal horn, suddenly breaking the spell like a child’s finger popping a soap bubble. Slowly gaining speed and coalescing from snippets of sound and motivic fragments, the Rondo-Finale eventually develops into a high-spirited, light-hearted romp, finally twisting the symphony a full 180 degrees from where it began. This movement exults, laughing in the face of all the preceding struggle and angst. In its masterfully inventive use of complex counterpoint, it also scoffs at Mahler’s critics, who had long accused him of being unable to master true polyphony. Finally, rising up from racing 16th-notes and frolicking strings, the victorious brass chorale from the second movement again bursts forth, this time in its full glory. As if realizing that to end with such pomp would be to take itself too seriously, the chorale dies away and the symphony races to a close with a final, boisterous yelp.
—Jay Goodwin