Beginning her musical education in her native China at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and finishing it in the United States at Cornell University, Xi Wang (who retains the Chinese custom of listing her family name first) has built an international reputation as a composer who pursues and combines both East Asian and Western musical styles. Her many honors and awards include the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and seven prizes from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Her piece River Snow from 2002 exemplifies one of Xi’s compositional approaches that foregrounds Chinese instruments and culture: It was inspired by a poem of the same name by Liu Zong-Yuan (733–819) from the Tang Dynasty and is scored for a range of Chinese instruments, including xun (a globe-shaped instrument akin to a flute) and yunluo (pitched gongs). Her 2011 piece for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano titled Encounter Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue represents another of her approaches that foregrounds more traditionally Western musical palettes and references. In many respects, Ensō, heard on this concert, can be seen as a synthesis of these two techniques, blending both conceptual and musical material from Chinese and Western art music traditions.
Xi describes Ensō as a “sister piece” to her 2021 double concerto for violin, trumpet, and orchestra titled Year 2020. Written as something of a musical and emotional journal of Xi’s observations of the global tumult during 2020, she describes Year 2020 as “full of struggle, pain, crying, memory, and, eventually, hope.” She explains that she “felt emotionally and physically exhausted after writing [Year 2020] and decided that [her] next piece had to be a ‘healing’ piece.” Ensō is the result of this compositional process of self-healing and is in many ways more introspective than its outwardly oriented predecessor.
The title Ensō refers to a sacred symbol in Zen Buddhism that takes the form of a hand-painted circle. The circle is traditionally drawn in a single, unbroken gesture that is understood to both represent and enact the experience of total spiritual enlightenment. Painting an ensō is therefore both a creative and meditative practice, as is the process of assembling the ink, brushes, and paper. In addition to the form and symbolism of the ensō, Xi also drew inspiration from the life of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama. Having grown up as a wealthy prince whose family attempted to isolate him from deprivation and pain, Siddhartha’s spiritual journey began with his first encounter with the suffering of others outside of the royal palace. Xi describes Ensō as a piece that tells the story of the spiritual seeker; she explains that the music “can be considered as representing the journey of looking for answers or enlightenment, the journey of freeing and understanding oneself, the journey of looking for the Buddha within oneself.”
If the explicitly spiritual focus of Ensō represents a departure from Xi’s earlier, more secular approaches, the musical language she uses in this piece can be heard as a continuation of her attempts to foster dialog between Western and Chinese idioms. In addition to the instruments of a traditional symphony orchestra, the work calls for the inclusion of Tibetan singing bowls, small metal instruments traditionally used to aid meditative practices. The opening of the piece begins with instructions to “circle the edge of the singing bowls with a wooden stick,” which produces a sustained, ethereal tone, establishing a contemplative atmosphere from the outset. The piano then introduces one of the central musical themes, the “light” motif that makes repeated appearances throughout the composition. This theme uses all 12 tones in the chromatic scale and articulates them in a single, flowing phrase that is evocative of the circular form of the ensō itself.
Several other musical themes are then introduced, each of which is intended to represent what Xi describes as “different aspects of the human world” including “joy, wonder, suffering, heaviness, lightness, humor, drama, [and] void.” By the middle of the work, a tumultuous rhythmic theme in the percussion, low brass, and strings begins to dominate over the other musical material, although its rampage is repeatedly interrupted by the piano’s “light” theme. The chaos eventually gives way to the final section, which Xi describes as a musicalized “Zen garden” replete with flowers, butterflies, waterfalls, and monks. The final bars repeat the opening “light” motif, thereby closing the compositional circle and bringing Ensō to a meditative conclusion.
—Sean Colonna
Mozart, age 35, was basking in the enormous popular success of his most recent opera, The Magic Flute, when at 10:30 on the night of Friday, October 7, 1791, he wrote to his wife, who was taking a cure at a nearby spa:
Dearest, Most Beloved Little Wife! I have this moment returned from the opera, which was full as ever. As usual the duet “Mann und Weib” and Papageno’s glockenspiel in Act I had to be repeated and also the trio for the boys in Act II. But what always gives me the most pleasure is the silent approval! You can see how this opera is becoming more and more esteemed. Now for an account of my own doings. Immediately after your departure I played two games of billiards with Herr von Mozart, the fellow who wrote the opera which is running at Schikaneder’s theater; then I sold my nag for 14 ducats; then I told Joseph to get Primus to fetch me some black coffee, with which I smoked a splendid pipe of tobacco; and then I orchestrated almost the whole of Stadler’s rondo. Meanwhile I have had a letter which Stadler has sent me from Prague.
Although the composer was clearly in great spirits, he was dead less than nine weeks later. The letter to Constanze, together with one to her the next day and another the following week, are his last that survive. Mozart died on December 5 at about one in the morning.
“Stadler’s rondo” refers to the finale of the Clarinet Concerto we hear tonight, Mozart’s last completed major work (a Masonic cantata and the unfinished Requiem followed). Anton Stadler (1753–1812) provided Mozart with the impetus for a variety of pieces, and with them the clarinet entered music history in a truly significant way. The instrument was relatively new and still evolving when Mozart was a youth. He probably first heard it as a child on his travels to England, France, and Germany. More than a decade later, in 1778, he wrote to his father from Mannheim, which boasted a famed orchestra: “Ah, if only we had clarinets too! You cannot imagine the glorious effect of a symphony with flutes, oboes, and clarinets.” Mozart used them marvelously in Idomeneo and later operas, but was more sparing in his concertos and symphonies until his final years.
Anton Stadler, and his younger brother, Johann, were leading musicians in Vienna and offered Mozart new possibilities. For Anton he wrote the Clarinet Quintet (“Stadler’s Quintet,” Mozart called it in a letter), and probably the Trio for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano, the so-called “Kegelstatt” (Bowling Alley—allegedly written while playing skittles). Like Mozart, Anton was a Freemason, and the two apparently became good friends. Biographers have tended to cast Stadler in a poor light because Mozart lent him a large sum of money that he could ill afford, but they must have enjoyed each other’s company. In the late summer of 1791, not long before writing the concerto, Stadler accompanied Mozart to Prague for the premiere of La clemenza di Tito, in which Mozart included two arias with dazzling parts for obbligato clarinet and basset clarinet (an alto clarinet). As Mozart noted in his letter to Constanze, Stadler had stayed on in Prague and sent updates about the situation there. Mozart probably never heard the concerto, though Stadler supposedly played it in mid-October in Prague.
Stadler was particularly praised for his playing of the lower “chalumeau” register of the instrument, which raises an important point: The Clarinet Concerto was not written for the clarinet as we know it today. The chronology is unclear, but perhaps as early as 1787 Mozart began to write a Concerto in G major for basset horn (K. 621b). He got only part way through the first movement before abandoning it. He returned to the project in 1791, casting it now in A major for an instrument with an extended lower register—extra notes at the bottom—exactly the area where Stadler excelled. This alto clarinet is often referred to as a basset clarinet, although it was not called so by either Mozart or Stadler. A review from 1782 mentions the instrument in connection with one of Stadler’s concerts and credits its invention to one Theodor Lotz. (Stadler himself later said it was his invention, but by then Lotz was dead.)
In any case, the basset clarinet did not catch on, and by the time Mozart’s concerto was first published around 1800, a decade after his death, it had been arranged for a conventional clarinet in A. Mozart’s original manuscript is lost, and the anonymous arrangement that was published by three different firms made various changes to accommodate an instrument that could not play the lowest four notes Mozart originally wanted. There is therefore occasional awkwardness in the solo line, which later musicians and editors have tried to address in more sensitive versions. (For this evening’s performance, Mr. Morales plays a basset clarinet in a reconstruction of Mozart’s original concerto.)
The concerto is scored for a small orchestra. Mozart provides the solo instrument with little competition from its woodwind colleagues, omitting the oboes and clarinets entirely, and even the double basses play a reduced role. He explores the chromatic and arpeggio possibilities the instrument offered him and, more importantly, its varied quality of sound in different registers. The soloist leaps from high pitches to low (and the reverse), which can seem to produce a sort of operatic duet between two characters. An enthusiastic critic reviewing Stadler’s playing at one of Mozart’s concerts in 1784 commented: “Never should I have thought that a clarinet could be capable of imitating a human voice so deceptively. … Truly, [Stadler’s] instrument has so soft and so lovely a tone that nobody can resist it who has a heart.” Such skills magnificently suited Mozart, the supreme opera composer, by offering the chance for the clarinet to sing.
In any concerto the composer is faced with the issue of the relationship between the soloist and the full ensemble, be it one of conflict, partnership, or something else. Mozart here chose an intimate partnership, often with a chamber-music texture, in which the orchestra asserts itself only in isolated tutti passages. The opening Allegro begins buoyantly rather than triumphantly with the orchestra but, once the soloist enters, moves on to explore a wide variety of moods. The simple ABA-form Adagio, a slower tempo than Mozart usually used in his concertos, is the closest to opera and possesses the tinges of melancholy that have sometimes invited overly sentimental placement of his late works. (The movement is, however, in D major for the most part.) The finale is a Rondo: Allegro, in 6/8 meter, in which the lively principal theme is surrounded by episodes of increasing intensity and display.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
By 19th-century standards, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is imposing in its length and instrumentation, and unusual in ending with a movement that calls for a soprano soloist. But for later audiences, ones familiar with all of the composer’s symphonies, the Fourth may seem rather modest, intimate, and Classical. It is Mahler’s shortest symphony, calls for the smallest orchestra, and employs some conventional forms. This is one of Mahler’s most “normal” symphonies and perhaps his “happiest.” At least that is what many commentators have said about it for more than a century, despite the fact that with a composer so prone to irony things may never quite be as straightforward as they initially appear.
By 1901, when Mahler conducted the premiere of the Fourth in Munich, he was one of the leading musical figures in Europe. His ascension to the directorship of the Vienna Court Opera in 1897 had placed him in a position of extraordinary power and prestige, earning him adoring fans and implacable foes. The consuming demands of his job meant that time to compose came mainly during the summers, with revisions and orchestrations squeezed in when possible during the regular season.
After writing his first three symphonies, each longer and more complex than the preceding one, Mahler had reached something of a limit and in 1899 struck out in new directions. His earlier symphonies all had programs of some sort—stories, titles, and poems—extra-musical baggage that he increasingly sought to suppress: “Death to programs,” he proclaimed at the time.
Mahler addressed the issue of the differences among his early symphonies while composing the Fourth. As he resumed work on the piece in 1900, he confided to a friend his fears of not being able to pick up where he had left off the summer before: “I must say I now find it rather hard to come to grips with things here again; I still live half in, half out of the world of my Fourth. It is so utterly different from my other symphonies. But that must be; I could never repeat a state of mind, and as life progresses I follow new paths in each new work.”
The Fourth Symphony has a rather complicated genesis that is important for understanding its special character. For more than a decade, beginning in the late 1880s, Mahler was obsessed with Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn), a collection of folk poetry compiled in the early 19th century. One of the poems, “Das himmlische Leben” (“The Heavenly Life”), relates a child’s innocent idea of blissful existence in heaven. Mahler first set the poem for voice and piano in February 1892 and orchestrated it soon thereafter. A few years later, he decided to end his Third Symphony—destined to be the longest symphony ever written by a major composer—with that song as its seventh movement. He eventually changed his mind and chose to divert it to conclude his next symphony instead.
Mahler originally planned for the Fourth Symphony to have six movements, three of them songs, leading to “Das himmlische Leben.” Although he eliminated the other vocal movements, and suppressed as well most of the programmatic elements he had initially envisioned, the heavenly Wunderhorn song remained and in fact helped to generate the entire symphony. Mahler called attention to this on a number of occasions, such as when he chided a critic that his analysis was missing one thing: “Did you overlook the thematic connections that figure so prominently in the work’s design? Or did you want to spare the audience some technical explanations? In any case, I ask that that aspect of my work be specially observed. Each of the three movements is connected thematically with the last one in the most intimate and meaningful way.”
Melodic, rhythmic, and instrumental ideas, drawn from both the vocal and orchestral parts of “Das himmlische Leben,” can be discovered in each of the three preceding movements. Mahler retained the rather modest orchestration of the original song, which omitted trombones and tuba, even though he regretted not having recourse to lower brass for the climax of the slow movement. The unusual instrumental sound of sleigh bells, which opens the first movement, is derived from the refrain that separates the stanzas of the song. Even the large-scale key scheme of the symphony, the progressive tonality so rare before Mahler, comes from the song, in which G major leads to an ethereal E major.
From melody, to rhythm, to orchestration and tonal planning, “Das himmlische Leben” was the source of the Fourth Symphony, and ultimately provided the spiritual vision as well. In the end, Mahler decided not to divulge its program. He told his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner: “I know the most wonderful names for the movements, but I will not betray them to the rabble of critics and listeners so they can subject them to banal misunderstandings and distortions.” She also reports Mahler remarking: “At first glance one does not even notice all that is hidden in this inconspicuous little song, and yet one can recognize the value of such a seed by testing whether it contains the promise of a manifold life.” The rich image of the “seed” from which an enormous work grows is useful in understanding the importance of this song and its hold on Mahler.
The sounds of the sleigh bells that open the first movement (Bedächtig. Nicht eilen) set a pastoral tone that pervades the work. This sunny landscape, however, darkens in the middle of the movement. Mahler remarked on the mood of the Fourth being like “the uniform blue of the sky … Sometimes it becomes overcast and uncanny, horrific: but it is not heaven itself that darkens, for it goes on shining with its everlasting blue. It is only that to us it seems suddenly sinister.” Other clouds will pass in the following movements, but the blue sky always returns.
The scherzo (In gemächlicher Bewegung) unleashes demonic powers. The concertmaster at points plays an instrument tuned up one tone. Mahler originally subtitled the movement “Friend Death Strikes Up the Dance.” According to Mahler’s widow, Alma, her husband was “under the spell of the self-portrait by Arnold Böcklin, in which Death fiddles unto the painter’s ear.” The profound slow movement (Ruhevoll) has the character of a lullaby elaborated in a set of variations.
Despite all that proceeds, the final vocal movement (Sehr behaglich) is not so much a culmination, as is the finale of Mahler’s earlier Second Symphony, but rather an arrival. The music is charming, wise, and difficult to pin down. Mahler provides an intriguing performance instruction: “To be sung with childlike, cheerful expression; entirely without parody.” Reacting to the last time Mahler conducted the work, with the Philharmonic Society of New York at Carnegie Hall in January 1911, a critic commented: “Mahler’s Symphony is more or less a puzzle. The composer did not provide titles for the individual movements for the Symphony as a whole. Through the artistic device of connecting the movements thematically and through the employment of a solo voice in the last movement Mr. Mahler admits, voluntarily or involuntarily, that his work is to be counted as program music.” Nearly a century later, musicians and audiences are still discovering its richness and meanings.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
Program notes © 2022. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association and/or Sean Calonna.