Friday 16 January 2015

Endless Melody

Today I'm sliding a bit away from my normal field for this blog and commenting on a piece that is actually fairly well-known.  My bad.  But I was listening to this piece the last few days, and felt moved to play it several times over.  The more I played it, the more I appreciated the special form of genius at work in this music, a genius which I feel is not often appreciated for what it truly is.


Among Mahler's symphonies, the longest without question is the Third.  It's a remarkable symphonic fresco or panorama of the layers of life on earth and beyond.  In Mahler's original programme for the work, the final movement was entitled "What Love Tells Me".  Coming after the angel song of the penultimate fifth movement, it's pretty obvious that Mahler intended to make a reference to the Love of God for humanity.  That, by the way, is reinforced by several letters he wrote at the time he composed the work.


How can you, in music, depict the Love of God?  Many composers have evaded this supreme challenge.  Mahler tackled it head-on, and the result is a most unusual symphonic movement.  One of the greatest rarities in all of music is a symphony that ends with a slow movement.  But Mahler actually did just that twice in his career -- here in the Third Symphony, and again in the Ninth.  In both cases, the music is dominated by the sound of the strings.


This is easy to understand.  When you choose to move in a slow tempo, the strings can convey a long singing legato line far more easily than the winds or brasses.  But there's more to it than just technical ease.  When the strings are played quietly, with sordines, and high in their range, they can produce the most gentle, unearthly sounds, filled with a sensation of peace and serenity.  And that's just what happens in this finale.


All this is beautiful, and easy to understand.  What amazes me is that no commentator I have ever read has drawn attention to Mahler's truly unique achievement in this music.  The movement opens with a rising fourth followed  by a descending and ascending melody which spans four bars of music.  This much will recur.  But after the first four bars, the music never traces the same path twice.  Without haste, and in an atmosphere of true calm and peace, the melody continues to unfold in 4-bar phrases, no two alike.  The only exception is the four-bar opening.  That's remarkable enough evidence of pure creativity at work in itself.  Even more remarkable is the length of the melody which Mahler continues to spin from this simple beginning.  At the six-minute mark, a new melody played high up in the violins takes matters into a new direction.  Finally, at about eight minutes in, the music rises to the first of several loud passages and then dies back down to a repeat of the opening.


Put that in perspective.  Most popular songs last for 3-4 minutes.  Many symphonic movements, even in Mahler, are over in seven minutes or less.  Here, Mahler has taken eight minutes just to unfold the first stream of continuous, uninterrupted melody.  It's truly amazing -- as well as being one of the most purely beautiful pieces of music ever written, in my humble opinion.


As the movement continues to unfold, it rises to two Bruckneresque climaxes which Jack Diether so memorably described as "evocative of burning pain."  The second is the anguished, tortured height of the entire movement, and dies slowly away into a silence which is finally broken by what I can only describe as a gentle, quiet voice of blessing intoned by a solo flute. 


Then the main melody returns, now played quietly in a high register by a solo trumpet.  This sound in context is so unearthly beautiful that one senses Mahler must have been putting his own personal gloss on the Christian tradition of the "Last Trumpet" which will sound at the end of the world -- notably, a totally different gloss from the one he used in the Second "Resurrection" Symphony.


The feeling that this huge slow finale is perfectly balanced arises not least from the fact that the long final statement of the melody and the majestic coda together last almost exactly as long as the sustained opening where the melody unfolded without any significant repetition for eight minutes.


Perhaps it was an unsolvable problem, but I have to confess that the lengthy final chord with slow timpani open fifths played beneath doesn't quite crown this movement or complete it as convincingly as I would like.  But never mind.  The entire movement, the final pages apart, stands as one of the most extraordinary sustained outpourings of melody in the entire musical repertoire.  For that reason, if for no other, it certainly deserves to ranks as a masterpiece.

Friday 2 January 2015

Snow: Be Careful What You Wish For

Snegurochka, "The Snow Maiden", is a Russian fairy-tale play by Alexander Ostrovsky.  It tells the story of the divine Snow Maiden who makes the mistake of falling in love with a mortal, only to then become subject to the rays of the sun -- with predictable and lamentable results.  It's one of many folk tales from various traditions which examine the grave dangers of immortals and mortals trying to join their lives together.  Not incidentally, it also shows the dangers of wishing for something that you really can't or shouldn't have.

Well-known, at least by name, is Rimsky-Korsakov's operatic version of the play.  If the complete opera is not heard outside of Russia, the orchestral suite which the composer prepared from it is certainly familiar to many people.

Just recently, I stumbled across a Chandos recording from 1994, conducted in Detroit by Neeme Jarvi, of the incidental music which Tchaikovsky composed for the play's premiere.  It was the first time I had ever heard of Tchaikovsky having any connection with this story!

I popped the record on to listen, and was immediately hooked.  This is a fairly early Tchaikovsky work, his Op. 12, and it predates all the famous concertos, the three great ballets, and all the symphonies except #s 1 and 2.  Four years after composing The Snow Maiden music, Tchaikovsky produced his finest opera, Eugene Onegin, and I was immediately reminded of that work as I sat down to listen to The Snow Maiden

 This resemblance is due in no small measure to the fact that much of The Snow Maiden consists of vocal solos and choral movements.  The melodic style, harmony, and orchestration of these numbers, the very innate "Russian-ness" of the musical world, definitely point the way towards Onegin.  Right from the Dance and Chorus of the Birds which follows the introduction, the tone is set.  The lively chattering woodwinds introduce a folk-like melody which, as folk tunes tend to do, simply repeats its phrases over and over, relying on masterly orchestration to sustain interest.  The programme notes, by the way, point out the use of over a dozen actual folk songs in the music, without specifying whether this is one of them.  However, Tchaikovsky was certainly a good enough melodist to be more than capable of writing a tune in folk-song style!

A key character in the story is Lel, the shepherd who introduces the Snow Maiden into the mortal world.  She has three songs in all, and two of them use authentic folk tunes. 

The score is laced with instrumental movements which served as introductions and entr'actes.  In these Tchaikovsky demonstrated his already-advanced gifts in orchestration, especially the use of the woodwinds for their specific colours.  A "Jester's Dance" provides a lively contrast, reaching back to the musical world of the second symphony and forward to the first act of Swan Lake.

The  choral movements are the ones where the score is at its most "Onegin-ish".  The harmonies are laid out mostly in block chords, the choral sound generally used as a single 4-part mass. 

The entire score runs to just a few seconds under 80 minutes.  It may not be absolutely top-drawer Tchaikovsky all the way, but the composer retained a strong fondness for this music -- and no wonder.  It has a kind of spring-time freshness and brilliance which makes it unique in his output  The brooding melancholy of so many of his later scores is almost entirely absent, in spite of the unhappy ending of the Snow Maiden herself.

The excellence of the playing and singing makes this record self-recommending.  Any Tchaikovsky fan should certainly investigate this release, still available through the Chandos records website!