Stockport Symphony Orchestra 9 November 2019
Ernest Bloch (1880 – 1959): Schelomo: Rhapsodie Hébraïque for cello and orchestra (1916)
Like Mahler, Ernest Bloch was born to Jewish parents, and spent much of his later life in America. Mahler converted to Catholicism for professional reasons and incorporated ‘Jewish music’ only insofar as brief outbursts of Klezmer in his early symphonies, but for Swiss-born Bloch, his Jewishness remained a central inspiration in his composition. During early studies in Brussels, Frankfurt, Dresden and Paris, he was an occasional correspondent of Mahler, and he also met Debussy. Bloch’s fascination with the exotic was characteristic from his early years, producing his Oriental symphony at the age of 15. He recalled that his greatest inspiration as a composer came while explicitly writing as a Jewish composer: “The only way in which I can produce music of vitality and significance”. He made no claims on the authenticity of his music: “I do not propose or desire to attempt a reconstruction of the music of the Jews, or to base my work on melodies more or less authentic. I am not an archaeologist. I believe that the most important thing is to write good and sincere music—my music. It is rather the Hebrew spirit that interests me, the complex, ardent, agitated soul that vibrates for me in the Bible.”
Though relatively sheltered from the war in Switzerland, Bloch was deeply affected by the tragedies unfolding in Europe in 1915. Things were bleak at home, too: the family business in Gevena was close to failure, and he was turned down for a much-desired conducting job. In this mindset, he found comfort in the book of Ecclesiastes , supposedly written by Solomon, or Schelomo as transliterated in German. He found comfort in its pessimism, highlighting verses such as ‘I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and vexation of the spirit…Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’
Bloch was initially struck with the idea of making Schelomo a vocal finale to his ‘Jewish Cycle’, which had otherwise consisted of the Three Jewish Tone Poems, the Prelude and Psalms 114 & 137 for Soprano and Orchestra, Psalm 22 for Baritone and Orchestra, and Israel: Symphony with Voices. He came upon a problem, though when he realised that his grasp of Hebrew was inadequate for writing a choral work, and neither English nor German seemed to fit the text. Inspiration came when he met the cellist Alexandre Barjansky, whose playing was so lyrically expressive that he immediately resolved to make Schelomo a work for solo cello and orchestra. He worked on the piece through 1915-16 (his last music before emigrating to America), and it was premiered the next year by Hans Kindler in Carnegie Hall.
The twenty-minute piece uses the cello soloist as the voice of King Solomon, and the orchestra as the world around him. It consists of three paragraphs, forming a despairingly pessimistic reflection on life. Bloch’s own very explicit programme for the piece provides detailed commentary on the music. The soloist opens the piece with a dark lament, representing the text ‘Nothing is worth the pain it causes’, and ‘All this is vanity’. A gentle but exotically harmonised ‘languorous dance’ follows, before a feverish outburst from the whole orchestra, ‘Rich as though his wives and concubines would displace these thoughts’. Solomon dismisses this: ‘And then revulsion… And of all this? Nothing, nothing.’
In the second part we hear a bassoon motif recalled from the composer’s father singing in the bathroom, before another passage of ever escalating anguish. Solomon joins the tumult, while ‘The maddened crowd hurl blasphemies against the Universe’. The final section begins with a rhythmic figure for solo timpani. A brief suggestion of light is offered: ‘The orchestra leaves this world to enter into a Vision, where live again peace, justice, loving kindness. Schelomo drifts into the dream, but not for long’. After this apparently bright conclusion, though, the orchestra seems to fracture into pieces. Eventually, all that is left is Solomon and the contrabassoon. Bloch explained that ‘Even the darkest of my works end with hope… [but] this work alone concludes in a complete negation.’
Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911): Symphony No. 5 (1902)
Part I
1. Trauermarsch (Funeral march). In gemessenem Schritt. Streng. Wie ein Kondukt
2. Stürmisch bewegt, mit größter Vehemenz
Part II
3. Scherzo. Kräftig, nicht zu schnell.
Part III
4. Adagietto. Sehr langsam.
5. Rondo-Finale. Allegro – Allegro giocoso. Frisch.
Standing on the cusp of old and new worlds, Gustav Mahler’s music marks a monumental cultural strophe between the decadence of Austro-German Romanticsm and the advent of Modernism. As a student, he was fascinated by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and in the company of Klimt, Freud, Schoenberg and Witgenstein in fin-de-siècle Vienna, he was at the forefront of a creative outpouring without which the novel soundworlds of the twentieth century could never have existed. For such a progressive artist, though, Mahler’s major influences are surprisingly domestic. Born in rural Bohemia to ill-matched parents as the second of fourteen children (eight of whom did not survive to adulthood), he was deeply troubled by early experiences of domestic strife. Freud later attributed Mahler’s sense of sardonic irony to an experience in which the young Gustav dashed from the family home amid a parental quarrel to be faced with a bathetically jolly hurdy-gurdy in the street. He was so entranced by the marching bands of the military garrison in Iglau that, as a four year old, he was found by neighbours wearing little more than his miniature accordion, having given pursuit to the band in the treet. Later in life, his obsession with his own mortality was such that in the opening cello and horn figure of the ninth symphony he literally notated the mitral stenosis heart murmur which predisposed him to his death from infective endocarditis. His mature works are thus permeated with themes of nature, the deaths of children, militarism, the sublime and the ridiculous, and above all mortality, brought together by his philosophy that a symphony must be ‘like the world – it must embrace everything’, as he famously wrote to Sibelius.
1901 was an eventful year even by Mahler’s own standards. On a cold February day he conducted Bruckner’s fifth symphony in the afternoon and then The Magic Flute in the evening, before collapsing with a near-fatal gastric haemorrhage that night, requiring emergency surgery. He resigned the Principal Conductorship of the Vienna Philharmonic (the relationship had always been fragile), and later in the year fell in love with Alma Schindler, an irrepressibly spirited student of Zemlinsky. The two were married by the next summer. During the summers of 1901 and 1902, as was his custom, he left his conducting duties in the city and travelled to his holiday cottage in Maiernigg, taking with him some Bach scores. This was significant: he had entered the second phase of his conducting career, turning away from the programmatic music of symphonies 1-4 which had so heavily relied on the human voice and inspiration from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. His style also changed, seeing an increasing deployment of complex counterpoint, and more writing for small ensembles within the orchestra. His fifth, sixth and seventh symphonies came from this phase, the fifth being completed in 1902 and premiered in Cologne in 1904. It takes an unusual form, with five movements divided into three parts.
The opening of the fifth symphony is perhaps even more striking than the remarkable first lines of his earlier symphonies. A solo trumpet call rings out, hinting at a brief dark moment in the otherwise serene finale of his fourth symphony (‘A child’s view of heaven’). From the solo emerges a sombre funeral march, though we are immediately a world away from the quaintness and emotional flourishes of the earlier symphonies. The march is now cleaner and darker, with strong hints at the song ‘Der Tambourg’sell’ (The Drummer Boy), describing a young deserter who faces death. It is a world away from the grand heroic deaths of the first two symphonies. The second movement follows abruptly as a savage continuation of and reflection on the march. There is an air of tragic inevitability, and though there is a brief break in the clouds near the end, giving us a glimpse of a golden brass chorale, it is quickly snuffed out as the music dissolves into darkness.
The second part of the symphony consists solely of the third movement, a curious waltz scherzo on a grand scale. Mahler described the movement as “A human being in the full light of day, in the prime of his life”, and in this regard it begins the cataclysmic shift from the darkness of the symphony’s first part to the light of the finale. A prominent concertante horn part is featured, the solo player frequently asked to stand for the movement for his Alpine horn calls.
The famous fourth movement Adagietto offers another route out of the darkness of the early movements of the symphony. For the first time, Mahler dispenses with his wind and percussion players, writing for strings and harp alone in a passage of breathtaking eloquence. It was reputedly written for his new wife, accompanied by the verse ‘In which way I love you, my sunbeam / I cannot tell you with words. / Only my longing, my love and my bliss / Can I with anguish declare.’ There are strong hints of the most moving of his many lieder, ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekomme’ (I am lost to the world), written the same summer.
The Adagietto immediately gives way to the finale with a fresh horn call, heralding a bright and dewy morning. A rising woodwind theme hints strongly at the song ‘Lob des hohen Verstandes’, describing a singing contest in which the judge is a donkey, and there are other hints of the naturalism of the earlier symphonies amid Alpine meadows and birdcalls. As the Rondo gathers momentum, the golden chorale from the second movement eventually re-ignites, now catching and driving the music into a blazing conclusion. Mahler resists a heroic big finish, though, instead allowing a playfully irreverent postscript to have the last word.