Stockport Symphony Orchestra November 2021
Arnold Bax (1883 – 1953): Tintagel (1919)
Born into wealth in London, Arnold Bax was an unapologetic romantic. Labelled an anachronism by the great music writer Neville Cardus even in his own day, he embraced the sounds of the nineteenth century when his contemporaries were striding towards the future. Throughout his adult life he embraced a passion for all things Celtic, particularly Irish, and published a significant amount of poetry under the pseudonym Dermot O’Byrne. In his later years, once knighted and appointed Master of the King’s Music, his output dwindled, and he is now best known, if at all, for his tone poem Tintagel.
Both Tintagel the symphonic poem and Dermot O’Byrne’s literary poem Tintagel Castle were inspired by a visit to the Cornish castle in 1917 with Bax’s mistress, the pianist Harriet Cohen, for whom he would leave his wife and children. On the face of it, the fifteen-minute work is a vivid depiction of the Cornish coastline, or as the composer himself put it, ‘The castle-crowned cliff of Tintagel, and more particularly the wide distances of the Atlantic as seen from the cliffs of Cornwall on a sunny but not windless summer day’. Bax was less than coy, however, about a deeper meaning in the music. In a soundworld which he describes as portraying ‘Immense waves slowly gathering force until they smash themselves upon the impregnable rocks’, he makes unmistakeably sensual allusions to his relationship with Cohen. The work was even dedicated to Cohen, and Bax goes as far as to make repeated musical reference to Richard Wagner’s Cornish opera Tristan und Isolde. The ‘wounded Tristan’ motif from that opera is repeatedly quoted, and it is hard not to hear reference to the climactic final scene of that opera in the climax of Tintagel.
The work begins with a bracing portrait of the clifftop castle in low brass, blustered by flurries and gusts of flutes. A luscious string theme follows, undulating in melody and dynamic to evoke the sea. This gives way to a more agitated passage, saturated with repeated quotations of the chromatically descending motif which Wagner used to portray the wounded lover, Tristan. Eventually, the music works its way to a searing climax. Even if one foot is firmly in the past and its moral compass is uncertain, Tintagel contains some of the best melodies in British music. Dermot O’Byrne’s Tintagel Castle poem is less convincing, but Bax’s Symphony No. 6 is a good next step for those moved by Tintagel.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827): Concerto for violin, cello and piano (1803-04)
Ludwig van Beethoven’s music remains some of the most influential art in any genre through history. In his 56 years, his greatest achievement was to raise the arts from a polite entertainment for the ruling classes to a universal endeavour relevant to all of humanity. The turning point in his career, when he grew from a merely excellent composer to perhaps the greatest ever, was his ‘Heligenstadt Testament’ of 1802, in which he resolved to live on and continue writing for the sake of his art despite rapidly encroaching deafness. This marked the end of his early period, and the beginning of his middle (or ‘heroic’) period, a phase which dragged music irretrievably into the Romantic period. The Triple concerto (not a term used by Beethoven) was written in the earliest part of the middle period, most likely between late 1803 and early 1804 in a hiatus from work on his opera Leonore. Also on his desk at the time was a draft of the Eroica symphony, and so it is perhaps surprising that the Triple is a rare example of Beethoven looking over his shoulder into the past, rather than blazing towards the future.
The origins of the unusual format lie in the baroque concerto grosso and the French sinfonia concertante, both genres featuring a small group of soloists and an orchestra, with a debt owed to the piano trio pioneered by Joseph Haydn. There are a handful of innovations, but on the whole this is a piece cut from the same cloth as the even-numbered symphonies, if we are to endorse the old cliché of the odd-numbered symphonies being the most revolutionary. This may explain why, aside from the surviving sketches for early violin, piano and oboe concertos, the ‘Triple’ is the least frequently performed of Beethoven’s concertos. It is likely to have been written for Beethoven’s student, friend and patron, the Archduke Rudolf of Austria (son of Emperor Leopold II), though was dedicated to another patron, Prince Lobkowitz. That the intended pianist was a teenage student of modest technical prowess may explain the disparity in complexity between the relatively simple piano part of the concerto, and the more virtuosic violin and cello parts.
The spirit of the Triple concerto is one of genial conservatism, a world away from the irrepressible revolutionary who wrote the Eroica. After a novel opening, in which the theme emerges quietly in the low strings, the soloists are handled carefully so as to avoid issues of balance, frequently giving their contributions in turn or in duet rather than as a group. In place of particularly elaborate cadenzas, the soloists converse with intimate dialogues between one another. The brief central Largo lacks the profundity of many other Beethovenian slow movements, its attractive cello melody only briefly elaborated upon before leading directly into the finale. The third movement finds a higher gear in a boisterous rondo which owes its three-in-a-bar rhythm to the Polonaise later much loved by Chopin. The bravura is tempered, though, pervaded with a sense of watery sunlight rather than pyrotechnics.
Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911): Symphony No. 1 in D major (1884-88)
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 remarkably 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 street. 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. Thus from his very first symphony, his mature works are 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.
It is unclear exactly when Mahler commenced work on what became his first symphony, though the earliest references to it are from 1884. Most of his work on it came in a frenzy in Spring 1888, whilst working at the Leipzig opera. He later recalled that the music “Came gushing out of me like a mountain torrent... All of a sudden all the sluice gates in me opened”. While musical inspiration was in no short supply for its composition, Mahler struggled uncharacteristically with the structure and form of his new work. Perhaps feeling the heavy glare of Beethoven over his shoulder, he initially shied away from the term ‘symphony’ in favour of ‘Symphonic Poem in Two Parts’. He later rejected this term, wishing to distance himself from the likes of Don Juan by the young Richard Strauss, but added the title ‘Titan’. The work’s structure was revised from five movements in two parts to a conventional four-movement format, with the original second movement (‘Blumine’) discarded altogether. It was not until 1896 that Mahler referred to the work as his first symphony, though later dropped ‘Titan’. Mahler ultimately rejected the concept of ‘programme music’ altogether, though generally described a narrative of the life and struggles of a great hero, before his eventual downfall to fate. The hero’s ‘true, higher redemption,’ he told his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner, ‘comes only in the second symphony.’
The new work’s early performances were no easier. At the 1889 premiere in Budapest, the third movement variously disturbed and amused the audience, Mahler later writing to Bauer-Lechner that "In Pest… my friends bashfully avoided me afterward; nobody dared talk to me about the performance and my work, and I went around like a sick person or an outcast." At the Viennese premiere in 1900, Mahler’s future wife Alma Schindler left in disgust.
Although Mahler came to regret deeply his original provision of a narrative programme for the symphony, it offers us a useful insight into his inspiration for the music. The first half of the symphony was originally subheaded ‘From the Days of Youth’, and the latter half the ‘Commedia humana’ (after Dante), The first movement, originally entitled ‘Spring without End’ is perhaps the boldest by any composer. Out of the heavy silence of the early morning, a single note, an A spread across 7 octaves, emerges through the mist. Adding the performance direction ‘Wie ein Naturelaut’ (‘as if from nature’), we hear several of the composer’s characteristic signature motifs, including bird calls and distant trumpet fanfares, recalling his upbringing near the Iglau garrison. The young hero stretches, and sets stride on his path to the bucolic melody of the second of Mahler’s four Wayfarer songs [the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen], in which the young journeyman steps out into the dewy fields and exchanges greetings with the birds, flowers and sun. The excitement of youthful adventure grows, all the way retaining a sense of natural delicacy, until a monumental ‘durchbruch’ [breakthrough] heralds the boisterous coda. Here, according to the original programme, ‘The hero bursts out laughing and runs away’.
The original second movement, Blumine, was cut amid the vigorous early revisions of the symphony. In its place, the scherzo [initially titled ‘In Full Sail’] is a muscular Ländler, derived from an earlier by Mahler about Hansel and Gretel. The slow movement is a stark contrast, in the form of a sombre funeral march. Inspiration for this movement was taken from a woodcut by Moritz von Schwind, entitled ‘How the animals bury the hunter’, in which a procession of forest animals carry the coffin of the dead hunter, again hinting at Mahler’s unmatched love for irony and the bizarre. A lone double bass introduces a minor-key round of Frère Jacques, in a grim hint at the trauma of infant death in the Mahler househould in his youth. Another Wayfarer song is quoted, this time the cycle’s tragic finale, in which the hero takes his leave from life beneath a linden tree, remembering the blue eyes of his beloved. The sudden appearance of a rowdy klezmer band is another typical Mahlerism, juxtaposing the sublime and the ridiculous, or the banal and the profound. It is easy to imagine the Viennese audience in 1900 being appalled.
The finale, originally headed ‘Dall’inferno’, erupts with a shriek of terror. The music rages onward amid a blaze of brass and doubled timpani. A softer, yearning string theme offers momentary respite, but it takes another tumultuous durchbruch cloudbreak to offer any real chance of resolution. Here, Mahler turns to Wagner, who in 1882 had incorporated the old Dresden ‘Amen’ intrinsically into his opera Parsifal as a motif representing the Holy Grail. Is Mahler implying redemption for the dead hero? Perhaps: after quoting Wagner’s grail theme, a heroic theme loosely reminiscent of ‘And he shall reign’ from Handel’s Hallelujah chorus takes the symphony to a triumphant conclusion. Mahler invites the reinforced horn section to rise to their feet as they carry the hero’s aloft through the final pages, ushering in a new age in the history of the symphony.