I’ve been listening to this symphony a lot of late. I find it a very compelling work, with a wealth of Romantic melody, vigorous orchestration, and quite a bit of pleasing energy. It’s also a mainly forgotten work, by composer John Knowles Paine. A big focus in this series has been to listen to a good many works of music that don’t deserve the obscurity into which they have faded, and Paine’s Symphony No. 2 certainly is that. Subtitled “In Spring”, the symphony is in four titled movements:
I. Adagio sostenuto: “Departure of Winter”; Allegro ma non troppo: “Awakening of Nature”
II. Scherzo Allegro: “May-Night Fantasy”
III. Adagio: “A Romance of Springtime”
IV. Allegro giojoso: “The Glory of Nature”
This is one of the most genial works I have ever heard, which is one reason I keep returning to it. There is some occasional brooding to the music, but the brooding invariably gives way to song and optimism. Perhaps that’s in keeping with the symphony’s vernal inspiration, and I for one find it hard to hear the last movement singing its heart out and not feel something of that optimism myself.
The American composers of the Romantic era are an interesting bunch, because they exist in a kind of musical purgatory. Their music is not heard much, mainly because it’s all pretty firmly ensconced in the European symphonic tradition, and thus isn’t terribly interesting in any nationalistic sense. But a lot of their music is still quite good, and the trouble with musical purgatory — especially as time passes — is that it captures works that might not rank with the greatest masterpieces, but which also don’t deserve the sad obscurity that awaits most works of art.
This symphony popped up as a recommendation for me on YouTube a while back. I had never heard of John Knowles Paine before that moment, and I listened to his Symphony No. 1 on a whim and found it quite pleasing, muscular and dramatic and at times very lyrical. The knock on the American music of the time — that it is too essentially European — is in evidence here, quite strongly. There is nothing about this symphony that sounds the least bit uniquely “American”, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad, just that the American voice had not developed yet into its own sound. That would not happen until the early 20th century, when jazz finally came along. Instead, the work should be heard as a fine piece in the Brahmsian tradition (Paine was almost an exact contemporary of Brahms).
Here is John Knowles Paine’s Symphony No. 1 in C-minor.
Still not ready to discuss Mahler’s Second yet, so meantime, we’ll go back 120 years or so to Mozart. Here is his Symphony no. 29 in A major. This performance is on period instruments, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. This symphony is a short and fascinating listen. Mozart was eighteen when he wrote this, and on the cusp of his mature period. The music has lot of forward momentum, as does much of his best music, and it also blends youthful optimism with hints of the profundity that is to come in his later works.
I’m not ready yet to talk about Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (when you hear it, if you haven’t, you’ll understand why), so meantime let’s turn back the clock and hear a work at the opposite end of the symphonic pool. It’s the Symphony No. 104 by Franz Joseph Haydn.
Haydn isn’t heard much these days. He has long been nicknamed “Papa” Haydn, and he does seem to be viewed as a lesser-talented contemporary of Mozart, someone who is primarily famous for being one of the better placeholders between Bach’s death and Beethoven’s rise. This is, of course, totally unfair. Haydn is a composer of unappreciated depth, which I think shines forth in this, his last symphony.
During the Classical era the symphony settled into pretty much the form in which it would exist for most of the coming hundred years, the efforts of composers like Berlioz aside: four movement works, sonata-allegro form in the first, and so on. Haydn was deeply prolific, as just his production of over a hundred symphonies attests. But the work itself is the thing, and it glows throughout with classical restraint and an almost folkish feel at times. Even some of Haydn’s joking manner comes through, as the symphony opens with a minor key introduction before settling in to a cheerful major-key allegro.
It’s particularly interesting, when I’ve been listening to so much Mahler, to go back and revisit the earlier days of the form that Mahler would stretch farther than nearly anyone else. Here is Haydn’s 104th Symphony.
I’m not ready to write about Mahler’s Second yet, so in the meantime, here is a repost of an AMAZING performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. I’m just letting Beethoven speak for himself here.
The symphonies of Gustav Mahler represent perhaps the apex of the symphony itself as a musical form. These are enormous works that make enormous demands on the listener. They are dense in concept and epic in scope, with musical architecture that is so complex that it calls to mind the large-scale works of JS Bach.
Mahler’s symphonies are also deeply human, reflecting the loves and hopes and dreams and despairs of one of classical music’s most driven and tortured figures. Mahler’s vision was almost Herculean, and there is scarcely a moment in any of his symphonies when he is not plumbing deeply personal depths. In his symphonies one encounters entire worlds, with sunrises and songs to nature and starry skies and loves both found and lost. One also finds meditations, both fearful and elegiac, of death and what lies beyond. Mahler’s art is a testimony to a depth of feeling that is only found in the greatest artists, and his ability to translate that feeling meaningfully into musical terms is one of art’s great mysteries.
Mahler lived a relatively short life, from 1860 to 1911. He was a late Romantic, and thus did for the symphonic form what Richard Wagner did for opera. Where Wagner’s work was lionized and celebrated and nearly worshiped, though, Mahler’s was largely rejected and did not start to gain serious traction until after World War II, partly as the musical pendulum began swinging back from the modernism that was already astir as Mahler’s life drew to a close. This was partly due to the very enormity of many of his works and the demands they placed on huge orchestral forces; the rediscovery of Mahler probably owes something to the arrival of long-playing recording technology in the middle of the 20th century. It’s also hard not to suspect that the world’s reluctance to embrace Mahler’s music was partly due to anti-Semitism (Mahler was a Jew). It seems fitting that one of Mahler’s greatest interpreters and champions was Leonard Bernstein (whose work we hear today).
Mahler’s compositional output is relatively small, not consisting of much beyond his symphonies. This is not due to laziness, but because he was actually one of the hardest working musicians in history. In addition to his composition, Mahler focused strongly on conducting, serving for a number of years as the head of the Vienna State Opera. He ruled over that organization with a fiery, dictatorial zeal, micromanaging nearly every detail. A later experiment with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and then the New York Philharmonic, ended poorly and Mahler had to return to Europe. By this time his health was failing.
By all accounts Gustav Mahler was a difficult person with few social graces, so it can be hard to square the coldness of the man with the depth of feeling in his music, some of which is filled with warmth. Mahler seems to have had no outlet for his deep emotion other than his music.
David Dubal writes:
Mahler’s music seems to encompass the total range of human emotions. For countless numbers of people, it has become their Bible of sounded emotion. They feel Mahler’s elation, rejection, panic, terror, sentimentality, and drunkenness as their own. In short, the music expresses dozens of sensations so pointedly that the true Mahlerite surrenders himself completely, becoming, it seems, at one with the composer’s inner world.
The Symphony No. 1 opens mysteriously, like a dawn on an uncertain day, and descending motifs are heard in a kind of call-and-answer until we arrive at the main melody of the movement which is suddenly warm and genial. The entire first movement is filled with pastoral pleasure, even in a few stormy passages which lead to pleasing fanfares. The entire movement closes in a burst of rhythmic energy that leaves one smiling.
In the second movement we have not a traditional scherzo but a tune that sounds like a Landler, which is an Austrian folk dance that preceded the more famous waltzes to come. This dance is lumbering and forceful, but it too is laced with moments of genuine tenderness. The mood darkens further in the third movement, where Mahler’s masterstroke is a minor-key rendition of the tune “Frere Jacques” in a funereal procession. Mahler’s lyricism shows up here as well, and the verdant warmth of the first movement is mostly forgotten at this point.
Then we get to the finale, where all is storm and passion. A mighty cymbal crash ignites the fire which bursts forth in a torrent, and this long movement goes from violence to lyrical torture to violence again…but there are hints along the way of a triumph to come, when we hear a very soft passage of hope in the brass midway through. This is heard again a bit later, more loudly, and then at the end–after Mahler finally returns to the mysterious sounds of the symphony’s opening pages–the triumph is complete. The symphony closes in tremendous, victorious light and the sense that a true journey has just been completed.
And that’s in a little under an hour. Mahler’s second symphony will take another thirty minutes, and his third will take even longer than that.
Here is Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major, with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
Next week: Hopefully, the Mahler Second. I will likely not be doing all of Mahler’s symphonies in consecutive weeks, because I need to give them the hearing they deserve before I write about them. I’ll probably alternate my way through them over the next couple of months.
I keep promising Gustav Mahler, and I keep postponing Gustav Mahler. Alas!
And no, no Mahler this week, either–but in a way, this week’s symphony does help pave the way a but. Instead we’ll revisit Hector Berlioz, because you can never have too much Berlioz. This is one of my handful of “desert island” works: if I were banished from society but I could have recordings of a few classical works to hear for the rest of my days while banished, this would make the cut. It’s Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette Symphony, which is one of several works he wrote that are really not easily classified. The work bears no formal resemblance to any symphony written around its time, and at times it seems like it might be straight-up opera. And yet it is not: its most intimate moments are purely orchestral, and its heart lies in the central portion where Romeo meets Juliet at the ball, and then the love scene between the two, and then the scherzo depicting Queen Mab as Mercutio describes her. So much depth of feeling and illustrative color in those movements, along with some frankly amazing melody. Berlioz never gets enough credit for his melodic invention. Berlioz’s formal scheme here does anticipate Mahler in a way, for Mahler too was never one to rigidly adhere to the four-movement symphonic model that dominates the form.
This work is on my thoughts anyway of late, because I have been reading Berlioz’s memoirs. I haven’t got to where he writes of this symphony yet, but I look forward to that. Here is Romeo et Juliette.
Next week, I really do hope to get to Mahler. Really.
I’m still trying to get ahead on writing my Mahler posts — there’s a lot of work involved in listening to Mahler — so meantime, here’s Maestro Mozart and his Symphony no. 41 in C, the “Jupiter”.
I don’t have a new work to post here (listening time was hard to come by this week), so I’ll revisit something old. Here’s one of the very greatest symphonies of all time, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A Major. The Seventh is one of the towering masterpieces of all music (and probably of all human art), and the performance I previously used in this series was a brilliant one from the Proms concerts, performed by a youth orchestra of young Israeli and Palestinian musicians. That performance is wonderful, but it’s interesting to hear the work as Beethoven might have heard it. Here’s the same symphony, played on period instruments and using period performance standards by La Chambre Philharmonique.
