When we have to talk about the final phase of a composer’s activity it is really difficult to avoid wrapping everything in a sense of farewell, it is really difficult to resist the temptation to see – for example – in the last Symphony a summary of the author’s own journey. In the case of Not at of Mahler it is perfectly useless to resist because the farewell and the retrospective are an integral part of the score.
There Symphony no. 9 in D major it is the last one completed by Gustav Mahler before his death and, together with the previous ones, forms a body of nine great novels, nine sound universes directly connected to each other (the letter to Max Maschalk is famous in which Mahler, speaking of the Second, writes «I called the first movement Totenfeier, and if you want to know, it is the hero of my Symphony in D major that I am taking to bury»), but also through more intimate and pervasive traits: the obsession with death, the tension towards the divine or in any case the transcendent, memory, childhood, the unbearable weight of destiny. These same themes also innervate the Not atbut they are presented in a less linear way than what happened in other works – such as the case of Fourth or of Sixth – and imbued with a feeling of farewell so concrete as to make it indivisible from the equally concrete step of death. It is not a bolt from the blue nor an unexpected blow of the axe, because the farewell already makes an important entry in the previous title, Das Lied von der Erde of 1908; in this regard it is very interesting to read the notes of the Dutch conductor and personal friend of Mahler Willem Mengelberg, who writes about his scores «Lied von der Erde is: Goodbye to the «friend»! (to humanity!)/9th Symphony is: Goodbye to everything he loves/and to the world/and to his art, to his life, to his music». In the case of Not atMengelberg also draws up a scrupulous program of the individual movements, indicating how the first represents the farewell to his loved ones, the second a Totentanz («“You must go down to the grave – As long as you live, forget the bad mood”), the third «dark humor – ! Work, business, all useless efforts are swallowed up by death!! trio-a foreign ideal (original motif) and the fourth is labeled «Mahler’s Song of Life / Mahler’s soul sings his farewell! He sings his whole being. His soul sings-sings-/ for the last farewell: “Leb wohl!”.
A farewell with the flavor of farewell and abandonment, which somehow realizes the prophetic motto “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (“I am lost to the world”) of the Rückert Lieder nine years earlier; however this should not make you think of Not at or to the movements that compose it as islands of homogeneity. As mentioned before, the treatment of extramusical suggestions is not linear and is subjected to thickening and rarefying – usually on several levels at the same time – and the emblem of this way of proceeding is the first movement, undoubtedly the sound object more difficult to handle than the whole Symphony.
Daniele Gatti he is more careful than ever in managing what to the ear seems like a shapeless and constantly changing magma rather than an orchestral score: the impression of the perceptive data is not wrong because the label of Andante comfortable identifies one of the most complex pages of Mahler’s work tout court (much loved by Berg), where the concepts of variation and development from sonata form merge in a single solution. The result is precisely a landscape with many parameters in simultaneous variation, under which there remains a substratum of gestures and motifs that cross the entire twenty-five minutes of the movement. An interesting example is the figuration with which the harp begins, inherited now from the double basses, now from the timpani, up to the tubular bells and here it is really difficult not to imagine a reference to the scene of the communion of Parsifal.
Gatti is extremely scrupulous in the conduct of the motifs through their transformations, both in the mind and in the gesture, therefore the score manages to acquire great clarity despite the actual complexity of a text that was born with an important difficulty in deciphering. Certainly it also helps to frame the work in terms of instrumentation which on the one hand is indeed one of the final blows of that overflowing romanticism, but on the other hand indicates with surprising clarity where it will strike in a more advanced twentieth century of that known by Mahler, starting from the Second Vienna School: the unisons that generate a new sound color (at number 9 of the first movement there are ten instruments that sing the same note), the search for timbral illusions between the solo violin and the piccolo, the taste for the extreme registers of the harp, the fragmentation of the same phrase – even note by note – between different groups of instruments or even between different solo instruments, just to give the most banal examples. In the ability to provide a solid overall picture animated by so many veins, the proof of La Scala Philharmonic Orchestra, on this truly titanic occasion; the attention to timbric-coloristic detail reaches very high peaks and the execution of the solo steps (frequent, long and complex) is absolutely impeccable, with particular appreciation for those performed from the shoulder Laura Marzadori.
A curious case is that of the second movement, in some ways similar in content to that of the Fourth; there it was referred to as Death playing the violin, while in this case we have a real Totentanz. The Scherzo therefore has the same sign as the rest of the Symphony, the tangible presence of death, but in this case there is also a hint of mockery which also presents accents of unequivocal grotesqueness; souls that are not truly different but with a noticeable difference and Gatti manages to provide a reading that is not afraid to underline these characteristics, while managing to maintain an excellent balance with the general architecture: everything is always coherent, everything is always part of that single great flow. Gatti’s direction has the same success as a cinematic shot which in an “ensemble scene” decides to focus on some details: one never loses the context in which an episode takes place and knowing that a sound event is actually inscribed in a given panorama it gives the possibility of placing the situation in different perspectives. The appearance of the quotation – well marked – from the Scherzo della is interesting Second: a further direct link to a previous work only increases the sensation of Mahler looking back and measuring the distance traveled.
The same bitter irony is the driving force of the excited Rondo, significantly indicated as “Sehr trotzig”, “very stubborn”. The first movement contained the sonata form, the variation and, not too veiledly, also the Scherzo and the Rondo. In the third movement – the “official” rondo – it explores a dense counterpoint in a severe style well rendered by the Philharmonic which does not lack rigor, above all we admire the great expressiveness which allows us to escape from the cage of counterpoint to make the entry of the chorale natural in which the small group that will become fundamental in the last movement appears evident for the first time. The horn section works hard throughout Symphonybut in this situation the composer asks a lot of them and the Philharmonic’s horns respond splendidly, impeccable both in intonation and in articulation.
The last movement, an Adagio of similar length to the initial Andante comfortable, imposes a heroic effort on the conductor and orchestra, to say the least. The times are so dilated and the notes so long that sustaining the twenty-five minutes of this heartfelt prayer (confessional or secular is absolutely irrelevant) is a test of resistance and concentration with a result that is anything but obvious. Gatti reaches the peak of pathetic intensity while the Philharmonic proposes itself in a winged grace over which the shadows of the low reeds quickly flow and the fortissimi are nothing other than the same agglomerations of thickened matter heard at the beginning of the Symphony with a significant variant: this time Mahler plays a lot on the failure to meet expectations, leading them several times to resolve on nothing. The abandonment and the farewell have become so strong that even the banging of the dishes has a humble appearance, a vestige of grandeur which no longer has any meaning. For the same reason, the sweet consonances of the last pages cannot be mistaken for a happy ending: it is a long, bitter and painful farewell that continues to fade in the air with the reverberation of the last chord, until the applause kills it.
The review refers to the concert on April 24, 2024.
Luca Fialdini
