Notes for: July 26, 2011
About The Debussy and Mahler Arrangements
The concert continues with two orchestral works performed by reduced chamber-sized groups in arrangements inspired by composer Arnold Schoenberg. Following World War I, Schoenberg, with his disciples Alban Berg and Anton Webern, established the Vienna “Society for Private Musical Performances” (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen) to present music by contemporary composers to the city’s conservative musical public. The society had to go out of business in December 1921, due to the postwar inflation in Austria, but in its four seasons it gave 353 performances of 154 works in a total of 117 concerts.
The Society’s range of music was wide – the “allowable” composers were not limited to the Schoenberg circle but drawn from all those who had “a real face or name.” The programs included works by Stravinsky, Bartok, Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin, and Reger as well as Webern and Berg. During the Society’s first two years, in fact, Schoenberg, the father of atonality, did not allow any of his own music to be performed.
Concerts were normally given at the rate of one per week. The players were chosen from among the most gifted young musicians available, and each work was rehearsed intensively, either under Schoenberg himself or by a “Performance Director” appointed by him. The primary objective was audience education, with clarity and comprehensibility of the performance the overriding aim. No applause was permitted, and complex works were sometimes played a second time at the same concert.
The audience was highly selective — only those who had joined the organization and had been issued photo ID cards were admitted. Such precautions were exercised to exclude ‘sensation-seeking’ members of the Viennese public who would often attend concerts with the intention of whistling derisively at “modern” works. Further, to prevent hostile criticism in the press, a sign was displayed on the door: “Critics are forbidden entry”.
Orchestral music was presented with reduced musical forces to minimize costs and to accommodate the small stage that was available. Schoenberg believed the arrangement of large works for reduced forces made possible “a clarity of presentation and a simplicity of formal enunciation often not possible in a rendition obscured by the richness of orchestration.”
In the Society’s first three seasons, orchestral works were generally performed in piano transcriptions, but in the fourth season performances were offered by a chamber orchestra of up to 16 of Schoenberg’s students. The two arrangements we hear this evening were among the ten manuscripts of such chamber-orchestra arrangements now known to exist. Many of these arrangements, however, were unperformed by the Society because of its abrupt termination midway through the fourth season.
Notwithstanding their 14-year difference in age, Mahler and Schoenberg had been friends and colleagues since the start of the 20th century. In 1899, Mahler, an international figure as a composer and conductor, attended the dress rehearsal of Schoenberg’s early masterpiece Verklarte Nacht, and became an enthusiastic supporter of Schoenberg’s music. They maintained their close relationship even after Schoenberg veered off into atonality, which Mahler never accepted. The friendship was terminated only by Mahler’s untimely death in 1911.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Schoenberg turned to the music of his deceased friend for the reduced-force concerts by the Society for Private Musical Performance. In fact, Schoenberg selected three of Mahler’s orchestral masterpieces for arrangement. Schoenberg himself handled Songs of a Wayfarer, and Webern did Das Lied von Der Erde. For Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, Schoenberg turned to Erwin Stein, his principal assistant in running the Society.
In the autumn of 1920, Stein transcribed the Fourth Symphony for 15 players and soprano, and conducted its premiere performance at the Society’s January 10, 1921, concert. The history of Stein’s transcription following that performance is a bit murky. With the termination of the Society that December, Stein apparently lost interest in the reduction process; the parts of his Mahler reduction were lost, and there was no repeat performance of the reduction for nearly 70 years.
Meanwhile, Stein went on to a successful career as a music teacher, conductor and writer on music. In 1924 Schoenberg entrusted him to write the first article, “New Formal Principles”, announcing and explaining Schoenberg’s revolutionary twelve-tone system. Stein remained in Vienna until Hitler’s anschluss of Austria in 1938, and he then fled to London where he worked as an influential editor on the music of Mahler, Schoenberg and Benjamin Britten.
Finally, in the summer of 1990, Britten’s estate, created following his death in 1976, approached a young American conductor Alexander Platt about reconstructing Stein’s lost chamber version of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Platt had attracted the estate’s attention by leading a revival of Britten’s neglected opera Owen Wingrave at Cambridge University, and had then made his professional debut at Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival.
Platt executed the task by using a copy of Mahler’s original score, freely annotated in Stein’s own hand, which had been preserved in the Arnold Schoenberg Institute’s Archives in Los Angeles. Platt’s reconstruction of Stein’s chamber version was premiered at Wigmore Hall, in London, on November 22, 1993, on what would have been Britten’s 80th birthday.
Mahler composed his Fourth Symphony between 1899 and 1901, but it incorporated a song, “Das himmlische Leben (Heaven Joys)”, that he had originally written as a free-standing piece in 1892. The song, presenting a child’s vision of heaven, appears in various ways in the first three movements, and in the fourth movement, it is sung in its entirety by a solo soprano.
The song is based on a text from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn), a collection of German folk poems published between 1805 and 1808. The collection became an important source of folklore in 19th century Germany, and provided a strong sense of unity for a people still divided into separate political entities. Mahler published settings of nine of the songs in 1892 and used themes from the collection in his first four symphonies.
In his Fourth Symphony, Mahler was a masterful and exuberant orchestrator. In addition to the soprano, his score called for four flutes, three oboes, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, a battery of percussion and a full orchestral body of strings. Stein’s and Platt’s final arrangement reduced these forces to the soprano and 12 instrumentalists -- one flute (alternating with the piccolo), one oboe (alternating with the English horn), one clarinet, a harmonium, a piano, two violins, one viola, one cello, one double bass and two percussion players. In tonight’s performance, the harmonium part will be played on a keyboard synthesizer.
A performance of the symphony takes about an hour, making it one of Mahler’s shorter symphonies. There are four movements, with captions in German rather than traditional Italian which are translated into English in the parentheses below.
The first movement (moderately, not rushed) opens with a chirping rhythm seasoned by sleigh bells. This striking instrumental coloring will reappear later in the first movement and again in the fourth movement, unifying the entire symphony. The first movement is in traditional sonata form. The first theme is a lilting melody presented by the violins, and the second a more flowing tune for the cello. The development includes a third strain stated in the original by four flutes in unison over a dark accompaniment by the lower instruments.
The second movement (leisurely moving, without haste) features a solo part for a violin whose strings are tuned a tone higher than usual. The violin depicts Freund Hein, a skeleton from German folk art who plays the fiddle and leads a “death dance.” The scherzo movement represents the dance, with the violin’s unusual tuning adding to the tension and contributing to the music’s ghostly character.
The third movement (peacefully, somewhat slowly) is a solemn march cast as a set of variations on two different themes. According to Mahler, the movement was inspired by a vision of a church sepulcher, with the reclining stone figures of the dead having “their arms closed in eternal peace.”
The fourth movement (very comfortably) opens with an innocent phrase on the clarinet setting the mood of childish innocence. The soprano presents the child’s sunny, naïve vision of heaven and then depicts the feast being prepared for all the saints including a sacrificed lamb, garden vegetables and fruits, and fish freshly caught by St. Peter. There is also music sung by 11,000 virgins and choirs of angels. The symphony then draws to a tranquil close.