Season Opener: Mahler’s Titan Plus Pieczonka Sings Schubert

Although Schubert lived only 31 years, he composed nearly 1000 pieces. More than six hundred of them are art songs or lieder, a genre in which he proved himself a supreme master. They communicate every possible emotion, from peace and romantic warmth to heartbreak to terror, as the outstanding examples you will hear at this concert will convincingly demonstrate. Many great composers have known and loved this glorious music, and some of them have paid their respects by preparing sensitive, stylistically appropriate orchestral transcriptions of the original piano accompaniments. Demonstrating the breadth of this music’s appeal, you will hear examples prepared by composers from England (Benjamin Britten), Austria (Anton Webern), France (Hector Berlioz), Germany (Max Reger) and Hungary (Franz Liszt).

The lightly teasing An Sylvia (To Sylvia, 1826) sets a German translation of verses from Shakespeare’s play The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Who is Sylvia, and is she as kind as she is beautiful?

Die Forelle (The Trout, 1817). This (mostly) jolly piece tells the tale of an encounter between a fish and a fisher. Two years after composing the song, Schubert used the main melody as the point of departure for a set of variations in the Piano Quintet. That was the source of its nickname, “Trout Quintet.”

The text of Die junge Nonne (The Young Nun, 1825) tells the story of a woman whose heart was formerly beset by rage, but who has come to know peace through the love of Christ.

Der Wegweiser (The Signpost, 1827) comes from the magnificent song-cycle Winterreise (Winter’s Journey), one of Schubert’s final creations. It tells how a man wanders inconsolably through a landscape that mirrors his melancholy inner feelings.

In October 1814, the seventeen-year-old Schubert read Goethe’s literary masterpiece, Faust, the story of a learned doctor who sells his soul to Satan. Gretchen is an innocent young woman whom Faust seduces and abandons. In a single day, Schubert composed the melancholy song Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel). The accompaniment mirrors the motion of Gretchen’s wheel.

Erlkönig (The Erl King, 1815) sets a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It tells, in graphic style, a macabre story about a demon that is menacing a young boy. His father, carrying him in his arms, rides desperately on horseback to escape from the monster and reach safety back at home. Schubert skillfully portrayed and differentiated the three characters, and built maximum tension from first bar to last. Berlioz, with his vivid sense of the macabre, was the ideal orchestral interpreter of this piece.

Program Notes © 2019 Don Anderson

Reactions to Mahler’s First Symphony reflect a century’s worth of change in musical taste. He conducted the premiere himself, during his tenure as Director of the Royal Budapest Opera. Given that the audience was accustomed to little save mainstream Italian opera, the indifferent, if not hostile response came as no surprise. Press reaction was almost unanimously negative.

But what struck so many ears as shapeless and vulgar in 1889 has become loveable, even quaint. This robust score bursts with the boldness and fire of youth, proudly displays a burgeoning mastery of orchestration, and flirts cheekily with traditional ideas of good taste. At first, Mahler referred to the work as a symphonic poem rather than a symphony, and gave each of the five movements (later revised to four) a programmatic association 15 – nature’s awakening after the long sleep of winter (first movement); the hunter’s funeral procession (third movement); from the inferno to paradise (fourth movement), and so forth. At other times, he associated the symphony with The Titan, a novel by one of his favourite authors, Jean Paul. He eventually disavowed all these outside inspirations, confessing that he made them up after composing the music, in the sole hope of making the pieces easier to understand.

In the first movement, he built a crescendo of sound and emotional awakening. It grows from a quiet beginning dotted with bird calls, through a warmly flowing melody for cellos, to a jubilant conclusion. The second movement is a hearty “peasant” scherzo. Its strong accents and rustic themes, with their echoes of yodelling, recall the mid-European country dances Mahler had known and loved from childhood onwards. Timpani set the pace for the third movement, an ironic funeral march. The solo double bass introduces a minor-key version of the old French children’s round song Frère Jacques, or Brüder Martin, as Mahler knew it. A witty, klezmer-like parody of military band music intrudes. The march resumes, only to fade away into silence. The finale bursts in abruptly with an explosion of heated emotion. Romantic yearning wages battle with darker sentiments, but positive feelings win the day.

Program Notes © 2019 Don Anderson

Is it now? is Simms’ first work commissioned by the VSO, and her first commissioned piece for full symphony orchestra. In the preface to her score, Simms reflects on her works being typically played by ensembles dedicated to exclusively presenting new music, often alongside other premieres. She writes, “The context for the work’s première performance alongside German romantic composers [Schubert and Mahler] compelled me to consider connections between my work and theirs. Most, if not all, of my work is filtered through the lens of my anxiety. However, I have rarely confronted the anxiety and its accompanying existential wonder-and-dread in a ‘head on’ musical fashion; it is simply a feature of my music, but not THE theme or topic. Considering the emotional earnestness of the Romantic composers that would occupy the same program as my music (for the first time!), and especially considering Mahler’s own ruminations on anxiety-inducing topics, for this work, Is it now?, I aimed to more explicitly address these feelings in my own music. The title refers to the underpinning dread of the disaster-in-waiting, which is the main feature of my anxiety. A brain obsessing with the likelihood of scenarios or events that include life-altering injury or death can mean, on particularly bad days, that every incoming phone call holds the chance of telling you that your life or happiness as you know it – is over. The question ricocheting in my head always is – is it now?

Because of this topic, the work is in some parameters a departure from much of my other recent music: it is personal rather than detached; it is denser in pitch rather than economical and spare, it is often in flux rather than always static; it is seeking rather than satisfied – in some ways, it seeks to be unsatisfying. Replacing where I normally would insert bombast and climax – something reliable or predictable – there is instead mostly noise elements and the faintest grace note-to-perfect-fourth Mahler reference. Other elements, including nervous sputters and granular bursts and roiling tension, are unavoidable anxiety artefacts.” (Bekah Simms)