PROGRAM NOTES GUSTAV MAHLER Symphony No. 4 in G major for Soprano and Orchestra COMPOSER: Born Kalischt, Austrian Empire (now Kaliště, Czech Republic), 1860, July 7, 1860; died Vienna, Austria, May 18, 1911 WORK COMPOSED: 1892/1899-1900, with numerous later revisions. WORLD PREMIERE: Munich, November 23, 1901. Soprano Margarethe Michalek, Kaim Orchestra (predecessor of the Munich Philharmonic), conducted by Mahler. INSTRUMENTATION: 4 flutes (third and fourth doubling piccolos), 3 oboes (third doubling English horn), 2 clarinets (second doubling small clarinet in E-flat, third doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, timpani, percussion (bass drum, triangle, sleigh bells, glockenspiel, cymbals, tam-tam), harp and strings. A soprano singer joins the orchestra in the fourth movement. ESTIMATED DURATION: 60 minutes “A ctually, I only wanted to write a symphonic humoresque,” Gustav Mahler told his close friend and confidante Natalie Bauer-Lechner, “and out of it came a symphony of the normal dimensions— whereas, earlier, what I imagined would be a symphony turned out, in my Second and Third, to be three times the normal length.” The Fourth is the shortest and the sunniest of the Mahler symphonies, and definitely the one for the novice to start with. The composer’s use of the word “humoresque” is revealing, for that was also what he had called his songs after texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”) at the first performances. One of these songs, “Das himmlische Leben” (“Heavenly Life”), later became the last movement of the Fourth Symphony. Des Knaben Wunderhorn was a collection of German folk verse collected and published by poets Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim (heavily edited and interspersed with their own poems) between 1805 and 1808. The peculiar combination of simplicity and refinement, found in many of these poems, greatly appealed to Mahler, who repeatedly turned to the collection for texts to set to music. Mahler wrote his first Wunderhorn songs (for voice and piano) in 1887 to 1890. The great Wunderhorn songs with orchestra date from 1892 to 1899, the same years during which Mahler included vocal settings from the collection in his Second and Third Symphonies. Both of these symphonies also contain instrumental movements that are adaptations of Wunderhorn songs. The symphony opens with the characteristic sound of sleigh bells, which will return several times later on. The first real theme almost sounds like Mozart, as if to evoke some nostalgic memories from the past. For the most part cheerful and genial, this opening movement nonetheless contains a moment where, suddenly, the fun is over. Toward the middle, clouds begin to gather on the horizon, and the trumpets turn their jolly melody from before into a desperate, dramatic statement: they are instructed to raise the bells of their instruments for better projection. Soon after this brief outburst, everything returns to normal, and the music of the coda is once again idyllic and happy. Alma Mahler wrote in her memoirs that when her husband was writing the second movement of his Fourth, he “was under the spell of the self-portrait by Arnold Böcklin, in which Death fiddles into the painter’s ear while the latter sits entranced.” Mahler captured this image in the title he originally 22 Santa Rosa Symphony (707) 546-8742
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