Mahler at his Darkest Opens SFS Subscription Season

The hut on the shores of the Wörthersee in Carinthia, where Mahler composed during his “summer breaks” from his conducting duties (photograph by OboeCrack, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) began its 108th subscription season, which is celebrating the 25th season of Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) serving as Music Director, with MTT conducting a single symphony by one of his favorite composers. The entire program was devoted to Gustav Mahler’s sixth symphony in A minor, taken by many to be his darkest symphony. (By way of balance, the season will conclude with what is basically Mahler’s “largest” symphony, accounting for not only duration but the massive number of resources required.)

Mind you, it is difficult to find a composition by Mahler in which darkness does not prevail at some time or another. The sixth was composed during the summers of 1903 and 1904. By that time Mahler had completed the first three settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert that would eventually be published under the title Kindertotenlieder (songs on the death of children); and the last two songs were also composed in 1904. Death was always on Mahler’s mind; but the obsession that led to the Kindertotenlieder would emerge with even sharper edges as Mahler worked his way through the four movements of his sixth symphony.

This culminated in a final movement, which he structured around “three hammer-blows of fate,” the last of which would be fatal. Ironically, that vision would return to haunt him in the summer of 1907. The first blow came with the death of his eldest daughter Maria by diphtheria. This was followed by a diagnosis revealing Mahler’s heart disease. Then came the termination of his directorship of the Vienna Court Opera. Mahler was so shaken by this coincidence that he excised the final hammer-blow from his score, fearing that it would forecast his own death.

For all of its dark connotations, the first three movements of the sixth tend to follow conventional formal structure: a sonata-allegro opening, followed by a scherzo and an Andante moderato. (There are different schools of thought regarding the ordering of the second and third movements. Last night MTT played the scherzo as the second movement.) In the final movement, on the other hand, disciplined structure gives way to rampant expressionism. Yes, there are still themes; and there is even some sense of recapitulation. However, the hammer-blows are the structural pillars; and the logic of the movement involves how they are approached and then recede.

At past performances the sounds of those blows came from the percussion section. The attentive listener could catch site of a massive hammer being raised, but there were no visual cues as to what provided the deadening thud that would follow. Last night the source of that thud was mounted on a tower that required Jacob Nissly to strike it while standing at the front of the Center Terrace. Thus, what one saw was as scary as what one heard, scary enough to allow one to appreciate Mahler’s superstitious feelings about the third of the blows. (Nissly only struck his hammer twice.)

Nevertheless, all this poses a broader question of how to prioritize climaxes. Mahler’s scores abound in “full-out” gestures, which can make it difficult to establish one of them as the ultimate climax. Over the course of the symphony, there is a series of gestures involving a major triad in which the middle note drops down a semitone to transform major to minor, while the timpani thuds out an ominous rhythmic motif. Many would say that the “ultimate climax” of the symphony comes at the very end when that same sinister rhythm presents a “primal scream” minor triad that is not approached through its major complement.

The problem, of course, is to make sure that this final gesture is clearly established as the “highest peak” in the “landscape of climaxes.” The one difficulty in MTT’s otherwise compelling account given last night is that he invested too much energy in all of those “lesser peaks,” as Pierre Boulez called them. Thus, by the time the performance had progressed to “the climax that mattered” in the final gesture, it seemed as if both players and listeners were too worn down for that moment to have its full bone-chilling effect. As a result, many of those that have frequented MTT’s past Mahler offerings in Davies may well have come away feeling as if last night’s account did not take one into depths as harrowing as those of past performances.