Apr 6, 2023
There is a thread of musical theory called Schenkerian
analysis, based on the work of Heinrich Schenker. Schenker
believed that musical works could be boiled down to their
fundamental structures and harmonies. Entire works could be
described with single chords. If Schenker had applied his
analysis to Mahler’s 5th symphony, he might have played just two
chords for you: a C# minor chord, and then a D Major chord.
The reason why? Over the course of 70 minutes, Mahler
takes the listener on a wild journey, starting in C# minor with a
lonely military trumpet, and then ending in a glorious D Major coda
that might be the most unambiguously sunny thing Mahler ever
wrote:
But of course, how we get there is the most fascinating part
of this monumental symphony. Today, on Part I, I’m going to
take you through Part I of the symphony, which encompasses the
first two movements. Next week, we’ll take a look at Parts 2
and 3 together, which take up the final three movements of the
piece. Part I of the piece represents both a shift in
Mahler’s music, and a nostalgic remembrance. As always with
Mahler, there are multiple meanings to every phrase. The
opening of the symphony, which sounds so unusual, is itself based
on a seemingly random moment of the 4th symphony. The funeral
march that dominates the first movement is based at least partly on
a piece he was writing at the same time, the Kindertotenlieder, or
Songs on the Death of Children. And the second movement, one
of the most unusual and complicated movements Mahler had ever
written up to this point, quotes a motive from Schubert’s Death and
the Maiden string quartet. Clearly, death, a specter that
always haunted Mahler, is alive and well in Part 1 of the
symphony. The first two movements of the symphony might be a
perfect distillation of Mahler; they are passionate, wild, intense,
but also tightly scored, precisely structured, and full of that
constant push and pull between the past, the present, and the
modern, that makes Mahler’s music both a product of its time, but
also music that is always relevant to us. Join us!