The Union of Two Families; a Review of Mahler 8 on LAPhil Live-in-HD

Mahler's massive Symphony No. 8 was a work engineered to make an impression.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Símon Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela joined together on the same stage in Caracas, Venezuela to close the Mahler Project undertaken by conductor Gustavo Dudamel with a massive performance of Mahler 8 that was transmitted as part of the LAPhil Live-in-HD series.

During the preconcert documentary, Dudamel called the endeavor "the union of two families."

It was an orchestra of more than 200 players and more than 1,000 choristers, and the sound was big. Really big. But the event itself had a significance that transcended its massiveness.

The National Youth Choir of Venezuela was grouped in front, and one could hear gradations of older singers behind them that seemed to stretch in every direction. Some camera angles that revealed the vast number of singers present were simply amazing. The musicians of the Símon Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela and the singers documented the range of ages and experiences from the entire system of musical education called "el Sistema." It was a sounding index of miraculous successes. It was inspiring.

Mahler 8 has a significant chamber music side that was infrequently captured in this performance, and it was hard to gauge the balances of the soloists in the cinema--particularly in the solo ensembles. There were so many singers that there was no room for benches. The singers stood throughout the performance. This caused noticeable fatigue by the end. But the sweep of the symphony was still delivered intact.

A dramatic touch was created when the Mater Gloriosa came into position on the balcony just after the Doctor Marianus episode with the choral line "Dir, der Unberührbaren (To you, the immaculate)." The presence of the Mater Gloriosa this early in the second movement helped us to properly place her significance. Kiera Duffy sang this brief but structural music with tenderness and fire. I first reviewed Duffy in 2006 at Tanglewood as Rose in Carter's "What Next" and the next season as Despina in Ira Siff's production of Così.

Dudamel was superb in his preconcert discussions of the music. However, because this work consists of two huge panels of complicated music, it would have been better to have even more narrative around the kind of listening strategies he advocated. There was a 20-minute intermission just before the concert started and then both movements were played without break. The design felt strange at first but it worked, even though we did not need a full 20-minute break.

The cinema in which I watched the event had a solid audience. Bring these events with more regularity and this following will expand. The only other announced event will not be a live transmission but a screening of the LAPhil season opening Gershwin concert featuring Herbie Hancock. That event will be in cinemas on March 18.

Introspective Friday Music; a review of the Berliner Philharmoniker from the Digital Concert Hall

"What kind of music," asked Sir Simon Rattle in his preconcert interview, "do you write in the middle of a world war?"

He was introducing Le Tombeau de Couperin by Ravel, which opened a performance that was transmitted live through the digital concert hall and was also the second of three programs this season that will also be beamed to cinemas in Germany, London, Berlin, Prague, Dublin, and Austria. The program itself allowed the great Berliner Philharmoniker an opportunity to express warmth in a collection of works that each sought a better world during a time of personal crisis.

"Often before these great conflicts," said Rattle, "people write music full of tension. Often during the conflict people are writing music that looks back to some kind of idealized past." Ravel dedicated each movement to people he knew who fell in the great war.

Rattle found a quiet ecstasy in this performance of Ravel. He shaped textures with caresses, often looking deep into background textures to focus details. There was a brilliant awakening of sound in the codetta of the Forlane, where the Philharmoniker produced glassy clarity as they tuned the whimsical and unexpected close of this mosaic movement.

The Biblical Songs Op. 99 by Antonín Dvořák and Mahler's Rückert-Lieder, both featuring mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, were the centerpiece of the program, which closed with Schubert's Unfinished Symphony.

Kožená was able to channel the dramatic intensity of the texts in the Biblical Songs while keeping their fragility intact. After intermission we heard the Rückert-Lieder. These songs are performed in one of several different orderings--in this program Rattle performed them as follows:

Liebst du um Schönheit
Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder
Um Mitternacht
Ich atmet einen linden Duft
Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

Usually I prefer to hear Um Mitternacht last, because then it creates the kind of questioning in line with the finale of the Mahler's seventh symphony. In this program the quasi-religious closing of Um Mitternacht allowed it to resonate with the Biblical Songs, and its ending seemed sincere and free of paradox.

Closing with Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen was a perfect bridge into the sound world of the unfinished symphony by Schubert..

Rattle led the Berliner Philharmoniker in a performance that voiced the dynamics of this work as Schubert marked them; this is music that presents itself on the verge of the inaudible. The dynamic level changed the meaning of the music itself. The second theme group in G major often sounds joyous in performance. It shouldn't. It is marked pianissimo. It should sound like you are outside on a day like today hearing other folks being happy.

Rattle found the ache within the unfinished and sent it through the digital concert hall intact. Introspective music is especially attractive on cold, rainy days. This program allowed us to make new connections with the music itself, as we shared it live among invisible friends.

Ewig, ewig; The Berliner Philharmoniker Binds two works on the Secular Eternal

In a much anticipated pairing the Berliner Philharmoniker, led by music director Simon Rattle, juxtaposed the final scene of The Cunning Little Vixen by Leoš Janáček with Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. Both works explored ideas of the eternal in terms related to the cyclical in nature. Both used common images from daily life as a portal toward awakening--toward seeking solace in the idea that even though the particular dies that there is still youth expressed through rebirth. It is the idea that Nietzsche called "eternal return."

The correspondence between the two works was more than metaphysical, it was also strangely practical. It turns out that the scene, centered on Bass-Baritone Gerald Finley, also required two small roles--the innkeeper's wife, and the schoolteacher that could be performed by the mezzo and tenor from Das Lied. This not only gave us an extra opportunity to hear Mezzo-Soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, and tenor Stuart Skelton, but it also seemed to connect them directly from the opera into Das Lied.

A new insight was layered into Das Lied in this performance: It was as if the mezzo role in Das Lied was still the innkeeper's wife, and the tenor was still the schoolteacher.



Rattle began the excerpt from The Cunning Little Vixen just after the gunshot that kills the Vixen (beginning with the adagio on page 159 of the piano vocal score). This opened the concert with music of transition; it was like a 90 second upbeat to the final two-scene division that Janáček marked in the score.


The scene at the inn was described by Milan Kundera in an essay from his book "Encounters." Kundera observed that the scene "seems insignificant but [it] always grips my heart. The woodsman and the schoolteacher are alone at the inn. The [...] The innkeeper’s wife is very busy and doesn’t feel like talking. The teacher himself is taciturn: the woman he loves is to be married today. So the conversation is very sparse: where is the innkeeper? off to town; and how is the priest getting on? who knows; and the woodsman’s dog, why isn’t he here? he doesn’t like to walk any longer, his paws hurt, he is old; “like us,” the woodsman adds. I know no other opera scene so utterly banal in its dialogue; or any scene of sadness more poignant, more real."

"Janáček has managed to say what only an opera can say," continued Kundera, "the unbearable nostalgia of insignificant talk at an inn cannot be expressed any other way than by an opera: the music becomes the fourth dimension of a situation which without it would remain anodyne, unnoticed, mute."

Finley voiced this scene and the meditation that followed with simple expression and with resonant
grace.

After intermission von Otter and Skelton returned for Das Lied von der Erde. Skelton sang with deeply voiced baritonal colors, but he was able to sing effortless high As and projected like a heldentenor over the orchestra. He brought a wide variety of characteristic expressions to the role--fear during the passage where he first sees the ape among the tombstones, wit during the reflected images of friends chatting seen on the surface of the "little pool," intoxicated conversation with a bird in springtime.

Von Otter brought dignified solemnity to the texts on loneliness and charm to Von der Schönheit, a work about the dangers of youthful obsession.

In a short blog entry last week, I wrote about Kundera's sense that Janáček sought the opposite of "Wagnerian emotion­alism." This performance showed Janáček and Mahler to be brothers.

Janáček and Mahler in the Digital Concert Hall; Brothers or Others?

Beginning in August 2010, the Berliner Philharmoniker undertook a project that involved the performance of the complete major orchestral works of Gustav Mahler. These events were transmitted over, and archived within, the Digital Concert Hall. This project will come to a close on Saturday with a performance of  Das Lied von der Erde with mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and tenor Stuart Skelton as soloists.

Das Lied will be paired with the final scene of the "Cunning Little Vixen" by Janáček. One imagines that this imaginative companion was chosen for its similarities. The brief online notes for the program indicate that the Janáček scene "reveals fascinating parallels to Das Lied von der Erde. Janáček, born like Mahler in what today is an area of the Czech Republic, creates a wonderfully delicate scene in which the Forester ponders life – and in turn bids farewell to youth and beauty."
In an essay called "The Most Nostalgic Opera," from his recent book "Encounters," Milan Kundera argues that Janáček wrote in opposition to romanticism.

To help make his case Kundera focuses on an unexpected moment at the end of the final scene where a frog jumps up onto the woodsman and talks with him. The woodsman believes this to be the same frog that led the vixen to him in the first scene, but time passes quickly for animals; this stuttering frog is the grandson of the frog the huntsman believed him to be.

"Ah, that little frog!" wrote Kundera. "Max Brod did not like him at all. Max Brod—yes, Franz Kafka’s closest friend—he supported Janáček wherever and however he could: he translated his operas into German and opened German theaters to them. The sincerity of his friendship authorized him to let the composer know all his criticisms. The frog must go, he wrote Janáček in a letter, and in place of his stammering, the woodsman should solemnly pronounce the words that will close the opera! And he even suggests what they should be: 'So kehrt alles zurück, alles in ewiger Jugenpracht! (Thus do all things repeat, all with a timeless youthful power.)' ”

"Janáček refused. Brod’s proposal went against all his aesthetic intentions, against the polemic he had waged his whole life long. A polemic that set him in opposition to opera tradition. In opposition to Wagner. In opposition to Smetana. In opposition to the official musicology of his countrymen. In other words, in opposition (to quote René Girard) to 'the romantic lie.' The little disagreement about the frog shows Brod’s incurable romanticism: imagine that weary old woodsman, his arms widespread, head thrown back, singing the glory of eternal youth! This is the romantic lie par excellence, or, to use another term: this is kitsch."

I can't imagine that Kundera would call "Das Lied" Kitsch. But his concept does create the possibility that the works are more others than brothers. I will tune into the Digital Concert Hall on Saturday to hear this event and will write about it here on Sonic Labyrinth. Join me.

Mahler 8 in the Digital Concert Hall

The Berliner Philharmoniker took on Mahler's Symphony No. 8, for only the seventh time in its history, in a performance that was transmitted live in the Digital Concert Hall. It was an event of significant magnitude that brought together a bewildering confluence of forces and efforts both in performance and in transmition.

Conductor Simon Rattle prefaced the symphony with two choral works, the Crucifixus by Antonio Lotti, and the infamous 40-part motet "Spem in alium" by Thomas Tallis. While these works felt a little elbowed-out of place by the massive opening movement of the Mahler Symphony, they served two important functions. First, their 15 minute combined duration made an intermission in between movements of the Mahler symphony seem workable. Secondly, they represented texts from the sacred tradition set within a sacred context.

This context was important. In Mahler 8, the first movement explores the secular implications of personal creativity within a sacred text, and the second movement treats a secular text with sacred implications.

Rattle produced a performance with clear goals. The lift into E major in the opening section "Accende lumen sensibus" had the energy and had the optimism of encoded aesthetic realization. Rattle prolonged the intensity of this section with terrific authority, through the marches, the double fugue, the parenthetical interlude of soloists in D-flat major, and landed back with perfect force back in E-flat major. This kind of lift and subsequent directional goals made the second movement feel increasingly operatic.

The combined forces of the MDR Rundfunkchor Leipzig and the Rundfunkchor Berlin sounded great. They were particularly impressive during the awakening chorus & echoes of their second movement entrance. Often one hears only staccato sound from singers during this passage, but these choirs created a resonant, ringing sound that made the text seem divine rather than spooky.

The soloists blended effectively in ensemble. Of the soloists, Bass John Relyea gave a vibrant and carefully conceived performance as Pater Profundus. He made us both consider, and luxuriate in, music that can sound transitional.

There were moments where the special chamber music qualities of this work came through. Examples include the music for solo strings in both movements, and that wonderful passage in E major where the harps and sectional violins take us to a different realm (just before the choir sings Dir, der Unberührbaren). But there were also moments, as with the passages for mandolin, where the sound did not carry over the wires as one would have hoped.

The chorus mysticus gave me chills. "Alles Vergängliche," whispered the choir, "ist nur ein Gleichnis." The digital age has given us new possibilities for permanence. The combined effort and spirit of this performance might well teach us to think in new ways.

Digital Concert Hall; Review of Jurowski conducting Stravinsky and Mahler

Vladimir Jurowski, Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, led the Berliner Philharmoniker in a kaleidoscopic program that sparkled with the colors of the unfamiliar.

The event, transmitted live in the Digital Concert Hall, opened with Stravinsky's revisioning of the Bach Chorale variations on "Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her," written in 1956.

The work is scored without violins and cellos, so Jurowski had the female members of the chorus sit in the chairs left and right of the conducting podium. The men were arranged behind the ensemble stage right, which made for a powerful motion of sound, a canonic debate, as they interacted with the female voices across the stage during the canon in inversion at the 9th in the final variation. The chorus sang while seated and used an early music sound that was mostly non-vibrato. They produced a consistently clever and engaging sonority.

Jurowski conducts with minimal motions. He projects a relaxed confidence that helped create a warm sound during a piece with the intellectual acrobatics of both Bach and Stravinsky intertwined.

The first half ended with Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles.

Jurowski imagined a soundworld that is slower than often played, but where ricocheted rhythms and echoed entrances accumulated in impact as the work progressed to through the "Rex Tremendae." The texture of the "Libera Me" was perfectly balanced with the four choral soloists blending with the four muted horns. The parlando choral part was given submerged in the background like a refracted summation of echos and ricochets.

After intermission we heard Das klagende Lied, the massive early work of Gustav Mahler, given in its three-movement format as presented in the 1997 Gustav Mahler Edition. During intermission, Chorus Master extraordinaire Simon Halsey explained that significant work was done to rethink vocal allocations in this sprawling early work that Halsey described as "fabulously impractical."

The changes were noticeable, and sometimes surprising, but they helped to create a convincing sound. Halsey should make these eloquent and carefully considered alternatives available in an amended performing edition.

A list of memorable passages in this performance would need to include the nightingale interlude in the first movement sung with sweet sound and piercing clarity by soprano Christine Schäfer. It would also include the fabulous boy-sopranos in both the second and third movements, and the richly overplayed quality of off-stage music as it began to mix with sounds from the orchestra during the third movement.

From the standpoint of production, I would have liked to see more of Jurowski during the Mahler. From a visual standpoint we often got lost within the shifting ensembles and soloists and missed the extremely varied left-hand gestures and eye-cues that make Jurowski's specific impact on music easier to understand.

This performance of Das klagende Lied is something of which to be proud. It will be its own exclamation point in the Mahler cycle that will be completed next season by the Berliner Philharmoniker.

Somewhere in (a different) Time; Mahler 9 as Farewell

The 18th variation (andante cantabile) of Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini has was so carefully integrated into the texture of the 1980 movie "Somewhere in Time" (starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour) that it may come as a surprise that the music of Rachmaninoff does not appear in the book that inspired the movie. Instead it is Mahler's ninth symphony.

In 1975 Richard Matheson (b.1926) wrote a novel called "Bid Time Return." The title is a reference to Richard II "O, call back yesterday, bid time return," and was changed to "Somewhere in Time" in all editions subsequent to the movie. Matheson wrote more than a dozen episodes of "The Twilight Zone," and also wrote "The Enemy Within" for the first Star Trek series. He is a prolific writer of both novels and short stories.

On Sunday, November 14, 1971 Richard Collier was escaping from something unnamed in his dark blue Galaxie. He had no plans, no destination: "heads north, tails south." He carried two bags. One with clothes. "In the other suitcase, my phonograph, headphones, and ten Mahler symphonies." Collier is likable.

As in the movie Collier is drawn to a photograph of Elise McKenna. He begins to pursue her:

"I'm listening to Mahler's Ninth now: performed by Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic. I agree with Alban Berg. He is quoted on the record jacket as saying (when he read the manuscript) that it was 'the most heavenly thing Mahler wrote.' And Walter wrote, 'The symphony is inspired by an intense spiritual agitation; the sense of departure." Of this first movement, he wrote it 'floats in an atmosphere of transfiguration.'"

Walter premiered the ninth symphony and worked closely with Mahler. The 1961 stereo recording by Walter is still around on LP.

By Wednesday the 17th Collier was studying Priestly's "Man and Time," and attempting to "make use of the nontemporal part of his mind." Still, Collier's attempts to enter 1896 fail:

"Another solution occurs to me! [...]Since the sound of my voice distracts, let me eliminate that sound. I'll write instructions to my subconscious--twenty-five, fifty, a hundred times each. As I do this, I'll listen to Mahler's Ninth Symphony on my headphones, let it be my candle flame, my swinging pendant as I send written instructions to my subconscious that today in November 19, 1896."

"An amendment. I will listen only to the final movement of the symphony. The movement in which, wrote Bruno Walter, 'Mahler peacefully bids farewell to the world." I will also use it to bid farewell to this world--of 1971."

Essayist Lewis Thomas (1913-1993) wrote "Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony," in which he chronicled how the sense of farewell inspired by Mahler nine had become magnified by fears we came to understand during the cold war:

"I cannot listen to Mahler's Ninth Symphony," wrote Thomas, "with anything like the old melancholy mixed with the high pleasure I used to take from this music. There was a time, not long ago, when what I heard, especially in the final movement, was an open acknowledgement of death and at the same time a quiet celebration of the tranquility connected to the process. I took this music as a metaphor for reassurance, confirming my own strong hunch that the dying of every living creature, the most natural of all experiences, has to be a peaceful experience. I rely on nature. The long passages on all the strings at the end, as close as music can come to expressing silence itself, I used to hear as Mahler's idea of leave-taking at its best. But always, I have heard this music as a solitary, private listener, thinking about death."

"Now all that has changed," wrote Thomas, "I cannot think that way anymore. Not while those things are still in place, aimed everywhere, ready for launching." Thomas begins to hear the work as a farewell to all life.

The notion of the ninth symphony as a form of farewell comes directly from Bruno Walter and was developed and perfected by Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein described the final movement as a form of "church-music." He described parts of it as being "Eastern" and "like a form of meditation." Later in the work he said “it is as though [Mahler] is trying on for size...disembodiment." He seeks "to be part of the universe...to be molecular.” Continuing to alternate and push these two final extremes Mahler pressed this movement into a thirty-minute epic. Until “finally at the end of the movement,” observes Bernstein, “there is nothing but a series of spider-web strands.” This is Bernstein at his most convincing.

The Walter/Bernstein view of farewell is predicated on the notion that Mahler's tenth symphony would never exist; that the work as left at the time of Mahler's death was too fragmentary to be reassembled. Reassembled it has become, and increasingly it has entered the repertoire. As it has done so, Mahler's tenth symphony many, like Simon Rattle, have come to understand the ninth symphony differently: it is often viewed as being life affirming.

I last wrote about Mahler's ninth symphony in a preview article for the Hartford Courant. There I wrote:

"The symphonic repertoire is vast and deep. There are works that seek to entertain, to reveal bewildering virtuosity; there are works that dance with regret, and others in aerobic celebration. There are works that laugh and others that are philosophical puzzles in sound. But the repertoire has only one Mahler nine—-because it seeks to accomplish all of these things. No other work in the orchestral literature has the mystique of Mahler’s ninth symphony."

Norman Lebrecht, Mahler and Big-Hearted Charlie

In an article that appeared yesterday in the Telegraph, Norman Lebrecht wrote of how Gareth Davies, principal flute of the LSO, found catharsis during a performance of Mahler's tenth symphony. “Why Mahler?” is both the question that Lebrecht asks in the article and the title of his new book published by Faber & Faber.

Lebrecht described Davies on the edge of despair. Then, in the finale of Mahler 10, Davies said: “There was a low thud of a drum...I closed my eyes and just played this tune. At that moment, everything came flooding back. Something connected. The music of Mahler had flicked a switch somewhere in my brain. I knew I could carry on.”

That gorgeous flute solo, in a performance by the Radio-Sinfonie-Orchester Frankfurt, can be heard rising from almost nothing during the opening minute and twenty seconds of this excerpt from YouTube:



What cannot be heard is the "low thud of a drum." This is because the duration of a typical performance of the finale of Mahler 10 is about 24 minutes, and since YouTube allows only 10 minutes per segment, the host decided to split the track into two segments and start about four minutes in--seconds before the flute solo---and to cut the opening music. Technology giveth; technology taketh away.

But that was no ordinary thud.

The drums that are heard are echos of the "thud" that closes the fourth movement and they are essential to the structural and narrative context. Alma Mahler's "Memories and Letters" detailed an occurrence in 1908 when a funeral procession stopped below the window of the Mahler apartment on Central Park West:

"Hearing a confused noise, we leaned out the window and saw a long procession...alongside Central Park. It was the funeral procession of a fireman about whose heroic death we had read about in the newspaper. [...] There was a brief pause, then a stroke on a muffled drum, then dead silence. [...] [Mahler] too was leaning out, and tears were streaming down his face. That brief drum stroke impressed him so deeply that he used it in his tenth symphony."

The funeral procession was for Charles W. Kruger. Kruger was known to his colleagues as "Big-Hearted Charlie." He had thirty-six years of service before leading his men into a sub-cellar on 215 Canal Street.

The original Times story that the Mahler's read is available here.

The article includes a vivid description of the events. Kruger had "plunged into a stone cellar filled with eight feet of water, with slimy walls, and no ladder or steps to the floor above." Andy and several other guys fought to get a grip on him and pull him out to no avail. "I'm going, boys," whispered Kruger who "splashed back into the pit and was gone."

The original Times story about the funeral procession that stopped in front of the Mahler house, which includes references to the music that was played during the funeral service, is available here.

Lebrecht meditates on the significance of Mahler's music for the 21st century: "Once we grasp the possibility of multiple meanings," he writes, "[Mahler's] music combines intellectual challenge with emotional catharsis."

These multiple meanings include a sound captured during the funeral procession for Big-Hearted Charlie. The sound was the gateway for a flute solo by Gareth Davies.

Mahler in Hartford

I just read the article from the Hartford Courant written on February 17, 1911 that describes the performance by Gustav Mahler and the "Philharmonic Society of New York" in Hartford on February 16 at the Parsons Theater. The Parsons Theater was located on 66 Prospect Street.

Mahler "fully demonstrated, to the music-lovers there assembled, his remarkable abilities." The first work was an arrangement by Mahler of a "suite for orchestra" from the second and third Bach Suites. Mahler played continuo on piano "so modified in tone as to approximate the effect of the harpsichord."

Also on the program was the Beethoven Pastoral Symphony, Weber's Invitation to the Dance, and Les préludes by Liszt.

The program was well received. At one point the applause was "so insistent" that "the members of the orchestra were called on to rise to share it with their leader--and they, as well as he, fully merited the audience's appreciation."

The anonymous reviewer complained that the "audience was not as large as it should have been, by any means." At the end of the review a fateful statement: "If [Mahler] ever comes here again at the head of an orchestra he should be welcomed by an audience as large as the theater will accommodate."

Mahler and the Philharmonic had come from a performance in Springfield MA on the 15th, and would perform only twice more in New York--on the 19th and the 21st, before Mahler's health required him to return to Vienna. He died there on May 18.

There is a fantastic searchable database that has been added to the New York Philharmonic website. If one enters a search on "Mahler, Gustav" under the "Search by Artist" tab one can look through 67 programs that he conducted, both at home in New York and on tour. Interestingly the Hartford performance is not listed yet in this database. One can also see that Mahler performed 160 different works, a few as many as twenty-one different times.

Augustin in August

Almost exactly one hundred years ago, in August 1910, Gustav Mahler sought out Sigmund Freud. The two had trouble coordinating schedules and cancelled three times before finally meeting. They spent four hours walking in and around a University town in the province of South Holland called Leiden.

What we know of the encounter was shaped by interdisciplinary interaction between scholars on the Mahler side (Donald Mitchell) and the Freud side (Ernest Jones) in the mid-1950s. In a transcript from a 1955 radio broadcast Mitchell quotes Jones:

“Mahler suddenly said that now he understood why his music had always been prevented from achieving the highest rank through the noblest passages, those inspired by the most profound emotions, being spoilt by the intrusion of some commonplace melody. His father, apparently a brutal person, treated his wife very badly, and when Mahler was a young boy there was an especially painful scene between them. It became quite unbearable to the boy, who rushed away from the house. At that moment, however, a hurdy-gurdy in the street was grinding out the popular Viennese air ‘Ach, du lieber Augustin’. In Mahler's opinion the conjunction of high tragedy and light amusement was from then on inextricably fixed in his mind, and the one mood inevitably brought the other with it.”

Mitchell knew this was an oversimplification. But putting aside any specific connection to Mahler’s music I remain interested in this anecdote.

It clarifies a species of disconnect: an overlay or juxtaposition of incongruent attitudes which might be called an “Augustinian Conflict.”

Augustin was a 17th century street musician in Vienna. The legend is that he fell one night into a pit hastily dug as a mass grave for victims of the bubonic plague. He fell pipes and all. Relaxed because he was drunk, the legend also implies that alcohol protected him from contracting the plague. Unlike those around him, Augustin climbed out of the pit. He became legend.

The song is not focused on the drama of the story but instead derives humor from contrasting lyrics of despair and loss with a tune both catchy and carefree. Most English speakers know this melody as “Did You Ever See a Lassie” where the text matches the spirit of the tune.

How different is this text from “Lassie?"
The Refrain:
Ach, du lieber Augustin, Augustin, Augustin,
(Oh, Beloved Augustin, Augustin, Augustin
Ach, du lieber Augustin, alles ist hin.
(Oh, Beloved Augustin, all is lost now)

The first of several verses:
Geld ist weg, Mäd´l ist weg, Alles hin, Augustin.
(Money gone, girlfriend gone, all is gone Augustin)

O, du lieber Augustin, Alles ist hin.
(Oh, Beloved Augustin, all is lost now)

Take away the text and imagine Mahler hearing this tune while in a state of torment:
 
Creepy right?

A variation on Mahler's Augustinian conflict was created by Mahler's younger colleague and admirer Arnold Schoenberg. Two years before the meeting between Mahler and Freud, Schoenberg actually quoted "Ach, du Lieber Augustin" in a conflicted musical context.

Written during Mathilde Schoenberg's ill-fated affair with their neighbor, the painter Richard Gerstl, in 1908, the second string quartet is a work full of contradiction. It is a quartet for five players: a soprano is required for the final two movements where the voice articulates the dramatic spine of the music with a magical presence. This is music of the unconscious mind; a mind being mapped in real time in the Vienna of 1908.

The opening movement focuses on a waltz of silences, and breaking suddenly away from this waltz seems more significant than the dancing itself. The second movement, "Sehr rasch," has a contrasting central section in which there is an Augustinian moment.

The passage happens from 3:56-4:30 in this lively recording:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TK83Og8c6o

Listen for the second violin for the first quotation from "Ach, du Lieber Augustin." The reference then sinks into the viola and then into the cello where it fragments and vaporizes while displaced motives sound above.


Woodcarving of "Der Lieber Augustin" at the Griechenbeisl Inn on Fleischmarkt in Vienna June 2010