Eschenbach conducts Mahler's Seventh

Gustav Mahler is an immensely popular composer, and we can doubtless expect to hear even more of him when the centennial of his death arrives in 2011. Yet not all his symphonies have found equal favor.

This is particularly true of Mahler's Seventh and Eighth. The latter, performed at last year's Philadelphia Orchestra concerts, hadn't been heard here in nearly a century. At least part of the Eighth's rarity, of course, stems from the huge choral forces it demands; hence its sobriquet, "Symphony of a Thousand." The forces on hand for last year's concerts were far fewer, but still very substantial.

Mahler's Seventh Symphony presents no such difficulties. It's a purely orchestral work, and calls for no more than the customary Mahler complement. It's long, but no longer than the Second, Sixth and Ninth symphonies, and shorter than the Third. It has a catchy subtitle: "The Song of the Night."

Yet it's perhaps the least performed of the Mahler Nine (or Ten, if one includes— as I do— the fully sketched but only partially orchestrated score the composer left at his death). Astonishingly, the Philadelphia Orchestra didn't play it until 1978, and then only under Eugene Ormandy's understudy, William Smith.

Missing: a narrative

What's the problem here? It's not in the quality of the inspiration, which is entirely up to the composer's standard, nor in the idiom— which, although forward-looking, is an extension of the melodic and harmonic language of the Fifth and Sixth symphonies.

The musical progression, too, tracks the five-movement arch form of Mahler's Fifth and Tenth symphonies, with large-scale outer movements flanking two inner ones, marked Nachtmusik, that wrap around a central scherzo.

What is absent, however, is the sense of narrative drive that unites the disparate elements of Mahler's other symphonies and gives them the ultimate coherence and unity that's so much a part of Mahler's impact on the listener. This isn't a matter of symmetry, thematic recurrence or overall architecture, all of which the Seventh exhibits. It's rather the elusive but unmistakable sense of a story unfolding and moving, however waywardly and mysteriously, toward resolution.

The Seventh Symphony is wonderful to listen to, moment-by-moment and movement-by-movement. The finale moves to a gloriously sonorous close. What's lacking, though, is emplotment. You don't mind this in a Mozart serenade, but you expect it in Mahler.

Writing two symphonies at once

The compositional sequence of the Sixth provides some clue to its character. The Nachtmusik movements were composed first during the summer of 1904, when Mahler was still working on the finale of his Sixth Symphony. There is no other example of Mahler working on two symphonies at the same time, unless one counts the generation of the first movement of his Second Symphony, originally conceived as a symphonic poem, while he was still at work on the First.

The finale of the Sixth is so epic in sweep and tragic in import that it's hard to conceive it leaving room for anything else, and the conjecture that the Nachtmusiken represented a breather for Mahler in the midst of the mighty effort demanded to complete the Sixth is perhaps as good an explanation as any. Genius is as genius does.

Having composed two inner movements of his next symphony, Mahler found himself at an impasse when he returned to the score of the Sixth the following year. Of this we have abundant testimony, as well as Mahler's account of the summer boat ride that gave him the key to the remainder of the work. The first, third and fifth movements followed quickly.

Two torsos clapped together

It wasn't entirely unusual for Mahler to compose sections of a work out of their final order, and he never did settle on whether the scherzo or the andante of the Sixth Symphony should be performed first. In the case of the Seventh, though, the compositional sequence suggests that we are dealing with two independent torsos clapped together to make a problematic whole.

This explanation, I must confess, isn't quite satisfactory to me either. The powerful, knotty, lengthy first movement of Mahler's Seventh (adagio, allegro risoluto), with its thrusting opening call, seems to take up expressively where his Sixth had left off, and the horn duet that begins the first of the Nachtmusik movements (allegro moderato) initially promises to develop the mood.

The latter is a very curious piece, however: marked by obsessive trilling on downbeats that reminds one of nothing so much as a bull lowering its head to snort. Trilling is also prominent in the second Nachtmusik movement, although less aggressively so.

The middle movement of the score is, like that of the Fifth Symphony, a scherzo; unlike it, however, it doesn't bear the crucial weight of the arch construction. The narrative, if one was ever conceived, doesn't fuse.

A 20th-Century question

Is this a weakness, even a flaw? If the Seventh is harder to pull together than Mahler's other works, if it even willfully resists the more predictable satisfactions of the grand Romantic statement, it also prods us to question those satisfactions, and to question narrative itself.

That is precisely what early-20th-Century literature, art and philosophy were doing in general, and what, arguably, makes the Mahler Seventh the most modernist of his works. If that seems more heavy lifting than is required, though, it may be enough to experience 87 minutes of unflagging invention and ravishing sound. It seemed to be for the Kimmel Center audience, which rose uncertainly but inevitably to reward Christoph Eschenbach's reading with an ovation.

As for that, Maestro Eschenbach led a performance that, his characteristically expansive tempos notwithstanding, permitted no slackness or indulgence. The Orchestra played with exceptional energy and precision, and even the horns were in (almost) good voice. Principal timpanist Don Liuzzi particularly distinguished himself.

Why Eschenbach makes music 90 miles down the road instead of in Philadelphia remains, for this listener, as big a mystery as the Mahler Seventh itself.