Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra

Autumn for eagles

ROBERT ZALLER

Riccardo Chailly, a Milanese, has made his reputation mostly with German and Dutch orchestras. He has also often been mentioned as a future music director here, but Chailly says he’s not on the market, so his March 4 performance at the Kimmel Center was merely a visit, not an audition.

Chailly programmed an early Romantic symphony (Schumann’s First) with a late one (Mahler’s Fifth). Normally, a work of the scope and length of the Mahler would have the concert to itself— at least on this side of the Atlantic, where musicians don’t like to work too hard and audiences don’t like to take in too much. But Chailly represents the sterner European ethic, which asks performers and listeners alike to put in their time, and so we got a gracious plenty. No one seemed exhausted by the ordeal, and certainly no one in the hall complained.

Philadelphia Orchestra audiences hardly lacked for Schumann under the Wolfgang Sawallisch regime, but Chailly’s account of the First was fresh and crisp. The symphony virtually jetted out of Schumann in a three-day period in January 1841, although the orchestration, never his strong point, took longer. Like smaller birds flying under an eagle, the symphonies of the post-Beethoven generation have never quite received their due. But with their combination of Romantic sensibility and post-classic form, they can claim their own distinctive profile.

Schumann’s young talent, reveling in its own strength

Schumann’s own melodies never flowed more freely, and seldom more cheerfully, though the wayward theme of the Larghetto, like so many of his slow movements, seems to begin in mid-thought. Here is young talent reveling in its own strength, yet comfortable in traditional forms. If Beethoven is the model, it is the Beethoven of the even rather the odd-numbered symphonies, of the Fourth and Eighth rather than the Fifth and Ninth.

The 20th Century had already turned when Mahler began work on his own Fifth Symphony. As with the Schumann First, Mahler opens with a trumpet fanfare. But whereas in Schumann it’s a mere flourish that commences the work, Mahler makes his trumpeter a dramatic protagonist whose extended proclamation is that of a Promethean figure, and an at least figuratively posthumous one at that, for the movement it introduces is a Trauermarsch.

From unaffected joy to protracted struggle

Mahler had originally designed the first movement of his Resurrection Symphony the same way, as a symphonic Totenfeuer that would lead, through a long and tortuous road, to the affirmation of the finale. In the earlier work, he had used text as well as music to signify this, but in the Fifth he employs musical means alone, constructing the symphony as a grand arch, with a titanic central scherzo as the bridge between the first and last two movements. Unaffected joy was no longer possible to the late Romantic composer; rather, affirmation of any sort was only to be won by protracted struggle, and at best contingently. Perhaps the blame, if that is quite the word, belongs with the Liszt of the Faust and Dante symphonies, or even with Berlioz. But in Mahler, joy is extraordinarily hard work, and never fully convincing.

Mahler never wrote a concerto, but his spotlighted solo instruments are all dramatis personae, each with a personal voice and a specific role. This is true throughout for the trumpet (the Gewandhaus’s principal, Gabor Richter, received a well-deserved ovation), and scarcely less for the first horn, while the harpist has a similar part to play in the Adagietto. This in turn points up the nature of Mahler’s symphonic craftsmanship, which, despite its epic scale and frequently overwhelming sound, is a tapestry of micro-events in which the most telling gesture is often made by a solo instrument, a duet, or a concertante-like ensemble, as in the passage for cellos alone in the second movement.

Chailly leads the cheers

In this sense, the Fifth is a turning point in Mahler’s corpus, and in modern symphonic writing generally, for never before had a work of such instrumental complexity been produced. Chailly and his exceptionally well-drilled ensemble kept on top of it all the way, and raised the rafters of the Kimmel in a way that has not been seen in a long time, with the conductor himself cheerleading the applause for his musicians.

One should not, of course, generalize too hastily. The straightforwardly winning Schumann of the First Symphony was only a few years from the tragic mental illness that would claim his life in his mid-40s, while the neurasthenic Mahler, succumbing to heart failure at 50, was still an artist at the peak of his powers. We can only wonder where he would have gone had he been given the 70 years, say, of his pupil Zemlinsky. In the year he died, Stravinsky produced Petrushka, and, two years later, The Rite of Spring. In between, Schoenberg wrote Pierrot Lunaire. Romanticism was, if hardly spent, no longer the reigning style of music. New birds would fill the sky, but no more eagles.



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