TTC Guidebook-Mahler-（视频见优酷！）

Great Masters: MahlerHis Life and Music Professor Robert Greenberg THE TEACHING COMPANY ® Robert Greenberg, Ph.D. San Francisco Conservatory of Music Robert Greenberg has composed over forty works for a wide variety of instrumental and vocal ensembles. Recent performances of Greenberg’s work have taken place in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, England, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and The Netherlands, where his Child’s Play for string quartet was performed at the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam. Professor Greenberg holds degrees from Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in music composition in 1984. His principal teachers were Edward Cone, Claudio Spies, Andrew Imbrie, and Olly Wilson. Professor Greenberg’s awards include three Nicola De Lorenzo prizes in composition, three Meet the Composer grants, and commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress, the Alexander String Quartet, XTET, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the Dancer’s Stage Ballet Company. He is currently on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he served as Chair of the Department of Music History and Literature and Director of Curriculum of the Adult Extension Division for thirteen years. Professor Greenberg is resident music historian for National Public Radio’s “Weekend All Things Considered” program. Professor Greenberg has taught and lectured extensively across North America and Europe, speaking to such corporations and musical institutions as Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting, Harvard Business School Publishing, Deutches Financial Services, Canadian Pacific, Strategos Institute, Lincoln Center, the Van Cliburn Foundation, the University of California/Haas School of Business Executive Seminar, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, the Chautauqua Institute, the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, and others. His work as a teacher and lecturer has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, Inc. magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Times of London. He is an artistic codirector and board member of COMPOSER, INC. His music is published by Fallen Leaf Press and CPP/Belwin and is recorded on the Innova Label. Professor Greenberg has recorded 256 lectures for The Teaching Company, including the forty-eight–lecture super- course How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership i Great Masters: MahlerHis Life and Music Table of Contents Professor Biography ............................................................................................i Course Scope .......................................................................................................1 Lecture One Introduction and Childhood.......................................2 Lecture Two Mahler the Conductor ................................................5 Lecture Three Early Songs and Symphony No. 1...........................10 Lecture Four The Wunderhorn Symphonies .................................14 Lecture Five Alma and Vienna .....................................................17 Lecture Six Family Life and Symphony No. 5 ...........................20 Lecture Seven Symphony No. 6, and Das Lied von der Erde.............................................23 Lecture Eight Das Lied, Final Symphonies, and the End ..............................................................27 Vocal Texts ........................................................................................................31 Publication Credit ............................................................................................36 Timeline .............................................................................................................37 Glossary .............................................................................................................39 Biographical Notes............................................................................................40 Bibliography......................................................................................................41 ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership ii Great Masters: MahlerHis Life and Music Scope: To a greater degree than that of many other composers, the work of Gustav Mahler is a highly personal expression of his inner world, a world characterized by an overwhelming sense of alienation and loneliness. Some of this feeling can be attributed to Mahler’s Jewish heritage and his critics’ response to it. Part of his isolation began in childhood, a reaction to a brutal father and the loss of eight siblings, including his beloved brother Ernst. From the beginning of his compositional career, at age six, to its end, Mahler’s music focuses on the lonely, isolated individual attempting to cope with romantic rejection, the struggle between hope and despair, the questions of death and redemption, and the grieving process. Mahler’s work constitutes the first generation of expressionism, the early twentieth-century art movement that celebrates inner reality as the only reality. Unlike other expressionist composers, however, Mahler used the musical language of the nineteenth-century to explore expressive themes very 20th century in their nature. Mahler also had an exceptional career as a conductor, beginning in a small theater in Austria and culminating at the Royal Vienna Opera, the New York Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Philharmonic. His performances were almost magical for his audiences and he ultimately achieved critical acclaim for his conducting. His conducting career was nevertheless marked by difficulties, because of Mahler’s tyrannical stance with performers and theater management and because the anti-Semitic press, particularly in Vienna, continued to attack him with a ferocity that we must consider almost pathological. In the last years of his life, Mahler’s older daughter, Marie, died of scarlet fever. Soon after, Mahler himself was diagnosed with a heart condition that was not serious at the time but would contribute to his death in 1911. We are left with Mahler’s unique and all-inclusive body of workhis symphonieshis universal statements about life, death, love, redemption, religion, God, nature, and the human condition. ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 1 Lecture One Introduction and Childhood Scope: One of the most significant aspects of Mahler’s life was his sense of alienation, brought on largely by his Jewish heritage and his critics’ reaction to it. In fact, the tension created by the Czech, Germanic and Jewish culture of which Mahler was a part may be one of the elements that makes his work so striking and fascinating. As a child, Mahler built a fantasy world to which he retreated as a defense against abuse and loneliness. This ability to retreat reveals itself in the highly personal inner landscapes of Mahler’s music. From the time he was quite young, he was entranced by music and became devoted to the piano from about the age of five. Outline I. A central fact of Mahler’s life is his isolation and alienation. He was psychologically and culturally alone, the eternal outsider. A. Mahler wrote, “I am thrice homeless, as a Bohemian in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, as a Jew throughout the world, everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.” B. Mahler’s “Jewishness” was held against him as a man, a conductor, and a composer, both during his lifetime and after. C. On April 10, 1897, two days after the announcement of Mahler’s appointment as conductor of the Vienna State Opera, the Viennese newspaper Deutsche Zeitung attacked what it called “the frightening Jewification of art in Vienna” and questioned whether a Jew could perform “our great musicour German opera” (Lea, 51). D. Even reviews published later in Mahler’s life echo these sentiments. E. I might suggest that we find Mahler’s music so unbelievably moving today because its angst; its uncontrollable extroversion, optimism, and pessimism; its sheer power and often schizophrenic emotional progressions are even more relevant to us than to the music’s original audience. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 1, movement 4 conclusion [1888].) F. Mahler’s music is a mixture of brilliant, rich, irregularly changing harmonies; of extraordinary (often grotesque) juxtapositions of moods: tragedy, humor, farce, irony; constant, almost obsessive melodic activity; sudden, unexpected explosions of passion or rage that disappear as quickly as they come; strutting march music heard back-to-back with Viennese love music; and a pure, crystalline, overwhelming passion untempered by the “civilizing” effect of artistic control and manipulation. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 5, movement 2 opening.) II. Mahler was born to Jewish parents in the Bohemian town of Kalischt in 1860, in what was then part of the Austrian Empire and is today the Czech Republic. A. Like so many emancipated Jews in their part of Europe, the Mahler family considered themselves assimilated Western European Jews. Typical of the Czech (Bohemian and Moravian) Jewish community, the Mahlers spoke German at home, not Yiddish, and moved in a cultural orbit that was distinctly Austrian/German. B. While growing up, Mahler had little contact with Jewish religious practices. According to biographers Kurt and Herta Blaukopf, he was more familiar with Catholic religious practice than Jewish. C. Little documentary evidence exists that Mahler considered his Jewish heritage as anything other than a burden to be overcome. D. In February 1897, Mahler converted to Catholicism, not because he really cared about the religion, but because doing so was the only way he could secure the position of conductor and music director of the Vienna Opera. 1. Whatever Mahler considered himself, those around him, especially in the artistic and political atmosphere in which he traveled, forever considered him a Jew, with all the attendant reserve, distrust, and sometimes outright hostility that accompanied that identification at the time. ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 2 2. The anti-Semitic Viennese press played a large part in having Mahler drummed out of Vienna in 1907, ten years after his “shotgun conversion” to Catholicism. 3. After his death, Mahler’s music was condemned and banned by the Nazis as being both degenerate and Jewish. E. In 1916, Max Brod published the first of his essays dealing with Mahler’s music. 1. Brod was a novelist, music critic, and Franz Kafka’s editor. He was also, like Mahler, Kafka, and Freud, a Bohemian-born Jew who grew up in a German-speaking household. 2. Brod’s observations approach very nearly the heart and soul of Mahler’s music and help to explain the basis of the anti-Semitic criticism directed toward him. 3. Brod concluded that Mahler, like Heine and Mendelssohn, was culturally only partially German/Austrian. 4. Those aspects of his music that seemed bizarre and arbitrary from the German perspective are in reality completely natural if we perceive Mahler as a Jewish artist of the emancipation and cosmopolitan period who was, nevertheless, not entirely assimilated into German/Austrian culture. 5. Most of Mahler’s contemporary German/Austrian critics argued that European music was essentially “Nordic” in structure and expressive content, meaning serious, metaphysical, idealistic, carefully structured, stylistically consistent, exalted, and “pure,” and, therefore, superior to all other music. These critics maintained that no bridge could be built between “Nordic” and any other music and that the Jews exerted a destructive influence on Nordic culture. 6. Max Brod pointed out that the tension between East and West, Germanic and Jewish culture, made the works of Mahler, Heine, and Kafka striking, different, and fascinating. F. Perhaps if Mahler had been a practicing Jew and hadn’t been as culturally assimilated as he was, he wouldn’t have felt as alienated as he did. But Mahler was a supreme individual and egotist; he considered himself an enlightened, cosmopolitan European, even as the community around him continued to stereotype him as “a Jew.” G. Perhaps a more personal issue can also be found in Mahler’s rejection of his heritage. 1. Mahler’s sense of alienation, loneliness, and existential homelessness was part of his personality, almost from the very beginning. 2. Without the fantasy world he created as a defense against childhood loneliness, the extraordinary and equally fantastic music-scapes of his adulthood could never have been created. 3. As a young man, Mahler identified himself as Ahaseurus, the Wandering Jew. The figure of the homeless, lonely wanderer, searching but never finding, asking questions for which few answers exist, is a constant, basic theme in Mahler’s letters and music. H. From the beginning of his compositional career to its end, from The Songs of a Wayfarer (1885) to The Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde) (1909), Mahler’s music is about the lonely, isolated individual “coping” with: 1. Romantic rejection (The Songs of a Wayfarer, 1885); 2. The struggle between hope and despair (Symphony No. 1, 1888); 3. The questions raised by death and redemption (Symphony No. 2, 1894); 4. The relationship between the individual and nature (Symphony No. 3, 1896); 5. The deaths of children (Kindertotenlieder, 1904); 6. The grieving process (Symphony No. 5, 1902). I. Mahler’s music asks many questions; by his late works, The Song of the Earth (1909) and the Symphony No. 9 (1910), very few answers can be found. J. Mahler’s “world”the environment that shaped his soul, the core of his being, his music, and his relationships was his inner life, his emotional landscape. Rarely do we encounter an artist who generated such a degree of his reality from a place entirely within himself. Incredibly, Mahler was able to unite the diversity of his world and his often tortured emotional makeup into rich and original music. III. Gustav Mahler was born on July 7, 1860, in the Bohemian village of Kalischt, roughly midway between Vienna and Prague. A. Bernard Mahler, Gustav’s father, was a totally self-made man, ferociously ambitious, and a strict authoritarian who brutalized his wife and, on occasion, his children. ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 3 B. Gustav certainly learned from his father’s example; he, too, was voraciously ambitious, unshakable in his convictions and will, and equally despotic (if not actually physically violent) as a conductor and husband. C. Marie Hermann Mahler, Gustav’s mother, was a quiet, affectionate, sickly, and not surprisingly, unhappy woman. She had a weak heart, suffered from migraines, and walked with a limp as a result of a clubfoot. D. No physical ailment could compare to how Marie suffered as a result of the mortality rate of her children, which was ghastly even by the standards of the nineteenth century. Six Mahler children survived into adulthood, but in the twenty years between 1859 and 1879, the Mahlers buried eight sons. IV. When Mahler was a little more than four months old, his family, recently emancipated by imperial decree, moved to the nearby town of Iglau, in Moravia, where Bernard opened a distillery and modest tavern. A. Iglau was a bustling trading and mining town of 25,000, an oasis of German culture in a Slavic sea, a town that boasted a major music school and an extensive season of symphonic concerts and operas. B. Despite his shortcomings, Bernard Mahler gave his children the comforts and education that he himself had never had. The Mahler apartment was spacious and comfortable, filled with books, curio cabinets, and a grand piano on which young Gustav practiced. V. Gustav was precocious and entranced by music from infancy. A. The Mahler home in Iglau was near a military barracks, and Gustav grew up fascinated by military marches, songs, and tattoos. B. In fact, we have difficulty finding a single symphonic work by Mahler that does not feature a march of some kind. C. Given Mahler’s morbid inclinations, it should come as no surprise that many of his symphonic marches are funeral marches. 1. First listen to the genuinely bizarre funeral march of Symphony No. 1. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 1, movement 3, Funeral March [1888].) 2. Next hear the grisly and ghastly march of the dead in Symphony No. 2. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 2, movement 5, March of the Dead [1894].) 3. Now, the numbed and agonized funeral march that initiates Symphony No. 5. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 5, movement 1, Funeral March [1902].) 4. Finally, the inexorable march of fate and death that begins Symphony No. 6. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 6, movement 1, March of Fate.) D. Mahler’s mature music continued to reflect, to the end of his life, the tragic experiences and environmental and musical influences of his childhood in Iglau. E. Mahler also developed a propensity, from the earliest age, to enter into a sort of dream or fantasy state for hours at a time to escape Bernhard’s emotional and physical abuse. F. Mahler began taking music lessons around the age of five. 1. The single-minded intensity with which he threw himself into the piano was nothing short of compulsive. 2. Like so many families with a single-minded prodigy, the Mahler family’s daily life, routines, and dreams of fortune soon began to revolve around Gustav’s particular needs. 3. Mahler made his first public appearance at the age of ten and, if he had wanted to, he could undoubtedly have made a career as a performing pianist. But Mahler had another musical interest, one that transcended even playing the piano: making up his own music and writing it down. ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 4 Lecture Two Mahler the Conductor Scope: Mahler began composing at age six, was sent to school in Prague at eleven, and experienced the death of his dear brother Ernest at age fifteen. Later in his fifteenth year, he went to the Vienna Conservatory to study music. There, he became enamored of the work Richard Wagner, which became a great influence on him. After graduating in 1878, Mahler composed Das klagende Lied (The Song of Sorrow), based on an old folktale. In 1880, he began his conducting career at a small theater and realized that he had found a calling. He steadily moved up the ladder to larger theaters, where his audiences appreciated his attention to detail, but performers and musicians found him tyrannical. Ultimately, he replaced the ailing Artur Nikisch, the most famous conductor of the day, at the Neues Stadttheatre in Leipzig, then moved on to the position of music director and first conductor of the Royal Hungarian Opera in Budapest. He stayed in Budapest for three years, sometimes conducting as many as nineteen different operas a month. Outline I. Gustav Mahler began composing around the age of six. He entitled his first composition Polka with Introductory Funeral March. Even at six years old, because of the circumstances of his life and the ironic and morbid nature of his psyche, he was already writing music that juxtaposed the joy of dance with the ritual sadness of a funeral march. II. In 1871, partly because of Gustav’s lackluster academic performance in elementary school, Bernard Mahler decided to send him to Prague to study at the Neustadte Gymnasium. Gustav was eleven years old. A. Bernard arranged for his son to board in the house of a leather merchant named Moritz Grunefeld, who was a well