The 7th's Finale

[Ivor]

  Often thought to be problematic.

  I've got to love it. It helped that the brass tune after the drum solo at the start was the first bit of M I loved. Now the movement is a breeze. What's kept me with it is that Mahler wrote it and 'passed it' for public consumption, so I've decided he knew of what he was about.

  MTThomas has recently done it at the BBC Proms (can be heard online on the BBC Radio 3 Listen Again online facility). In an interview with him before the performance, he says the pnt about this finale is, precisely, that it is about a something called  'nothing'.


  how are you with the meovement?


     Ivor

[barry guerrero]

I'm not positive what MTT was driving at - I would have had to have heard the entire conversation, I suppose. But to me, Mahler pokes fun at himself, as well as the entire late romantic idiom in this finale. He himself refered to it as a ray of sunshine in C major. When his wife walked into the room at the dress rehearsal in Prague, he stopped the orchestra and jumped to the finale. In the most obvious sense, the 7th takes you from the darkness and tragedy of the sixth symphony, and gradually dumps you on to the doorstep of the mighty 8th. I'm not sure that a whole lot more needs to be made of it than that - it is what it is. People often times have trouble with humor in serious, formal music. I'm glad that you like it - I've always liked it.

My problem with MTT in M7 is that he takes the "allegro ordinario" of the first movement at just a ridiculously fast tempo - far faster than much of the finale.

Barry

[Ivor]

  My apologies. I just listened again to what MTT says before the Prom perfomance.

  What he says is different. He says conductors have struggled to make sense of the finale whereas for him the finale doesn't make sense. What mahler does is a lot of jump-cutting, from one type of music to another. Finally that mahler may have found the material both amusing and terrifying.

  I like humour generally, and certainly welcome it in art music. Plenty of examples spring to mind; any amount of Haydn, like the end of the Farewell Symphony, Beethoven, Rossini or course, like the Il Bruschino overture; Ivert's Divertissement. Comic operas, for goodness sake

  I like you're idea that Mahler was laughing at himself. That's very apealing. All , no, most Cancerians (e.g.Mahler) have an off-the-wall sense of humour. And there are any number of Jewish comedians.

  The finale begins as tho' we're clearly going to have fun now, and there's something comic, too, about that decrescendo on the penultimate chord. At one performance of the 7th, when the trumpeter plaed his gentle trill about 5 minutes from the end, I noticed the odd titter - it sounds a bit comic, and I like to think Mahler would have approved


   

       Ivor

[Ivor]

   Do other people find the finale either fun or a problem?  or what?

   Don't be shy,I dor one just, well , don't bite, just share.


   

   Ivor

[bluesbreaker]

Humor is good, no doubt. But I also enjoy rocking out and rocking real hard with art music.
Plenty of that also from Berlioz, Beethoven, Bruckner, and of course Mahler. 

And as for M7 finale, well what more I can ask? plenty of good humour and hard rocking moments!

[Jot N. Tittle]

   Do other people find the finale either fun or a problem?  or what?
 Ivor

I  had the good fortune a couple of years ago to hear Riccardo Chailly speak to The New York Mahler Society before leading the NYPO in a  performance of the Seventh. The occasion allowed me to ask him whether he found any humor in M7. He said, "Hmm. Yaess. Hmmm. Sarrrrdonic."  I'd hoped for more, but the hour was late.

Is the brief tango passage sardonic?

     . & '

[Ivor]

   bb,         

  jot, can you give an approx. timing for the tango passage.

  It might be sardonic, or it might be for some and not for others.


    Ivor

[Jot N. Tittle]

The tango music occurs in the background, as it were, at about 9:00 into the Nachtmusik I movement, Ivor. It is more or less apparent depending on the interpretation favored by the conductor--from a random sampling just done,  it seems most obvious in the De Waart and Gielen recordings. The rhythm is clearly there, if not the melody, in the four-hands piano performance by Zenker and Trenkner. Now, when the tango came to mind, I overlooked that we were supposed to be talking about the Finale. Beggin' yr pardon.

Humor, sardonic or not, in the Finale? I find the intrusions of the Turkish march music to be amusing, even more so than the parody of Wagner in the opening. I must give it another hearing.

     . & '