简介:Mahler portentously declared during or soon after composing his SixthSymphony (completed over the two summers of 1903 and 1904, and first
performed in 1906) that it ‘will pose conundrums that only a generation
that has absorbed and digested my first five symphonies may hope to solve’. As he
was to discover, early critics seemed to confirm this prediction, finding the work,
in his words, ‘another hard nut’ to crack with their ‘feeble little teeth’. If this
fraternity of commentators had initial problems yet again with a Mahler symphony
that did not ‘behave’ as a symphony should (for one thing offering what was con -
sidered to be ‘programme music’ without a programme), evidence suggests that by
contrast it quickly gained traction as ‘musicians’ music’, appreciated by the true
cognoscenti (though admittedly these were often friends and colleagues of the com -
poser). ‘The only sixth despite the Pastoral’ eulogized a young Alban Berg, for
example; and in an extensive laudatory but critically informed essay on Mahler,
Schoenberg singled out the principal theme of the Andante as a paragon of organic,
asymmetrical and continually developing melodic construction. The conductors
Willem Mengelberg and Bruno Walter were sensitive in other ways to the gravitas
and bleak intensity of the work, the latter dramatically equating its portrayal of a
‘terrifying, hopeless darkness, without a human sound’ with the composer’s search
for truth in an increasingly godless world.
Mahler was, and remains, a polarizing composer. Fraught with some of the most
extreme musical and aesthetic tensions in all his output, the Sixth Symphony is a
high-energy locus of that combustible creative friction which results from the simul -
taneous dogged adherence to, yet daring insurrection against, generic norms, and
which can readily incite both the strongest polemic and adulation. The philo sopher
Albert Camus once wrote: ‘when I describe what the catastrophe of modern man
looks like, music comes into my mind – the music of Gustav Mahler’, and none of
Mahler’s works paints the human condition’s potential for irrevocable (self-)destruc -
曲目:I. Allegro energico, ma non troppo. Heftig, aber markig 24'41II. Andante moderato 16'10
III. Scherzo. Wuchtig 13'18
IV. Finale. Allegro moderato – Allegro energico 31'42