The Chicago Symphony is playing Mahler’s Fourth Symphony this week, a work I always manage to both anticipate and dread. Maybe not “dread,” especially, so much as back away from. It’s a smaller symphony than those it’s bracketed by, the Third with its women’s and children’s choirs and eight French horns, the Fifth with its four brawny movements and the lovely Adagietto. The Fourth doesn’t have a tuba or even a trombone section in it, by contrast. It can kind of get overlooked, despite being a solid hour long on its own, and having a soprano feature at the end that manages to be both tidy and expansive.
What I like about the symphony, and what makes me look forward to it—and this may not appear to have all that much to do with the symphony itself—is that it reminds me of the first time I heard it live. I drove up to Chicago in 1999, treating myself to a birthday present of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with the CSO and conducted by Riccardo Chailly. The program also included Mahler’s orchestration of Bach’s Third Orchestra Suite: a two-fer. I met up with a couple of other friends who were visiting family that weekend, and we had a time of it afterwards, at Miller’s. I think I had to pull off the road and sleep at a rest station on I-65 for a little bit as I made the three-hour drive back to Indianapolis, having set out for the return trip around 11:30. It was one of the few times I heard Bud Herseth play before he retired in 2001.
But there’s a flip side here, naturally. In 2003, I was in Bloomington, Indiana, and coming down off a day of studying, and had the radio on. It was a broadcast of the Indianapolis Symphony playing Mahler’s Fourth, with Sylvia McNair as the soprano soloist. I think it was her; I’d gone to Indianapolis to hear the concert recently, and she was singing that weekend, at any rate.
This was the spring of 2003, which was the culmination of the long buildup to the Iraq War. Speeches were being made, troop levels discussed, presentations to the UN being given, everyone was talking about WMDs and whether Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 or if the Taliban was in Iraq, and it was all a muddle, basically, because as we now know, the information we did have was twisted beyond recognition and our leaders really wanted to go into Iraq.
So, March 20, 2003, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is on the radio, and I was probably reading a book with my cat resting on my lap, the way we spent many evenings during the week. The final movement began, and I don’t remember how far the ISO, conductor Jun Markl, and McNair got into it. McNair was singing that lovely poem, giving voice to a child rhapsodizing about the wonders of Heaven.
By the standards of the American middle-class, let’s say, it’s not much of a vision of
Heaven, though. The child is basically pleased to sing about a place where there is sufficient food, itemzing plenty of meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, and bread. Everyone there also dances a lot. This isn’t Heaven where every wish is fulfilled; this is Heaven where simple subsistence and having enough are true blessings.
McNair was singing about these things, of a child’s joy in a life where his needs were met, when the music went into a fade-out and the announcer came on. “We’ve just received word that bombs have begun to drop in Iraq,” he said. In my mind’s ear, it was profundo voice of George Walker intoning those words.
In the space of a couple seconds, then, we had gone from the joyous and naive poem about Heaven’s richness to word that we had just started a war. Leaving aside how that war has progressed since, it was nevertheless made vividly clear that the delight Mahler was composing and the cheerful victory he was broadcasting at that time was incomparably far from reality. Sadness and misery were going to be the lot in life for several thousand people, on both sides of the firing lines.
Mahler is famous, of course, for the irony in his music, the sense that however happy the music is now, melancholy or resignation is rarely a page or two away. But it’s usually in the music, and not from whatever is going on in our own lives that produces that tension. However you or I feel going into a concert is going to have some bearing on how we feel after it, but, usually, for two or three hours, we leave it up to the music to provide a channel for our emotions to go through. With Mahler’s Fourth, though, the piece can never really do that, because of the very non-musical memories I have bound up in it. That might not be the ideal way to approach the symphony, but it is a symphony I’ll never miss a chance to hear.