“What a joyful time to live when the music of the great Gustav Mahler is winning general recognition… Whyishismusicsocaptivating? First of all, its profound humanness. Mahler understood the high ethical meaning of music. He would penetrate into the inmost recesses of human mind, he would care about the highest world ideals. His humanism, indomitable temperament, ardent love for people in combination with an amazing composing gift helped Mahler create his symphonies, Songs of a Travelling Journeyman, Songs on the Death of Children, and the grandiose Song of the Earth.”
Dmitri Shostakovich
The great Austrian composer Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) entered the galaxy of the European symphonists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Along with Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf, he was one of the most prominent representatives of the post-Wagnerian music art of Austria and Germany.
Taking an interest in his contemporaries' works, Mahler followed his own path. The Austrian composer's view of symphony as a musical drama created an affinity between him and Pyotr Tchaikovsky; emotional excitement of music and propensity to programme works linked him with Richard Strauss. However, when Strauss demonstrated elegance and external lustre, Mahler was more inclined to bare feelings.
Mahler was one of the few artists who raised the most acute moral and philosophic problems in his works, those that concerned the mankind. His music has themes of life and death, good and evil, and it is filled with passionate struggle for the ideal and bitterness in the face of earthly calamities and suffering.
The composer said, “What music is created about is still only a human in all his manifestations (that is a feeling, thinking, breathing and suffering one).”
“To my mind, the symphony won't leave anyone indifferent,” the composer said about his SecondSymphony. It turned out to be a logical continuation of the first one.
“I titled the first movement Funeral Rites, and, if you want to know, I shall bury the hero of my D-dur (first) symphony in it, whose life I now contemplate from above and as if it is reflected in a clear mirror.”
This work raises new questions about the meaning of human life. One of the main ones is “Why did you live? What did you suffer for? Was it all an enormous terrible joke? We must somehow settle these questions if we're to live and even if we're only to die! Anyone in whose life this call resounded at least once must give just any answer.”
The composer worked on the symphony for six years – an unusually long period for Mahler. In 1891, he supposed to compose a symphonic poem and later he came up with the middle movements of the symphony. However, their sequence was unclear. The story of creation of the finale was dramatic. Mahler could not find a text for the chorus – that “resolving word” which would express the idea of the last movement. One day he heard Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's chorale to the text of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock's holy song Die Auferstehung (The Resurrection).“It struck me like lightning, this thing, and everything was revealed to me clear and plain.” The composer started his work on the finale and finished it in June 1894.
The symphony consists of five movements. The first one recounts one of the collisions of human spirit and heart – life and death. Both interludes of the cycle – that was how Mahler called the second and third ones – repeat the composition of the middle movements of the First Symphony. The fourth movement is a preparation for the centre of the entire symphony – its finale.
The key nature of the first movement is tragic heroics of a mournful procession. It has two contrasting images – a lyrical idyll and a theme of struggle. The second movement stands in the cycle as if it is separate, by itself, “and to a certain extent interrupts a strict and stern course of events.” Not linked with the other movements of the symphony thematically, it forms a peculiar episode which sets the major line of development aside. It is precisely how Mahler described it: “The second movement is a reminiscence! A sunny moment, pure and serene, from the life of my hero…”
The third movement, scherzo, returns the mood of the first movement of the symphony and puts the main question of the entire symphony again. The scherzo is based on Mahler's songDes Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt (St. Anthony of Padua's Sermon to the Fish). For the composer, it became a tragic symbol of futility of an artist's labour in the society which is deaf to all things elated, moral and beautiful.
The scherzo is a “human comedy… a satire… on the human race.” The main idea is pointless going round which renders unstoppable dance movement. “Everything resumes its normal course.”
The fourth movement is based on the song Urlicht(Primeval Light) for an alto and orchestra to the words from the cycleDes KnabenWunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn). In the vein of religious symbolism characteristic for old German songs, it speaks about the faith in eternal life, the faith of a little man in his right for eternal bliss.
The finale unfolds a drama. Its content is finding the answer to the “great question.” The quest for the truth passes in agonizing tension to the last sounds of the symphony.
Inmyopinion, aconductoris first of all a preacher. Apreacherofbeauty, good, truth, love…
Yuri Temirkanov
Yuri Khatuyevich Temirkanov was born in a Kabardian aul of Zaraghizh in 1938.
He started to learn music absolutely accidentally. “It seems I didn't see a single musical instrument before I was seven,” he told. “My first musical impression was a brass band that played on Sundays in the town park. And those sounds from the speakers coming from every window. But probably I didn't perceive t as music. It was a usual background of life…”
Painting was and is another object of his attraction. “If I weren't a musician, I would probably be a painter. Apart from music, it was my very first and may be the most serious passion. I drew quite well when I was a kid and now, sometimes with joy, I look at some of my remaining childhood drawings… Visits to picture galleries wherever I happen to be give me an indescribable pleasure.”
Temirkanov's first teacher Valery Dashkov taught the boy to play the violin. Truvor Scheibler, a composer and pupil of Alexander Glazunov, helped him develop his hearing and taught theoretical disciplines. At the age of thirteen, Temirkanov was sent to Leningrad, to the special music school of the conservatory. Later on, he studied at the Leningrad Conservatory two times: first in the viola class of the orchestral department, then as a student of the conducting department. He graduated from the operatic and symphonic conducting class in 1965 and debuted at the Leningrad Maly Opera and Ballet Theatre in Verdi's La traviata. In 1966, the 28-year-old musician became a second prize winner of the All-Union Competition of Conductors in Moscow.
“I felt like a real conductor after the competition,” Temirkanov remembered. “Although the first place was something unexpected to me. We had the last audition in the evening, and on the next morning I became a prize winner. It didn't make a better conductor out of me. But as for any artist, the feeling of confidence mattered. I started to move forward extremely quickly, even I could tell that myself.”
He had a joint overseas tour with Kirill Kondrashin and David Oistrakh, and was invited to conduct orchestras of the United States, France and Germany. In early 1967, Temirkanov performed at the Great Hall of the Philharmonic Society and after that Evgeny Mravinsky offered him a position of his assistant. In 1968, Temirkanov became leader of the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Philharmonic Society. He expanded the repertoire and often toured in the countries of Europe, Japan and the USA with the orchestra.
In 1976, Temirkanov became an artistic director and chief conductor of the Kirov (Mariinsky) Theatre.
“When I was going to be a conductor, I didn't set tasks like that because of the young age, but then I found out that a conductor was not just a performer, not just an artist, but also a messiah because an individual should leave the performance a better man than before he came to it,” Temirkanov admitted.
In 1988, Yuri Temirkanov was elected chief conductor and artistic director of the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Society.
“The fate put me at the head of one of the best orchestras of the country… I obtained all that I learnt and can do now when I worked with that orchestra, with those people many of which were significantly older than me, previously played under the leadership of wonderful conductors. I highly appreciate the orchestra members' ability not to lose their artistic mood of soul, ability to rise above the humdrum and live by the poetry of music. I am also confident that good sound is impossible to achieve without good human relations within the orchestra. To my mind, when I perform with my orchestra, I always conduct better than when I'm a guest.”
In 2005, the orchestra was the first domestic collectives to open the concert season of Carnegie Hall. Temirkanov has collaborated with some of the best orchestras of the world such as the Philadelphia Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic Orchestra, orchestras of San Francisco and Rome (Santa Cecilia).
“...There's one nicety to our work – you must love the composer and the piece you play today. You must be convinced that it is your favourite one.”
In December 2013, Yuri Temirkanov marked his 75th birthday and 25 years of his leadership of the celebrated symphony orchestra of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Society.
FirmaMelodiya presents a recording of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 performed by the Symphony Orchestra of the Leningrad State Academic Kirov Opera and Ballet Theatre conducted by the outstanding Yuri Temirkanov.
