Mahler: Symphony No. 8 Berliner Philharmoniker & Sir Simon Rattle

• Gustav Mahler (1860 - 1911): Symphony No. 8, Erster Teil:
• 1 Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Erster Teil: I. Veni, creator spiritus 05:49
• 2 Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Erster Teil: II. Infirma nostri corporis 11:29
• 3 Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Erster Teil: III. Veni, creator spiritus 04:07
• 4 Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Erster Teil: IV. Gloria Patri Domino 02:27
• Symphony No. 8, Zweiter Teil:
• 5 Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Zweiter Teil: V. Poco adagio 09:40
• 6 Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Zweiter Teil: VI. Waldung, sie schwankt heran 04:27
• 7 Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Zweiter Teil: VII. Ewiger Wonnebrand 01:41
• 8 Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Zweiter Teil: VIII. Wie Felsenabgrund mir zu Füßen 04:25
• 9 Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Zweiter Teil: IX. Gerettet ist das edle Glied der Geisterwelt vom Bösen 03:02
• 10 Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Zweiter Teil: X. Uns bleibt ein Erdenrest 03:04
• 11 Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Zweiter Teil: XI. Höchste Herrscherin der Welt! 07:15
• 12 Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Zweiter Teil: XII. Bei der Liebe, die den Füßen 04:42
• 13 Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Zweiter Teil: XIII. Neige, neige, du Ohnegleiche 05:02
• 14 Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Zweiter Teil: XIV. Blicket auf zum Retterblick 05:36
• 15 Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Zweiter Teil: XV. Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis 05:32
• Total Runtime 01:18:18

Info for Mahler: Symphony No. 8

“Forewords” to the Eighth

When Simon Rattle prefaced his interpretation of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with Henry Purcell’s Funeral Music, he was seeking programmatic unity through the idea of the funeral march. Introducing this performance of the Eighth Symphony are liturgical settings from the Renaissance and Baroque, polychoral works of the old masters that prefigure the conception of a “resounding universe” by which Mahler described his newly completed Eighth. The ultimate example of this style is the Tudor court organist Thomas Tallis’s 40-part motet Spem in alium. An essential feature of this composition’s structure is the alternation between imitative passages involving only a few voices and huge tutti entries with powerful chords.

The idea of a polyphonic overlay of vocal lines also inspired Antonio Lotti 150 years later. Born in Hanover, he lived most of his life in Venice, where he served as organist and later maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s. Among his compositions for the basilica are a number of highly expressive settings of the Crucifixus for 5-10 voices, the manuscripts of which are still widely scattered in libraries in Europe and the US. In place of the almost cosmically revolving consonances in the Tallis motet, Lotti’s eight-part Crucifixus features the expressive dissonances of the Italian Baroque known as durezze.

“My most important work” – Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony

“It would be absurd if my most important work happened to be the easiest to understand,” wrote Mahler to his wife Alma in September 1909 after playing portions of his Eighth Symphony to his Dutch friends Willem Mengelberg and Alphons Diepenbrock. “It’s funny: the work always makes the same, typically powerful impression.” These were harbingers of the overpowering effect the Eighth would make at its world premiere in Munich’s Neue Festhalle on 12 September 1910. All the more rapid was the decline of its reputation in later decades when Theodor W. Adorno’s polemical phrase “giant symbolic shell” made the rounds. It was not the only objection raised against this exceptional work. One saw in its affirmative tone a retreat from the scepticism of the three preceding instrumental symphonies. Mahler biographer Jens Malte Fischer has declared: “The Eighth was reproached for having committed itself too wholeheartedly to the late 19th-century’s appetite for the value-producing, value-celebrating Gesamtkunstwerk in an age of the value vacuum.”

The composer would have been baffled by such reservations, convinced as he was that the Eighth was a gift from above. In a letter to Alma he recalled beginning work on the symphony in June 1906: “Four years ago, on the first day of the holidays, I went up to my hut at Maiernigg with the firm resolution of idling the holiday away ... and recruiting my strength. On the threshold of my old workshop the spiritus creator took hold of me and shook me and drove me on for the next eight weeks until my greatest work was done.”

Mahler himself helped weave the legend of that euphoric summer of 1906. He reportedly found the Pentecost hymn Veni Creator Spiritus by the 9th-century Mainz archbishop Hrabanus Maurus in a “damned old hymnbook”. When the “creative spirit took hold” of him, there was no room for textual questions. Only later did he discover that two and a half strophes of the original were missing from his popular version of the hymn, but, miraculously, they fit seamlessly into the sketches he had drafted without knowledge of this additional text. So it was that one thing after another contributed to the notion that this work in its entirety was meant to be.

Veni Creator Spiritus

Mahler set the Whitsun hymn as a powerful symphony cantata for double chorus, boys choir and orchestra, tonally centred in the typical hymn key of E flat major and organized in a taut sonata form, whose themes recur and are transformed in the symphony’s second part. In the middle of the first part’s development, a powerful new theme is introduced that symbolizes the text “Accende lumen sensibus”: “Illuminate our senses”. It is this theme that begins Part II, now in E flat minor and moved down to the basses in muffled pizzicato to depict Goethe’s “mountain gorge”. In the course of the second part, the theme recovers its euphoric power as a symbol of creativity itself, which Mahler in this symphony connects with the theme of Eros, redeeming love. At the end of the work, the Eternal Feminine that “leads us on high” and the descending Creative Spirit come together in a mystical union where the two forces are conformed and fused.

Scene from Faust

“We experience the truth of life without knowing how.” In this succinct phrase Goethe encapsulates what he is trying to say with the conclusion of Faust II. Mahler, too, was inspired by this idea when he set Goethe’s verses: Everything is revealed here through music – the ascent to the heights and disclosure of life’s ultimate truths – as the composer’s reply to the creativity kindled by the spirit in the first part. “Everything subjectively tragic is abolished in the Eighth,” he told Mengelberg. “Try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound. These are no longer human voices, but planets and suns revolving.”

The Eighth is also monumental in the sense that Mahler needed every musical element – from the six flutes to the elaborate choral sub-division – in order to particularize the various stages of Goethe’s ascent to the heights and, at the end, to reintegrate them in a grand conclusion. The scene begins with a long orchestral prelude, evoking the mountain gorge whose caves are home to the Anchorites, hermits of the early Church. From deep pizzicato basses in dark E flat minor, the view opens upward to where a keening woodwind theme floats in the strings’ tremolo clouds. This is the dotted-rhythm motif that informs all the love themes of this vast scene. Thus the orchestral prelude, both in its motifs and its strict counterpoint, prepares the “great liturgy”, as the final scene has been described.

For the Anchorites’ entry Mahler again takes up the double-chorus principle he uses in Part I, here as a division into tenors and basses singing, extremely softly and in alternation, “Waldung, sie schwankt heran” (“Wavering woods”) on clipped breathlike syllables – a visionary modern choral technique. The next big choral section leads us to “higher spheres”. It is the Chorus of Angels “carrying the immortal part of Faust”. Their verse “Gerettet ist das edle Glied der Geisterwelt vom Bösen” (“Now that precious part of our spirit world is saved from evil”) is sung at first by both women’s choirs together. Above them is the Chorus of Blessed Boys “circling round the highest peak”. Later the women’s voices are sub-divided: Mahler gives the Chorus of Younger Angels to the “lighter voices” of the first choir, that of the “More Perfect Angels” to the second women’s choir, further divided into sections. Doctor Marianus’s rapturous solo with chorus follows. Then the Boys intone “Er überwächst uns schon” (“He is already surpassing us”), the choral sound growing ever more ecstatic and splendid until it culminates in “Jungfrau, Mutter, Königin, Göttin, bleibe gnädig!” (“Virgin, Mother, Queen, Goddess, keep us in thy favour”). Following a numinous orchestral interlude the nearly hour-long movement reaches its final consummation in the “Chorus mysticus”: “All that passes away is only a likeness”. The chorus’s ppp E flat major entry inevitably recalls “Auferstehen” (“Rise again”) at the end of the “Resurrection” Symphony. In a similarly broad, sweeping intensification – with the euphoric words “Blicket auf”, exhorting the penitents to “gaze aloft” at “her” saving glance, the work moves to its climax: “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan” (“The Eternal-Feminine leads us on high”). In the orchestral conclusion, the mighty “Veni creator” motif chimes in tellingly, welding the entire symphony into a gigantic unity. (Karl Böhmer)

Erika Sunnegårdh, Sopran
Susan Bullock, Sopran
Anna Prohaska, Sopran
Lilli Paasikivi, Mezzosopran
Nathalie Stutzmann, Alt
Johan Botha, Tenor
David Wilson-Johnson, Bariton
John Relyea, Bass
MDR-Rundfunkchor
Knaben des Staats- und Domchors Berlin
Rundfunkchor Berlin
Sir Simon Rattle, Dirigent