A magisterial Mahler

O Man! Take heed!
What does the deep midnight say?
I slept!
From the deepest dream I have awakened!
The world is deep!
And deeper than the day had thought!
Deep, deep, deep is its woe!
Ecstasy, deeper still than grief!
Woe cries: pass on!
But all ecstasy seeks eternity!
Seeks deep, deep eternity!

So sings the alto in Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony, the work with which music director and conductor Ruggero Barbieri and the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra conclude the PPO Concert Season 2002-2003. That the concert presented by the Cultural Center of the Philippines with the cooperation of the Embassy of the Republic of Austria should feature the composer’s paean to the brotherhood of man at a time when the United States, Great Britain, and their allies are waging a war to liberate the people of Iraq from the chains of a tyrant is most propitious.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in D minor is an opus of Titanic proportions. It employs, in addition to a large orchestra, a contralto, a women’s chorus and a boy’s choir. It consists of six movements, the first of which alone runs for nearly 45 minutes. It challenges in its enormous scale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, "Ode to Joy." The devotees of Beethoven are not likely to admit that Mahler’s ode to mankind is the equal of their idol’s symphonic masterpiece. Even the most avid followers of the Austrian composer are not likely to deny his faults. Nonetheless, the emotional impact of Mahler’s Third is undeniable and this is much in evidence in the PPO’s account of the symphony.

Mahler himself seems to have been uncertain about his original conception of a large-scale program symphony in seven movements, each with its own title, the whole encompassing all of creation. It did not spring full-blown from the brow of its creator. It had its birth pangs, undergoing various metamorphoses as it depicted the stages of creation from inanimate nature to flowers of the field, the beasts of the woods, man, the angels and finally the transfiguration of life through the love of God. Later he reduced the movements to only six and dropped their titles. Later, he allowed the titles to be used as a guide, a sort of road-map, so that the listener, like Theseus, may have a ball of thread as he winds his way through the vast symphonic labyrinth.

Mahler used mythological allusions too in this epical opus. The Introduction he calls "Awakening of Pan" and the first section he describes as the death of winter, the birth of summer – "The Procession of Bacchus."

The PPO sounds somewhat overcautious for the first three minutes or so of the first movement, Kraftig Entschieden, the brasses intoning the funeral march with deliberate slowness as Maestro Barbieri keeps his orchestral forces securely under check. Afterwards, the music seems to take off on its odyssean journey on its own.

The vast expanse of this opening movement, "What the Rocks and Mountains Tell Me," for all its apparent confusion, its chaotic and conflicting moods and its mish-mash of themes and thematic fragments, does follow a grand design. Its trumpet calls, drum rolls suggesting a funeral march, the tunes of the tavern, the solemn trombone solo, the humming trills on the muted strings – all these, according to Bruno Walter, one of the first and the greatest exponents of Mahler, are in accord with the composer’s concept of a primordial world.

The second movement, "What the Flowers of the Meadows Tell Me" is a graceful minuet introduced by the oboe and picked up by the strings and rendered with touching tenderness. So beautifully does the PPO’s string section serve its part that it can be described only in the phrase of the poet as lying "too deep for tears."

The third movement, "What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me" is a Scherzando that quotes in orchestral terms a melody from Mahler’s own song, "Redemption in Summer" from Des Knaben Wunderhorn: "We wait for Lady Nightingale, who lives in the green hedgerow; when the cuckoo’s day is done, then she begins to sing!" This forest idyll is intruded upon twice by a human element – the sound of a hunter’s horn. The themes of the cuckoo and the nightingale undergo various treatments – gentle, grotesque, even vulgar.

In the fourth movement, "What the Night Tells Me," the human element introduced in the preceding movement comes to the fore – a human voice. In this instance, it is that of alto Agnes Garcia Barredo. The text of her song comes from Nietzche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra: "O Man! Take Heed!" The syllables of the song are sung with long, long pauses between them to stress a painful sense of alienation. Only in the last lines does the voice of the singer rise from the depths of despair to ecstatic heights – "All ecstasy seeks… deep, deep eternity!" Barredo’s soulful account cannot fail to touch the depths of the human heart.

The fifth movement continues the ascent toward the eternal light, "What the Angels Tell Me". The alto is now joined by the women’s voices of Chorus Philippines and the Mandaluyong Children’s Chorus.

This time the alto represents the repentant sinner: "I have broken the Ten Commandments. I go my ways with bitter tears."

In contrast, the women’s chorus raises a joyous hymn:

Three angels were singing a song so bright

It set Heaven with joy and delight

Their message made a merry din;

"St. Peter is free of Sin!"

And the children’s choir mimes the tolling of the steeple bells: Bimm bamm, bimm bamm…

The Finale of the Third Symphony, "What Love Tells Me," dispenses with the human voices and relies fully on the forces of the orchestra to summon a beatific vision of the brotherhood of man living in universal peace and harmony under God’s heaven. Maestro Barbieri unleashes the full power of the PPO to project the full glory of Mahler’s dream-symphony. The effect on his audience is absolutely staggering.

Leonard Bernstein, a great admirer of Mahler, calls his idol "a double man, musically speaking, a genius of dualities: Conductor and composer, sophisticate and naïve, German and Bohemian, Christian and Jew, tragic figure and happy child, Western traditionalist and Oriental, operatic nature and symphonic composer, huge orchestra and chamber music."

It is interesting to note that long before Bernstein made this observation, Nobel-prize winning author Thomas Mann modeled the protagonist of his novel, Death in Venice, after Mahler. Many more dichotomies are implanted by Mann in the character of Aschenbach.

When the novel was made into a motion picture by Luciano Visconti, the quality of the film was enhanced in no small measure by the use of the ethereal Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony.

The PPO has already presented the Fifth and Third Symphonies of Mahler. These have received the highest acclaim from the public and critics alike. Cannot Maestro Barbieri bring to them the rest of this esteemed composer’s symphonic cycle next season? We all wait with bated breath…

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