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Mahler time
Ben Zander and the BPO celebrate their 25th
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

Back in 1978, Benjamin Zander was ousted as conductor of Boston’s Civic Symphony, whereupon he founded his own orchestra, the Boston Philharmonic. A major reason for Zander’s departure, it was rumored, was that the Civic had been playing too much music by Gustav Mahler. And whether or not that’s true, it’s a fact that Zander and the BPO have since established an international reputation as Mahler interpreters. Their 1994 recording of his Sixth Symphony got respectful reviews from the likes of Fanfare and the Gramophone, and Zander has since signed a contract with Telarc to record all of Mahler’s symphonies with the Philharmonia of London, one of the world’s most prestigious orchestras.

Now Zander and the BPO are celebrating their 25th anniversary with — what else? — an all-Mahler season. It’ll start next weekend with a thoughtful program that reunites the First Symphony with its missing movement, the "Blumine" serenade, and with the song cycle that gave rise to the symphony, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen ("Songs of a Wayfarer"). The interconnections among these three works are biographical as well as musical, and their story has yet to be fully told.

In 1884, when he was second conductor at the Royal and Imperial Theater in Cassel, the 24-year-old Mahler was enamored of the blonde, blue-eyed soprano Johanna Richter. For her he wrote the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, four songs of romantic anguish. "Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht" ("When My Sweetheart Weds") expresses the singer’s despair when his beloved marries someone else. "Ging heut’ Morgens über’s Feld" ("I Walked Out This Morning Across the Fields") starts cheerfully, with the singer talking to finches and bluebells, but by the end he’s despondent again ("The world can never bloom for me"). "Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer" ("I Have a Gleaming Knife") describes what he feels in his breast when he thinks of his beloved. And "Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz" ("The Blue Eyes of My Sweetheart") sends him out into the world lonely and forlorn, like the wanderers of the Schubert song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise.

It seems likely that Gustav also wrote for Johanna the trumpet serenade that was part of a suite of incidental music (for a staging of Joseph von Scheffel’s popular romantic poem Der Trompeter von Säkkingen) that he was commissioned to compose at Cassel. By 1889, when Mahler’s five-movement symphonic poem premiered in Budapest (where he was then conducting), Johanna was gone from his life but not from his music: "Ging heut’ Morgens über’s Feld" and "Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz" play major roles in the poem’s first and fourth movements, respectively, and the Säkkingen trumpet serenade, transposed from D to C, becomes the second movement. The work was not a huge success in Budapest, so for its second outing, in Hamburg (where he had moved on), Mahler added the title "Titan" and a program; he also gave the serenade the name "Blumine." Titan was the name of Mahler’s favorite novel by his favorite writer, the German Romantic Jean Paul; Herbst-Blumine was the name of a volume of Jean Paul’s essays. He can hardly have failed to notice that Johanna’s surname, Richter, was the same as Jean Paul’s.

But the symphonic poem fared no better in Hamburg than it had in Budapest, and after one more attempt, in 1894 in Weimar, Mahler dropped the "Titan" title and the program and also removed the "Blumine" movement. What was now his First Symphony, in four movements, went on to relative success; "Blumine" was not part of the symphony when it was first published, in 1899, and was in fact considered lost for good until 1966, when a manuscript of the 1893 version turned up at Yale. Mahler scholars have generally argued against its reinsertion in the symphony; conductors have generally agreed with them.

All the same, the links of "Blumine" to both the song cycle and the symphony are just beginning to be explored. The serenade’s opening phrase, it turns out, has the same notes you heard in the "Blum und Vogel Groß und Klein" ("flower and bird great and small") cadence of "Ging heut’ Morgens über’s Feld" and in the first movement of the symphony; it’s also identical to the big C-major theme in the last movement of Brahms’s First Symphony. Other elements of "Blumine" pervade the remainder of Mahler’s symphony (the cellos’ underpinning of the scherzo theme; the romantic flashback in the finale), and one theme goes on to play a major role in his Ninth Symphony — but that’s another story. You can expect Ben Zander to touch on some of this in "Zander on Mahler," a talk he’ll give this Friday, October 3, at 6 p.m. at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, 56 Brattle Street in Harvard Square. Tickets are $5; call (617) 547-6789 extension 1. The opening program of the BPO’s 25th season will be offered October 9 at 7:30 p.m. and October 12 at 3 p.m. in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, 45 Quincy Street in Harvard Square, and October 11 at 8 p.m. in NEC’s Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street. Call (617) 585-1260 for the Boston concert, (617) 496-2222 for the two in Cambridge.


Issue Date: October 3 - 9, 2003
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