IU Philharmonic, Effron take on Mahler’s Seventh
By Peter Jacobi
Come Wednesday evening in the Musical Arts Center, the IU Philharmonic, led by David Effron, performs that vast, 80-minute musical landscape of Gustav Mahler’s, his Symphony No. 7, a piece that hasn’t been undertaken here since 1980.
I asked myself: How does one do the Seventh?
How did Mahler do it? How are Maestro Effron and his orchestra doing it?
The composer
For Mahler, it was a process fraught with complications and frustrations. As he would later explain to his wife Alma: “In the summer before (1905), I had planned to finish the Seventh, of which the two Andante movements were already completed. Two weeks long I tortured myself to distraction, as you’ll well remember, until I ran away to the Dolomites! There the same struggle, until finally I gave up and went home convinced that the summer had been wasted.
“At Krumpendorf . I climbed into the boat to be rowed across the lake. At the first stroke of the oars I found the theme (or rather the rhythm and the character) of the introduction to the first movement . and in four weeks the first, third and fifth movements were absolutely complete!”
The Mahler summers were devoted to composing. Through the remainder of his years at the time, he was frantically busy as director of the Vienna State Opera and as an in-demand guest conductor. Summers were happily spent at his lakefront retreat, Maiernigg, in the quiet of non-urban Austria. The one in 1904 had him completing his Sixth Symphony and the “Kindertotenlieder,” while also getting started on the Seventh, establishing what he later referred to as its architecture.
“Architecture,” in this case, meant sketches and two movements, each of which he titled “Nachtmusik” (“Night Music”). These would become major elements of a symphony for which he as yet had no final plan. That plan and its realization would have to wait until the following summer. Settling down again at Maiernigg in June, he still was not sure how the project would work out, as the letter to Alma, quoted above, bears out.
But after that boat ride, he became sure of his compositional path, made the “Nachtmusiks” movements two and four, and labored as an artist possessed, completing the five-movement No. 7 by August, save for details and for changes that would later be made in preparations leading to the symphony’s 1908 premiere in Prague, Mahler conducting. To a friend, the relieved Mahler wrote, “Septima mea finite est.” (“My Seventh is finished. I believe this work to be auspiciously begun and happily concluded.”)
Audience response was moderate, but Mahler must have been pleased when, following a later performance, he heard from fellow composer Arnold Schoenberg. “This time,” wrote Schoenberg, “I felt perfect repose based on artistic harmony — something that got me going without unsettling my center of gravity . something drawing me calmly and pleasantly into its magnetic field like that force that guides the planets in their courses.”
The conductor
“As with any work,” says David Effron about preparing a performance of the Mahler Seventh, “I better know the score really well. But this piece is so complex, with instruments doing different things simultaneously, that I’ve spent far more hours than normal, but I have to be ready to solve inherent technical problems. The strings do frantic work. The trumpet line lies very high. There are dramatic tempo changes.
“The musical styles keep changing. There are marches. There are waltzes in the Johann Strauss style that require explaining for young musicians unfamiliar with their stylistic requirements. And there’s the length, 80 minutes. That takes physical energy and, on my part, a lot of work to keep the performance interesting and flowing. Everything requires careful attention from the conductor.”
This will be the first time Effron has conducted the Seventh. “I waited a long time,” he says. “I’ve done all the others by now except the massive Eighth, and I do know the Mahler repertoire. I’ve felt, however, it takes a lot of experience to understand this piece and to pull it off. I thought that now was the time for me. And a Bloomington audience hasn’t had a chance to hear it live since Bryan Balkwill conducted it in 1980. That’s a long time between performances.”
Rehearsals have been “really intense,” Effron reports. “My musicians have come to rehearsals interested and excited. Young musicians love Mahler, and mine show it every time we come together. As for me, I spend hours with the score and its world each day. Usually, I can turn things off, but I find myself dreaming about the music. That happens to me with Mahler. It’s very personal. I become emotionally involved, and I believe that transfers to the orchestra.”
He speaks of the symphony as “happy. It was written at a happy time, when there happened to be less drama in Mahler’s life. There is light music. There are Mahler marches and the wonderful waltzes in the third movement. There is loud music. The tenor horn starts the symphony solo. In the last movement, you’ll hear guitar and mandolin, the only time he uses these instruments, and they give the music a different color. There are lots of fanfares. I admire the craftsmanship, Mahler’s understanding of the orchestra, of what the instruments can do and how to push them.”
The success of Wednesday’s performance, says the maestro, “depends on the students’ ability to capture the emotional content and for me to keep them from getting tired. We’ll have no problems. It’ll work. The morale is so high. It’s an event.”
Sadly, I’ll miss the event because of long-standing out-of-town obligations. So, dear readers, go in my stead, and think of me very much wanting to be there to share the experience.
The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music would like
to thank the Herald Times for permission to republish this review.
