Symphonic Connections

I've often felt that Mahler's symphonies refer to their numbered Beethovenian counterpart.  Mahler's Fifth, for instance, nods to the famous four-note motif with which Beethoven begins his paradigmatic Fifth. The Sixth has pastoral tones, though in Mahler those are quashed by hell rather than sublimated by heaven. And what about after Mahler's inheritors? There's been some debate on my own Facebook page about the ending of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony in response to my and Semyon Bychkov's comments about hope in the piece in my Independent on Sunday article.

It is possible, just about, to see the 'giddy' C major conclusion to Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony as exultant. Yet Bychkov remained ambivalent in his comments: 'If the past is the proof, there is no hope. Yet the present depends on us. And it determines the future. So there might be hope after all.' That happy ambiguousness reminded me of Mahler's Seventh Symphony, a work Shostakovich may have known at the time, thanks to Sollertinsky (pictured above), one of the first men to whom Shostakovich played his own Seventh. Mahler's Seventh also ends over-triumphantly in C major, about which I wrote the following last summer:

Yet you would not be alone in feeling that Mahler was protesting a little too much. The Symphony has been so divided up to this point that the purity of C major and the endlessly fanfaric joy of its Finale may not seem entirely earned. Just as in the more cyclically drawn Fifth Symphony, listeners can feel that Mahler is creating unity at the expense of credibility. The truth of the matter doubtless exists somewhere between those interpretative factions. 

Given Mahler’s intense sensitivity, could he really have written something unconsciously bombastic? Rather is that bombast indicative of the hollowness of the idea of a happy ending? Adorno later accused Mahler of being ‘a poor yea-sayer’ who ‘makes music as if joy were already in the world’. But perhaps Mahler recognized that apparent shortcoming. Instead of returning wholesale to the ‘darkness to light’ synopsis of earlier symphonies (based on Beethoven’s model), Mahler tenders something more ironic. He provides what appears to be the very opposite of the ending of his Sixth Symphony, though the false glitter and glory of the Finale of the Seventh may ultimately confirm that such a pessimistic view was right all along. 

Thinking of that and Shostakovich's Mahlerian ambitions – just as Mahler had Beethovenian ones – I will try and listen afresh to the Symphony on Thursday evening at the Barbican.

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