Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

It's easy to forget that Mahler, for all of his ubiquitous success nowadays, was much better known as a conductor during his life than as a composer.  He had basically one major success in his compositional career: a performance of his 8th symphony in Munich in 1910 that finally seemed to give him the approval he craved from the audience.  But for much of his compositional life, Mahler was misunderstood. His symphonies were either too long, too dense, too confusing, too esoteric, too vulgar, too banal, lacking in sophistication, or had too MUCH sophistication - the list goes on and on.  Mahler famously said in regards to his music that “my time will come” and it certainly has come, with regular performances of his music all around the world.  But as we discuss the third movement of Mahler’s 9th symphony today, I want to keep reminding you that Mahler was really not a popular man.  Even as a conductor, he had bitter enemies that drove him out of his position as the Director of the Vienna Court Opera in 1907.  As a person, he could charitably be described as difficult, with moments of kindness followed by bouts of stony silence or fierce rages.  Mahler was a complicated man, and it's perhaps in this third movement that we can learn so much about this side of Mahler that doesn’t get talked about as much - that bitter, sarcastic, nasty side of him that many choose to ignore, preferring to focus on the love and warmth that he instills into much of his music.  In the third movement of his 9th symphony, Mahler seems to be letting out some of his rage and anger at the Viennese public, concerned in his mind only with intrigue and gossip, and those critics who trafficked in open Anti-Semitism in order to bring him down from his lofty perch.  But amidst all of this, Mahler continually grasps for order throughout the movement, only to find it ripped away from him.  This is the shortest movement of Mahler’s 9th symphony, but it is also the most dense.  So today, we’ll talk about that bitter pill that is this movement, a movement that is nevertheless relentless in its search for beauty, form, and order. Join us!

Remember where we ended in the first movement of Mahler's 9th symphony? After a 27 minute farewell which touched on the two poles of rage and acceptance, while filling in every conceivable emotion in between, we ended in total peace, calm, and acceptance .   There is a lot about this symphony that is traditional - it has four movements, it's tonal(for the most part), it uses(mostly) traditional forms, but there is one thing about the symphony which is extremely unusual: the fact that it is bookended by two slow movements.  A traditional symphony takes the form of a moderately fast first movement, either a slow movement or a fast dance movement for the second movement, the same for the third(almost always the opposite of whatever the second movement was), and a fast last movement to send the crowd home happy.  Mahler,  using a form that he never used before, and would never be used again by any composer, writes a slow first movement, then 2 fast dance movements, followed by a slow final movement.  It's a fascinating formal design, but one that presents a lot of problems to solve; how do you contrast the two middle dance movements?  How do you create a sense of excitement when you’ve just finished a 27 minute slow movement which could easily be its own piece?  And perhaps most importantly, how do you conceive of the arc of a 16 minute dance movement, one that seems almost shockingly simplistic in its basic harmony and melody.  Well, Mahler finds a way through a combination of genuine joy, sarcasm, bitterness, and irony, emotions we will certainly be talking about as we take apart this second movement.

Two events, occurring on the same day, drove Mahler to the brink. His daughter Maria died at the age of just 4, and Mahler himself was diagnosed with a heart condition that would prove to be fatal. He became consumed even more so than he ever was before with the idea of death, the afterlife, and all the philosophical trials and travails that came with these thoughts.  These ideas of death did not come only from his own sense of loss and grief; they were about his place in history, and how he would be remembered. The 9th symphony explores all of these questions in a remarkably powerful way. The symphony sets up two poles: acceptance and struggle, and then wavers between them for its duration, vacillating between desperately clinging to life, and accepting and letting go.  Leonard Bernstein famously said that the symphonies' 4 movements represent 4 ways for Mahler to say farewell, but they could just as easily be 4 movements for Mahler to say he will be here forever. Join us today for part 1 to discuss the first movement of this monumental symphony!

Shostakovich is one of the easiest composers to do podcasts about because his life and his music is full of such incredible stories. But as easy as it is, it's also complicated. Shostakovich's music is sometimes heard as a musical history book, a testament, which it often is, but we should never lose sight of the fact that Shostakovich was a composer first, not a politician.  So today we're going to be looking at the 4th quartet in two contexts, the historical and the musical, and then try to see how one works(or doesn't) with the other.   How do you incorporate religion into music, and how do you handle the heavy burden that was laid down to you by masters of the String Quartet like Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert? How do you write political music without getting in trouble with the authorities? How do you speak out against injustice when it can put you in grave danger? Shostakovich, as always, has the answers. Join us!

Barber’s Adagio seems to access a deep well of sadness, heartache, passion, and nostalgia in the listener that is very difficult to explain.  As dozens of commentators have noted, there is nothing in particular in the piece which is particularly remarkable.  There are no great harmonic innovations, no formal surprises, nothing NEW, at all. In fact, the music was completely anachronistic for its time.  Despite all of that, or perhaps because of it, Barber’s Adagio has become perhaps the most well known piece of American classical music in the world.  It became even more famous after its use in the Vietnam War Movie Platoon.  It was played at the funeral of Franklin Roosevelt and Robert Kennedy, and was performed to an empty hall after the assassination of John F Kennedy.  A deeply emotional performance of the piece was done at the Last Night of the Proms, a traditionally celebratory affair, on September 12th, 2001.  Simply put, this piece has come to symbolize SADNESS in music.  But would it surprise you to hear that the Barber Adagio for Strings wasn’t originally for string orchestra at all?  That it was the second movement of a string quartet, sandwiched by movements that were much more modernist and “forward-thinking” than its slow movement?  Would it surprise you that sadness might never have been the intention of Barber in the piece?  Well, let’s take a closer look at Barber’s Adagio this week - how the piece works, what originally surrounded it, it’s different arrangements, and its tempo. Join us!

There are many reasons why Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony remains a mystery to this day -  the literally unfinished form, the unusual way of the symphony's emergencee into public consciousness, and probably most importantly, the character of the music itself, which seems to inhabit a different realm altogether, whether in its brooding first movement or the heavenly second movement.  When Schubert’s half-finished symphony was discovered, it had been sitting in a drawer of the minor composer Anselm Huttenbrenner for 43 years, unmissed and unheard by anyone.  The score was discovered by the conductor Johann von Herbeck.  Herbeck naturally considered the moment where he first held the score unforgettable, quickly organized a performance, and 37 years after Schubert’s death, the Unfinished symphony was heard for the first time.  But, the truth is that the fact that the symphony is unfinished isn’t really that special.  Composers started and failed to finish works all the time, whether they were songs, symphonies, operas, cantatas, or something else.  Most of those pieces are either ignored or are regarded as interesting curiosities by none but the most hardcore classical music lovers.  So why is this one different?  Why do these two movements rank up there with Bach’s Art of Fugue, Bruckner’s 9th symphony, Mozart’s Requiem and C Minor Mass, as pieces that are still performed today despite their unfinished nature.  Today, we’re going to find out.  We’ll explore the two existing movements of the symphony, take a look at the fragment of the third movement that Schubert started, stopped, and then tore out of the score, and also the speculative last movement, theorized by some enterprising musicologists.  But all along, we’ll marvel at Schubert’s lyricism, his endless creativity, and the powerful character of this unique symphony. Join us!

Brahms’ two piano concertos could not possibly be any more different.  The first, written when Brahms was just 25, is dramatic, stormy, and impulsive.  This makes sense seeing at it was written practically as a direct response to the attempted suicide of his friend and mentor Robert Schumann.  The second, written 22 years later when Brahms was a seasoned and mature composer at the height of his abilities, was not, as far as we know, inspired by any specific event.  It is a warm, almost sun-tanned piece, but it also does something that makes it both the perfect piece to analyze on a show like this, but also makes it a rather elusive one that takes some baking to really understand and appreciate.  What Brahms does in the 2nd piano concerto is to distill everything that makes Brahms really Brahms into one 50 minute piece of music.  There’s continuous development, gorgeous melodic lines, contrasts of character, stern willful music immediately followed by tenderness, Hungarian music, light music - it’s ALL there - but here’s the key - it’s not an events based piece.  What I mean by that is that its not like Brahms moves from one character or personality trait to another like he’s putting together mismatching clothes.  Instead, he integrates all of these different facets of his music into the whole - one moment you are hearing stern and powerful music, and the next, almost without realizing, you are into some of the most tender music he ever wrote.  This is the power but also the complexity  of Brahms’ 2nd piano concerto.  Join us to learn all about it!

How do you orchestrate a painting? How do you take the detail and the visual imagery of a painting and translate that into something that is so vivid that even if you’ve never seen the painting before in your life, you can picture it as clearly as if it was right in front of you? Most people look at a painting for no longer than a minute or two at a museum, so how do you sustain that image over nearly 20 minutes of music? Well, to answer all of these questions, all you need to do is look at Rachmaninoff’s brilliant tone poem, The Isle of the Dead, which he wrote in 1908.  In 1907 Rachmaninoff saw a black and white reproduction of a painting by the Swiss artist Arnold Bocklin entitled The Isle fo the Dead. This painting had cause a storm of interest all across Europe. Vladimir Nabokov said that prints of the painting were found in every home of Berlin, Sigmund Freud owned a copy, as did Lenin. Bocklin painted 5 different version of the piece, but they all had the same theme - a desolate haunting image of a large rocky island, with a solitary boat with a coffin approaching it. It is said that the painting portrays the mythological river Styx, and even reproduced on the computer, it is a striking image. From that encounter, Rachmaninoff sat down and created one of his most underrated and enduring compositions, the masterful Isle of the Dead, which features a gigantic orchestra that very rarely shows off its full power, a rhythmic character that is both inevitable and unstable, and an unsettling and haunting theme that followed Rachmaninoff throughout his life, the Dies Irae. We’re going to talk all about this brooding and mysterious piece on this Patreon sponsored episode this week - join us!

While the inspiration for the show today is likely obvious, I’m also very happy to get the chance to share this wonderful music with you, separate from the current horrors going on right now. Here’s a little quiz for you - name a Ukrainian composer. Were you stumped? Well, so are many people by that question. Despite a long line of brilliant composers throughout history, the music of Ukrainian composers has not entered the standard repertoire, except if you consider the contemporary composer Valentin Silvestrov. But Ukrainian music has a long and fascinating history, from the so called Big Three of the 18th and 19th centuries who were heavily influenced by the legendary Austro German composers but wrote in a highly unique style, to the nationalistic and folk inspired music of Lysenko, to the wild experimentation of Lyatoshinsky in the 20th century, all the way to the contemporary era  and the post modern work of Silvestrov.  Today on the show I’m going to take you through a history of Ukrainian classical music, and all along the way I’ll share the stories and the music of 6 of the most important Ukrainian composers.  You’re going to hear some of the most fascinating and touching music around, and you’re going to wonder how it’s possible that you haven’t heard this music before. Join us! Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqdwQ4eCTHM (Documentary on Ukrainian Composers by Natalya Pasichnyk)

In 1888, Tchaikovsky’s 5th symphony was premiered. It was enthusiastically received by the audience, and by Tchaikovsky’s friends. But Tchaikovsky’s nemesis, the critics, were not so happy with the piece.   One utterly tore apart the symphony, writing after a performance in Boston: "Of the Fifth Tchaikovsky Symphony one hardly knows what to say ... The furious peroration sounds like nothing so much as a horde of demons struggling in a torrent of brandy, the music growing drunker and drunker. Pandemonium, delirium tremens, raving, and above all, noise worse confounded!” Another wrote: “Tchaikovsky appears to be a victim of the epidemic of the Music of the Future, that in its hydrophobia, scorns logic, wallows in torpor, and time and again, collapses in dissonant convulsions. Of basic inspiration in these people, who present interest at most as pathological cases, there is very little indeed.”  Usually this is the moment where I quote Sibelius’ brilliant: “no one ever built a statue to a critic” line, but for once, Tchaikovsky somewhat agreed with his critics. He wrote to his legendary patron Nadezhda von Meck: “I am convinced that this symphony is not a success. There is something so repellent about such excess, insincerity and artificiality.” Though he later changed his mind, the last movement of the symphony was always problematic for Tchaikovsky, and its been problematic for many performers and audience members to this day. Is the ending a profound expression of triumph over fate? Or is it hackneyed, over the top, and as Tchaikovsky said, excessive? Perhaps it’s the controversy over its ending, or perhaps something else, but ever since its premiere, Tchaikovsky’s 5th has been one of the most dependable audience favourites around the world. Today I’m going to take you through the genesis and the composition of this wonderful and polarising symphony. Join us!