The Fredösphere

Mahler's 6th Symphony caught my attention a while back when Alex Ross mentioned the big box constructed especially for the Redwood Symphony, to be used in the symphony's final movement.  Something in Alex's description moved me, especially when he wrote "to produce the famous hammer blows in Mahler's Sixth, the orchestra deployed a large wooden box that matched Mahler's original specifications."

Oooh, that got the latent speculative fiction author in me thinking.  The resulting story is still gestating and will continue to do so for a while, as fiction writing is my third-ranked hobby (after composing and bread baking) but I may finish the thing eventually.  Meanwhile I am loathe to give away all the details, but I'll mention that the story will feature a black hole, a skeleton orchestra sawing away on their violins with femurs--or something--and will definitively explain why Mahler was never comfortable with that last thud at the end of the fourth movement.

The thud whereof I speak is one of three (later revised to two) thuds Mahler specified in his score.  He did not, however, specify the means, asking only that the sound be loud but dull, and non-metallic, "like the stroke of an ax."  They were meant to be three blows that fate delivers on the heroic protagonist of the symphony.  Alma Mahler famously described these blows as prophetically depicting Gustav's own coming disasters:  the death of his daughter; his forced resignation from the Vienna opera; and the diagnosis of his (eventually fatal) heart condition.  (Keep in mind that, for whatever reason, almost anything Alma has said about Gustav and his music is generally treated as dubious.  And one critic has pointed out her oversight in mentioning another hammer blow of fate: her own infidelity.) Various orchestras have devised ingenious devices--usually big wooden boxes or giant bass drums--of varying thuddiness in an attempt to carry out the composer's wishes.  Mahler himself was doomed to frustration with his thudders, never finding a satisfying instrument.

For more information on Mahler's 6th and its tripartite thuddiness, do listen to Benjamin Zander's superb analysis of the four movements, and his decision to restore the 3rd thud in the recording he made with the Boston Phil.  (The mp3s are available at the link; I'm told the files of the symphony itself are low-res, but those of the discussion disc are crystal clear, and feature the most awesome, phattest thuds imaginable.)  Meanwhile, Ionarts has a good comparison of the various recordings of No. 6.  I've enjoyed Iván Fischer's Budapest recording, even though he chooses Mahler's second (and final, apparently) thoughts on both the thud numbering (only two) and the ordering of the middle movements (Andante, then Scherzo).  I lean heavily toward Mahler's original concept, although I'm hardly ready to call myself an expert on the work.  (I can say I also bought Lenny Bernstein's reading as a bargain from Amazon, but the recording seems veiled; perhaps a failing of the original engineers, or a mistake in conversion to a compressed file format.)

Finally, let me leave you with a quote from David Hurwitz, writing in The Mahler Symphonies: An Owner's Manual: "There has been more nonsense written about this symphony [no. 6] than any other work by Mahler."  As I sketch the outline of my story, to be titled Mahler's Box, I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to this opportunity to contribute yet more nonsense to the pile.

Labels: Composer, Fiction, Spooky