Extended Concert Programme: London Symphony Orchestra with Barbara Hannigan | Mon 13 March 2023

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992): L’Ascension

1. Majesté du Christ demandant sa gloire à son Père (‘The Majesty of Christ Demanding His Glory of the Father’)
2. Alléluias sereins d’une âme qui désire le ciel (‘Serene Alleluias of a Soul that Longs for the Heavens’)
3. Alléluia sur la trompette, alléluia sur la cymbale (‘Alleluia on the Trumpet, Alleluia on the Cymbal’)
4. Prière du Christ montant vers son Père (‘Prayer of Christ Ascending Towards His Father’)

No 20th century composer fulfilled the command ‘aim high’ more breathtakingly than Olivier Messiaen. There are many hymns of praise to God in Western music, but few have dared to depict heaven, eternity, infinite love, and to declare their intention boldly in their titles. But that’s exactly what Olivier Messiaen did, without any arrogance or sense of hyperbole, and in its utterly original way the music lives up to its expressed aims over and over again. This is all the more remarkable in the case of L’Ascension (Ascension Day, 1932-3), in that its composer was still in his mid-twenties and only just beginning to build a reputation for himself. While it is in some ways clearly an early work, so many features of Messiaen’s mature style are already in place: the use of unusual scales to add ‘unworldly’ colouring, the complex, systematically organised rhythms, partly to convey the sense of intoxicating, abandoned dance, but also in the slower music to create a feeling of time itself being defied, even transcended.

An intensely devout, if somewhat idiosyncratic Roman Catholic, Messiaen was also influenced by the music and thought of Hindu and Buddhist traditions – as can be heard particularly in the scherzo-like third movement – and by the erotically charged mysticism of Wagner. Yet, even at this stage in his career, what Messiaen makes of it is like nothing before. Where Wagner’s exotic harmonies reach out for resolution, however long delayed, the lush hymn-like wind writing at the start of the first movement seem content simply to ‘be’: progression towards a goal, one of the defining features of traditional Western classical music, is abandoned in favour of a kind of movement that circles upon itself – the demands of human clock-time fade.

Rhythms and scales become freer and more colourful in the ‘Allelujahs’ of the second movement, and there are foretastes in the woodwind of the birdsong that was to be such an arresting feature of Messiaen’s later music. Then the third movement obeys the Biblical Psalmist’s injunction to ‘praise His name with dancing’, evoking complex, mesmerising footwork. Finally comes one of those rapt, intensely slow-moving hymns which stand at the heart of Messiaen’s devotional writing. The strings, previously forced to be silent or play a background role in the orchestral texture, are now centre stage, their song rising slowly but steadily towards the stratospheric final chord as Christ’s ascension into Heaven ends, his mission on earth complete.

© Stephen Johnson

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911): Symphony No 4 (1899–1900, rev 1901–10)

1. Bedächtig. Nicht eilen [Deliberate. Not hurried] – Recht gemächlich [Very leisurely]
2. In gemächlicher Bewegung. Ohne Hast [At a leisurely pace. Without haste]
3. Ruhevoll [Restful]
4. Sehr behaglich [Very cosy]

In 1900, just after he’d finished his Fourth Symphony, Gustav Mahler wrote about how the work had taken shape. He had set out with clear ideas, but then the work had ‘turned upside-down’ on him: ‘To my astonishment it became plain to me that I had entered a totally different realm, just as in a dream one imagines oneself wandering through the flower-scented garden of Elysium and it suddenly changes to a nightmare of finding oneself in a Hades full of terrors … This time it is a forest with all its mysteries and its horrors which forces my hand and weaves itself into my work. It becomes even clearer to me that one does not compose; one is composed.’

Mahler’s remarks about ‘mysteries and horrors’ may surprise some readers. Writers often portray the Fourth as his sunniest and simplest symphony: an affectionate recollection of infant happiness, culminating in a vision of Heaven seen through the eyes of a child – with only the occasional pang of adult nostalgia to cloud its radiant blue skies. But Mahler was too sophisticated to fall for the sentimental 19th-century idea of childhood as a Paradise Lost. He knew that children could be cruel, and that their capacity for suffering was often seriously underestimated by adults. There is cruelty in the seemingly naïve text Mahler sets in his finale, ‘Das himmlische Leben’ (Heavenly Life): ‘We led a patient, guiltless darling lambkin to death,’ the child tells us contentedly, adding that ‘Saint Luke is slaying the oxen’. A moment or two earlier we catch a glimpse of ‘the butcher Herod’, on whose orders the children were massacred in the Biblical Christmas story.

What are images like these doing in Heaven? Interestingly Mahler wrote this final movement before he’d written a note of the preceding three. It was one of several settings of poems from the classic German folk collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Youth’s Magic Horn) Mahler had composed in the 1890s. At one stage Mahler thought of including it in his huge Third Symphony; but then he began to see it as more clearly the ending of his next symphony, the Fourth. Even then, Mahler’s ideas changed as the new work took shape. In its final form, the first three movements of the Fourth Symphony prepare the way for the closing vision of ‘Das himmlische Leben’ on every possible level: its themes, orchestral colours, tonal scheme, most of all that strange emotional ambiguity – blissful dream touched by images of nightmare. Far from being Mahler’s simplest symphony, it is one of the subtlest things he ever created.

The very opening of the Fourth Symphony is a foretaste of the finale. Woodwind and jingling sleigh-bells set off at a slow jog-trot, then a languid rising violin phrase turns out to be the beginning of a disarmingly simple tune. There is a note of contained yearning in the lovely second theme (cellos), but this soon subsides into the most childlike idea so far (solo oboe and bassoon). Later another tune is introduced by four flutes in unison – panpipes, or perhaps whistling boys. After this the ‘mysteries and horrors’ of the forest gradually make their presence felt, until in a superb full orchestral climax, horns, trumpets, bells and glittering high woodwind sound a triumphant medley of themes from earlier on. But this triumph is dispelled by a dissonance, underlined by gong and bass drum, then trumpets sound out the grim fanfare rhythm Mahler later used to begin the Funeral March of his Fifth Symphony. How do we get back to the land of lost content glimpsed at the beginning? Mahler simply stops the music, and the simple theme starts again in mid-phrase, as though nothing had happened. All the main themes now return, but dark disturbances keep casting shadows.

The second movement proceeds at a leisurely pace (really fast music is rare in this symphony). Mahler described the first theme as ‘Freund Hain spielt auf’: the ‘Friend Hain’ who ‘strikes up’ here is a sinister figure from German folk-lore: a pied piper-like figure whose fiddle playing leads those it enchants into the land of ‘Beyond’ – death in disguise? Mahler evokes Freund Hain’s fiddle ingeniously by having the orchestral leader play on a violin tuned a tone higher than normal, which makes the sound both coarser, and literally, more highly-strung. Death doesn’t quite have the last word, though the final shrill forte (flutes, oboes, clarinets, glockenspiel, triangle and harp) leaves a sulphurous aftertaste.
The slow movement is marked ‘restful’, but the peace is profoundly equivocal. Mahler wrote that this movement was inspired by ‘a vision of a tombstone on which was carved an image of the departed, with folded arms, in eternal sleep’ – an image half consoling, half achingly sad, and clearly related to the Freund Hain/Death imagery in the second movement. Mahler explore facets of this ambiguity before springing a wonderful surprise: a full orchestral outburst of pure joy. This passage looks forward and backward: horns anticipate the clarinet tune which opens the finale, then recall the whistling boys’ flute theme from the first movement. Then the movement slips back into peaceful sleep, to awaken in …

… Paradise – or, at least, a child’s version of it. Sleigh-bells open the finale, then the soprano enters for the first time. Possibly fearing what adult singers might get up to if told to imitate a child, Mahler adds an NB in the score: ‘To be sung in a happy childlike manner: absolutely without parody!’. At the mention of St Peter, the writing becomes hymn-like, then come those troubling images of slaughter. The singer seems unmoved by what she relates, but plaintive, animal-like cries from oboe and low horn disturb the vision, if only momentarily. At last the music makes its final turn to E major, the same key as the heavenly vision near the end of the slow movement. ‘No music on earth can be compared to ours’, the child tells us. Then the child falls silent (asleep?), and the music gradually fades until nothing is left but the soft low repeated tolling of the harp.

© Stephen Johnson