Mahler 8

Asher Fisch
Principal Conductor & Artistic Adviser

A renowned conductor in both the operatic and symphonic worlds, Asher Fisch is especially celebrated for his interpretative command of core German and Italian repertoire of the Romantic and post-Romantic era. He conducts a wide variety of repertoire from Gluck to contemporary works by living composers. Asher is now the longest serving Principal Conductor of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO), commencing his tenure in 2014. His former posts include Principal Guest Conductor of the Seattle Opera (2007- 2013), Music Director of the New Israeli Opera (1998-2008), and Music Director of the Wiener Volksoper (1995-2000).

Born in Israel, Asher began his conducting career as Daniel Barenboim’s assistant and Kappellmeister at the Berlin Staatsoper. He has built his versatile repertoire at the major opera houses such as the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Teatro alla Scala, Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, and Semperoper Dresden. Fisch has conducted at leading American symphony orchestras including those of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, and Philadelphia. In Europe he has appeared with the Berlin Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Orchestre National de France, among others.

In addition to his concerts with WASO, Asher’s 2024 season includes Aribert Reimann’s Lear at the Teatro Real de Madrid, Carmen at the Wiener Staatsoper, and Dialogues des Carmélites at the Israeli Opera. Guest engagements with orchestras include a return to the Queensland Symphony in Brisbane. His recent seasons featured Lohengrin and La forza del destino at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Cavalleria Rusticana & Pagliacci at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre and concerts with the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, Queensland Symphony, Sydney Symphony, and Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.

Asher’s award-winning recordings include Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and tenor Stuart Skelton’s first solo album “Shining Knight” - all recorded with WASO - and Ravel’s L’heure espagnole with the Munich Radio Orchestra. In 2016, the complete Brahms symphonies with Asher Fisch and WASO were released on ABC Classic to great acclaim. His recording of Wagner’s Ring Cycle with the Seattle Opera was released in 2014. His first Ring Cycle recording, with the State Opera of South Australia, won ten Helpmann Awards, including best opera and best music direction. Asher Fisch is an accomplished pianist and has released a solo recording of Wagner piano transcriptions for the Melba label.

Asher Fisch appears courtesy of Wesfarmers Arts.

Anna-Louise Cole
Soprano

In 2022, Anna-Louise Cole appeared as Chrysothemis in Elektra for Victorian Opera and as Elsa in Lohengrin in Bologna. 2023 engagements included Brünnhilde and Sieglinde in Opera Australia’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and Venus in their Tannhäuser; she sang Lady Macbeth (Macbeth) for Opera Queensland, Mahler’s Symphony No.8 in Sydney and his Symphony No.2 in Melbourne.

Anna-Louise’s stunning 2022 debut as Turandot (at the Sydney Opera House) thrilled critics and audiences alike. Her other appearances with Opera Australia have included the title role in Aida, Gerhilde in Die Walküre and Third Norn in Götterdämmerung.

For Australia’s state and local opera companies, Anna-Louise has sung the title role in Tosca, First Lady in Die Zauberflöte and Der Friedensbote in Rienzi.

Concert appearances have included the soprano solos in Rossini’s Stabat Mater and Mozart’s Mass in C minor and recitals of Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, Berg’s Seven Early Songs and the works of Richard Strauss and Josef Marx.

© Patrick Togher Artists’ Management 2024

Gustav Mahler
(1860-1911)

Symphony No.8

Part 1. Hymnus: Veni, Creator Spiritus
Part 2. Final Scene from Goethe’s Faust

Anna-Louise Cole soprano (Magna
Peccatrix)
Samantha Clarke soprano (Una
Poenitentium)
Sara Macliver soprano (Mater Gloriosa)
Ashlyn Tymms mezzo-soprano (Mulier
Samaritana)
Deborah Humble mezzo-soprano (Maria
Aegyptiaca)
Paul O’Neill tenor (Doctor Marianus)
David Greco baritone (Pater Ecstaticus)
Derek Welton bass (Pater Profundus)

A Work for Special Occasions
by David Garrett

The wonder is that Mahler managed to compose any of his later symphonies at all. No full-time composer subsidised by a government grant, he was the extremely busy director of Vienna’s Court Opera, involved not just in conducting but in producing and especially administration. Composing could only be done on summer holidays. A flagging of creative energies, even a drying up, would be understandable, and in fact Mahler does seem to have gone through something of the kind in 1906. All the more amazing, then, that the Eighth Symphony was written in just eight weeks, in a period interrupted by a visit to the Salzburg Festival to conduct Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro.

But this temporary drying-up of creative inspiration does help explain why the Symphony came out as it did, why the first movement seems composed in one huge sweep, and drives irresistibly to its conclusion. It’s like the answer to the prayer it sets to music: ‘Come, creative spirit’ – like what happens when a blockage is removed in a stream and the water flows faster and stronger.

Here, after just one huge preludial chord of E flat major, the full vocal forces come in at once, and let you know exactly what the movement is about: the invocation
‘Veni, Creator Spiritus’. Mahler has decided to use voices, and with voices come words. The voices will rarely be silent from now on.

Mahler wrote to the conductor Willem Mengelberg: ‘I have just completed my Eighth – it is my greatest work to date. And so unusual in content and form that one cannot describe it in a letter. Imagine the whole universe beginning to sing and resound. These are no longer human voices, but coursing planets and suns.’

Symphony of a Thousand or Barnum and Bailey?

When Mahler composed the Eighth Symphony in 1906, there was no chance in the immediate future of mounting a performance. The music was ready for publication in 1907, but the first performance did not take place until 12 September 1910, Mahler conducting, in the Neue Musikfesthalle (New Festival Music Hall) in the city of Munich’s Exhibition Grounds – a kind of superdome, designed for music. There were 858 singers and 171 instrumentalists. 250 choristers came from Vienna, and an equivalent number from Leipzig. These were joined by 350 children of the Munich Central Singing School, and eight solo singers from Munich, Vienna, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Wiesbaden.

Mahler, who supervised the preparations, was worried about the Munich impresario Emil Gutmann’s publicity. He feared that the performance might turn into a sort of ‘Barnum and Bailey Show’ (the famous 19th-century American circus). The tag ‘Symphony of a Thousand’, often used to publicise this symphony then and since, encourages this view, but is misleading, since the symphony can be quite satisfactorily performed with fewer than a thousand musicians. Mahler’s use of an exceptionally large orchestra was to ensure that the balance with his choral forces was a near perfect as possible. The tag does, however, remind us why this symphony is rarely performed. Since 1951 when Eugene Goossens conducted the first performance in Australia, each state capital except Hobart has had at least one performance, now that Perth and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra have marked another Mahler 8 milestone. Any performance is a triumph of organisation.

What is the Subject of the First Completely Choral Symphony?

Beethoven had introduced singing in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony, and Mendelssohn had followed his example in his Second Symphony, the
‘Song of Praise’. But Mahler’s Eighth was the first completely choral symphony, just preceding Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony, finished in 1908-9. You would think that the choice of words makes it easy to say what Mahler’s symphony is ‘about’. In a sense, it is. Mahler wanted the first performance to take place without the aid of detailed explanatory program notes. He hoped that the combination of words and music would make his meaning clear. This is easier for a German speaker, someone brought up and educated in the works of Goethe, because the second and longer part of the symphony is a setting to music of the final scene of Goethe’s Faust.

But the first movement had a text hallowed by ancient tradition, unexpectedly presented in Mahler’s very personal style of music. What was a composer Jewish by birth, admittedly a convert to Roman Catholicism doing, setting to music one of the great hymns of the Christian tradition?

The First Movement: Veni, Creator Spiritus

This hymn in Latin, whose first words are ‘Come, creator spirit’, is sung at Pentecost (Whitsunday), the Christian church’s feast of the Holy Spirit. It is attributed to the Benedictine Abbot Rabanus Maurus (776-656), though it is now doubted he was its author. In English churches it is sung in a translation by John Cosin (1594-1672), to the words ‘Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire/and lighten with celestial fire’.

Mahler recalled that he went up to the hut at Maiernigg in that summer of 1906 ‘with the firm resolution of idling the holiday away and recruiting my strength. On the threshhold of my old workshop the Spiritus Creator took hold of me and shook me and drove me on for the next eight weeks until my greatest work was done’. He told his admirer and fellow-composer Arnold Schoenberg that the music came ‘as if it had been dictated to me’. And Mahler’s wife Alma is reported to have said of him ‘Gustav is always on the telephone to God’.

The hymn ‘Veni, Creator Spiritus’ is often set to music as a humble, prayerful invocation. Mahler’s setting is virtually a demand! There are two adult choirs, boys’ choir, and eight soloists, matching a very large orchestra. Mahler tends to treat the words as building-blocks in a vast many-voiced structure, breaking them up so that it is sometimes difficult to hear them. The complexity of the handling of these many parts, masterly though it is, is often more apparent to the eye reading the score than to the ear. But this polyphonic choral treatment of a traditional text has bothered some of Mahler’s most fervent admirers. After the searching music (some of it so modern sounding) of his Symphonies Nos 5, 6, and 7, the Eighth appears almost as a throwback. It represents a continuation of where Mahler left off with the concluding choral movement of his Second Symphony, the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony. But it also looks back much further than that: to Mahler’s hero Beethoven, and even to the complex layout in multiple choirs and instrumental groups of the late 16th and 17th centuries, such as the music Gabrieli wrote for the choir galleries of St Mark’s Church, Venice.

It is as though Mahler was saying, in this mighty first movement: Look, all you people who’ve said that my music is chaotic, noisy, incomprehensible – I can do it, too! I can write the most learned music in the most complex counterpoint, and I can make it conform to your Beethovenian symphonic ideal. My conversion to Catholicism isn’t just opportunism, either! I didn’t do it just to get the coveted position as director of your beloved opera house. I can write music of deep conviction on an ancient sacred text! This is the music which poured out of me when I started to reflect on the old prayer for spiritual inspiration!

A symphonic first movement: the main themes

The first movement can be analysed as a hugely expanded version of the sonata form which underlies symphonies in the Beethoven mould. But at the same time the themes have more than just a musical, structural function: they carry words as well, and therefore symbols, which knit the huge structure of the symphony together. It is important to listen carefully at the very beginning, where Mahler presents three motifs in succession, which are referred to again and again, not only in the rest of the first movement, but in the second as well.

The first theme, strongly rhythmical and powerfully demanding sets the words ‘Veni, Creator Spiritus’, and the rhythm setting the word ‘spiritus’ will be important. Immediately the theme’s first notes are taken up by all the trombones in unison, and against them the trumpets play a rising sequence of notes.

After this material has been worked into more climaxes the music suddenly becomes quiet, and a ‘second subject’ appears to the words ‘Imple superna gratia’ (Fill with overflowing grace) set to a beautiful flowing melody, presented first by the vocal soloists.

After a varied return of the opening come the words ‘Infirma nostri corporis’ (To our bodies, weak and frail). The music now suggests suffering, doubt, and pain – an important aspect of the middle part of the movement.

Then a very important theme appears: ‘Accende lumen sensibus’ (Bring light to our senses), a musical motif which the second movement will reveal to be a basic unifier of the whole work, especially in the form in which these words are first presented triumphantly, in E major (in a movement dominated by E flat).

The climax of Mahler’s huge working-out of these themes is a double fugue, where a running theme and the trombone motif are explored together, in march rhythm, the boys’ choir entering with superb effect. The Gloria which concludes the hymn is the pretext for a symphonic coda (tail-piece), with a change of key.

Goethe and Faust

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was the most important man of letters of the German Romantic period. He was poet, novelist, playwright, and natural philosopher (scientist), as well as politician and civil servant. He wrote some of the most influential plays in German, and some of that language’s greatest lyric poetry, but it is above all for Faust that he will be chiefly remembered. Part I of this great verse drama, published in 1808, reflects the ‘storm and stress’ of Goethe’s youth in its story of academic dissatisfaction (the pact with Mephistopheles), seduction (Gretchen), and infanticide. Part II, completed just before his death, conveys his scientific interests and wisdom expressed in often obscure symbolism. Faust’s pact with the devil is part of a restless seeking for knowledge and experience seen as representative of Western man. Faust’s activity, a result of the divine spark in humanity, brings his ultimate salvation. The end of Part II of the poem, chosen by Mahler in this symphony, shows what awaits mankind in the spiritual sense.

Mahler and Goethe’s Faust: Part II of the Symphony

In Salzburg to conduct Mozart’s Figaro, Mahler was noticed wandering around with a dog-eared copy of Goethe’s Faust poking out of his pocket. He had found
a link between Goethe’s idea in the last scene of Faust and the hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus. The key to it is in the words from that hymn ‘Accende lumen sensibus’
(Illuminate our senses, pour love into our hearts). The second part of Goethe’s Faust is a profound reflection on redemption through love – or at least that is one aspect of a very complex symbolic poem. In this scene Faust’s soul is borne aloft by angels and granted salvation by the Virgin Mary as Mater Gloriosa (Mother in glory).

The Mater Gloriosa sings only two lines in Mahler’s symphony, but they are crucial, as they are the point to which the whole symphony is tending. ‘Come, then,’ she sings, ‘rise to higher spheres! Seizing you, he will follow.’

Mahler at this time was much preoccupied with the nature of love. He had married, in Alma Schindler, a wife much younger than himself, and he was becoming aware of the (reciprocated) interest of other men in her. Indeed, at about the time of the premiere of the Eighth Symphony, Mahler went to Sigmund Freud for analysis of his sexual and emotional problems. Goethe, too, during a very long life, had meditated on the nature of divine and human love, and his conclusions expressed in Part II of Faust can be summarised thus:

‘Love is the all-uplifting and all-redeeming power on Earth and in Heaven; and to man it is revealed in its most pure and perfect form through woman. Thus, in the transitory life on earth, it is only a symbol of its diviner being; the possibilities of love, which earth can never fulfil, become realities in the higher life which follows; the Spirit, which Woman interprets to us here, still draws us upwards as Gretchen draws the soul of Faust’.

Mahler revealed, in a letter to his wife, his deep agreement with this aspect of Goethe’s thought: Goethe expresses it, he said, with growing clearness and certainty right on to the Mater Gloriosa – the personification of the eternal feminine. So Mahler concludes his symphony with a setting of the Mystical Chorus which ends Faust. Here’s one attempt at translating these beautiful but difficult lines:

All things transitory
Are but parable;
Here insufficiency
Becomes fulfillment,
Here the indescribable
Is accomplished;
The ever-womanly
Leads us above.

So Mahler dedicated the symphony to Alma, and the music of the Mater Gloriosa is a passionate idealisation of Mahler’s own wife. ‘You were always, for me,’ he wrote, ‘the light and the inner point, raising my feelings to the infinite.’