jwilzewske: The Open-Ended ‘Present’: Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A Minor

I deology seems to pop up precisely when we attempt to avoid it, while it fails to appear where one would clearly expect it to dwell.”
— Slavoj Žižek, in Mapping Ideology, 1994, p. 4.

DSM: This Quartet was written in 1876, when Mahler was around 16 years old . . . when he was a student at the Vienna Conservatory. It was written in A minor, a key Mahler believed symbolized the ‘unconscious anticipation of things to come.’ The melancholy end of the movement is clairvoyant—premonitory of sad things ahead for Mahler, the death of his children, sad things ahead for his country, for Europe, and the world. This quartet is the only chamber piece known to be composed by Mahler. And, as you know, it’s incomplete; only the first movement was finished.

CMT: There’s an intensification of the emotion in this Piano Quartet—an increase in the magnitude of what Žižek would call ‘disturbances of the real.’ The ‘real’ manifests itself in this Piano Quartet as an innocuous cadence whose presence becomes uncanny only when the cadence keeps recurring. Its constant presence disrupts the other motifs and symbolisms, and serves as a continual reminder that these realities are only constructions. The rendering of the ‘real’ seeps into the core of the Quartet, through the ‘leaping’ motif (in the left hand of the piano in this snippet):

which irrupts on the surface again and again, setting into motion the final passage which becomes a materialization of a pure, singular drive. What was abstract in the opening becomes pernicious and concrete motive by the end—a psychological ‘fixation.’ Yes, it’s a ‘fixation,’ monotonously dominating the Quartet. This motive, an empty signifier, represents the kernel upon which Mahler’s modern subject’s reality is grounded. Irruptions of the ‘real’ become an pervasive feature in Mahler’s musical discourse in this Quartet, to the exclusion of most everything else.

DSM: This Quartet may have been written in his young student days, but it isn’t ‘juvenilia.’ It does show some emulation of Dvorak, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. It has a dark consonance that grows denser toward the end. Mahler’s transitions into remote keys occur unexpectedly. This lends a sense of vulnerability and uncertainty to the piece. Uneasiness.

CMT: Look at this tenuto combined with a marcato—a ‘portato’—intermediate note-lengths, detached but not staccato. Accentuated one way or another, more détaché than martelé—it’s played on one bow stroke, but each note is gently articulated, used when a feeling of “carry” from one note to the next is needed. The portati consume the bow—moving from the bow tip back up to the frog, say—running out of time, running out of life. This is emotional writing (violin staff in snippet below).

DSM: The melodic elements sink deeper and deeper into the bass register until all energy is spent and only a quiet malignant evocation of the minor third of A minor is left. Grim pathos here!

CMT: To a certain extent, the Quartet finds its own means of managing and containing the ruptures of the ‘real’ within its constructed musical universe. But with the increase in the size of the ruptures, the ‘real’ affects the Quartet on an more and more ‘pathological’ level. The Quartet’s means of integrating the little piece of the real into the constructed universe is not so pathological. But by the middle of the movement, we have a recapitulation for the sonata form—a kind of ‘payment of symbolic debt’ that brings an end to the pure emotional ‘drive.’ By the end, the emotional devastation wrought by the ‘real’ in this Quartet is catastrophic. The piano’s last two chords are a poignant fatalism. All other meaning has been obliterated by the end of the movement, leaving only an empty husk. In a sense, the Quartet documents an almost complete destruction of the musical universe.

DSM: As such, its drama feels a bit like Barber’s Adagio. But, your qualifier ‘almost’ is important: history is not closed here with those last two piano chords. What was to be a suicide note, a work commemorating something or someone in memoriam, has failed: in the final chords we find that the work is a testament to the author’s, and to humanity’s, resilience and ability to survive.

CMT: Ultimately, the end of the Quartet proves the continued existence of the Quartet’s subjects—the composer; the performers; the listeners—by showing that the subject still remains, despite all that’s happened. So, while the Quartet argues convincingly that catastrophes definitely do happen, the catastrophes don’t bring about a complete end. In Lacanian psychoanalysis no act is ever totally complete: something always remains. For Žižek, there’s always a survivor or survivors, however damaged they may be. As the Quartet pushes towards its final notes, a conclusive End is an impossibility. The End doesn’t come. The exhausted survivors are left to carry on.

DSM: In Lacanian terminology, the survivors of the apocalypse represent the “the excess that cannot be accounted for by any symbolic idealization”—embodiments of the ‘real.’ With the apocalypse, the exhausted survivors, having survived The End, become representatives of a rendering of the ‘real’—they are the ‘ruptures’ in this symbolic reality.

CMT: The devastation pushes Mahler’s apocalyptic narrative to its limit, as the Quartet’s narrative concludes with a catastrophic act. To continue the intensification process of the apocalyptic narrative is, I think, not possible. Maybe that’s why Mahler never wrote other Piano Quartets: how does one write after the apocalypse? How does one compose a sequel to an ‘end’ that does not bring The End?

DSM: Along with the narrative break, there’s also a dissolving of the barrier of the distance created by the apocalyptic trajectory of this Piano Quartet, and a humanizing of the pathological irruptions of the ‘real.’

CMT: I think so. And, in his book, Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin differentiates between the stylized, ‘absolute’ past of the epic and the open-ended, solvent-like ‘emergent’ or continuing reality found in the novel. An ‘epic’ is set in a past that is so distant that the ‘gap’ created is unbreachable. It is a place where everything is “absolute and complete…everything is finished, already over.” It’s a place of unwavering protagonists and narrative trajectories that never divert from the path. The beginnings of epics are “idealized” or “brightened” and the endings are “darkened.”

DSM: On the other hand, ‘novels’—or in this case, novelistic musical compositions—don’t speak to a remote experience but instead address current reality. Epics have one language, an omniscient voice that knows and tells all. In the novel there are multiple languages, a variety of voices caught in the act of development. In short, the epic is a single-voiced discourse; the novel a multi-vocal discourse. Where the epic prophesies, the novel predicts; while the epic must end in death, the novel depicts “a life process that is imperishable and forever renewing itself, forever contemporary;” the epic is closed and complete, while the novel contains “an unrealized surplus of humanness.”

CMT: Following Bakhtin we can think of this Mahler Piano Quartet as a narrative trajectory of an epic form. Its opening begins with stylized innocence, referring to an absolute past. In the middle of the piece there’s a narrowing of focus to the singular (epic) story where no provision is made for varied voices or points of view. The epic distance is solidified at the end of the Quartet as the world of the past becomes completely inaccessible. At the end there is the violin cadenza—a “canonizing of events” that leads up to the catastrophe or apocalypse.

DSM: But, if we continue following Bakhtin, a novel has discursive features that are capable of seeping into other genres, including the epic. What happens at the end of the Quartet is not the end of history but, to use Derrida’s words, “the end of a certain concept of history,” in this case the epic history of the apocalypse. Mahler’s 16 year-old premonition is of modernity itself. That’s what I hear in this!

CMT: So we have a ‘novelization’ of the Quartet’s discourse when a single voice no longer speaks monologically from an absolute, epic past, but instead multiple voices now sound from current reality—life in the aftermath of the apocalypse. The process follows Attali’s notion of innovative music, leading to “a…conception of history…that is open, unstable.”

DSM: The Quartet strikes me as a searing elegy, a dirge where “death chords” are interrupted by laments equal in their emotional force. The individualistic utterances that are set apart from the surrounding music (both physically and emotionally) have their lyrical and harmonic beauty effaced by the irruptions. The ending passage opens the way for the diffuse finale that represents an unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality.

CMT: The finale is the longest section in the Quartet, and in it material from earlier movements returns cyclically. The increase in tempo over the five movements combined with the cyclic return of themes, the intensity and sheer length of the finale create an end-oriented trajectory for the work culminating in the final movement that is an exhausting tour de force. The movement is a sonata form in which every section has developmental tendencies and the recapitulation returns themes not only from earlier in the movement, but also the cyclic returns.

DSM: Well, ‘long’ is a relative term. Melissa Rose and her fellow ensemble members who performed yesterday in Kansas City performed this Quartet in 9 minutes and 20 seconds. By contrast, Christoph Eschenbach’s performance with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra last year was 13 minutes. Various other artists’ performances of this Quartet are also 12 to 13 minutes long. So it was a tremendous disappointment to hear Rose compress this piece by more than 30% and, in so doing, extinguish the portato and the emotional drama. The ‘arc’ of the recurrences lacked dignity, and the existential impact that the piece should have was blunted by this interpretation. The last two chords became no more than appendages. Regrettably, it retained nothing at all of the depth that Eschenbach projects:

[30-sec clip, Eschenbach, 2.6MB MP3]

T he dignity of Mahler’s music lies in the fact that it can be understood and understands itself, but eludes the hand that would grasp what has been understood.”
— Theodor Adorno

H ow can an artist expect that what he has felt intuitively should be perfectly understood by other people, since he himself feels in the presence of his work—if it is genuine art—that he is faced by a riddle about which he too may have illusions?”
— Richard Wagner, letter dated 25-JAN-1854, to August Roeckel

jwilzewske

Monday, July 16, 2007

The Open-Ended ‘Present’: Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A Minor

No comments:

Post a Comment