Four Centuries of Great Music December 3, 2022 The Symphony Through the Centuries Episode 15

We open today’s Four Centuries of Great Music of the 15th episode of the Symphony Through the Centuries series with Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C‑sharp minor.  

This symphony has gained a great deal of popularity this Fall because it is featured in the movie “Tar” when the fictional conductor Lydia Tár, the only Mahler symphony she has yet to record with a major orchestra in order to complete what audiences are told is a kind of Grand Slam of conducting. Throughout the film’s two and a half hours, she pursues the live recording with single-minded intensity, even as her professional and personal lives begin to unravel amid the fallout from her abuses of the power of the podium.

Completed in 1902 and premiered in 1904, it represents Mahler’s move into the “new music” of the 20th century.  In a letter home to his wife Alma of the symphony he wrote: “Heavens, what is the public to make of this chaos in which new worlds are forever being engendered, only to crumble into ruin the next moment? What are they to say to this primeval music, this foaming, roaring, raging sea of sound, to these dancing stars, to these breathtaking, iridescent, and flashing breakers?”

Mahler casts the work in five movements:
I.  Trauermarsch
II. Stürmisch bewegt, mit größter Vehemenz
III. Scherzo
IV. Adagietto
V. Rondo-Finale

We are going to close this episode of Four Centuries of Great Music with Finnish composer Jean Sibelius – Symphony No 1 in E minor, Op.39 which was composed and premiered in 1902
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It is in 4 movements:

I.   Andante, ma non troppo – Allegro energico
   

II. Andante (ma non troppo lento)


III. Scherzo: Allegro
    

IV. Finale: Quasi una fantasia (Andante – Allegro molto)