The sweetness of death after the chaos of life. Such seems to be the musical message delivered by Gustav Mahler’s “9th Symphony,” magnificently interpreted on Saturday, June 14, during an exceptional concert given by the Nice Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Maestro Marco Guidarini.
When he began, during the summer of 1909, to work on this piece, this precocious musician born in a small Bohemian village, who wrote a “polka” already preceded by a funeral march at age six, who, later on, composed “Lied” to survive, who plagiarized his wife Alma but who also conducted, from Vienna to New York, the greatest orchestral formations, did he really ignore that it would be his last musical creation? His dread of the number nine -already fatal, according to him, to Beethoven, Schubert, and Bruckner- led him to change the name of his 8th Symphony to “Song of the Earth,” as if to delay an inevitable fate. It suffices to listen to the four movements of this “9th Symphony” to grasp all the terrible evocations of finitude. Especially in the fourth and final movement, an Adagio “sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend” (very slow and still restrained, highlights the score) but also of sublime beauty, both orchestral and tonal. To illustrate the suggestive power of this piece, one only needed to observe the posture of Conductor Marco Guidarini, eyes closed in concentration, and watch his body, like that of Saint Sebastian, giving the impression of being pierced by each haunting and painful burst of strings. A movement that ends in an infinite sweetness of eternity and leaves the Maestro, the Orchestra, and the audience completely frozen, silently united in a welcome contemplation after so much suffering.
It must be said that these latter struggles, numerous in the composer’s life, seem to concentrate in the first movement of this symphony. Marked from early childhood by parents who “went like water and fire,” Gustav Mahler lost seven siblings before seeing one of his two daughters, Maria, die at the age of four. Very ill himself -he would die two years later- he knew he was doomed when he began composing the 9th. The beginning of the first movement, which lasts twenty-five minutes, underscores with cellos the gravity of life’s chaos. Mahler seems to have converged all the influences that mattered in his artistic life: shaken, like Bruckner’s work, by an arrhythmic dialogue between strings, winds, and percussion, impressed by the Wagnerian surges of brasses, the audience takes a brief breath with a nostalgic lyrical melody from the first violin, soon chased by the composer’s old tyrannical demons, a particularly painful birthing between romanticism and modern times. Even when thrown off by the frequency of these shifts between major and minor tones, bewildered by this clash of rhythms, one can ultimately only savor the prolific and poignant personal writing of the composer. And admire the faithful rendering of which the Nice Orchestra and its Maestro hold moving testimony.
Musical Journey for the Music Festival:
FROM 6 PM IN THE COURTYARD OF THE PALACE OF THE KINGS OF SARDINIA
Claire Brua Mezzo-soprano / Pauline Courtin Soprano / Alexia Ercolani Soprano / Elodie Tisserand Soprano
Jean-Luc Ballestra Baritone / Guy Bonfiglio Baritone
Soloists of the Nice Philharmonic: Thierry Trinari Cello / Sébastien Driant Piano.
Ballet of the Nice Opera
GRAND STAIRCASE
6 PM Thierry Trinari Cello
7:40 PM Solo instrument
8:30 PM Bach.
Thierry Trinari Cello
FORECOURT
6 PM – 8 PM:
Children’s Choir of Matisse College,
Choir of the IUFM of Nice,
La Sidorella Choir.
CHÉRET GALLERY
6:25 PM / 7:10 PM / 8:55 PM / 9:35 PM:
Arias and opera excerpts
BALLROOM
6:40 PM Quartet,
7:25 PM Ballet: improvisation,
Thierry Trinari Cello,
9:10 PM Ballet: improvisation,
Thierry Trinari Cello,
9:45 PM Ballet / Quartet,
BAROQUE ROOM
6:10 PM,
6:55 PM,
8:40 PM,
9:25 PM:
Baroque music
