Branching Out / Vol. 4

What to listen to next, based on our recent experiences with the music of Mahler, Bach, and Vivier.

Paul Signac (French, 1863–1935). The Pine Tree at Saint Tropez, 1909. Oil on canvas. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

Welcome to the fourth edition of Branching Out — where works recently featured in Shades of Blue become your launching point for discovering more melancholy classical music that cultivates calm, connection, and healing. If you missed the last installment, head over here to get to know music by Aaron Copland, Jean Sibelius, and Franz Schubert.

To grow our tree of classical music knowledge this month, we'll explore music based on our recent deep dives into the tranquil solitude of Gustav Mahler's "Lost to the World"; the vision of a glorious future that closes J. S. Bach's B Minor Mass; and the powerful message of universal love embedded in Claude Vivier's Lonely Child. 

So let's dig in and branch out …

If you loved exploring Mahler's quiet realm, far removed from the world's turmoil, where love and art help us to heal, be sure to check out …

Gustav Mahler / Adagietto, from Symphony No. 5

Despite taking up just five of the 249 pages that comprise the score of Mahler's titanic Fifth Symphony, the fourth movement, often referred to as the Adagietto, is in every way the emotional heart of the work. 

Its rapturous harmonies, tender orchestral textures, and meditative melodies provide a moment of repose in a symphony that, in its first three movements, is largely dominated by ideas of death. But neither death nor mourning was on Mahler's mind when he composed the Adagietto. Scored for just orchestral strings and harp, this movement is a fervent declaration of love for his wife, Alma. The pair met in late 1901, just a few months after Mahler began work on the symphony, launching an impassioned romance that led to marriage and the birth of their first child the following year.

Mahler was notorious for keeping the narratives behind his music a secret, but thanks to Alma, we know her husband encoded a love letter in the movement. She confessed in a letter that Mahler presented her with the symphony's score and a short poem he had written — which, in its original German text, matches the contours of the violin's opening melody:

How I love you, my sun,
I cannot tell you with words.
Only with my longing, and my love, my bliss
can I declare it to you!

Beginning with a whisper in the violas, the Adagietto slowly blossoms as it journeys from moments of quiet reverence to exhilarating awe, heated passion, and back again. Listen closely to the monumental climax that closes the movement, and you'll hear the cellos and basses bellow the final phrase they sang in "Lost to the World," Mahler's melancholy reverie in which he manifests a heaven of his own making.

By quoting the song at this moment (10:32 in the video below), we can hear how that vision of heaven has expanded — from a place of solitude to a sanctuary of love he shares with his wife and growing family.

If you were moved by the way J. S. Bach married musical traditions of the past with innovative techniques of his own creation in his Mass in B Minor, then get to know …

Arvo Pärt / Agnus Dei, from Berliner Messe

After two decades of writing dissonant, atonal music, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt descended into a years-long musical silence. He immersed himself in early music, from monochromatic Gregorian and Russian Orthodox chants to the florid counterpoint of Renaissance choral music — and when he emerged from that compositional cocoon, his new music carried a deeply mystical character that both baffled his contemporaries and left music lovers entranced.

Pärt had developed a stripped-down style he called tintinnabuli (from the Latin for "little bells") in which he pairs one melodic line with a secondary line that, when their harmonies dance with each other, ring and resonate like a set of bells. In an interview with the Icelandic singer Björk (yes, that Björk!), Pärt describes the spiritual aspect of his new style:

"The music has two voices, one is more complicated and subjective, but another is very simple, clear, and objective. One line is my sins, and another line is the forgiveness of these sins."

Berliner Messe, for four voices and organ, is an ideal introduction to Pärt's tintinnabuli style and the ways it can sound both ancient and modern, foreign and yet somehow familiar. Commissioned for the 1990 Katholikentag (Catholic's Day) celebrations — the first held in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall — the Berliner Messe offers as much of a spiritual experience as an overtly religious one. It's equally at home in the church or concert hall, allowing all listeners, regardless of creed or dogma, to find a sense of stillness and repose in its heavenly harmonies.

In the closing "Agnus Dei," the four voices move in pairs as they hand off the mass text to one another:

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,
have mercy on us.

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,
grant us peace.

Not until the final iteration of the text does Pärt bring the quartet together in a quiet invocation of an eternal three-word prayer — dona nobis pacem (grant us peace) — that must have resonated so much with the work's first audience in a reunified Germany. 

It's hard not to be lulled into a prolonged state of stillness as the final notes dissolve and give way to silence. Therein lies the magic of this composer. Through such simple musical means, Pärt gives us the space to step outside of ourselves, to feel our heartbeats drum so loudly that we become one with the silence itself — providing us with the rare opportunity in our fast-paced modern world to feel the world, and time itself, stand perfectly still.

And if you were left breathless by Claude Vivier's "games of color" and his dazzling expression of love both earthly and cosmic, then queue up …

Alexander Scriabin / Le Poème de l'extase (The Poem of Ecstasy)

To introduce you to Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy, I'm going to pass the mic to Henry Miller, who explained the work's powerful effects in his 1959 novel, Nexus:

That Poème de l'extase? Put it on loud. … [It] has that far-off cosmic itch. Divinely fouled up. All fire and air. The first time I heard it I played it over and over. ... It was like a bath of ice, cocaine, and rainbows. For weeks I went about in a trance. Something had happened to me. … Like an étude gliding off a glacier.

Wild, right? 

Alexander Scriabin conjured music of a singular artistic vision informed by his synesthesia and an obsession with the occult, mysticism, and Nietzschean philosophy. Trapped in an age when scientific advancements and rapid industrialization were pushing society into uncharted territories, Scriabin believed music and poetry were more than an intellectual pursuit or a pleasure garden of sensory delights — they were the portals through which we can achieve total liberation of the human spirit. 

He merged those two mediums in his Poem of Ecstasy — a kaleidoscopic voyage of the soul that speaks to the glory of art and the orgy of love, both physical and cosmic, it manifests. Through languid, shimmering passages led by solo woodwinds and strings and strident trumpet fanfares sounded over a bed of undulating, seething syncopations, we encounter states of longing and desire, tension and release. Finally, the music erupts in a thunderous climax — as a corps of French horns intones the ecstasy theme over clanging bells, swirling strings and winds, and the tremulous roar of a massive pipe organ. 

This moment of astonishing grandeur — which has to generate seismic activity around the concert hall during every performance — stands as the sonic embodiment of spiritual self-fulfillment attained at the end of the 300-line poem Scriabin wrote as a companion piece to his orchestral work:

The universe
Is embraced in flames
Spirit at the summit of its being
Feels and perceives
endless tides
of divine power
of free will
emboldened

…

Thence the universe resounds
With a joyful cry: I AM.

The Poem of Ecstasy left Henry Miller in a trance for weeks. What sensations will course through your body and mind as you experience this music?

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