G L A S M A L E R

(M E L G A C I A N_V A R I A T I O N S
O N_ A_T H E M E_O F_M A H L E R)

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 46:01] all rights reserved

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The artist Otacílio Melgaço has two official curators in the virtual world. A curator (from Latin: ´curare´, meaning ´to take care´) is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library or, as the present case: sound archive) is a content specialist charged with an institution's collections and, highlighting the context in force here, involved with the interpretation of personal (heritage) material. Both, Mr. Paz and Mr. Campbell, are, therefore, reviewers of the Melgacian works. To learn more about their missions, tasks, assignments and responsibilities by means of valuable informations regarding the compositional process, the performative rhizomes and other special features, just click the following link: otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/preamblebypsp
(O.M.Team; P r e l u d e)

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"´The real art of conducting consists in transitions.´ / ´It's not just a question of conquering a summit previously unknown, but of tracing, step by step, a new pathway to it.´ / ´A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.´ (G.M.)

Mahler's composing cottage in Maiernigg Mahler wrote his Fifth symphony during the summers of 1901 and 1902. In February 1901 Gustav had suffered a sudden major hemorrhage and his doctor later told him that he had come within an hour of bleeding to death. The composer spent quite a while recuperating. He moved into his own lakeside villa in the southern Austrian province of Carinthia in June 1901. Mahler was delighted with his newfound status as the owner of a grand villa. According to friends, he could hardly believe how far he had come from his humble beginnings. He was director of the Vienna Court Opera and the principal conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic. His own music was also starting to be successful. Later in 1901 he met Alma Schindler and by the time he returned to his summer villa in summer 1902, they were married and she was expecting their first child.

Symphonies Nos. 5, 6 and 7, which all belong to this period.

Otacílio Melgaço chose the Fifth for his Variations. More specifically,
- 4. Adagietto. Sehr langsam (Very slow) -

Herbert von Karajan once said that when you hear the symphony, ´you forget that time has passed. A great performance of the Fifth is a transforming experience. The fantastic finale almost forces you to hold your breath.´

The fourth movement may be Mahler's most famous composition and is the most frequently performed of his works. The British premiere of the entire Symphony No. 5 came in 1945, 36 years after that of the Adagietto, which was conducted by Henry Wood at a Proms concert in 1909.

It is said to represent Gustav's love song to his wife Alma. According to a letter she wrote to Willem Mengelberg, the composer left a small poem:

´Wie ich Dich liebe, Du meine Sonne,
ich kann mit Worten Dir's nicht sagen.
Nur meine Sehnsucht kann ich Dir klagen
und meine Liebe, meine Wonne!´

(In which way I love you, my sunbeam,
I cannot tell you with words.
Only my longing, my love and my bliss
can I with anguish declare.)

This German text can easily be sung to the first theme of the Adagietto, beginning with the anacrusis to bar 3, reinforcing the suggestion that it is indeed intended as Mahler's love note to Alma and returning to the more vocal quality of the earlier symphonies.

G.M.'s instruction is Sehr langsam (very slowly). Mahler and Mengelberg played it in about 7 minutes. Some conductors have taken tempos that extend it to nearly 12 minutes (viz. recordings by Eliahu Inbal, Herbert von Karajan, and Claudio Abbado), while Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic performed it in 9+1⁄2 minutes. The shortest recorded performance is from Mengelberg (Concertgebouw, 1926) at 7′04″. The longest commercial recording is Bernard Haitink (Berliner Philharmoniker, 1988) at 13′55″. A recording of a live performance with Hermann Scherchen conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1964 lasts 15′15″. Melgaço, considering his sui generis ´Ouvertüre´ here, reaches 46′01″! Perhaps no one took the Mahlerian indication for
´very´ so solemnly. That's ´very´ Melgacian, no doubt. For any living soul who may find this duration perchance exaggerated, Gustav once says something that seems to be especially aimed at Otacílio: 'Tradition is disorder… On the human plane I make all concessions; on an artistic level, none. I can't stand those who slouch, only those who exaggerate interest me.´

I cannot fail to mention that Leonard Bernstein conducted it during the funeral Mass for Robert F. Kennedy at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Manhattan, on 8 June 1968, and he also briefly discusses this section along with the opening bars of the second movement in his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures from 1973.

Although the Adagietto had regularly been performed on its own, it came to popular (i.e. non-classical) prominence in the 1971 Luchino Visconti film Death in Venice. In that film, the lead character was modified from the novel's original conception of writer to that of composer, with elements in common with Gustav. Since then, the music has been used across many fields, from advertising and figure skating to television and further film uses, easily making it the most familiar piece of Mahler's musical output.

Music professor Jeremy Barham writes that such fourth has become the most ´commercially prominent´ of Mahler's symphonic movements, and that it has ´accrued elegiac meaning´ in the popular consciousness over the years, becoming particularly used in commemorative events.

´In which way I love you, my sunbeam,
I cannot tell you with words.
Only my longing, my love and my bliss
can I with anguish declare.´

I don't believe that ´anguish´ is actually present in GLASMALER, but I have never heard the fourth movement of Mahler's Fifth symphony, ´the´ Adagietto, from such an ecstatically loving, enchantingly (in good and irreplaceable Portuguese) ´saudosa´ perspective, through a blissness-in-transubstantiation; impossible to translate into words and therefore Otacílio probably pronounces (a blessed) ´I LOVE YOU´ with, before us, audible rays of sunlight." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"´Mahler´, in German, originally refers to ´Glasmaler´, stained glass painter. And now, Melgaço places us in front of (and inside) one of his most mesmerizing Cathedrals." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

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I - Campbell's A d d e n d u m:

<< Out of curiosity, there are several elements from Gustav Mahler's biography in this extraordinary composition by Otacílio. I will list a few:

Mahler always had such corners - little paradises - as the most appropriate spaces for composing, and he celebrated these achievements, both in Steinbach and after, where he later built a villa, Maiernigg on the shores of the Wörthersee in Carinthia. In the midst of nature, in addition to his family home, there was, at some distance, a private cabin notably dedicated to creating music. We can notice a reference to this in the opening of Melgaço's sonic Piece,

Subsequently there is a more kinetic-dynamic passage, I imagine representing the artist's engendering inner universe, full of ´fires being preserved´ as he himself, in peculiar collisions and incendiary, uttered: ´I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way. Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire´,

´Des Knaben Wunderhorn´ (The Boy's Cornucopia / Magic Horn), name of a collection of folk poems relevant to Gustav. These three words [probably through which O.M. portrays how he perceived the two sides of the same coin: Mahler/Music], in German, are prominently pronounced,

Maria Anna (1902-1907) died early from diphtheria. This tragedy, as we can assume, deeply affected Gustav. The first of Mahler's two daughters, she would probably have the voice that counts from One to Five, also in the Germanic language. Five takes us back to the Fifth Symphony from which Otacílio drew his variations of the Adagietto,

Mahler died in Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from a streptococcal blood infection. However, Gustav had long suffered from his heart (infective endocarditis). An organ of extreme symbolicity that we can hear beating (the via crucis of a delicate health but simultaneously with a thought-provoking ´mortal coil´ outside the box); stop beating (death when we get close to children playing: reunion, so reverberating and echoing, with his daughter?, reassembly with himself in childhood?, rediscovery of a post-existential quintessentiality?); indexical sign of starting to beat again (ultimately, metaphor for a prevalent - ascendant - uppermost perenniality?) >>;

II - Gustav Mahler (7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect, which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 his compositions were rediscovered by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century.

Born in Bohemia (then part of the Austrian Empire) to Jewish parents of humble origins, the German-speaking Mahler displayed his musical gifts at an early age. After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he held a succession of conducting posts of rising importance in the opera houses of Europe, culminating in his appointment in 1897 as director of the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper). During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler—who had converted to Catholicism to secure the post—experienced regular opposition and hostility from the anti-Semitic press. Nevertheless, his innovative productions and insistence on the highest performance standards ensured his reputation as one of the greatest of opera conductors, particularly as an interpreter of the stage works of Wagner, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky. Late in his life he was briefly director of New York's Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.

Mahler's œuvre is relatively limited; for much of his life composing was necessarily a part-time activity while he earned his living as a conductor. Aside from early works such as a movement from a piano quartet composed when he was a student in Vienna, Mahler's works are generally designed for large orchestral forces, symphonic choruses and operatic soloists. These works were frequently controversial when first performed, and several were slow to receive critical and popular approval; exceptions included his Second Symphony, and the triumphant premiere of his Eighth Symphony in 1910. Some of Mahler's immediate musical successors included the composers of the Second Viennese School, notably Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten are among later 20th-century composers who admired and were influenced by Mahler. The International Gustav Mahler Society was established in 1955 to honour the composer's life and achievements;

III - Alma Mahler-Werfel (born Alma Margaretha Maria Schindler; 31 August 1879 – 11 December 1964) was an Austrian composer, author, editor, and socialite. Musically active from her early years, she was the composer of nearly fifty songs for voice and piano, and works in other genres as well. 17 songs are known to have survived. At 15, she was mentored by Max Burckhard.

She married composer Gustav Mahler, who later began to support her in composing and assisted in preparing some of her works for publication, but he died in 1911. In 1915, Alma married Walter Gropius, and they had a daughter, Manon Gropius. Throughout her marriage to Gropius, Alma engaged in an affair with Franz Werfel. Following her separation from Gropius, Alma and Werfel eventually married.

In 1938, after Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Werfel and Alma fled, as it was unsafe for the Jewish Werfel. Eventually the couple settled in Los Angeles. In later years, her salon became part of the artistic scene, first in Vienna, then in Los Angeles and New York;

IV - The Symphony No. 5 by Gustav Mahler was composed in 1901 and 1902, mostly during the summer months at Mahler's holiday cottage at Maiernigg. Among its most distinctive features are the trumpet solo that opens the work with a rhythmic motif similar to the opening of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, the horn solos in the third movement and the frequently performed Adagietto.

The musical canvas and emotional scope of the work, which lasts nearly seventy minutes, are huge. The symphony is sometimes described as being in the key of C♯ minor since the first movement is in this key (the finale, however, is in D major). Mahler objected to the label: "From the order of the movements (where the usual first movement now comes second) it is difficult to speak of a key for the 'whole Symphony', and to avoid misunderstandings the key should best be omitted";

V - Death in Venice (Italian: Morte a Venezia) is a 1971 historical drama film directed and produced by Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, adapted by Visconti and Nicola Badalucco from the 1912 novella of the same name by German author Thomas Mann. It stars Dirk Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach and Björn Andrésen as Tadzio, with supporting roles played by Mark Burns, Marisa Berenson and Silvana Mangano. It was filmed in Technicolor by Pasqualino De Santis, with a soundtrack featuring classical composers such as Gustav Mahler, Ludwig van Beethoven and Modest Mussorgsky. It is the second part of Visconti's thematic "German Trilogy"—preceded by The Damned (1969) and followed by Ludwig (1973).

The film premiered in London on 1 March 1971, and was entered into the Cannes Film Festival. It received positive reviews from critics and won several accolades, including BAFTA Awards for Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, and Best Sound. It was nominated for Best Film, Best Direction, and Best Actor in a Leading Role for Dirk Bogarde. Visconti won the David di Donatello for Best Director.

In 2012, Death in Venice was ranked the 235th greatest film of all time in the Sight & Sound critics' poll. In 2010, the film was ranked the 14th greatest arthouse film of all time by The Guardian. In 2016, it was ranked the 27th greatest LGBT film of all time in the British Film Institute poll.

Although the character Aschenbach in the novella is an author, Visconti changed his profession from writer to composer. This allows the musical score, in particular the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony by Gustav Mahler, which opens and closes the film, and sections from Mahler's Third Symphony, to represent Aschenbach's work. Apart from this change, the film is relatively faithful to the book, but with added scenes where Aschenbach and a musician friend debate the degraded aesthetics of his music;

VI - The songs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn by Gustav Mahler are voice-and-piano and voice-and-orchestra settings of German folk poems chosen from a collection of the same name assembled by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano and published by them, in heavily redacted form, between 1805 and 1808.

Ten songs set for soprano or baritone and orchestra were first published by Mahler as a cycle in 1905, but in total 12 orchestral songs exist, and a similar number of songs for voice and piano.

Mahler's self-composed text for the first of his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Travelling Journeyman, often translated as Songs of a Wayfarer; 1884–1885) is clearly based on the Wunderhorn poem "Wenn mein Schatz"; his first genuine settings of Wunderhorn texts, however, are found in the Lieder und Gesänge ('Songs and Airs'), published in 1892 and later renamed by the publisher as Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit (Songs and Airs from Days of Youth). The nine Wunderhorn settings therein were composed between 1887 and 1890, and occupied the second and third volumes of this three-volume collection of songs for voice and piano. The titles of these nine songs (different in many cases from the titles of the original poems) are as follows:

Volume II
"Um schlimme Kinder artig zu machen" – To Teach Naughty Children to be Good
"Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald" – I Went Happily Through a Green Wood
"Aus! Aus!" – Finished! Finished!
"Starke Einbildungskraft" – Strong Imagination
Volume III
"Zu Straßburg auf der Schanz" – On the Ramparts of Strasbourg
"Ablösung im Sommer" – The Changing of the Guard in Summer
"Scheiden und Meiden" – Farewell and Forgo
"Nicht wiedersehen!" – Never to Meet Again
"Selbstgefühl" – Self-assurance
Mahler began work on his next group of Wunderhorn settings in 1892. A collection of 12 of these was published in 1899, under the title Humoresken ('Humoresques'), and formed the basis of what is now known simply (and somewhat confusingly) as Mahler's 'Songs from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn"'. Whereas the songs in the Lieder und Gesänge collection were conceived for voice and piano, with no orchestral versions being produced by the composer, the Humoresken were conceived from the beginning as being for voice and orchestra, even though Mahler's first step was the production of playable and publishable voice-and-piano versions. The titles in this 1899 collection are:

"Der Schildwache Nachtlied" – The Sentinel's Nightsong (January–February 1892)
"Verlor'ne Müh" – Labour Lost (February 1892)
"Trost im Unglück" – Solace in Misfortune (April 1892)
"Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?" – Who Thought Up This Song? (April 1892)
"Das irdische Leben" – Earthly Life (after April 1892)
"Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt" – St. Anthony of Padua's Sermon to the Fish (July–August 1893)
"Rheinlegendchen" – Little Rhine Legend (August 1893)
"Lied des Verfolgten im Turm" – Song of the Persecuted in the Tower (July 1898), see: Die Gedanken sind frei
"Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen" – Where the Fair Trumpets Sound (July 1898)
"Lob des hohen Verstandes" – Praise of Lofty Intellect (June 1896)
"Es sungen drei Engel" – Three Angels Sang a Sweet Air (1895)
"Urlicht" – Primeval Light (1893)
"Urlicht" (composed ?1892, orch. July 1893) was rapidly incorporated (with expanded orchestration) into Symphony No. 2 (1888–1894) as the work's fourth movement; "Es sungen drei Engel", by contrast, was specifically composed as part of Symphony No. 3 (1893–1896): requiring a boys' chorus and a women's chorus in addition to an alto soloist, it is the only song among the twelve for which Mahler did not produce a voice-and-orchestra version and the only one which he did not first publish separately. Other songs found themselves serving symphonic ends in other ways: a voiceless version of "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt" forms the basis of the scherzo in Symphony No. 2, and "Ablösung im Sommer" is adopted in the same way by Symphony No. 3.

An additional setting from this period was "Das himmlische Leben" ("Heavenly Life"), of February 1892 (orchestrated March 1892). By the year of the collection's publication (1899) this song had been reorchestrated and earmarked as the finale of the 4th Symphony (1899–1900), and thus was not published as part of the Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection, nor was it made available in a voice-and-piano version.

After 1901, "Urlicht" and "Es sungen drei Engel" were removed from the collection, and replaced in later editions by two other songs, thus restoring the total number of songs in the set to twelve. The two new songs were:

"Revelge" – Reveille (July 1899)
"Der Tamboursg'sell" – The Drummer Boy (August 1901)
Shortly after Mahler's death, the publisher (Universal Edition) replaced Mahler's own piano versions of the Wunderhorn songs by piano reductions of the orchestral versions, thus obscuring the differences in Mahler's writing for the two media. In spite of this, voice-and-piano performances, especially of the lighter songs, are frequent. The original piano versions were re-published in 1993 as part of the critical edition, edited by Renate Hilmar-Voit [de] and Thomas Hampson.

...for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
quotes have Wikipedia as a source...

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Between two parentheses...
(Atonalism, Twelve-Tone, Serialism, Musique Concrète... Acousmatic. Eletroacoustic. Magnetic Tape. Expressionism, New Objectivity, Hyperrealism, Abstractionism, Neoclassicism, Neobarbarism, Futurism, Mythic Method. Electronic...Computer Music, Spectral, Polystylism, Neoromanticism, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism...are addressed by Melgaço. Paradoxically New Simplicity and New Complexity also.
Art Rock, Free Jazz, Ethnic Dialects, Street Sounds are occasional syntax elements.
All the possibilities mentioned above and others that were not mentioned are the usual accoutrements of the composer/instrumentalist to establish his ´babelic´ glossary. We can prove this in a short passage of a single composition up along the entirety of a conceptual phonograph album. All distributed over a career and idiosyncratic records. Have we a universe before us and I propose to see it through a telescope, not a microscope.
I propose not handle very specialized topics here. Otherwise would be, with the exception of musicians and scholars, all hostages of a hermetic jargon. Because more important is to present Otacílio Melgaço to the general public and not to a segment of specialists. Faction of experts not need presentations, depart for the enjoyment beforehand. For this reason there is no niche here for intellectual onanism and encrypted musical terminology. The reason for these parentheses is to establish such elucidation. The non-adoption of technicalities leads to more panoramic, amplifier reviews. Are You always welcome. Those who do not dominate contemporary music and are introduced to the world of ubiquitous O.M. [autodidact and independent artist who, being more specific, does not belong to schools or doctrines; artist who makes Music and that´s enough; music devoid of labels or stylistic, chronological, historical paradigms or trends] and Those who belong to the métier and turn to enjoy propositions they know and also delving into advanced Melgacian sound cosmogonies...
I conclude poetically. ´Certeza/Certainty´ by Octavio Paz. ´Si es real la luz blanca De esta lámpara, real La mano que escribe, ¿son reales
Los ojos que miran lo escrito? De una palabra a la otra Lo que digo se desvanece. Yo sé que estoy vivo Entre dos paréntesis.´ If it is real the white light from this lamp, real the writing hand, are they real, the eyes looking at what I write? From one word to the other what I say vanishes. I know that I am alive between two parentheses.
We´re all more and more a-l-i-v-e now.)
- P.S.P.