"There's no way to play three bars of Mahler without giving your all" - Mahler's 3rd Symphony

Readers of my blog know my fascination with Mahler's music. It started long time ago, with Zubin Mehta and Israel Philharmonic Orchestra performance of Mahler's VII symphony during the first "Festival of Four Cultures" in Lodz, Poland. This time I return to Bernstein's recording of Mahler's Third with Wiener Philharmoniker. Mahler's 3rd is the longest of all his symphonies, and one of the most beautiful. Mahler tried to provide some interpretation for this symphony, and it has a form of "messages" that we might receive: from Mythological God Pan, From Summer, from flowers on the meadow, from animals, Man, Angels and Love....

However, the sung parts of the Symphony, IV and V have amazing texts (corresponding to the messages from Man and Angels). Message from Man uses famous part of Nietzsche, "Thus spoke Zaratustra" called Zarathustra'a Roundeley, while The Message from Angels uses anonymous folk song, part of "The Youth's Magic Horn". Seemingly primitive text about St. Peter's sin and his redemption is surprising after deep and dark Nietzsche strophe. But when you dig deeper you find that all this is about the yearning for etehrnity, about fundamental discord with death, with vanishing life ...

Musically, the best are first and last part (at least to me). You will find a lot of amazing and surprising moments there. But you must immerse yourself into the music to enjoy it.
For me the most amazing was the imitation of bell sounds, first by a boy choir in V part, singing literally Bim-Bam, Bim-Bom and later, the same imitation played by big drums (timpani) in the VI part - finale.

I also found fantastic article about Bernstein Mahler's fascinations.
The article cites Bernstein saying: "There's no way to play three bars of Mahler without giving your all. (...) Every pianissimo is as intense as every forte. . . . Everything has to be done at full intensity."

You can here this words in the bonus to 3rd Symphony in this recording (Leonard Bernstein: The Mahler Symphonies (DVD))

Thou great star! What would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for whom thou shinest!

Finishing reading Thomas Common translation of Nietzsche's "Thus spoke Zarathustra..." is a queerish experince while immersing into Mishnah ....

Weeks ago I read latest Polish translation of the book done by Sława Lisiecka and Zdzisław Jaskuła . But the classical English translation of Thomas Common has some different flavor.
It is a bit more poetic and more imaginative - but of course this is difficult to confirm when you can not read it in original (I can not ...).

If I was to make my final summary of "Thus spoke Zarathustra..." it is not, unfortunately, very positive. In short words, Nietzsche tries to build the meaning, the goal, the utter sense for man on the ruins of meaninglessness and nihilizm of our civilization (as it was in XIX century and was even more in XX...), but what he propheses is insufficient. His will to power, recurrence and superman related ideas, emerging from "Thus spoke..." narrative just can not be taken as apealing proposal after XX century. And it is not for trivial conotation of his superman idea and nazism... It is because of lack of any realistic ground for his new morality and new goals. His superman is a solitary hero, who attempts to find the ground in himself only. There is no God, and I could forgive him this error (sic !), but ... there is no other man - no The Other, no Other face. "I and thou" - is almost missing from Nietzsche proposal.

And when the ground is missing, the tower he built is like one errected on sand. It did not stand for historical challenge - XX century misuse of his thought ...

The only thing which I could say, after writing this post is that Nietzsche was apparently aware of his fate and the fate of his thought. I close this entry by the quote:

"I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous--a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite." (Ecco homo)