Sources
So I’ve got a Mahler 9 coming up in a few weeks with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. As you might imagine, I’ve been working on this piece for months and months and living with it for years and years. This symphony is about the end of a lot of things, not least among them the end of Vienna as Mahler knew it. The symphony is, in my mind, a witness to the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire and a collapse of the traditions and culture of that city. A good book to read about this is the extraordinary epic novel by Joseph Roth, The Radetsky March. It talks about how the Radetsky March becomes a parody as the empire collapses and becomes more and more decadent. Sound familiar? Those who know the second and third movements of Mahler 9 will get what I mean. In fact, the third movement of Mahler 9 may be a parody of the Radetsky March itself.
But what about the parody of the second movement? It’s about the ländler and the waltz. As I’ve been studying the second movement this week it occurred to me that I’d never seen a ländler danced or heard an authentic folk version played. So I did a search on YouTube and decided to go even further by typing in “Bohemian Ländler,” the kind of sounds Mahler might have heard in his childhood in Iglau.
This is what I got:
It occurs to me that there are more sources at our fingertips to learn about music than ever before. Who knows if this clip is accurate, but it certainly feeds my imagination.