(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Music open thread: Sixth Symphonies [1] ['Alonso Del Arte', 'Citizen Earth', 'Greg Dworkin'] Date: 2026-06-08 People heard the afterwar of math in the end of Robert Simpson’s Seventh Symphony, completed in 1977. “The end is C-sharp,” Robert Simpson insisted, referring to the long-held note at the end of the symphony. It was not the first time a British composer had said his newest symphony was not about war. When people listened to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 6 in E minor, completed shortly after the end of World War II, they heard Morse code in the insistent rhythm of the second movement. They heard the bombing of Café de Paris in the manic Scherzo with its saxophone solo, and they heard the desolate silence of a destroyed place in the bleak finale. Vaughan Williams preferred instead to allude to some lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. “And like the baseless fabric of this vision, … our little life is rounded with a sleep.” Just about anything I follow this up with is going to be a major mood whiplash. By the organizational gimmick I’m using this week, I either stay on E or move to C. You can find Emilie Mayer’s Symphony No. 6 in E major on YouTube, but none with a video track showing the orchestra. It seems like there’s only one available recording of it, I got it in an album that also has her Fourth Symphony, but in a different reconstruction than the one I already had in my collection (her original manuscript was lost, possibly destroyed). The old WQRS used to play Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 6 in C major a lot, almost as much as a later C major symphony he wrote. It’s a pleasant enough work, but it never made much of an impression on me. I like that later C major symphony of his a lot more. Or maybe it’s that I haven’t heard a performance with the proper approach to this music. Anton Bruckner suffers a lot more from unsympathetic performances than Schubert. I get the impression that when Bruckner’s luminous Symphony No. 6 in A major gets recorded, the project is initially motivated more by completeness than by any particular liking of this particular symphony. Leonard Bernstein’s recording with the New York Philharmonic is a notable exception. Bernstein knew all of Bruckner’s symphonies pretty well, perhaps as well as conductors who recorded the nine numbered symphonies, but only the Sixth and one other of Bruckner’s appealed to him enough for him to want to record it. Bernstein seriously considered the Eighth but ultimately chose not to ever perform that one. Even editors seem to not like Bruckner’s Sixth all that much. Whereas Leopold Nowak took the care to uncover versions of Bruckner’s other symphonies that Robert Haas ignored, Nowak simply took Haas’s edition of the Sixth, wrote a new preface and published it in the neue Gesamtausgabe (new complete edition) when it was essentially just a reprinting of the alte Gesamtausgabe (old complete edition). As a consequence of this, you can freely get that edition of this symphony from IMSLP without any worries about copyright. “Nowak’s edition here [on IMSLP] was reprinted from Haas’ edition of the 1930s (where the 1881 version appeared in score and parts),” writes IMSLP user Sallen112. “The engraving on this score clearly pre-dates the claim of 1952 by decades. Why this item would qualify for copyright in the United States is a complete mystery as there is nothing original of Nowak’s to be found in it” aside from Nowak’s preface, which is not available from IMSLP. I have an explanation. Robert Haas was a Nazi, according to Benjamin Korstvedt, a more recent editor of Bruckner’s music. Mary Jane Rein, executive director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, summarized Korstvedt’s presentation on this topic at the Strassler Center. Korstvedt highlighted the work of Robert Haas, a committed Austrian Nazi and music scholar, who praised Bruckner’s music for its pure German essence. Espousing flagrantly antisemitic language, Haas asserted that a cadre of former pupils, friends, and the composer’s music publisher — all largely Jewish — deceptively doctored the text of Bruckner’s compositions. Haas was committed to producing a critical edition that would restore the oeuvre to its supposedly original form. At the Regensburg festival, Goebbels pledged state financial support to the Bruckner Society, under Haas’ leadership, to publish an officially approved edition that would carry Hitler’s imprimatur. The Nazi investment in Bruckner proved long lasting and his work carried this taint for decades. Authoritarian regimes, Korstvedt explained, take music more seriously than democratic governments, both to harness its emotional resonance and to control its potentially unsettling political meanings. The case of Bruckner demonstrates how aesthetic symbols can be put in service to totalitarian ideologies. Laying bare the Nazi exploitation of Bruckner, Professor Korstvedt shows the power of music as an emotional force whose meaning can be subordinated to the state. Music turns out to be another important avenue for understanding genocide and underscores the significance of interdisciplinary research and teaching at Clark’s Strassler Center. As far as I can tell, the Israel Philharmonic has never played Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony, but has played some of Bruckner’s other symphonies after some initial trepidation. I guess the search engine A.I. thought I wanted to hear that the Israel Philharmonic did play something by Bruckner a few decades ago, but the Sixth only fairly recently. But the actual search results don’t mention the Sixth, suggesting that the Israel Philharmonic has never played this Bruckner symphony. In order to denazify Bruckner after World War II, a new edition of his music was needed. With the other symphonies, Nowak found valid, non-political reasons to create new editions, like Haas’s questionable merging of the 1887 and 1890 versions of the Eighth, which Nowak wisely untangled and published as two separate scores. But for the Sixth, Nowak really had no notes for Haas. So Nowak simply reprinted Haas. John Williams might know Bruckner’s Sixth almost as well as Bernstein did. The first movement of this symphony might have subconsciously inspired John Williams when writing his Superman March. I’ve reworked the beginning of the symphony trying to make the connection obvious. I was listening to the performance of this symphony by the SWR Sinfonieorchester conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado, and it’s good, but it’s lacking in, um, je ne se quoi… Then I remembered that YouTube had surfaced to me a performance conducted by Marie Jacquot a couple of weeks ago. I remembered I wanted to start listening to it back then, but I didn’t, even though I did click on the link. I guess some obnoxious ad came up and I didn’t feel like trying to skip it or put up with it, so I thought I’d save it later that day. But I didn’t and forgot about it. So about four minutes into the SWR video, I paused, looked in my YouTube history, pulled up Jacquot’s performance and started listening to that instead. The difference in Jacquot’s performance was immediately obvious to me. It was like a layer of dust was removed. As an encore, I suggest excerpts from John Williams’s soundtrack for Superman. The march, at the very least. It’s easier for people to hear film music in Gustav Mahler’s symphonies than in Bruckner’s. After all, a lot of the composers who fled Nazi Germany to come to Hollywood were influenced by Mahler, whose music was not allowed in Nazi Germany. Many people don’t understand that sometimes there isn’t a direct connection between a composer’s life and the music he writes. Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 in A minor is a very good example of this. Kristo Kondakci for the Boston Music Intelligencer: The summer of 1903, when Mahler began the symphony, was by all accounts one of the happiest periods of his life. Picture him for a moment: He is 43 years old, the most powerful musician in Europe. As director of the Vienna Court Opera, he commands the greatest singers, the finest orchestra, and the most prestigious stage on the continent. He is feared, revered, and exhausted. But he is also, finally, happy. The previous year he married Alma Schindler, twenty years his junior, brilliant and fierce and beautiful. Their first daughter was born that November. Alma would later describe those summers as almost impossibly idyllic: Mahler “young and unencumbered… often playing with the child, carrying her, dancing and singing.” The relentlessly driven conductor-composer had at last settled into family life, his neurotic intensity softened by fatherhood. And every morning, after swimming in the lake, he climbs the hill to his composing hut. He locks the door, and he writes music of annihilating darkness. The Sixth Symphony. A work that begins with a march so relentless it feels less like rhythm than machinery. A work whose lyrical themes—including one Mahler told Alma was his attempt to capture her in music—unfold with radiant intensity yet exert no influence on the system that contains them. A work that builds for nearly ninety minutes toward a conclusion so devastating that the conductor Willem Mengelberg, after hearing it, told Mahler he felt he had witnessed “his own disintegration.” Alongside the Sixth, Mahler was completing something even more disturbing: the Kindertotenlieder—songs on the death of children. He was setting Rückert’s poems of unbearable grief to music while his own daughters played in the garden below. Alma was horrified and found it incomprehensible. “For heaven’s sake,” she begged him, “don’t tempt fate!” By the way, Mahler gave the very first performance of Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony, but only the two middle movements. Both composers begin their Sixths with a march, but they have very different destinations in mind. Mahler’s itinerary includes cowbells, in a moment that might make you teary-eyed if nothing else in the symphony does. And in the finale, there’s a hammer that strikes thrice. Or twice, Mahler thought maybe if he left that the third strike out fate would not upset his happy life. Thanks to one of the commenters on the previous thread for sending me the hammer tutorial by Benjamin Schäfer, a percussionist in the Luxembourg Philharmonie. He speaks in German, and I probably knew every word he used prior to the first time I watched the video (it helps that he uses some unexpected English loanwords, such as “Equipment” when he could have said “Ausrüstung”) but I needed to turn on the subtitles, which I surmise were created by the orchestra’s A/V staff. Anton Rubinstein’s Symphony No. 6 in A minor is ultimately a more cheerful work. The A minor of the first movement is not so much tragic as it is heroically striving. The Scherzo might be the most skittish and playful Rubinstein ever wrote. Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F major, the “Pastoral,” might not be his most popular but it’s definitely up there. It has even been used in at least three distinct episodes of The Simpsons that I can think of. Don’t ask me for the episode titles, though, I don’t remember them off the top of my head. When I saw Ariane Matiakh’s name, I knew it would be a good performance. You might not see any signs until the end that this performance was during the coronavirus pandemic, when she puts on a mask to shake hands with the concertmaster. Actually, the spacing of the audience members is another clue. Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 6 in D major is in a mood that is somewhere between that of Brahms’s Second Symphony and Bruckner’s Sixth. A lot of conductors don’t know Dvořák’s Sixth. Alondra de la Parra made a little documentary about this symphony, which I recommend watching. But her performance of the whole symphony is not on YouTube. Leopold Mozart Symphony in D major, Eisen D6 is probably not the sixth symphony Mozart ever wrote, but it might be his sixth in the key of D major. It’s my favorite of Mozart’s symphonies. It might become popular if it had a catchy nickname. I propose “La Veneziana,” in reference to a symphony by Antonio Salieri that is also in D major. Tchaikovsky was definitely not experiencing a happy life like Mahler as he wrote his Symphony No. 6 in B minor, the “Pathétique.” Here’s Nishimoto Tomomi conducting the Russian Academic Symphony Orchestra. Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor predates World War II. It was premiered just as that great war begun. I wouldn’t be familiar with it if I hadn’t purchased a Melodiya label album in Okinawa. The conductor of that album, which also includes Shostakovich’s Fifth, is Yevgeny Mravinsky, who premiered the symphony in 1939. Here we hear the Estonian-born American conductor Paavo Järvi. Now, let’s see, Symphony No. 6 in G major, there’s one by Hamerik and another one by Spohr. Haven’t listened to either one of those yet. So for now I’m moving on to Felix Mendelssohn’s String Symphony No. 6 in E-flat major. Not much to choose from on YouTube. I’m not liking the sound quality of this video, but in the other video the conductor just goes way too sluggishly. After the dozen string symphonies, Mendelssohn wrote five orchestral symphonies and had a sixth one in the works, but did not complete it. I figure this is a place as good as any to mention Peter Schickele’s Unbegun Symphony. The composer explains that his old friends called his symphony “the Pathetic Symphony.” Of course “Pathetic” has a very different connotation from “Pathétique.” Schickele said in remarks before a performance “I’ve got a new set of friends now, and we’re calling it the Unbegun Symphony.” But if you listen to it, you’ll probably recognize a melody from the “Pathétique.” Main open thread question: What’s your favorite Sixth Symphony? Another open thread question: Do you hear war in Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony? 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