Sonic Majesty With a Message: DSO Performs Mahler’s Symphony No. 8

After completing his most ambitious work, Gustav Mahler exulted to a friend. “Try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound,” he wrote. “These are no longer human voices, but planets and suns revolving.”

As the premiere approached, though, Mahler feared the results would seem altogether more mundane. He was struggling, he told another friend, to keep the evening from turning into a “Barnum and Bailey performance.”

How could music by Mahler, whose works famously bridge the tormented and the transcendent, turn into a circus? Well, the Symphony No. 8 does marshal so many players and singers that the premiere’s impresario—who shared a bit of P.T. Barnum’s flair for promotion—dubbed it the “Symphony of a Thousand.”

Even though the nickname has stuck, the roster doesn’t have to be that big. But the Symphony No. 8 is nevertheless a special-occasion event—as it will be May 15-17, when it climaxes the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s season-long celebration of its 125th anniversary. Besides beefing up with extra players, the orchestra will enlist the Dallas Symphony Chorus, Dallas Symphony Children’s Chorus, eight solo singers and a second adult chorus, Baltimore Choral Arts.

No doubt the Meyerson Symphony Center will ring and resound. The sonic majesty is “something really special,” DSO music director Fabio Luisi says. But he looks beyond that.

“It’s not really about the size of the orchestra or the chorus. It’s about the message of the symphony, which is more important,” Luisi continues. Mahler “wrote the symphony as a description of the world, as a description of our existence. … What is it to be human? What does it mean to be part of humanity?”

The symphony unfolds in two hefty parts, distinct from one another in both text and musical profile. The first is based on the medieval hymn “Veni, Creator Spiritus”—”Come, Creator Spirit.” Mahler called the text “a song of yearning, of rapturous devotion in invocation of the creative spirit, the love that moves the worlds.”

Luisi views the text as “not necessarily Christian. [It] has to do with our spirituality and our need to have somebody to look to—who is, so to speak, responsible for our existence. We don’t know what it is, but we try to find out.”

Luisi is among many who think the music of this first part harkens back to Baroque oratorios. The kinships range from the brass fanfares to the bursts of vigorous counterpoint—all, of course, on a sonic scale dwarfing anything from the 18th century.

The symphony’s second part draws on Goethe’s mega-play Faust: the very last scene, which brings redemption to both the tortured title character and Gretchen, the innocent young woman he seduces. Mahler wrote to his wife that “the essence of it is really Goethe’s idea that all love is generative, creative.” To Luisi, Gretchen is “a symbol for ourselves. This is the redemption of humanity.”

Many listeners, perhaps with the text’s theatrical roots in mind, think Mahler’s music here harkens back to opera. The 10-minute introduction—the work’s only extended section for orchestra alone—might equate to an operatic prelude, replacing the first movement’s trumpetings with a more brooding tone. The soloists take off on individual flights as fervent as arias. When one of Goethe’s final stanzas exhorts listeners to “Look up” and be “translated to blissful fortune,” the vocal lines’ upward path points the way.

Mahler’s goal, Luisi says, is to lead us in “ascending to a better life—to a better understanding of life.”

The Dallas Symphony hasn’t tackled the Symphony No. 8 since 2000, when the score added its dazzle to the group’s centennial celebrations. For many musicians, tackling this massive score will be a new experience, but Luisi is undaunted. “The orchestra is an experienced ensemble,” he says. “It will be challenging, but they are familiar with Mahler’s language.”

Meanwhile, the orchestra’s production staff faces challenges of its own. The stage crew must install an extension to the stage to make room for extra players. The choral area behind the orchestra doesn’t have space for the roughly 200 adults and 60 children slated to perform, says Katie McGuinness, the orchestra’s chief artistic officer, so some of them may have to spill over into the adjacent boxes. All that will get sorted out during the rehearsals, with Luisi making the decisions. McGuiness isn’t fretting about that: She says he is “one of the nicest, most collaborative, most communicative music directors I’ve ever worked with.”

“If he sees the stage crew in a bit of a panic or sees me in a panic…he’s not nasty or aggressive,” McGuiness says. “That’s no element of him. He’s very, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out together.’”

—STEVEN BROWN