Resistance is never futile

Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony of 1904 lives up to its “Tragic” subtitle. The only one of his symphonies to end in a minor key, its unnamed hero is defeated by fate. But that doesn’t mean the 80-minute battle was pointless.

The Sixth is the focal point for the 38th edition of Boulder-based Colorado MahlerFest and the inspiration for a slate of musical works expressing this year’s theme: “Defiance, Protest, Resistance and Remembrance.”

“Some heroes fight bravely knowing in advance they will not survive or have a happy ending, and that is the point,” says music director Kenneth Woods, in his tenth year at MahlerFest. “To me, the Sixth is the most heroic music Mahler ever wrote, and the tragedy at the end is truly earned.”

Woods says that when the cause is greater than oneself, it isn’t always about triumphing, but sacrificing everything for a greater good. The symphony’s half-hour finale famously includes two huge “hammer blows” that mark points of structural significance and have symbolic meaning for the tragic journey. 

“From that first hammer blow, it is already certain that the hero is not going to survive,” he says. “But we still follow him to the end, as in a Shakespeare tragedy, and we remember.”

The symphony anchors the main orchestral concert May 18 at Macky Auditorium. Preceding it are two works about resistance to persecution and oppression. Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů’s 1943 Memorial to Lidice commemorates a small Czech village whose residents were massacred by the Nazis in 1942. 

“I only learned of Lidice through this piece of music, so it succeeded in keeping the memory alive,” Woods says.

The second of these preceding works is by William Grant Still, the “dean of African-American composers,” who wrote Dismal Swamp around 1936. The eponymous swamp was “a pathway for enslaved people to leave the South and get to freedom because the slave hunters thought it was too dangerous,” Woods says. He calls the one-movement piece for piano and orchestra a “powerful statement about confronting something dark and terrifying in hope of a better future.”

Out of the darkness

The other orchestral concert on May 17, titled “Celebrating Peace,” is about a more hopeful progression, ending with the only symphony by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a composer now mostly known for his film scores. He settled in the United States after fleeing the Nazis in 1934.

The Symphony in F-sharp major, completed in 1952 and dedicated to the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt, expresses the totality of what the previous decade-plus had meant for him and the world. 

“It shows the world coming out of crisis,” Woods says of the “ferociously difficult” symphony. “Three movements are full of dramatic suspense, anxiety and sorrow, but in the last movement, the sun comes out after the storm, a contrast to the pessimistic ending of the Mahler Sixth.”

The whole concert follows that trajectory. Todtenfeier (Funeral Rites), an early version of the dark first movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony, opens the program. Guest trumpeter Daniel Kelly plays the solo part in British composer Deborah Pritchard’s Seven Halts on the Somme, a concerto for trumpet and strings. It is inspired by seven paintings of artist Hughie O’Donoghue, depicting the progress of soldiers during the Battle of the Somme in World War I. 

“The horrors of that war are being quickly forgotten,” Woods says. “We come out of both world wars with the Korngold, heralding an era of peace, reconciliation and healing.”

‘The greatest defiance of all’

The concert week opens May 14 at Mountain View United Methodist Church with a concert performance of Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis (The Emperor of Atlantis), written in 1943 while the composer was imprisoned by the Nazis in the Theresienstadt ghetto. In the plot, Death goes on strike from a government founded on war and murder. 

“It is a satirical opera, bitingly funny, going straight to the jugular with Hitler and the Nazi regime,” Woods says. “It took bravery and courage to compose in that situation, knowing that Auschwitz was one step up.” 

Indeed, Ullmann was murdered there in 1944. But when the MahlerFest chamber orchestra performs with a cast of six singers, including returnees Brennan Guillory and Gustav Andreassen, Woods hopes audiences will be inspired by the immortal power of art in the face of tragedy. 

“Ullmann himself did not survive the Nazis,” he says. “But the music did, and that is the greatest defiance of all.”

ON THE BILL: Colorado MahlerFest presents symphonies by Mahler and Korngold. 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 17 (Symphony in F-sharp major by Korngold) | 3:30 p.m. Sunday, May 18 (Symphony No. 6 by Mahler) | Macky Auditorium, 1595 Pleasant St., Boulder. $35-$85