Gustav Mahler was a composer of superlatives. Why have one hundred musicians on stage when you could have one thousand? His Fifth Symphony‘s famous slow movement, Adagietto (meaning “just a little slow”) has a tempo marking of Sehr Langsam (meaning “very slow”).

Teasing aside, the music is marvelous and it’s easy to hear why it is his most played piece. There’s a touching story that this was a love-song he composed for his new wife. Mahler wrote this poem for her, and attached it to this movement:

“How much I love you, my sun, I cannot say to you in words.
Only through my lamenting can I show my longing and love.”

Musically, it’s a very slow lyrical song, played by the warm sound of the strings playing very slowly; the harp provides a sense of rhythm and motion through its arpeggios. The sense of longing comes through as practically every phrase is ripe with instances where you expect a certain note at a certain time, but are denied that expectation for an extra beat or two.*** And at a slow tempo, the wait for the musical fulfillment can be painful – that kind of wonderful pain of wishing yourself in your lover’s arms.

*** need a specific example? Right at the beginning – you’ll hear the violin melody come in at 0:10. It plays sol – la – ti – do … a simple musical idea that most anybody will recognize and know (think the theme song of the Adams Family, just very very slow.) You expect to hear the final note “do” at 0:15 … but you are denied that pleasure until 0:18. It’s only 3 seconds, but practically every phrase in the piece uses this compositional trick. And there’s even a marvelous 7-8 suspension at 0:58.

On this day, in 1945, the first nuclear weapon, codenamed “Trinity“, was detonated in Alamogordo NM, as part of The Manhattan Project. The project’s leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer, lived a wild life as magical and worthy of any ancient Norse saga. It’s hard not to read about him without invoking an air of mysticism. For one, the codename “Trinity” came from a devotional poem by John Donne: “As West and East / In all flatt Maps—and I am one—are one, / So death doth touch the Resurrection.” and “Batter my heart, three person’d God.” More than that, Oppenheimer said the bomb test brought to mind words from the Hindu poem, Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

American composer John Adams was commissioned to write an opera titled Doctor Atomic, in which Oppenheimer was to be portrayed as a modern-day Faust. The opera’s text was taken from declassified military and scientific documents, and sacred poetry. This politically edgy opera made quite a scene when it premiered in 2005, and was later performed at the Met (which is a HUGE deal for any contemporary opera.) Adams later adapted a “Dr. Atomic Symphony” for orchestral concert use. Musically, its style incorporates elements of neo-romanticism, film music, and post-minimalism (ok, I admit, I just made up that last word!)

Alternate title: GuilloTUNEs

France’s Fourth of July takes place on the fourteenth of July – Bastille Day (or, as the French prefer to call it, the much nicer-sounding La Fête Nationale), the beginning of the French Revolution. Now technically, the real beheading party didn’t begin until a few years later, Still, the guillotine has become the iconic icon of French liberty and justice.

Which is why I bring you this – iconic French composer Hector Berlioz‘s “March to the Scaffold”, the fourth movement of his Symphonie Fanstastique. Written in 1830, after two generations of political turmoil, it is a testament to the hardiness of humanity and our need for beauty in an ugly world. This Symphony is historically important because it fueled the romantic obsession of programmatic music; it also introduced an idea Berlioz called the idée fixe – a musical motif or melody which is attached to a specific thought, person, or idea. Out of the context of the whole symphony, the idée fixe won’t have much meaning when you listen to this single movement. However, that doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it.

Programmatic music is the idea that music can convey a non-musical story or idea. Sometimes programmatic music composers can be cryptic; other times they are very specific. Berlioz is the latter! He provided this awesome, drug-inspired summary of this head-rolling movement:

Convinced that his love is unrequited, the protagonist poisons himself with opium. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes somber and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe reappear like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.