Forward into the past!
Mahler visits strange new worlds.
[With a tip of the hat to The Firesign Theatre.]
Many years ago, when the local NPR affiliate decided that its audience preferred nonstop talk to classical music, I started exploring the world of Internet radio. Pickings were slim back then, but higher network speeds and advances in streaming media technology rapidly changed that.
Eventually, I stumbled upon the online version of “Performance Today,” a daily two-hour program produced by Minnesota Public Radio and hosted by the genial and well-informed Fred Child. The show “features live concert recordings that can’t be heard anywhere else, highlights from new album releases, and in-studio performances and interviews.” I am now a regular listener. My wife and I have even taken a couple of the musical river cruises hosted by Child and company.
The August 14th program (available online for one month after the original broadcast, as are all the episodes) included a little gem titled “Mahler, A Final Frontier-Fantasy on Themes of Mahler and Courage” by British composer/arranger George Morton. The “courage” in title is not the noun but rather the name: composer Alexander Courage (1919 - 2008), best known for the theme music for original “Star Trek” TV series.
What does Courage have to do with Mahler? Glad you asked. As CBC Radio host Tom Allen revealed in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek 2013 documentary video, the famous four-note motif of the ST theme (descending fourth, ascending minor second, descending fourth) is identical to the opening of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. Better yet, that version of the motif was Mahler’s way of giving a nod to Brahms, who used the same theme in the development section of the last movement of his Symphony No. 2. It’s at about the 4:37 point in this recording by Marin Alsop and the London Philharmonic
But, as Allen points out, Brahms’s use of the theme was his way of tipping his topper to a composer whom he idolized and who cast a very long shadow over much of the 19th century: Beethoven. Listen to the opening of his Symphony No. 4
and compare it with the opening of Mahler’s First
Kind of hard to miss the resemblance.
But wait, there’s more! In an article I wrote back in 2016 about an upcoming performance by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra of the 1994 Violin Concerto by John Adams I suggested that the theme of the second movement (“Chaconne – Body Through Which the Dream Flows”) also sounded rather like the one that launched the starship Enterprise. Sure, it’s a whole step up rather than a half step, but that’s close enough for me. Fortunately that performance was recorded, and you can listen for yourself.[
It is, in any case, an impressive legacy for that little tune.