MARC Neikrug (b. 1946): A Song by Mahler (2018)
An LCCMF co-commission with Chamber Music Northwest, La Jolla Chamber Music Festival, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Jennifer Johnson Cano, mezzo-soprano
Kelly Markgraf, baritone
David Shifrin, clarinet
FLUX Quartet
Tom Chiu, violin
Conrad Harris, violin
Max Mandel, viola
Felix Fan, cello

Doug Fitch, director

Nicholas Houfek, lighting designer

Marc Neikurg: A Song by Mahler (2018)

A Song by Mahler is the third piece I have written in a genre that I see as a combination of theater and music. I have tried to combine these two forms in a way that addresses some of the problems I find in opera, particularly the fact that singing any set of words takes approximately three times as long as speaking them. This leads to a sense of time, which is not how we experience “real time.” Another aspect, which I have always found problematic, is the setting of purely mundane, everyday words into singing.

In these works, I have written text to be performed as in a play, while composing music which, as in an opera, conveys underlying and essential emotional context. In the previous two pieces, there was no singing at all. In this one, I employ both speech and singing. The speech is rhythmically controlled in order to synchronize with the music, but it is essentially “acted,” as in a play. The singing takes over when an emotional threshold is reached where speaking doesn’t suffice.

The play itself considers the situation of a concertizing singer who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. She confronts the reality of this, as does her husband, who is also her accompanist. The play is not an attempt at documenting the myriad aspects of the disease. It is, rather, an attempt to address the specific emotional evolution of this couple, touching on their love and their particular relationship to music.

I have used one Mahler song, “Liebst du um Schönheit”(If You Love for Beauty), as a vehicle for the story. It is the song the play’s singer always performed as her last encore in concerts. I place a master class early in the play in order to explain the deep meaning of the song for her personally, and in order for our audience to understand it. Her gradual deterioration and her husband’s attempts to adjust, while also trying to keep his wife connected through music, lead to an eventual resolution and an evolved sense of their love.

©2021 Marc Neikrug