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During a 2008 tour stop at London's Royal Albert Hall, Cynthia Yeh, principal percussion, wields the hammer of fate as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performs Mahler's Symphony No. 6.
Todd Rosenberg Photography
In American English, the idiom “dropping the hammer” can mean many things: to take decisive action or to crack down on an injustice. In trucker lingo, it means pushing the accelerator to the floor — that is, driving at maximum speed.
But in Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, which the BRSO Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks (Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra), led by Sir Simon Rattle, will perform on Sunday, April 28, the expression takes on a literal meaning. In the last movement, the composer calls of the use of a percussion instrument, which came to be known as the Mahler hammer. Mahler described the sound produced by the instrument to be “brief and mighty, but dull in resonance and with a non-metallic character — like the fall of an axe.”
At the Sixth Symphony’s premiere in 1906, the sound did not quite carry far enough from the stage, and the problem of achieving the proper volume while maintaining a dull resonance remains a challenge. Methods of producing the sound have involved the use of a wooden mallet striking a wooden surface or a sledgehammer hitting a wooden box or a large bass drum.
The hammer has come to symbolize what has been described as Mahler’s “most dark and terrifying work.” Conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler once called the Sixth “the first nihilist work in the history of music.”
To music critic Paul Bekker, the hammer blow signifies “an interference by something outside this world, something of a supernatural, crushing effect that mankind can no longer fight against.”
In his drafts of the score, Mahler called for as many as five hammer blows, but after revisions, only two remained (contemporary performances sometimes restore the third) in the published version. Mahler intended the hammer strikes to signal “mighty blows of fate” experienced by the hero, “the third of which fells him like a tree.” In Mahler’s own life, the hammer blows are said to represent three tragic milestones: the death of his eldest daughter, his condition of a weakened heart (which eventually caused his death) and his ouster from the Vienna Opera.
Mahler himself seemingly devised the work’s epitaph when he wrote: “My Sixth will be asking riddles that can be solved only by a generation that has received and digested my first five.”
