Kenneth Woods- A View From the Podium

A while back, I started a little series here called Urtext Myths (part I here, part II here). While preparing for my recent performance of Mahler’s 5^th Symphony at the Harlech Orchestral Summer School, I came across something in the Preface that got me thinking about a new article in the “myths” series. This is possibly the biggest myth of them all-

“An Urtext edition meticulously reproduces exactly what the composer wrote, free of editorial interpretations or interpolations.”

What? I hear you say…. Isn’t that pretty much the definition of an Urtext- a clear and mistake free rendering of the text of the work as the composer wrote it, not as some performer or scholar though he or she should have written it?

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but we don’t live in that world.

Read more…

“The donkey found it pleasing, and only said
Wait! Wait! Wait! I will announce my judgement now.

Well have you sung, Nightingale!
But, Cuckoo, you sing a good chorale!”

On Friday, the intrepid musicians of the Harlech Orchestral Academy performed Mahler’s Fifth Symphony- a performance that was every bit as hot as the auditorium we were playing in. Although we’ve had a lot of Mahler on the blog this year, there is always more to discuss, and more to learn. One topic that came up was the use of Mahler’s Wunderhorn Song “In Praise of Lofty Intelligence” in the Finale. What is he up to, crowing such a massive and serious work with a movement based on such a silly song? Although many writers reference the presence of this song in Mahler’s Finale,  I’ve come across very little material that offers any thoughtful analysis of what Mahler was up to. With this in mind, I thought we might turn to Mahler scholar Peter Davison again to share his thoughts and discoveries–

“In praise of high intellect”

Have you ever wondered why the Wunderhorn song, Lob des hohen Verstands – In praise of high intellect, provides the thematic seed for the Rondo Finale in Mahler’s fifth symphony? One school of thought views such borrowings in fairly abstract terms. It is a good, perky little tune and Mahler could see some symphonic potential in it. So, along with other random musical sources, Mahler threw it into the melting-pot of his symphony and hoped for the best. Readers of this blog will by now know that this is not a view held by Ken Woods or myself. We take the view that Mahler always did things for very good reasons and understanding his motives will often reveal dense layers of meaning in his work.

Read more…

You can call it the best program you’ve never heard in your life. You can call it the almost revelatory program that almost happened- what you can’t call it is the program for the final concert of the Harlech Orchestral Summer School, which I’m now preparing for.

Harlech is an intense week long program that covers an immense amount of substantial repertoire. Some is simply workshopped and read, while a few pieces are selected for extra rehearsal and the final performance. This year it has been a given that Mahler 5 is going to be on that program- in this year, how could it not be? But what to pair it with?

As it turns out, part of the equation includes a premiere of a new work by Duncan Stubbs written for the winds of the academy called “Harlech Variants.” Given the massive scale of the Mahler and the presence of the Stubbs, it would seem that all that is needed is a relatively slight work to open the program.

Of this year’s repertoire, the obvious choice is Ravel’s La Valse, although one would never call it slight! The parallels with the Mahler are obvious and fascinating- the Scherzo of the Mahler seems an obvious model for the Ravel. Both use dance, notably (but not exclusively) the Viennese waltz, to delve into the darkest corners of the human psyche.

However, as we get closer to the beginning of the festival, there is another work in the repertoire I’ve longed to program alongside the Mahler. I even went so far as to suggest to my colleagues that we ought to ditch the Ravel and do it instead- in spite of the fact that it would make for a ridiculously long program and a very exhausting week of rehearsals. My associates wisely talked me down from that particular ledge.

The piece, of course, is Shostakovich’s 6^th Symphony. Why? Surely the Ravel is the obvious and perfect pairing? Is this just a case of Ken the Shostakovich nut looking for any possible chance to perform a Shostakovich symphony?

Well, I can’t rule that out, but there was more to it than that. First, the Ravel is the obvious pairing. The Shostakovich is just the more interesting pairing because it seems that putting these two great but highly unorthodox works on the same program could be much more illuminating, and could help us to hear both works with clearer ears.

Shostakovich 6 is one of those pieces that is often described as “enigmatic.” It is in 3 movements- one very long slow movement followed by two very short fast movements. It has always had its advocates (Lenny loved it and conducted it brilliantly), but many people can’t get past the fact that it doesn’t seem to do what symphonies after Beethoven are supposed to do, which is to reconcile and resolve large-scale tensions.

The Largo completely overshadows the other two movements, obviously in terms of scale, but also in terms of emotional impact. On the other hand, surely a genius like Shostakovich knew which rules he was breaking and why. Surely Beethoven taught us  that what a symphony ought to do with a movement like the Largo is to balance it with a Finale of equal scale and weight? That’s what his 5^th and 9^th symphonies do so well, and it’s something Mahler mastered in his 2^nd Symphony.

In fact, Mahler 2 might be the ultimate symphonic example of a vast, tragic opening movement (like the Largo of Shostakovich 6) which is followed by some shorter intermezzo-like movements (again like the Shostakovich), which culminates and a vaster and more dramatic triumphant Finale in which all the darkness and tension of the first movement is transcended and resolved (something conspicuously missing in the Shostakovich).

If Mahler 2 is the grandest and most perfect example of that approach to symphonic form, it’s certainly not the only example. Bruckner deals with it in his 5^th, 8^th and 9^th Symphonies (we can see from the fragments where he was going with the Finale of his 9^th). And, even if the 2^nd is the most powerful and explicit example of a cathartic Finale in his music, Mahler’s 1^st 4 symphonies all treat the Finale in a similar way- as a summing up and culmination of all that precedes them.

However, in the 5^th Symphony, Mahler for the first time goes in a different and more ambivalent direction. The 5^th is written in 5 movements, which are grouped into 3 parts. The 1^st part of the symphony is unmistakably where the center of gravity of the entire work is located- two movements of unprecedented darkness, intensity and ferocity. Part I of Mahler 5 ends in as black an abyss as anything in the repertoire I can think of (like the Largo of Shostakovich 6). Dark as the Funeral March is which opens the 2^nd Symphony, there still seems to be room for the drama to continue from that point. The ending of Part I of Mahler 5 is so black and nihilistic that it seems impossible that anything could follow which would be able to balance or transcend that darkness.

Mahler follows this in Part II with an ambivalent Scherzo which you can read about here. Like the Ravel, it is in many ways a dance of death, or at the very least a dance which expresses a certain affection for oblivion. Again, Part II of the Shostakovich is similar- it is also a Scherzo, but the mood is hardly carefree.

Part III of the Mahler promises a return to life. It is now well known that in many respects, the famous Adagietto is a love song, but it is also filled with references to Mahler’s own Kindertotenlieder, or Songs on the Death of Children. Yes, it has moments of stunning tenderness and exquisite longing, but it, never mind what today’s politically correct writers tell you, includes passages of searing anguish and deep, deep pain.

In Mahler 2, the last grand and dramatic Finale is preceded like a structural upbeat by the song Urlicht. Like the Adagietto, it is intimate and tender music in which hope seems to begin to awaken, if not assert itself. However, where the Finale of the 2^nd begins with a savagely dramatic outburst (obviously related to the opening of the Finale of Beethoven 9), the Finale of Mahler 5 begins with a joke. Mahler quotes one of his own songs (Lob des hohen Verstandes, or “In Praise of Lofty Intelligence”) about a singing competition between a cuckoo and a nightingale judged by an ass. It hardly promises a Finale in which the tragedy of  Part I can be overcome, and it turns out to be.

The Finale of Mahler 5 is humorous, virtuosic and passionate. The humor is sometimes warm and bright, other times black and sardonic. It makes extensive reference to the music of the Adagietto, now played in a genuinely carefree, breezy style, perhaps as if to say love is as much a game as anything else. There is only one reference to Part I, but what a reference it is- just before the end, he brings back the great chorale of the 2^nd Movement. This overpowering peroration had collapsed into abject crisis the first time it was heard, but here, it shines out in triumphant confidence. If the symphony ended here, he might just have pulled of the kind of transcendent ending we’d been hoping for all along, and what a feat that would have been!

But Mahler chooses not to do so. Instead, the piece continues just long enough to undermine the Chorale. Instead of ending in catharsis, the piece ends in laughter – perhaps, like love, triumph is also all just a game, or perhaps he is saying that the culmination of the chorale is the ending to yesterday’s story- life goes on! The piece ends with a torrent of whole tone scales- the most ambivalent of musical structures. Is it light or dark humor? Is there an edge of madness in that laughter? Those whole tone scales seem to signal we can’t be sure Do we all live happily after? Are all life’s problems solved? I don’t think so, but life goes on, and in Mahler’s world the primal force of life is extraordinarily powerful.

Likewise, the 3^rd Mvt of Shostakovich 6 doesn’t try to fix what the Largo has broken. Like Mahler’s Finale, the primary emotion is humor, both dark and light. Much as I love, and much as the world needs the Finale of Mahler 2, the Finale of Maher 5 is truer to life, hard as that is to accept. My sense is that Shostakovich 6 is also a pretty profoundly true-to-life work. Perhaps he is saying that suffer as you will (remember the Largo), don’t expect the heavens to open and for God to give you all the answers. Life goes on, in all its hilarity and insanity.

Side by side, the Shostakovich looks a little less of an enigmatic failure and much more a triumph of ironic realism, and the Mahler looks less Beethovenian and more modern.

Of course, it’s possible there is an even darker truth in the Shostakovich- we know he advertised that his original intention was to make the work a portrait of Lenin, complete with choral Finale. Maybe the work was meant to look more like Mahler 2, and the 2^nd and 3^rd movements were kindred intermezzi to the 2^nd and 3^rd mvts of Mahler 2?

However, in 1939, Russia was still waiting for the happy ending to the Lenin drama. Perhaps the deafening silence that follows the 3^rd mvt of the 6^th is the point. Shostakovich didn’t write a Finale because life hadn’t given him one to depict?

It sounds good, but I’m not convinced. The Largo seems to introverted and personal to have anything to do with politics and history- if it’s about anything other than despair, it is about music. More on that to come, I hope.

It has always bothered commentators that the ending of Shostakovich 6 doesn’t feel like an ending worthy of its beginning. Isn’t that obviously his point? Of course the piece is unfinished- he doesn’t want you to walk away from the symphony ready go out for a drink. He wants us to be thinking about what the piece means, to be struggling to make sense of its pain and contradictions. The work of the listener is just beginning when this piece ends.

As we celebrate the release of the new Gal CD, I’m hoping to use this blog to give readers a chance to get to know a little bit more about this fascinating musician and figure. I thought we might make a nice bridge from recent topics by starting with Mahler. Here are two wonderful and telling anecdotes from an article by Martin Anderson. The first is from an interview recorded by Anderson and Gal in 1986, when the composer was 96.

I believe you heard Mahler conduct in Vienna .

Yes, it was always an extraordinary experience. In attended one of his earliest performances at the Yie Opera. It was Auber’s Fra Diavolo, curiously.

But that was in 1897!

Yes, that is correct. I was only a small boy, but in those days it was the custom for children to go to the opera with their parents, and so we went to see Fra Diavolo. We heard Mahler conduct quite often at the opera house, where he remained until 1907. It is extraordinary how these things stick in the memory. But it was the most marvellous conducting – in all these years I’ve never heard anything to equal it.

In the appendix to this article, Anderson relays a story Gal told to Malcom Smith at Boosey and Hawkes

When I was a school-lad, I lived in Vienna [he did tell me what Gasse it was, but I can’t now remember]. It was on the first floor, above a confectioner’s. I was taught by my mother to play the piano, and after a time, of course, when I was nine or ten, she couldn’t teach me any more, so I had a gentleman in from the Conservatoire there. He used to come in on a Saturday morning and leave me a couple of pieces to learn by the next Saturday.

One particular Saturday he said: ‘Hansi, you’ve done very well today – here’s a pfennig for you: go and buy some sweeties downstairs’. After he’d gone, my mother said: ‘Alright, you can go down’. So I went downstairs. I knew the people in the shop very well: a couple of daughters and an old dear, who was about 80-odd and sat behind the door and took the money; the daughters made the sweets and cakes and they served.

When I came in with my pfennig [it might have been a groschen – it was the equivalent of about a ha’penny], one of the girls said: ‘Oh, Hansi, you played very well today, we enjoyed it very much. What can we do for you?’ So I said I had a pfennig and I’d like some sweeties. They said: ‘Well, as you know, you can have ten of your choice for a pfennig’. So they made a cardboard cornet for me out of paper and I put various selections in. Then they said: ‘As you played so well, you can have two more’. So I thanked them very much and went to pay my money to the old dear.

She said: ‘You played very well. It reminds me that, when I was a young girl, I used to live in such-and-such a Gasse. We lived on the second floor, and there was a flat above us, and there was a musician there who caused us terrible trouble. I slept in one room and my parents in another, and he used to bang on the piano all through the night, and my parents had to stand on the bed with a broomstick and bang on the ceiling and shout at him to stop. Of course, I saw this chap as I went to school in the morning – he’d be coming done the spiral staircase and I used to follow him down the road. He used to wear a long black coat and a top hat, and all the children used to shout and throw things at him. After a time he moved because he didn’t pay his rent’.

I said: ‘Who was that?’

She said: ‘It was Beethoven’.

Read the whole thing here.

Many, many years ago, as a young teenager, I became completely obsessed with Mahler’s music. Back then, living in the Midwest, there was far less material on Mahler about- I ended up scouring libraries and compulsively hunting through record stores, trying bit by bit to track down recordings of all his works. In the age of LPs, Mahler’s music was far rarer, an painfully expensive and sometimes hard to find. I kept checking out Karajan’s Mahler 6 from the local public library for over two years until I could finally get a copy in at the local record store to buy.

I remember that process like being sucked into a long novel that you feel compelled to finish as fast as possible. It wasn’t long from when I first started actively learning about his music that I discovered the 10^th Symphony. I managed to track down Rattle’s then brand- new LP of it with Bournemouth, which had the wonderful bonus of tremendously interesting program notes by a man named Michael Steinberg. Michael would later become a dear friend and wise mentor- life is funny that way.

I became fascinated with Mahler’s progression as a composer, and particularly with where he was at the end of his journey. I suppose that is just typical teenage attraction to the vaguely morbid and melancholy. I was so taken by Mahler’s evolution from the completion of the 7^th, which seems in retrospect the end of the main part of his creative life, through the 8^th, Das Lied von der Erde, the 9^th and finally the 10^th. Mahler was not an old man, and these are not morbid or fatalistic works, yet to me, they still seem to be part of a final voyage. I never could imagine a next after them. Perhaps that is simply a response to my superficial knowledge that they were his last pieces. If someone had told me that the 5^th or the 6^th were his last pieces before I knew better, what might I have thought they told me about Mahler and about music and creativity?

Still, this mystery of where, if anywhere, a composer could have gone given another year or even another week has always fascinated me. The interest in this music for me has never been about whether a given tune was intended for horn or clarinet, or if a countermelody might be added. From Mahler 10, I quickly took on the larger question and for a school project put together a huge presentation on the idea of “late style” in music.  Of course, there are the obvious parallels in other un-finished works like Bruckner 9 and the Mozart Requiem, but it’s not just a question of how those works might be different from the torsos we are so familiar with, or of what else those composers might have gone on to write that fascinated me then, and that, all these decades later, still fascinates me.

Not all composers have a true “late” style- Bruckner, Mahler, Schubert, Shostakovich and Beethoven all do, but not all of them were old when they entered that period of their creative lives. I think. Schubert’s is the most striking, and he was so young. Is it appropriate to call the music of a man in his early 30’s a “late” style of composition? In Schubert’s case, my strong conviction is yes. Unfashionably intuitive as such a statement is, I can’t help but feel convinced that works like the Cello Quintet, G Major String Quartet, Die Wintereise and the last Piano Sonatas are very much the works of a man who knew he had entered a final chapter in his life. In so many moments in late Schubert, I can’t escape the feeling that his music is taking me as close to an idea of what the next stage of existence might be as can possibly be communicated between two people who are still in this world. Likewise in late Beethoven or late Mahler- one is not only astounded at the musical quality of the works, but also at the deeply profound understanding of life that comes through in the music.

And yet, of course, had a shot of penicillin been available, Mahler might have gotten up from his death bed, completed the 10^th and gone on to write for many more decades. He and Strauss could have kept their rivalry going into the 1940’s, and the 10^th might have simply been seen as a document of the end of Mahler’s first marriage.

I must accept that such a thing could have been possible. Sometimes, we find new information that changes our understanding of a final work. For years, we believed that the Adagio of Bruckner’s last symphony was the last thing he wrote- his final, profound thoughts. We now know that he had almost completed the Finale. Had it not been for the greed of souvenir hunters who ransacked his house in the hours after his death, we would now have a Finale of Bruckner 9 that is essentially complete. Where Mahler had completed his 10^th in short score, Bruckner had finished the orchestration of  most of the surviving fragments of his 9^th. This means Bruckner had probably finished the creative work on the symphony and was well into the final details of orchestration and revision when he died. The Adagio was not his farewell. I couldn’t imagine what Bruckner could have done after the Adagio, but he could.

So, Mahler might well have lived to put the 10^th in a different light entirely, but  my heart tells me that the last three works by Mahler were, like the last string quartets of Beethoven and the late works of Schubert steps nearing the end of a great creative life. Any of them could have been the end, and he made sure that they were each worthy of being the end.  As the great comedian once said- live each day as if it were your last, and one day, you will be right.  Each is its own work- the nature worship and evocation of a distant Oriental dreamscape is unique to Das Lied. The 9^th seems wound up with the loss of his daughter and the loss of culture- in the Rondo-Burleske it is easy to sense Mahler feeling that his city, Vienna, had turned on him. And, yes, the 10^th certainly brings to a head the long musical relationship to Alma the muse and tormentor, who has been the primary recurring character since the 5^th Symphony.

But, in each of these works, Mahler’s autobiography seems ever less relevant, however poignant the story is- his message is ever more universal. I continue to sense in all three pieces that he is deeply aware that he is nearing the end of his journey, but rather than leaving us to wallow in his grief, these pieces are profoundly, profoundly hopeful, cathartic and transformative. In the last pages of the 10^th Symphony, Mahler seems to have left suffering and fear far behind- he no longer turns to the naïve hope of a blissful afterlife so wonderfully evoked in the 4^th, but instead creates bliss and transcendence through art itself.

Listen.

The Bridgewater Hall- Mahler in Manchester

Peter Davison continues his invaluable contributions to the Mahler discussions here with his thoughts on Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony. On Saturday, June 5th, the BBC Philharmonic and Gianandrea Noseda will perform Deryck Cooke’s  performing version of the work in the final concert of Mahler in Manchester

Escaping Klingsor’s Magic Garden; a painful awakening

Mahler’s Tenth Symphony teeters on the brink of irredeemable despair. It almost touches on madness, as the stabilising force of tonality is drastically undermined by using all the notes of the chromatic scale. This is music on the edge. It is generally understood that the work was written in the wake of the crisis in Mahler’s marriage, after discovering his wife’s affair with the radical young architect, Walter Gropius. The moving inscriptions Mahler added to the score express his profound anxiety that he might lose Alma, but also the hurt he must have felt at her betrayal. If you read David Matthews’ excellent article about the Tenth Symphony in the Oxford Mahler Companion, you will be left in little doubt that the work is concerned with the loss of love and the wounds of betrayal. Matthews identifies two quotations from Wagner to make his case.

The symphony repeats a pattern found in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony where the opening movement presents an overview of the work’s whole emotional journey, while the middle movements suggest a more specific perspective. The two strands connect in the work’s finale, where a love-song emerges out of the gloom of deep alienation. But I want to explore in more detail the first movement, the Adagio of the work; some of the most intense, and remarkably dramatic music which Mahler ever wrote. (Yet how many times, have you read in this blog that movement x or symphony y is the best of Mahler. He is an impossible composer, because everything he wrote was so strikingly original and executed with such extraordinary sureness of purpose that we find ourselves running out of superlatives and meaningful comparisons.)

The first movement of the Tenth is a slow movement which opens with a long solo viola line; a sinuous chromatic melody that is a recitative of profoundly melancholic introspection. It goes without saying that this recurring melodic shape provides the seed for much of the melodic material and harmonic colour that follows. But where does this idea of a long viola melody come from? The example which leaps to mind is found in Richard Strauss’ tone-poem Don Quixote, where a solo viola plays the part of Sancho Panza, Quixote’s trusty companion. The viola is naturally an instrument of subservience, as it traditionally does not receive much prominence as a voice in its own right. It produces a melancholic tone colour, ideal for Strauss’ to suggest the hint of exasperation and affection that the companion has for the deluded knight. It has been suggested that Strauss projected himself into the character of Panza and that this music is a self-portrait, which might indicate that Panza is the voice of common sense, a down-to -earth character, contrasting with the flights of fancy which characterise Quixote. This is music that marks the end of Romanticism, when the excesses and fantasies of that cultural movement were being exposed as charming or even dangerous delusions.

If you listen to the introduction of the Strauss you will hear passages of meandering chromaticism in the violas which portray Quixote losing touch with reality as his head is filled with daft notions. These meanderings anticipate the music associated with Sancho Panza. We can’t be sure that Mahler meant this allusion deliberately, but if we assume that he did mean it, what might he be saying? There is a very obvious answer, because Mahler is in this movement exploring the pain of waking up from infatuation. He is struggling discover what is real about what he feels. He thought he had found love with Alma. He had idealised her, projected feelings upon her, imagined her to be the goddess-like woman. But, by an act of faithlessness, she had shattered his hopes and dreams. This fall from grace in Mahler’s eyes had awoken him not just to her flaws as a human being, but the flaws of perception in himself. He had been dazzled by her beauty and by his desires to the point that he had lost touch with reality.

So Mahler’s emotional world has been turned upside down, and he has found himself waking painfully from delusion, as if he were Don Quixote. Quixote is the ageing Knight who tilts at windmills, who is courts a damsel who is in truth a mere farm-hand. He is naïve, a fantasist, a hero of the absurd whose irrational idealism and chivalrous heroism protect him from reality. Panza is by comparison the voice of reality – sceptical, questioning, warning of danger, going along with things rather reluctantly. So in these opening passages of the Tenth, could we be hearing an inner voice that is trying to articulate a sense of reality it can trust? The song-like orchestral tutti that cuts off this recitative has an imploring quality moulded by grief. It silences the introverted, reflective voice. It is as if Mahler is debating with himself – do I take the path of introspection and examine my inner reality or do I continue to extrovert my longing and seek love which risks bitter disappointment?

You might be a bit sceptical about this interpretation, but there is further evidence that Mahler is exploring the pain of waking from delusion. The faster material of the movement has a devilish dance-like quality, and when listening to it recently I found the main motive and its harmony sounded very familiar. I realised that there was a reference to the opening scene of Act II of Parsifal, which is set in Klingsor’s magic garden. It might be worth reprising a bit of the Parsifal story here to make the point. Parsifal was Wagner’s last opera; an exploration of the conflict between sexual love and spirituality. The Knights of the Holy Grail are in trouble because their leader, Amfortas, has been seduced by the harlot Kundry. As a consequence he suffers a wound that will not heal and the all-male bastion of the Knights is left in terminal decline. The Knights seem to suffer a general weakness of the flesh which prevents them dealing with Kundry and they are thus unable to restore the Order to good health. Kundry is directed by the evil magician, Klingsor, who has won dominion over his own sexuality by castrating himself. He lives in a magic castle with a garden of sensual delights; a web which lures the Knights to their fate so that Kundry can take advantage of them.  Only the innocent youth, Parsifal can save the Order by defeating Klingsor and resisting Kundry’s seductive powers.

But what has this do with Mahler? Mahler clearly identified himself in some respects with Amfortas, the wounded King who seeks redemption. Alma is identified with Kundry, the fallen woman – a seductress who has bamboozled Mahler with her beauty and youthful vitality. Sexual desire is portrayed in Parsifal as a weakness, driven by illusion and the false promises of sensual intoxication. Human sexuality thus appears as a dance of death led by cold-hearted Mother Nature who through the sex-drive causes reproduction, but cares nothing for the emotional consequences. Mahler experienced the failure of his marriage as a confrontation with the blind will of nature, but also as a moral failure on his part. The debacle of Alma’s affair was a failure of his perceptiveness and judgement as much as it was a betrayal by one he loved.

In the dance-like episodes of the first movement, Mahler suggests that he is surrounded by sensual delights which torment him, because he knows they are false, but part of him cannot resist them, like Amfortas, even though he knows it is leading him towards destruction. He loved and desired Alma, despite everything, and this made him vulnerable and helpless. This is why the music of the movement is so tormented and has such a diabolical air.

The lovelessness of Mother Nature is the very much the subject of the central scherzo of the symphony, the Purgatorio, which is secretly based on a poem by Mahler’s old friend Siegfried Lipiner about betrayal in love. The accompanying figurations of the music reminds us of the Wunderhorn song, Das irdische Leben, The Earthly Life – which depicts a child starving to death, because its mother does not feed it. There is also a quotation about the mortality of man from Das Lied von der Erde. Mahler seems to be saying lovelessness is the natural state of things because, with true Schopenhauerian pessimism, he believes that nature expresses itself blindly and deceives us by the beauty of its outward appearance. Mahler admits defeat. He is Don Quixote or the Knight of the Holy Grail who has succumbed to illusion, and his wound cannot heal until he learns penetrate the world of deceptive appearances.

The crunching dissonant climaxes which dominate the first and last movements of the symphony are the outcome of this struggle between two incompatible perspectives. Matthews suggests that the pulverising chord is based on Amfortas’ cry for redemption. But at these moments of crisis, there is also catharsis. Reality comes crashing in – as if Mahler has read Gropius’ letter to his wife or else he confronts her and she admits everything. He is cut to the quick; all illusions are shattered, all hope is proven false. But reality is also healing, because it exposes what was never true, what has been deception.  However, the symphony does not end in total pessimism, but achieves a moving serenity, even if its longing is never quite fulfilled. Mahler finds compassion and forgiveness, perhaps because through the course of the music, he gradually realises that Alma is only a mirror of his own inner woundedness, something innate to the human condition. By finding that universal truth in his personal situation, Mahler discovers a deeper truth which goes beyond his damaged ego and he finds the capacity to forgive. Thus compassion wins out over jealousy, and reality triumphs over illusion. Mahler was able to leave the prison of Klingsor’s magic garden.

Peter Davison

The Bridgewater Hall- Mahler in Manchester

The Halle, with their Music Director, Sir Mark Elder, will perform Mahler 9 as part of Mahler in Manchester on the 27th of May, 2010 in The Bridgewater Hall.

I hope readers don’t mind me framing my thoughts about Mahler 9 in terms of conducting. It seems to make sense if for no other reason than the fact that Mahler 9 is at or near the top of many, probably most, conductors’ lists of works they want to conduct before they die.

I began this series by asking if Mahler’s music is hard to conduct. If we come back to that question with a focus on Mahler’s most perfect work, and his last finished work, perhaps we can better understand a little bit about the challenges Mahler poses for all performers.

I completely concur with Peter Davison’s recent statement that the first movement of this symphony, the Andante comodo, is the best music Mahler ever wrote. It might well be the greatest symphonic movement ever written. But is it hard to conduct?

Read more…

The Bridgewater Hall- Mahler in Manchester

In American football, coaches learn that when a play is working for you, go keep going to it until the other team figures out a way to stop it. In this spirit, I’ve asked Peter Davison, whose previous contributions to this series ahve been so valuable and complimentary, for his thoughts about Mahler 9. The Halle, with their Music Director, Sir Mark Elder, will perform Mahler 9 as part of Mahler in Manchester on the 27th of May, 2010 in The Bridgewater Hall.

Burlesque and Elegy in Mahler’s Ninth symphony

I often think of Mahler’s Ninth symphony as his “New World” symphony, because it says good-bye to the familiarities of Vienna and tries to draw a line under the traumas of 1908. In that year, Mahler not only lost his position as Director of the Vienna Opera and went ot the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but he lost his first child and learned that his own health was detoriorating. For Mahler, composing was therapeutic. It was a way of getting to grips with the torments of his emotions and the sensitivity of his inner being. At the time of composing the ninth in 1908-9. Mahler had a lot of life experience to digest.

The Ninth symphony is often heard as valedictory; a work about Mahler’s own farewell to life, although there is little real evidence that this was his intention. There is certainly an air of resignation, but it is acceptance in a higher sense; namely he goes through a process of mourning to find inner peace. But as ever with Mahler, the music is never just about him, but a universal expression of compassion for the lot of man. Man is born to suffer.

So much can be said and has been said about the first movement of this work, that I don’t want to focus on it here. It is simply the best music Mahler ever wrote; a compelling essay on the human condition. It narrates the confrontation between Man’s aspiration to joy and hostile fate. It is suffused by anxious longing and, at times, paralysing fear. Yet within its enormous emotional and psychological compass, there is a perfect symphonic resolution. This begs the question – why compose three more movements after this at all?

Mahler was reluctant to let the format of the traditional symphony go much as he was attached to Vienna itself. But we can hear these three movements as a paranthesis to the first movement, i.e. Mahler’s explanation in more specific terms of what has been first presented as universal drama; like a Passion story in fact. But what do these three later movements express which illuminates the first?  The bitter irony of the Landler and Rondo Burleske are expressions of righteous anger. Mahler had lost his job in Vienna. He had been toppled from a great height by back-biting and gossip. We can hear these movements as depictions of the hustle and bustle of ordinary life, but increasingly devoid of any meaning. The Landler takes the most simple white-note motive, a rising C major tonic to dominant scale, and subjects it to serious violence. Only occasionally are there moments of sentimental longing to return to the innocence which this motive represents in its purest form. The movement marks a loss of innocence, so that urban life seem like a dreadful parody of true nature. There is grotesquerie, distortion and disintegration. What should be a dance of life-affirming joy has become the epitome of sardonic humour and ugliness. It is music of profound disappointment.

The Rondo Burleske takes this feeling a step further with its allusions to the flower movement of the third symphony and Lehar’s Merry Widow. All that is pretty surface is here blown apart by angry ripostes, resentful remarks and wicked asides. It is as if someone has walked into a Viennese salon and ripped down all the soft furnishings or thrown ink at the watercolours on the walls. The fugal voices of Mahler’s musical god, J.S. Bach, have here become transformed into a demonic crowd of carping critics who shout down the voice of truth. But who is angry with whom? This is a full-scale row with fingers pointing in all directions. We are in the thick of it; the pettiness, the squabbles, the absurdity of wounded egos and ruined reputations. Mahler knew he had allowed himself to be drawn into pettiness and that it had robbed him of his well-being. Mahler connected his personal situation with the universal truth. When we allow the small-minded to drag us down to their level, we become ourselves small-minded like them.

I made a discovery the other day while listening to the radio. I heard a work I did not quite recognise, but which nonetheless sounded very familiar. Then I realised why I knew it. It was the music of Mahler’s Rondo Burleske, but without its savage “wrong-note” irony. Instead I heard a pleasant rustic dance. At the end, I found it was from the Suite Pastorale by Chabrier – a suite drawn from ten pictorial piano works. This was the Dance Villageoise. Why would Mahler so obviously parody this rather ordinary work by one of the most bourgeouis of all 19C composers? But that is the point! Mahler hated the picturesque attitude to nature, because it could only see the surface of beauty and could never accept the wild, spontaneous and dark side of nature, nor its deep spirituality. The implication is that Mahler’s anger is being directed towards the hypocrisies of the bourgeouis culture around him. This is what had undone him in Vienna; why he had been so misunderstood. Mahler believed that he spoke with the voice of true Nature, and because he was uncompromising in that regard, Vienna had rejected him and his music. So the acerbic humour of the Rondo is aimed at his “Friends in Apollo”, as Mahler wrote in the score. It is a gesture of defiance against those who could only judge by the standards of formalism and surface beauty; the social conservatives, the power-hungry careerists and the simply ignorant. The Friends in Apollo were being given a lesson in angry Dionysian energy by Mahler preaching with fire and brimstone.

But there is something else to notice about this movement. It is a Rondo, and Rondos usually end symphonies by summarising what has gone before and resolving the drama with wit and playful detachment. Here the Rondo appears as a set-back. We have returned to a state of inner turmoil which seems to precede the first movement’s universal vision of tragic human destiny. It is a regression stimulated by worldly defeat and antagonism. There is no tragic dignity or soulfulness to be found, except in the fleeting anticipations of the adagio which emerge tantalisingly during the movement. Mahler may have had in mind Tchaikowsky’s Pathetique  Symphony which posits a false sense of triumph before a tragic slow-movement finale. But there is not much triumph, false or otherwise in Mahler’s Rondo. It is diabolical and cynical; music of angry and destructive protest “A plague on all your houses”….so to speak. Mahler knows deep down that he cannot stay in this hellish place. he must move on, put it behind him.

The work’s Adagio finale is then a refuge from this state of bitterness. Mahler searches deep inside himself to restores his soul to balance after deep trauma and hurt. This is expressed in the hymn-like opening of the movement. Mahler rediscovers some semblance of tragic dignity and reconnects with the atmosphere of the first movement. The unwionding of the inner tension comes through grief and mourning, through entering loneliness and confronting the most difficult questions. Mahler thereby finds some affirmation, by accepting loss and what life really is. But he must have found it hard to forgive or to be positive about a society that silences true nature; the child-like voice which is so often drowned out by the chatter of the world. He may at the end of this symphony have found some personal closure, but he was never again able to feel at home in Vienna.

Peter Davison

Postscript:

Anyone interested in listening to Chabrier’s Dance Villageouise can listen here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXpe2XqvYuU

I hear other Wunderhorn songs in this music: Lob des hohen Verstands and Das irdische Leben.You can imagine that Mahler may have identified a bourgeouis Frenchman as the ultimate falsifcation of true Nature (an opinion Wagner and Nietzsche might have held). Lob des hohen Verstands is about a donkey passing judgement on the music of the cuckoo and the nightingale. Das irdische Leben is about the mother who does not feed her hungry child; the the dark side of Nature, when it seems indifferent to the loveless predicament of her own off-spring. If anyone wants to speculate why Mahler has absorbed this work by Chabrier, please feel free to post your thoughts.

The Bridgewater Hall- Mahler in Manchester

Before and after the Mahler in Manchester performance of Mahler 8 last week, there has been a lot of discussion about what Mahler meant in this work by “the Eternal Feminine” and what, if anything, we should take as listeners from his dedication of the piece to his wife, Alma.

Today, Peter Davison takes a look at these and other questions, and helps us to understand what Mahler is trying to say with this extraordinary work

Mahler, the Eternal Feminine and the battle of the sexes

The Eighth Symphony is a work that causes a lot of controversy. Many find it a regression to the Wunderhorn style and that its optimism is insincere. The argument goes; Mahler wrote the Sixth symphony which was tragic, and the Seventh which was ironic, then he lost his way, before finding it again in the late works. There is a further layer which critics find hard to bear. Mahler dedicated the work to Alma after the crisis in their marriage, when he was trying desperately to impress her and win back her affection. The 8th seems mixed up with Mahler’s confusion about his relationships with women, which Freud diagnosed as a bad case of the mother complex. In other words, Mahler idealised women and sought from them unconditional maternal nurture which allowed him to remain in some sense a little boy. That’s simplistic, but there is some truth in it.

Mahler was not a mysogenist, quite the opposite in fact, but we might conclude that he was in some ways not very grown up about women. He inclined to assume (in common with many men) that women existed to love him, assist him and inspire him, but not to make any great claim upon him for their own sake or to have lives of their own. We might also suspect that this attitude is reflected in the 8th symphony, where woman – in the form of Gretchen – redeems Faust’s lost soul. She makes the sacrifice of forgiveness which heals Faust inner wounds, but Faust appears to have done nothing to deserve this loving generosity.

Mahler enjoyed the companionship of women – think of his sister Justine and his biographer Natalie Bauer Lechner. They were devoted to him. He also formed a tempestuous marriage with Alma who stirred something in him which resembled passionate love. But his feelings were mingled with his deep-seated hunger for the maternal affection and warmth that was not offered him as a child. Mahler’s mother was a troubled woman who saw in him a favourite son who could fulfill her needs and thwarted ambitions. When maternal love is loaded with such expectations, it can make a child very insecure and perfectionist. That child is often then hungry for the unconditional love that a Gretchen figure might have to offer. Freud was right to suggest that Mahler saw in Alma something of the perfect woman who could be mother, lover and muse.

How is this played out in the 8th symphony and does it matter? We can put a narrow personal interpretation on the work and use the Alma dedication to justify such a view, but Mahler was more visionary than that. He wanted to show us truths that have a universal application. The key is to see the work in terms of archetypes; the idealised forms and energies which operate in the human psyche. These are mythic charcaters which dictate how human personalities and human societies function and develop. The EternalFeminine, as Mahler stated often enough, is the archetypal symbol of Eros. That is the principle which binds things together and loosens the differences between things. It is associated with the feminine principle and encompasses what is indefinable and mysterious. This is in contrast to the masculine principle, often identified with Logos, which leads to the separation of things through discriminating judgement. Logos permits the creation of distinct forms, and it is when it comes together with Eros harmoniously that life becomes possible at all – as spirit finds form or a soul inhabits a body.

So although, in the 8th, we can easily feel justified to start a feminist diatribe about men expecting women to make all the sacrifices, we should probably take another view. Namely, the symphony is about men finding contact with their feminine side and learning to relate to it better. Faust is redeemed because he falls to ground – i.e. he loses his position of lofty male arrogance and must then come to terms with true nature and Eros from a position of humility before the femninine. Eros is then offered as a blessing and source of healing redemption. Life is generous to those who learns to worship the goddess as the symbol of life.

But one of the lessons of Eros, and perhaps the one Mahler struggled to learn, is that in real life women are not simply an embodiment of the Queen of Heaven. A woman is flesh and blood, not just a projection of a man’s soul. Most women will confess that it is nice if men show them respect and worship them a little. The majority of men like to do it too, if they have any soul at all. But the same women will also say that it drives them mad if they have to live up to that ideal all the time and not be valued for their humanity, which is as incomplete and imperfect as everyone else. That is a greater challenge in many ways than worshipping an idealised image from afar. Relating to another person depends on an understanding of what Goethe calls our dual-nature; that we are both human and divine.

Mahler’s symphony and Goethe’s poem are a great education in that duality. By this insight we can also better understand the stylistic differences between parts one and two of the symphony. In part one, we enter a constructed world – a world of conventional forms and clever counterpoint with many human voices all striving for unity, but remaining  separate nonetheless. Music is the spiritual force that binds people together. In this movement, divine spirit finds form n a masculine process that requires the acceptance of boundaries and limits to create order and stability. It is the realm of earthly Logos. By contrast, part two expresses Eros – where the form is freer and the music flows seamlessly as a series of transformative tableau where angels and mythical figures fly about freely. The soul sheds its earthly body, and the musical form seems to do the same. The music grows free of formal boundaries. At the end of the work, there is a feeling of homecoming, as if the collective human order of the first movement reemerges, but now in its original heavenly manifestation. Part one is then a kind of humanised version of the archetypal symbols in part two. The stylistic contrast suggests -  here below, that is earth…while up there, that is heaven. They are the same and yet totally different.

Goethe puts it well in those final lines of Faust when he tells us…all that we experience on earth is but a vague copy of what is in heaven. But here is the paradox. Music can only ever be a symbol of what is in heaven, so expressing a moment of transcendence such a this can only ever be a gesture. We feel a bit closer to heaven, but this is still music belonging to this earth. But because the freer romantic style mirrors a sense of release from worldly conventions and constraints, it allows Mahler to make his point. That is why at the end of the work, we feel Mahler is still straining to reach heaven just beyond his reach. Remember the end of the Fourth Symphony, where the text says…no music like this exists on earth…yet we are hearing this heavenly music on this earth, and we thereby get an intimation of what music from another world might be like.

So we don’t need to worry about the stylistic difference between parts one and two. It makes Mahler’s point about the difference between what is above and what is below, between the masculine and the feminine, Logos and Eros. Nor do we need to get into a tangle of political correctness about Gretchen and Alma. Mahler, like almost every man before and since, struggled to relate to women as they really are and not as he would like to them to be; that is to relate to women truly as a grown man and not as a boy. Equally, many women are often tempted to mother a man without realising that it perpetuates the problem of his immaturity. The problem works both ways. Mahler did at least understand what the essential and eternal aspects of the feminine are, and that is a head-start in resolving the battle of the sexes.

Peter Davison

Today we hear about the opening trumpet solo of Mahler 5 from the principal trumpeter of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Philippe Schartz. A former member of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra and a regular collaborator with Claudio Abbado, his most recent CD, “Trumpet Renaissance” on Chandos includes concertos by Artunian, Birtwistle, Roger and Jost with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Jac van Steen. A native of Luxembourg, he is the first continental European to hold a solo trumpet chair in a major UK orchestra in over 100 years.

“Mahler’s 5th Symphony begins with a solo Trumpet line.

Well, thank you Mr Mahler, for creating this amazing opening line/motive and dedicating it to the Principal – 1rst Trumpet chair in the orchestra. Mr Mahler recognized the extraordinary power of the brass section and thus created a supreme setting for the “Trauermarsch” that can be established with this strident instrument.

Every Trumpet player in the world is looking forward to perform this glorious opening and it is a great challenge to bring it off exactly according to Mahler’s instructions.

How’s that, you might question? The opening motive of the triplets cannot be that difficult to play etc, and yes, I agree it is only a few repeated notes, and arpeggio and a scale to play, but what Mahler is ( of course )  most notoriously famous for – among orchestral musicians and conductors – his defined and concise statements on how and when to execute  (almost) every note.

That paints a slightly different picture and I believe that the solo Trumpeters should try to satisfy this demand .

There are the many, many dynamic issues to focus on – it can be exciting to start as quiet as possible and then play each triplet motive a notch or so louder and subsequently back to a quieter triplet for the next phrase but not as quiet as the very first one ….  a lot of information to process at the very beginning of this epic five movement masterpiece.

Soon the rest of the orchestra joins the musical line and just when the first Trumpet believes it is safe to relax a bit – the next solo line is asking the Trumpeter to zing across the whole band and bring the opening statement to a sort of ‘coda’ where the opening triplet motive comes back, but this time in a downward fashion on the low side of the Bb Trumpet range and the Trombones are very happily taking over.

Every performance is going to be slightly different though despite all the many instructions from Mr Mahler and most principal trumpeters have their own concept of the opening.

Would it be possible to go back in time, I would go almost immediately try to knock on Mr Mahler’s door to kindly ask if it would be possible to hear Gustav sing the opening motive for me.

Personally I can’t wait to perform Mahler’s 5^th Symphony again.  It is a technical and  challenging solo Trumpet line at the start -, but there are so many solo Trumpet lines in this symphony and in all of Mahler’s works for the Trumpet. So I will try not to think about the limitations of my instrument but about the amazing musical idea and try to create the right atmosphere with dynamics and colours in my sound. And if all goes well, I will also try to get close to perform with Mahler’s imaginative singing voice in my head.

For the next few days, interested listeners can hear the Radio 3 Broadcast of Mark Elder’s performance of Mahler 5 with the Halle as part of the Mahler in Manchester festival.

Of course, Mahler 5 begins with one of the most difficult trumpet solos in the repertoire- it places quite unique musical and psychic demands on the player. I thought it might be fun to get the thoughts of two of my favorite trumpet players on this notorious solo.

James Smock has been principal trumpet of the Oregon East Symphony since 2005. In addition to leading the trumpet section for all of our Redneck Mahler concerts during my tenure there, he has been a busy soloist around the Pacific Northwest. In November of 2009, he gave the premiere of William Berry’s Cycling Music for Trumpet and Strings, and recently soloed in the Shostakovich Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings with the Yakima Symphony.

Of James’ playing on the OES performance of Mahler 5 last March, one of his colleagues in the orchestra said “James sounds like a cross between Maurice Murphy and Jesus.”

My first experience of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony was at college. Some friends invited me to a concert and I’d never heard the piece. The opening solo immediately caught my attention (it had to – I’m a trumpet player). I bought a cd (Ricardo Chailly conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra) and listened to it every day for a month.

The opening excerpt has been one of those interesting excerpts that flip-flops between being one of the best things I play and being the bane of my existence. I prepared this excerpt for years before I ever got a chance to actually perform it – I’ve spent hours in practice rooms trying to get it just right, I’ve sneaked into halls and gymnasiums to hear my sound in a big boomy space, I’ve by now heard thousands of renditions of the same solo. It’s been kind of a big deal.

It’s still for me certainly a big deal on stage.

The placement of the solo at the very beginning of the symphony is a bit daunting: you aren’t already playing the piece — you must sound the call into a void of expectant silence. You have to create the tonality yourself. No one else is playing a thing. The funereal trumpet call begins and starts again — I hear it as a poorly-muffled sob. It grows in intensity, cresting in a full blown wail, all the while retaining a martial character. It’s a lot of depth to convey in just a few seconds.

Not to mention that the solo is not played how it is written. Despite performance instructions which indicate the solo is to be “strict”, and “in measured pace”, the opening rhythm is actually to be rushed a bit (at least, that’s what Mahler seemed to have in mind – recordings of him playing this passage on the piano all sound this way). It may seem harmless enough, but to a musician who has been admonished to play exactly what’s on the page it can be problematic. And just how exactly are you supposed to choose between what he wrote and what he played?

For this solo in particular, I appreciate it when the conductor just signals my entrance, lets me play, and cues the orchestra’s entrance. Chances are good I’ve already spoken with the maestro about his concept, and we’ve come to an agreement. The extra stick-waving can be distracting.

The solo is only a few seconds long. Those few seconds seem to last a really long time; when the rest of the orchestra comes in at the phrase’s climax the feeling of familiarity rushes back, and it becomes easy to enjoy.

Hi everyone

As you know, Sunday night was Mahler 8 night in Manchester. I don’t do reviews, but I can tell readers a little about the concert, if you are content with just the facts….

Who was playing in the orchestra?

The combined forces of the BBC Philharmonic and Hallé. The orchestra was pretty evenly split between the two bands, but used a normal-sized string section. BBC Philharmonic players sat as principals in the strings, while Hallé players mostly sat principal in the winds. So, flute 1-3 were Hallé, 4 and 5 BBC Phil and so on, through the horns, where 1-4 were Hallé and 5-8 Phil. Trumpets and trombones were the exception, with the BBC’s folks playing principal. Strings alternated by stand, so the first stand of 1^st violins were the BBC’s leader Yuri Torchinsky and Midori Sugiyama, the second desk was Hallé and so on.

How was the orchestra set up?

Read more…

The Bridgewater Hall- Mahler in Manchester

Sir Mark Elder conducts the musicians of the Halle and the BBC Philharmonic, the Halle Choirs and the CBSO Chorus as well as a starry line up of soloists this Sunday, May 2nd in a performance of Mahler’s Symphony no. 8

Five flutes, four oboes and cor anglais, three clarinets with e-flat and bass clarinet, four bassoons and contrabassoon, eight horns, four trumpets, four trombones, bass tuba, timpani, bass drum, tam-tam, triangle, glockenspiel, tubular bells, celesta, piano, harmonium, organ, two harps, mandolin and strings. Off stage brass ensemble (at least four trumpets and 3 trombones). Two large mixed choirs, boy’s choir, girl’s choir. Vocal soloists- 3 sopranos, two altos, tenor, baritone and bass.

As I’ve noted many times, all of the Mahler symphonies are huge undertakings, and each is a big challenge for all of the performers. If there is a general consensus that Mahler 7 is the hardest to play and conduct, I’d think there is unanimous agreement that Mahler 8 is the most challenging to put on.

I suppose such an observation is self-evident, but it really is astounding how much more pre-concert planning and problem solving this particular work takes than almost any other piece in the repertoire.

I suppose the first question one has to confront when planning a performance of Mahler 8 is where to play it. Some orchestras decide to use their home venue, while others move to a new space. Either choice can be problematic. When the LSO did their Mahler cycle, they performed the 8^th in St Paul’s  in London instead of their regular home at the Barbican. The advantages were obvious- there is plenty of space in the church for a vast audience was well as all the legions of performers, and there is something inspiring about playing such a profoundly spiritual work in one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. You know this piece will look and feel right in that space. On the other hand, that space has an exceptionally reverberant acoustic, and the 8^th is one of the most contrapuntally complex works in the entire repertoire. As soon as the decision was made to go there, Gergiev said his primary concern was how to make the textures work in that building. It was no  small challenge to make the performance sound as right as it felt in there.

But staying home can create other problems. One orchestra I worked with in Ohio did the piece in their home venue, a very grand converted movie palace (many American orchestras, including groups like the Oregon and St Louis symphonies play in these beautiful if problematic halls). In order to make room for all the performers they had to build a huge stage extension, bringing most of the strings into the auditorium, and had to remove the usual acoustic shell to make room for more choir risers, which meant they could only use some portable baffles to wall in the performing space. It was a great performance, but paradoxically, it was the smallest the orchestra ever sounded. With nothing over the strings, their sound floated off into oblivion, and the wind and voice sorely missed the presence of that shell.

When I covered the piece with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales a few years ago(my first gig in this country), more than half the audience seats were filled with singers- it made for a tough ticket to get and a sense of occasion, but surely such an expensive piece wants as many paying customers as possible.

Wherever you end up playing, you’ve then got to figure out how to make the most of the space you have. Some conductors put the soloists on the front of the stage next to or behind them, while others put them on a platform between the orchestra and choir. With 9 soloists instead of the usual four, sightlines are a huge problem if you have the singers on the front of the stage, and this is a piece where they need to see you. The piece is just too rhythmically intricate for everyone to listen and guess. On the other hand, if you put the singers in back they can probably see well, but they’ll be getting a face-full of French horn and may not project to the audience as easily.

Then, you have to figure out where to put the off-stage brass. It’s a pretty stunning effect at the climaxes of the work when all those extra brass join in  from the balcony, unless you’ve paid a fortune to find yourself sitting next to a trumpet in the audience. Ideally, you want to find a place where the brass can make a big noise in the auditorium without being too close to anyone in the audience. Likewise the amazing solo soprano entrance from in the hall- you need a place where she can just appear. You don’t want the audience to be aware of her sneaking in, and ideally, you don’t want anyone sitting so close that they don’t get the impact of the moment.

So, long before the first rehearsal, the conductor, orchestra manager and stage manager will have had long conversations about risers, layout and spacing. Diagrams will have been drawn and plans made for getting hundreds of choristers on and off stage.

Then you’ve got to organize your team. Mahler asks for two huge choirs and a children’s choir. While many orchestras have their own choirs, few have the numbers or the resources to field enough good singers to do justice to the piece. That means bringing in another choir, which probably means sorting out buses, hotels and meals. It also means sorting out rehearsals. Who is going to prepare the choirs? Chances are the conductor of the performance can’t make many weekly rehearsals, so it will have to be a choir master. Will it be the same person for both (all) choirs? Is the director of the guest choir happy with such an arrangement? If it is different choir masters for each choir, how can one avoid learning incompatible approaches? It’s hugely important early on in a piece like this for the conductor to make up their mind about language and pronunciation early, an issue slightly complicated by the fact that Part I is in Latin and Part II in German. Will German or Church Latin be used for “Veni Creator?” One can’t afford to be sanguine and just assume that any differences can be ironed out at the final rehearsal. When BBC NOW did the piece, the guest choir missed almost a whole rehearsal because of a huge traffic accident. If they’d been counting on that time to sort things out, disaster would have ensued.  If you’ve got the budget, it is worth hiring a language coach (or possibly 2!). If you’re singing Goethe, you should get the German right.

Once you know who will be singing in the choir, it’s on to who will be singing the solo parts. Here it gets even tougher. Seven out of 8 parts demand big voices- regardless of where they stand on stage, it’s no joke being heard over such a vast orchestra and chorus. Mahler’s not the first composer to ask for big voices- think Wagner, but I don’t think anyone before or since has asked for such intricate ensemble work from so many singers with those kinds of voices. To vastly oversimplify the problem, lighter voices tend to be more flexible than heavier ones, so it is easier for someone with a moderate sized voice to blend and tune in an ensemble setting than someone with a huge instrument, all things being equal. Beethoven 9 is also a piece generally cast with “big” voices, but it only uses a quartet and there is much less ensemble work. Still, how many times have you heard a great quartet mess up that last chord before the coda?

So, you need 7 really special singers who can project but blend, carry off a big moment as a soloist and function in an ensemble. Mahler also takes advantage of the extra numbers to create the illusion of a super-singer who never has to breathe, which means you need, for instance, two extraordinary sopranos who can also match each other’s timbre perfectly. That you may have to cast them without hearing them in person, and almost certainly without ever hearing them together makes it even more fun. How tough is this? Pretty tough, and it’s almost always a messy process. I’ve never known another piece that made so many singers “sick” (as opposed to actually sick). The pressure in this piece is huge- everyone knows it will be an event. Then a singer gets to rehearsal and realizes its beyond them (this often happens with the poor tenor, who has a ferociously tough part) or beyond one of their colleagues. Last time I covered the piece, out of 8 soloists, only 4 in the concert were there at the first rehearsal, and there were another 4 or 5 who only came to one rehearsal (or never made it past the coaching with the pianist).

Then there’s that 8^th singer- Mater Gloriosa, who appears in the balcony at the most magical moment in the work . It is the softest and shortest of solos, and the most painfully exposed. It needs nerves of titanium reinforced steel, as there is no chance to warm up, no big moment to win back the public after that one entrance, and nowhere to hide. You can bet any artistic planning team tackling this piece will have a list of about 30 possible Mater Gloriosas, as you never know if your 1^st, 2^nd or 10^th person will feel up to it. When I was last covering the piece, we’d all but given up on it (there were jokes going round about the assistant conductor having to sing it) when at the 11^th hour soprano Gail Pearson appeared, almost as miraculously as Mater Gloriosa herself, and nailed it to the wall.

Speaking of the assistant conductor’s role in all this- I’ve done it a few times, and it’s quite a workout for the assistant. There are lots of balance issues to sort, some conductors may even want you to conduct a bit while they go and listen (then they must peel you off the podium when you refuse to leave). Some times you might be asked to coach the singers, although some singers won’t be coached by a mere assistant (although this is normal in the opera). I once came in for a coaching with orders to talk the soloists through a couple things before the maestro arrived. The first soprano bounded up to me and gave me a big hug and said she wasn’t expecting to see me this week. When she saw me take up my post, she then said- “Oh” (actually, it sounded more like “ewww”) “I’m afraid I thought you were ….somebody….” Ah well, I may not have been anybody then, but she’s a washed up nobody now.

The assistant might also get to conduct the offstage brass in the concert. That’s not a job I covet, although it is far less difficult than conducting the offstage band in Mahler 2 (which is about as tough as it gets). If you look at the film of Bernstein’s Vienna performance, there is an assistant flailing madly in no particular tempo next to the brass who calmly ignore him. My concern at that moment would be for Lenny, or whoever else is on the podium. If your assistant is backstage screwing up, you might never know, assuming your brass are experienced enough to ignore them. If you turn around to the balcony and see someone flapping around like a coked up baboon, just at the greatest moment ever, it can cause severe stress.

So, as big a test as it is for the performers on stage, Mahler 8 is a huge test for orchestra managers, fixers, carpenters, lighting technicians and everyone in the orchestra office, all of whom have to make ten-times more crucial decisions than they normally would for such a piece. And, no matter how well-organized it all is, there will always be some drama with a project like this. Problems will have to be solved, crises will have to be averted.

But just think for a moment of this Mahler 8, where two of the country’s best orchestras are working together. How are all those decisions being handled? Who is responsible for the string seating and who is responsible for booking soloists? Who has organized the offstage brass? Who is the contact person for the out of town choir? That two big organizations can collaborate well enough to pull this one off is pretty amazing.

I finally managed to make it to one of the Mahler in Manchester concerts this past weekend (in spite of my blog project, I’ve had concerts of my own every previous concert night). Happily, this time I had a rehearsal in Manchester, so I was able to catch Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic giving a quite stunning performance of Mahler 7.

Almost as interesting as the performance were the conversations before and after. There was a small army of rather distinguished composers about, as well as critics, Mahler nuts, broadcasters and other serious listeners. While everyone seemed unanimous in their praise for the performances, the work still sparked some rather pointed conversations- particularly the famous Finale, which still seems to shock and baffle.

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The Bridgewater Hall- Mahler in Manchester

“The Founder of the New Symphony as I understand it”

Gustav Mahler on Hans Rott

Let’s face it- we conductors will do just about anything to sell a record or promote a concert. And there is nothing that attracts more media attention than a good controversy.

Witness this week’s latest tempest surrounding Paavo Jarvi’s comment (listen here)  that Mahler’s incorporation of material from Rott’s Symphony in E Major marked “a historic crime… a historic case of plagiarism, today Mahler would be sued for plagiarism” (Thanks to Jens F Laurson @ IonArts for getting the conversation started)

There are many primers on Rott and Mahler available if this s ubject is new to you. Try this, this or this.

Was Mahler a plagiarist who refused to perform Rott’s Symphony in order to hide his guilt? If you think for a second that Mahler was somehow hiding his debt to Rott, please re-read the quote at the top of this essay….

In my opinion, no, and, for all I admire Paavo, I think he’s got this one completely wrong (I can’t believe he intended to be taken literally in any case), as do a fair number of Rott’s over-zealous fans.

Mahler’s music is saturated with references to the music of other composers, including Brahms, Beethoven, Lehar, Bach, Wagner and many more. The fact that he did not specifically mention the quotes from Rott is not unusual or important for him- he never did so with any of the hundreds and hundreds of references and shout-outs throughout his works. On the other hand, he was far from apologetic about these connections to music of the past- as Peter Davison pointed out last week, he often used programming to underline these connections. I can’t imagine any musician or music lover missing the obvious connection between Wagner’s Meistersinger Overture and the Finale of the 7^th Symphony, but Mahler still made the point of programming the Wagner as  a warm up for the 7^th.

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