His Time Will Never End
Living in Gustav Mahler's future
If He Could See Us Now
This day, we celebrate the birth of Gustav Mahler. Leonard Bernstein wrote in 1967 that Mahler’s time will come—echoing Mahler’s own comment about himself in respect to what was Richard Strauss’ popularity in his own era—and did so much to make that happen. But Mahler never went away, it was Western culture that moved away from him and what he represented for a few decades after WWII. The monstrous horrors of the war turned material and high culture in the West away from extremities of emotion and expression and toward the coolness of abstract painting and serial music. Shostakovich was composing through Mahler’s legacy, but his social and political circumstances were entirely different than those in the West, and music like the Velvet Underground, formed in the middle of the period when Bernstein was recording the first (and his first) Mahler symphonies cycle, were much closer to the composer than anything happening in new music.
But the constant lesson about hiding or controlling emotions is that it can’t be done forever. Eighty years of pretending that technology has brought humanity to a better state of being have failed, viciously. Mahler speaks so immediately and viscerally to the soul that we’ve been rediscovering (thanks, Lenny) what we’ve been missing in human nature. Mahler doesn’t appeal to everyone, there is a too-muchness that can be overwhelming. But all he has to do is make his way inside you once, that’s it. Once you feel Mahler, he creates a space in you that never leaves nor diminishes. You don’t have to listen all the time, but you’re either all in, or not at all.
There are no casual Mahler fans. His music is just too personal, encompassing, and enthralling for mild attention. There is just too much going on, all of it clear because of his incredible skill, dense and massive scores where every single detail matters and makes the music what it is. This page from Maurice Abravanel’s notated score of Symphony No. 2 has things like the cello part, where they play an eighth note then a sixteenth with a sixteenth rest, because Mahler needed that tiny bit of space and also the accented lift from the bows off the second note—meanwhile, there are four other distinctive musical ideas going on:
You can’t have it on in the background. It demands attention and touches the experience of obsession. He is so personal and so honest and so honest about not understanding himself, that all the stylistic elements of fin-de-siècle Vienna sound modern, in contrast to Strauss. I love Mahler and loathe Strauss because the latter is both frequently insincere about himself and has the bourgeois pretense that, with enough material wealth, life isn’t complicated.
When Mahler appears outside of the stereo or the concert hall, it’s always startling, it always signals a secret sharing between yourself and people—unknown—who, like you, know that the music can say things beyond our ability to describe our thoughts and feelings, like in this scene from near the beginning of The Gambler (1974):
I’m not the only person to see this movie, but I’m one of those people who was riveted by the Mahler needle-drop because it’s Mahler, and I know there are others out there who felt the same sensation in their spine, the crystal shining in the mind,
The written and spoken word, in books, onscreen, in person, can only convey one idea at a time in a possible sequence of ideas. Music can convey multiple ideas in a single instance, and can completely change the meaning and mood of those in an instant. And no one has ever expressed a vaster and deeper multitude of ideas, and juxtaposed mercurial and instantaneous conflicts between them, like Gustav Mahler. He is the ne plus ultra of modern artists.
Listening
You don’t need to know every recorded cycle of the symphonies, you don’t need to painstakingly construct a hybrid cycle with the best individual recordings of each work (I’ve done both and am thankful now that I’ve been able to slowly sell off Mahler sets through Discogs). While if listen regularly, I think it’s impossible to have only one collection in your library, there are very good ones that would satisfy any Mahler fan:
You can’t go wrong with Bernstein’s first cycle, with (mostly) the New York Philharmonic. He recorded the music again, live, for Deutsche Grammaphon, all live recordings spread across each of Mahler’s orchestras, the Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and Vienna Philharmonic, and that set is also excellent and important beyond the conductor himself (as I’ll detail below). Choosing between the two as whole sets is almost impossible, but I have an overall slight preference for the first (The earlier set does not include Das Lied von der Erde, but you can supplement that with the recording he made for Decca with the VPO, James King and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau).
With money and patience, it’s possible to pick the best from each for a superb cycle from one Bernstein, my preferences would be:
Symphony No. 1, DG with the Concertgebouw
Symphony No. 2, DG, NY Philharmonic
Symphony No. 3, Sony, NY Philharmonic
Symphony No. 4, Sony, NY Philharmonic
Symphony No. 5, DG, Vienna
Symphony No. 6, DG, Vienna
Symphony No. 7, Sony, NY Philharmonic
Symphony No. 8, Sony, London Symphony Orchestra
Symphony No. 9, DG, Concertgebouw
Das Lied, the Decca, for the VPO and Fischer-Dieskau
There is a superb box from EMI that I strongly recommend, which is their 150th Anniversary Complete Works on 16 CDs at a terrific price. What is great about this one is the label chose their leading recordings from various conductors and ensembles. It doesn’t suffer from the pitfalls of one conductor’s strengths and weaknesses in the repertoire. There is Otto Klemperer’s famous Symphony No. 2, Jascha Horenstein’s Symphony No. 4, Klaus Tennstedt’s live and gripping Symphony No. 5, and John Barbirolli’s extraordinary Symphony No. 6 (and much respect for EMI passing on Barbirolli’s No. 5, which is terrible and has been overrated for decades). And this is all of Mahler, including Das Klagende Lied, the A minor Piano Quartet, and Deryck Cooke’s completion of Symphony No. 10.
The Complete Works is a cornerstone on which another set can stand. That could be Bernstein, but there’s a real sleeper pick too, which is the cycle from Gary Bertini and the Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester. This one is So. Fucking. Good. Live recordings, great sound, great playing, and great thinking—not a weak or weird moment. Everything feels so right and deep, without exaggeration. Bertini doesn’t identify himself with Mahler, as Bernstein did, but he sees who Mahler is. This is sadly currently out of print, but when it has been in print it’s always been at a bargain price, so if Warner ever reissues it, get it. You may have it on your shelves next to Bernstein, and reach for Lenny out of habit, but if you ever put these ones on, they will be hard to take off. So, so, so fucking good.
Deep Cuts
The thing about Mahler is that even though nowadays pretty much every orchestra can play the notes, not many know how to play the music. I was spoiled living in San Francisco when Michael Tilson Thomas turned that orchestra into a great Mahler ensemble and started recording his own cycle (which is fantastic, by the way, but expensive). Being back in New York for now almost twenty years, I’ve heard a lot of different orchestras play Mahler, including the entire symphonies played by the Staatskapelle Berlin under Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez, a memorable Ninth from the Berliner Philharmoniker and Simon Rattle, a wonderful Symphony No. 2 with the Czech Philharmonic and Semyon Bychkov, a fantastic Fifth from the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal and Rafael Payare, and Simone Young filling in at the last minute for Jaap van Zweden and leading an incredible Sixth with the NY Phil. I’ve also seen Yannick Nézet-Séguin deliver an absolutely horrible, doltish Symphony No. 7, and a well done Ninth that also demonstrated that while the Philadelphia Orchestra has a beautiful sound, they don’t have a Mahler sound.
The Phil and Gustavo Dudamel played the best Seventh I’ve ever heard to end this season, and that and a new collection from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s RCO Live label, Gustav Mahler - The Chief Conductors Edition, had me thinking about that Mahler sound, and Mahler playing. The Phil is literally Mahler’s orchestra, he was music director here in 1909-1910, and he had important associations with the Concertgebouw and Vienna Phil, and also the Czech Philharmonic. These orchestras all have the Mahler sound, they began playing his music when it was new and have held onto his expressive and technical concepts as part of their institutional memory.
The marvelous thing is they each sound so right in Mahler, while also sounding different. Czech string playing has a special quality, and the woodwinds get Mahler’s rusticity; Vienna’s unique tuning glows, and they are suave as hell; the Phil is spiky and sinewy, energetic NY neuroticism; while the Concergebouw is colors and richness. Dudamel underlined that the best Fifth/Sixth/Seventh are by the Phil, they get that life-or-death crisis, while the European orchestras are fabulous with the “Wayfarer” Symphonies. The Eighth and Das Lied depend on the singers, and everyone is great in the Ninth.
What is important about this Chief Conductors Edition is that it’s a great Mahler orchestra playing with the conductors’ strengths. Riccardo Chailly leads Symphony No. 1, and there’s no better combination. His Fifth is excellent, Bernard Haitink leads the Sixth, Mariss Jansons the Seventh, Haitink is back for the Ninth and Das Lied. These are dream pairings (Chailly conducts the Cooke Tenth).
Daniele Gatti is at the podium for a terrific Symphony No. 2, but not everything is a modern recording. Symphony No. 3 is a 1957 performance, with Eduard van Beinum (and Maureen Forester), and Symphony No. 4 is from 1939, Willem Mengelberg conducting and Jo Vincent singing in the last movement. I think this is the single finest Mahler Fourth ever recorded, absolutely the most individual, Mengleberg gleefully pushing and pulling at the music in a way that’s a reminder of how classical music playing was a hell of a lot wilder than we’re used to hearing through the homogenization of styles via modern recordings.
Now, back to Bernstein on DG vis-a-vis this set: that’s a great Mahler conductor (though perhaps not always at his best), with three great Mahler orchestras. It’s close to the ideal way to hear this music, which what makes this RCO set so notable and enjoyable, i.e. an orchestra with different conductors in their best music. The Phil produced their own version of this, The Mahler Broadcasts 1948-1982, which is tantalizing but frustrating, because though it gathers a variety of conductors, none are at Bernstein’s level! His first cycle is better! Ah well.
The Czech Philharmonic’s cycle, with Vaclav Neumann, is also very good. That leaves out the VPO. With Mahler so important to the orchestra’s history (and also a fraught part of antisemitic history in Vienna), I’m sure I’m not alone in saying we need a comparable collection of VPO Mahler concerts with various conductors (the orchestra operates without a music director). But while many orchestras have their own labels, the VPO seems uninterested in its own recording history and archives. Considering how history is viciously catching up to us, that’s an intriguingly ambivalent situation. Mahler-esque, even.
Don’t forget to tune into WKCR for their 24-hour Mahler birthday broadcast today. And good listening to all.