It would be easy to spend all my remaining time on thinking about Mahler and Bach and the
whole topic of counterpoint which, especially from the Fourth Symphony onwards, was to become
one of his most prominent compositional techniques. It was indeed in the Fourth, precisely at the turn
of the century, that Mahler's preoccupation with counterpoint first manifested itself in a passage like
the one that I will play you in a moment, from the development of the first movement of the
symphony, in which Mahler's motivic polyphony is revealed at its most intense and its most brilliant,
brilliant in sound that is. One can not, in fact, make any distinction between the sound and the
counterpoint. The success of the latter is entirely dependent on the clarity secured by the former;
which allows me to return to a feature that I mentioned way back, the revolution Mahler effected in
the relationships between the constituent sections that in former times made up the homogeneity of
the symphony orchestra. Here's the passage I have in mind, in which once again the wind deliver a
high proportion of the developmental — that is to say, contrapuntal — argument:
MUSIC EX. NO. 5
Symphony No. 4, first movement, Rehearsal Figure 14 (double bar) bar 177 to Rehearsal Figure 16, > out by bar 211 or thereabouts.
The complexity and intensity of the counterpointing there makes it all the less surprising that a few
years on Bach should be more overtly acknowledged by Mahler in his late works as well as in his
performance repertory; and this reminds me not to depart from this topic without reference to what
remains for me one of the most original and far-reaching materializations of Bach in Mahler, in the
great 'Abschied' of Das Lied von der Erde, where I have suggested, and passionately repeat now,
that behind that movement stands Bach and his Passions and his cantatas, music well known to
Mahler. This I believe explains how it is that he so astonishingly confronts us, almost at the very
opening of the movement, with a recitative with minimal orchestral accompaniment plus flute
obbligato; while thereafter, as the 'Abschied' proceeds, it proves itself to be what to my mind is
virtually a self-contained cantata for solo voice and orchestra:
MUSIC EX. NO. 6
Das Lied von der Erde, 'Der Abschied', Rehearsal Figures 22 – 23, bars 158 – 165.
I don't need to be told that that's a million miles from Bach. The great gong stroke alone makes that
clear, that we are in another world; but rooted in Bach, and generated by Mahler's unique absorption
of Bach, which took no account of intervening centuries, the 'Abschied' most certainly is, in my
considered view. What makes it all the more extraordinary in thinking about Bach in the context of
Das Lied, is the fact that in this very same work Mahler opens up yet another path which I believe
may find fulfilment in the new, the twenty-first, century, an encounter this time not with a past, and in
some respects as I have said an unfamiliar past, but with a future, in which two world cultures, East
and West, if one may be permitted such a preposterous generalisation, may find a mode of mutual
creative collaboration. We talk a great deal these days about globalization, for the most part its
commercial evils; but what I am thinking about is the new resources in terms of compositional
techniques that the West has learned from the East, while there has been no little traffic in the
reverse direction in more recent decades. In this field too it seems to me that Mahler was undeniably
a major pioneer. I am aware of the fact that as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, there
was immense interest in the West in all the arts and crafts of the East, in painting, above all, but also
in design, music and literature: Chinoiserie and Japonoiserie were key cultural buzz words in this
period. But it was by no means all buzz and the acquisition of exotic knickknacks. In music there
was specifically Debussy and the impact made on him and his compositional processes by his
encounter with a Javanese gamelan at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1899, and there was a
decorative spin-off from a pursuit of Orientalism that we often find in Ravel and Stravinsky. Mahler
himself, I think quite knowingly, introduced the decorative into Das Lied; an example is the charming
pentatonicism of 'Von der Jugend':
MUSIC EX. NO. 7
Das Lied, 'Von der Jugend', from start to Fig. 4, bar 29 > .
That's the kind of pentatonic tune that we all knew as children and hammered out on the black notes
of the piano. Part of Mahler's intention, I believe, was to use this relatively familiar musical idea, with
its ready-made association with the 'Orient', as an indication, easily heard, that we are to be
encouraged to enter, to experience, quite literally, another world. The overt pentatonicism spells that
out immediately and audibly for audiences; it — so to say — sets the scene. However, when we
begin to delve more deeply into the work, and into the techniques that are ultimately responsible for
the unique experience it vouchsafes, we begin to discover features of the techniques Mahler deploys
much more thoroughgoing in their 'Orientalism' and more innovative in their essential character than
the decorative profiles of 'Von der Jugend' or 'Von der Schönheit', though the latter movement soon
reaches out and way beyond the merely decorative.
One of the ways in which it does so is to embark on an exuberant canon, to describe the
young men on their horses who crave the attention of the girls picking lotus alongside the river.
Interesting, is it not?, that counterpoint once again emerges as a prominent characteristic. Canon, of
course, is a specific contrapuntal device in the West, with a long tradition behind it; moreover, it
occurs with increasing frequency in Mahler's late phase of composition, in the last — the two late —
Wunderhorn songs, for example, and in Kindertotenlieder. It is also prominent in one of the four late
Rückert settings, 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen', a magnificent song which so often seems
to anticipate the style — no, 'style' is not adequate — the very language of the 'Abschied' in Das Lied.
It brings to mind the movement's coda in particular, in which the ecstatic polyphony of 'Die liebe Erde
allüberall/Blüht auf in Lenz . . . und ewig blauen licht die Fernen!' is finally released. (Mahler's own
words colouring the pitches, by the way, not Hans Bethge's.)
I think we can summon up for ourselves the peculiar radiance with which the 'Abschied'
concludes, without resort to a recording. What I should prefer to concentrate on for a moment is 'Ich
bin der Welt . . .'. It is important to remember in the context of the Rückert settings that the poet
himself was also a distinguished Oriental philologist. It must have been the case, though not often
remarked upon, that Mahler's absorption of Rückert would have prepared him for his immediate
creative response to the volume, shown him by a friend, of Hans Bethge's German language versions
of Chinese poems, poems that Mahler was later to use for the composition of Das Lied.
There is not only this significant literary link with the Orient by way of Rückert , pre-dating Das
Lied, but — and more importantly — there are pronounced technical features of the Rückert settings,
an overt pentatonicism, for example, that already prefigures the pentatonicism we meet again in Das
Lied. But more important than this, I believe, is the character of the relationship between voice and
orchestra in 'Ich bin der Welt . . .', a relationship Mahler was systematically to develop in Das Lied
and, as you will now hear, one which is generated by an extended canonic interplay between the
singer and his accompaniment:
MUSIC EX. NO. 8
'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen . . .', Fig. 3 – Fig. 6 > on cor anglais.
It is impossible with the benefit of retrospective hindsight not to hear there that Das Lied was, so to
say, just round the corner; but it is not, I want to suggest, just a matter of a shared spirit of resignation
— call it what you will — that unites the 'Abschied' and 'Ich bin der
Welt . . .', but the deployment of canon as the principal vehicle, the means, to achieve that expressive
end; and it is precisely in this area, I believe, that Mahler and the Orient join hands.
To be sure, canon had been a long-standing preoccupation of Mahler's — one only needs to
think back to the 'Frère Jacques' movement of the First Symphony, the Funeral March, which opens
with a round, a canon. Some might argue, then, that there is nothing very surprising about canon as
a device surfacing, though in a much more elaborate form, in the late songs and in Das Lied. The
surprise rests, I believe, in the fact that we also find in Das Lied a type of counterpoint, a form of
contrapuntal activity, with a long tradition behind it in the East, in the Orient, heterophony; and I want
to leave you with the thought that it is canon that provides a communicating bridge between the two
musical cultures. Heterophony is in effect a unison melody simultaneously combined with different
rhythmic versions of that same basic melody, often delivered at the octave, above or below. That is a
very simplistic explanation of a technique that in South East Asia produces a polyphony of
extraordinary rhythmic and textural complexity. It is, if you like, a challenge to musicians to see how
much can be got out of a unison. It is by no means without parallels in Western tradition, for which
very reason there is no doubt to my mind that heterophony in its Eastern guise has proved to be a
technique that beckons to the growing number of Western composers interested in exploring the
resources of the East; and it does not surprise me at all that composers with a pre-disposition to
think canonically — that is, to exploit the possibilities of a melody that can, at a given distance and
appropriately transposed, be combined with itself — should find heterophony particularly appealing.
Such, I want to suggest, was certainly the case with both Mahler and Britten, to name only one later
composer of genius who in his later years voyaged Eastwards on the wings of heterophony.
So it is, that Das Lied, in its course, juxtaposes both canon and heterophony, the latter notably
servicing the impassioned first movement, 'Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde', with counterpoint
that it can have been no accident has its roots unequivocally in classical Oriental practice. Mahler will
take a motive and then, even though sticking to the same pitches, will create a voice and orchestra
polyphony out of the combined statements of it in different rhythms and, not infrequently, octaves.
One would never guess that so few pitches
PIANO
'Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde', bars 1 – 16, horns, strings.
could produce music of such velocity, drama and passion. What you are going to hear is the end of
the development section of the movement and the transition into the recapitulation; and I promise
you that on close inspection you will find the texture is crammed with heterophonic practice:
MUSIC EX. NO. 9
Das Lied, 'Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde', from Fig. 39 (double bar), upbeat to bar 325 to Fig. 44 + 6 > on voice, out by bar 369.
You will have noticed that at the exact moment of the recapitulation in the song the pentatonic
idea that we have heard at the very onset returns. Nothing decorative about it or the uses to which it
is put. I can't help, since I'm near a keyboard, but remind you that Das Lied ends unforgettably as it
began, with the same pitches, now conflated into a chord that combines the A minor of the first
movement with the C major and added sixth, the chord that concludes — or rather, doesn't conclude
— the 'Abschied', the chord that for Benjamin Britten was a sonic image of eternity, though not
eternal life perhaps so much as the perpetual renewal of the earth.
PIANO
'Der Abschied', bars 568 – 572.
So it is then, for all the reasons that I have tried to touch on, I regard Mahler's last songcycle
as one of the first and most substantial, because creative, encounters between East and West in the
twentieth century. It is simply not enough to think of Debussy alone as playing the principal historical
role at this moment in time. Mahler has to join Debussy, Vienna has to join Paris. A profound cultural
trend was located not in one European culture, but in two, cultures which, quite wrongly to my way of
thinking, have so often been considered culturally opposed, a misjudgment that has led in turn to
much cultural confusion.
In this specific context, it is ironic indeed that Berlioz, from whom Mahler learned so much,
has never been wholly accepted by the culture of his own country as an integral, 'authentic', part of it;
while Mahler, for so long dismissed in France post-First World War as an all too authentic
manifestation of 'Germanic' tradition, has won, post-Second World War the acclaim and acceptance
in France that he commands elsewhere. I shall have more to say about this cultural question a bit
later.
I have focused so far on only one major dimension of Das Lied, but of course there are many
others which like the Oriental dimension were to cast a long shadow on and into the twentieth
century. Mahler raised the narrative power and scope of the songcycle to new heights in Das Lied,
not to speak of the remarkable formal innovation of the first movement, 'Das Trinklied', which unfolds
an Exposition and its (varied) repeat, a Development section, and then, via a lead-back, a
Recapitulation, a basic scheme we would not normally associate with what concept of a songcycle
but rather with the classical and romantic symphony. Das Lied, following the formal paths opened up
in Kindertotenlieder, conjoins symphony and songcycle, at least until the 'Abschied' when the
narrative drama — no less than a transition from anticipations of mortality to death itself and its
transformation in turn into renewal — required new forms to embody the new thought and feeling
which characterize the 'Abschied'. Let me leave you with the reflection that the story of Mahler's
three orchestral songcycles is not one whit less innovative than the much more often told story of the
symphonies and the suggestion that much more serious consideration should be given to the sub-title
Mahler bestowed on his last songcycle: 'Eine Symphonie'. Das Lied, in my view, can not be
separated out from the history of Mahler's symphonies and their ever newly evolving forms.
I sometimes think of Mahler's works — the totality of them — as constituting a kind of mythic,
epic Praeludium to the twentieth century in the sense that wherever one turns, to whichever work one
turns, it is virtually impossible not to hear outlined, somewhere along the way, an unmistakable
anticipation of a significant technique, the opening up of new formal paths, of significant areas of
expression to fresh exploration and fresh inspiration, by which the new century was to be motivated.
I fear I may already have tried your patience, and if I were to attempt anything like
comprehensiveness then you would find me taking up more or less permanent residence here in
Boulder. Festivals would come and go but not I: I should become not a Phantom of the Opera but a
Phantom of the Festival whose distinguishing feature was that he never stopped talking.
More seriously, I am conscious that time passes, and while there are still a number of topics
and issues that I want to bring in train as further evidence of Mahler's unique unveiling of routes that
were to lead directly to the new music of the new century, I have tried to choose items that, from my
point of view, are relevant to the other part of my brief: what, in the twenty-first century we should be
doing for Mahler, not in any sentimental sense, but to ensure that succeeding generations have a
reasonable expectation of hearing his works in performances that realize, to put it not too ambitiously,
what can be convincingly suggested were the composer's intentions when he wrote them.
I have said a fair amount already about Mahler's concept of the orchestra but perhaps have
not given sufficient emphasis to one of his most striking contributions to the history of the orchestra,
his creation of the idea — the concept — of the chamber orchestra. I believe that historically we have
to attribute that quite specifically to the concert, a 'Lieder-Abend with Orchestra', given in Vienna on
29 January 1905, in the small hall of the Musikverein, when the programme included not only the first
performance of a group of Wunderhorn songs but also the première of Kindertotenlieder, the second
of the orchestral songcycles, along with the first public hearing of the four independent Rückert
settings for voice and orchestra (one should write, in truth, for four differently compiled or constituted
orchestras!) The programme was repeated, with minor variations a few days later, and then taken to
Graz, some months later, where it formed part of the 'Tonkünstlerfest', whose director was Richard
Strauss. It was in an exchange of letters with Strauss that Mahler momentously announced that his
songs should be performed, 'in the manner of chamber music [Kammermusikton]; and as is now well
known, for the concerts I've just mentioned, he insisted on small halls with a correspondingly intimate
acoustic. To be sure, this development, with hindsight, had already been anticipated in what I have
earlier described as Mahler's deconstruction of the orchestra into a collective of orchestras or
ensembles; to take that process one step further and, moreover, to write of it so unequivocally, was
doubtless a consequence of practices that had been part of his orchestral thinking across the years
which gave birth to his symphonies.
Once again the influence of Mahler's 'Kammermusik' precedents exercised a direct influence
on succeeding generations of composers who embraced and absorbed the Mahler legacy and his
specific aesthetic of the orchestra, composers, some of whom might be thought even to have been
the very antithesis of Mahler in personality and aesthetic intention and ambition: Stravinsky, for
example, or Bartók, or Hindemith. But once again it is not 'influence' as it is generally understood
that I am talking about, but practice and principles embodied in compositional techniques which later
proved to serve composers entirely distinct in style and belonging to contrasting cultural traditions. I
return here to a point I made earlier, the inhibiting assumption that cultures with a specific national
identity have about them a built-in, hands-off exclusiveness; if it is a French tradition you have in
sight, then look elsewhere if it is an Austro-German tradition that you want to zoom in on. But the
truth is, as I've tried to show in the case of the Orientalism of Das Lied, this was an event that
traversed cultures, unthinkingly supposed to be mutually exclusive: Paris or Vienna, Mahler or
Debussy. The concept of the chamber orchestra encountered no culturally imposed or imaginary
borders.
And while on the topic of the convention of supposedly opposed cultures, when the artificial
image of one culture has excluded comprehension and identification with the other, it is relevant
perhaps to introduce into our discussion the composer I describe as the Italianate Mahler. At first
sight or sound this may seem to be a conjunction that makes little sense; but only to those, I suggest,
whose closed minds and ears preclude their hearing, say, during a performance of Verdi's Otello or
Aida a whole range of inspirations and influences that in the course of Mahler's lifetime were to leave
their mark on his music. It is certainly not without significance that, in a conversation with Bauer-
Lechner, he acknowledged his own debt to Verdi in the field of orchestration. But it was not by any
means Verdi alone, whose operas he knew so well from conducting them, who was the source of
Mahler's Italian connection. Among many others there was also Bellini; and it is Mahler in Bellini-
mode who surfaces unforgettably in the Eighth Symphony in the famous Adagissimo, when Mater
gloriosa swims into view — strings and harp — and Mahler wittily and consciously lapses into Italian
for his summons to the strings to play their ecstatic melody sempre molto cantando!
By far the clearest exposition I've ever read of the culturally impeding mindset I mentioned
earlier — Paris v. Vienna (or Berlin) — is to be found in an early, sardonic essay by Marcel Proust,
published in Les Plaisirs et les jours, long before he embarked on his monumental novel, A la
recherche du temps perdu. Here is just part of an exchange between two imaginary friends,
Bouvard and Pécuchet, whose names Proust pinched from Flaubert, one of his great predecessors.
One of them — Bouvard —is a resolute Wagnerian. In fact he has never heard a score by that
'Brawler of Berlin' as Wagner is described by Bouvard's anti-Wagnerian friend, Pécuchet, himself
'always patriotic and always misinformed' (as Proust caustically remarks). And why was this?
Because the Conservatoire — and remember Proust was writing in the 1890s — the Conservatoire,
the equivalent in Paris of the Vienna Conservatoire which Mahler attended, was 'dying of routine
between the stutterings of Colonne and the lispings of Lamoureux' (these last were two of the
principal concert-giving orchestral societies of the time in Paris). Proust's 'dying of routine' inevitably
brings to mind Mahler's 'Tradition ist Schlamperei ('Tradition is sloppiness').
The absurdity of the exchange of cultural insults is exposed when Pécuchet wades in: 'In spite
of the efforts of all your fine gentlemen' — the Wagner camp, that is — 'our beautiful country of
France is still the country of clarity and French music will be clear, or there will be no French music'.
Pécuchet, Proust continues, 'would strike the table with all his might to emphasize his words' and
release yet further volleys of abuse: 'I doubt if the Valkyrie is even liked in Germany . . . but to
French ears it will always be the most infernal torture, and the most cacophonic! and, let me add, the
most humiliating to our national pride'. And so on, and so on.
This, let me hasten to remind you, is Proust in sardonic mode. He was himself a passionate
Wagnerian; the Ring indeed was to have a demonstrable influence on the organization of his own
epic masterpiece. But he is making in the 1890s a highly serious and combative point about the
collisions between images of national cultures which bear little resemblance to reality, and — of
particular relevance to what I'm saying today — were often used as instruments of aggressive
criticism. For example, I can remember reading as a schoolboy in a compendium for music lovers,
first published in 1934, and running through countless reprints, sentences prompted by an
assessment of Mahler's Eighth, the last sentence of which reads — I'll spare you what precedes it —
'In this work and in Schönberg's Gurrelieder . . . the megalomania of Central Europe reached its
apex'. Wow. Not just a megalomaniac composer but the whole of Central Europe. It makes odd
reading now, does it not?, but it also shows how obsessive and inimical to rational thought the
reaction against German Kultur had become.
To be sure, in the wake of the First World War, we have to recognize the force of the reaction
against the arts, and music especially, of Austro-Germany. History and Politics and Nationalism all
combined here to form a kind of united front against a tradition which in many fields had indeed
reigned supreme for centuries. No doubt this was an insurrection that had to happen and was in fact
to have some remarkably fruitful creative consequences. It could be argued that it was, historically
speaking, a necessary liberation. But the supreme oddity of it, the irony of it, was the tarring of
Mahler with a brush that was simply wide of the mark — 'grandiose', 'monumental', 'megalomaniac',
'megalithic', 'monomaniac', 'grandiloquent', 'mammoth', etc., etc. This was a vocabulary that once
was commonly used to describe the character of Mahler's musical personality; and although those
days, thank God, have passed, it is still possible to run across it here and there. The irony to which I
have just referred was compounded by the general ignorance of the music which was dismissed so
boldly, and above all by the woeful failure to realize that almost everywhere in Mahler were to be
found signs and seeds and indeed deeds of the very counter-revolution that was being espoused. It
is a remarkable fact that, a few enlightened heroes apart, there was no general understanding that
Mahler in his lifetime was in truth already part of that future which we now ourselves inhabit.
Pierre Boulez, without doubt, is symbolic of the change in cultural attitudes that has evolved
during the last half of the twentieth century. He is one of the most radical creative figures post-
Second World War, French and in the best sense an apostle of 'French' culture; but in addition, he is
not only an admirer of Mahler but a fascinating interpreter of the symphonies, or of those at least to
which he feels close. False cultural distinctions have at last been erased, it seems, and there is a
kind of superb logic about the fact that at the end of the century in which Mahler died we were able to
hear his works conducted by a one-time leading advocate of twentieth century modernism. I think
Mahler might have relished the logic of it; it might even have reminded him of his own cross-cultural
espousal of Debussy during his last years in the United States. (I wonder however what Proust's
Pécuchet might have made of Boulez conducting the Ring at Bayreuth! Just think of it — a
Frenchman!)
This may have proved too lengthy a digression, but I think the relevance of it will strike you
when I return to the topic that started it all off: the birth of the chamber orchestra that was an integral
part of Mahler's later vocal music, which he came to regard as representing his Kammermusikton.
And bearing that in mind, and all that I've said earlier about his deconstruction of the orchestra —just
remember that each Wunderhorn song, each Rückert setting, in fact has its own orchestra,
independent of its companions — and if one checks the reality of his orchestral imagination, of his
sound, against the fictitious dismissal of him as a post-Wagnerian burdened with the mammoth
baggage of an exhausting and exhausted past, one is then brought face to face with one of the most
grotesque misconceptions that not so long ago plagued the reception of Mahler's music. And if I
have chosen to concentrate on the idea of the chamber orchestra, it is, I repeat, because that
concept often represents for composers of today and doubtless tomorrow the orchestral ideal, the
ideal sonority, that in the past it was the function of the symphony orchestra to provide.
Now, we live in a period when all the Mahlerian battles may seem to have been won.
Performances abound across the globe, there is a world audience for Mahler, an unceasing torrent of
recordings: so why don't we just sit back and feel good? But it is precisely here, in the performance
field, that I think there are battles still to be won. For example, to stick for a moment to the chamber
music issue, it is of vital importance that now we have clear evidence of how Mahler wanted his
songs performed, we should act upon it. I pay tribute here to the dedicated work done in this sphere
by Renata Stark-Voit and Thomas Hampson in Vienna which has made accessible archival
information about the string forces involved in Mahler's 1905 premières of his songs. In my
estimation, this results in a revelation of the songs themselves, of their unique, chamber-like sound,
above all. I have been active myself in this area in very recent times and have had the luck to work
with two conductors in Europe, Riccardo Chailly and Kent Nagano, in trying to secure performances
that respected what we must believe to have been Mahler's radical reduction of the string body; and I
can assure you that the contrast with what has been standard performance practice is extraordinary.
There are a couple of recordings on the way that I hope will claim your attention when they
are released; in addition, they are recordings which have taken into account the voices that Mahler
seems to have had in mind when composing the songs. I am not for a moment suggesting that we
should close our ears to a Janet Baker performing Kindertotenlieder because Mahler composed the
cycle for a baritone: that would be idiotic. Nonetheless, it can never be other than helpful to
performers to know what was the 'ideal' voice Mahler heard in his imagination when composing his
songs. Of one thing one can be absolutely certain; he would have preferred an inspired contralto to
an indifferent baritone. I must add finally that although progress is being made, for a performance I
heard not so long ago in the Royal Albert Hall in London, the young and indisputably talented
conductor on the podium, and himself a great Mahler enthusiast, had not done his homework. The
platform to my prejudiced eyes, seemed to be awash with strings and the result, to my equally
prejudiced ears, was horrible.
So it is, then, that I believe all of us who have something to offer in this field should take a
New Year resolution at the beginning of the new century to do what we can to secure performances
that are authentic in this sense, that they try to recover the freshness, boldness, unpredictability,
surprise and sheer shock that we know formed part of the impact the symphonies made on their first
hearing.
It is precisely these sometimes intendedly disturbing qualities, shock in particular, that I fear
the now worldwide consumption of Mahler, the flood of recordings, the iconic status among aspiring
conductors that the symphonies have attained, combine to put at risk. (No conductor it seems can be
taken seriously these days if he does not have, along with his baton in his knapsack, the ambition to
record a complete cycle of the symphonies.) I exaggerate, of course; but there is to my mind a real
danger of a cosmetic blandness, a softening, disguising, smoothing over, in short a blunting of the
sharp edges and thereby making acceptable a corpus of music that the composer more often than
not wanted to arouse discomfort, anxiety, disbelief, pain, ambiguity. Here again I want to suggest
that Mahler was far ahead of his time: the intent, the capacity to shock, was to become one more of
those leading features of the twentieth century that he had substantially anticipated. Alas, in later
decades, the 'shocking' in the arts, often deteriorated into triviality. Mahler in fact was no stranger to
triviality; but he used it, characteristically and creatively, time and time again, as a means of caustic
commentary on slovenly expectations and the threadbare feelings that accompany them.
Everyone here I am sure is familiar with one of the most famous examples in all Mahler of his
capacity, his intent, to shock by a highly original manipulation of the seemingly trivial in a context in
which audience expectations would have led them to expect something quite other. I believe it was
part of his strategy not to produce an unprecedented shock of his own but also —though this may
have been an over-optimistic ambition — to remind his public that they had got into the habit of
receiving a 'Funeral March' whether by Beethoven, say, or Wagner, as just another piece of lovely
music, just the thing for a comfortable Sunday afternoon in the concert hall. (Mahler was an enemy
of habit.) We all know the saying that familiarity can breed contempt. I'm not sure it was contempt
exactly that Mahler had as a target, but rather a whole culture whereby audiences ceased to respond
to, to be aware of, even, the challenge that many masterpieces from the past had originally
presented. It was to correct this corruption induced by familiarity that I think was at least part of his
intention in his First Symphony, in the slow movement, which he permitted to be described as an
'Andante grottesco' [my emphasis] in an early performance that he conducted himself. But I guess
no one at all could have been prepared for what they actually heard themselves listening to. These
opening bars of the movement remain one of the most discussed passages in all of Mahler:
MUSIC EX. NO. 10
Symphony No. 1, slow movement, from start to 4 bars after Fig. 4. > on continuation of lower strings' entry.
It is my conviction that that performance, from which my excerpt comes, marvellously realizes what
Mahler wanted his audience to hear, yes, to be, shocked by; and I expect many of you will have
recognized the recording itself, where Dimitri Mitropoulos conducts the Minneapolis Symphony
Orchestra — a recording that belongs to 1940 and, as far as I can determine, the first recording to be
made of the symphony. A historic recording from more than one point of view. That wiry, truly
grotesque, out of tune sound, has nothing 'beautiful' about it, certainly nothing solemn about it; and if
we can think back to 1889, it realizes, I believe, what was Mahler's intent, to challenge his audiences'
assumptions about what a Funeral March ought to be. But that much about the First Symphony's
slow movement has been said often enough, and I don't want to try your patience by repeating it.
Instead, I pose a question: how often in fact do we in a performance of the First in our own day hear
from the solo double bass anything that remotely resembles what we've just heard from that rightly
celebrated Mitropolous recording?
It might amuse you to know that when working with one of the major European orchestras on
the First, an orchestra renowned for its Mahler performances, I spent a long time trying to persuade
the principal double bass, an outstanding young player, to persuade him — no, to stop him
beautifying that opening solo and thus stripping it of its intended character and above all of its power
to shock. Here was a living example of that unconscious process of cosmetic beautification that I
believe to be a creeping threat to the genuine authenticity of Mahler performances today. There was
no ill-will on the player's part, simply an inability —and this in itself is an interesting point — to shed,
even temporarily, all that he had ever been taught about playing the double bass. You will recall that
I mentioned way back the extraordinary advances made in instrumental techniques by the sheer
difficulty and novelty of what Mahler habitually demanded of his players. Eventually they rose to the
occasion, met the challenges, and in so doing, they not only advanced their techniques but also
generated the tension that was, I'm sure, characteristic of performances that Mahler conducted
himself. It was of course a tension that in the very first place was an in-built component of the
musical ideas themselves. Nowadays, all these challenges have been overcome. Orchestral
virtuosity flourishes, and there is no denying that Mahler's own works played a fundamental role in
creating it. But it brings its own perils, and I hope in this century, as it progresses, we can campaign
against the smoothness and blandness which can often contradict the very contradictions with which
Mahler wants to confront us.
The Funeral March from the First is, as a whole, a locus classicus in Mahler's oeuvre, replete
as it is with so many examples of innovations that were to form the basis of his unique world of
experience, and most of which were to have a role to play in the music of the generations of younger
composers who succeeded him, irrespective of their national origin. In my doubtless untidy way I've
mentioned quite a few of these influential anticipations of how the twentieth century was to sound;
but one could scarcely move on from the Andante of the First without noting that it was here that
Mahler seriously launched the concept of the vernacular — after all, the movement opens with music
from a vernacular repertory, the 'Frère Jacques' round or catch, relocated however in a disorienting
minor key — a bold strategy that led to an extraordinary expansion of the language and resources of
romantic music that was indeed Mahler's inheritance. His feat in incorporating into the symphony so
many kinds of vernacular musics — my plural is deliberate —that had hitherto been kept out in the
cold, obliged to keep their distance, cannot be over-estimated. It is surely the case that he broke
down more cultural barriers, in purely musical terms, than almost any other composer one can think
of, certainly of his generation. His music, to put it perhaps rather oddly, is class-less in the materials
it deploys, and traverses the spectrum of the diverse musics — from the streets, concert halls,
theatres, parade grounds, dance halls and ballrooms — that serviced the society of which he was
part. It is surely that comprehensiveness, that huge inclusiveness, that must be one of the reasons
for the breadth of appeal his works have proved to make to a global audience itself of incalculable
diversity. (I think, by the way, this was a point very well made by Robert Olson in his introductory
note to the Festival Programme Book this year.)
Mahler and the vernacular is another huge subject in itself. Those of my generation will
remember that one of the earliest criticisms of him was aimed at his unconscionable 'vulgarity',
because, I assure you, that was how his innovative deployment of the vernacular was almost always
heard in the past. This alone goes to show the kind of cultural barriers that had to be brought down
before much progress could be made in comprehending the kind of realities with which his music
confronts us.
And of course there were many different kinds of vernacular realities that Mahler dealt in;
'Frère Jacques' is only one of them in the movement from the First we're thinking about; for instance
there's the street band, complete with obligatory bass drum and cymbal, that erupts mid-stream, a
vernacular intrusion that is one of the earliest examples again of a process that was to become ever
more important throughout Mahler's life, what I identify as his preoccupation with the mobility of
music, of music approaching, intruding and receding; music as it were overheard by a stationary,
captive audience at every conceivable distance, near or far; music that approaches, passes us by,
fades; one music that picks up the thread of the discourse while another music altogether, in its own
rhythm, marches off.
Mention of this mobility reaffirms for me the absolute necessity, often lost sight of in present-
day concert performances, of striving to realize Mahler's array of dynamics, which so often are
directly related to this concept of mobility both within the orchestra and without. And here I am bold
enough to suggest that a work like Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen, in which three diversely
constituted orchestras are strategically located around a concert hall and the sound each group
generates either passed round, so that the music is in continuous motion — continuously mobile — or
heard simultaneously in different combinations of the groups — Gruppen, I suggest, could never have
happened without the precedents for mobility, interplay and simultaneous combination first explored,
consciously, as an aesthetic strategy, by Mahler. The exploitation of acoustic space has to have a
high place in any accounting of his excursions into a future that has become very much our present.
It may also strike some of you as far-fetched to introduce the name of Webern into the context
of this talk, though we should always remember that he was an ardent advocate of Mahler during the
composer's lifetime; and after his death was, from all reports, a remarkable Mahler interpreter, of the
Second Symphony in particular. He was, too, in the audience in 1905 at that memorable 'Lieder-
Abend' in Vienna which I have mentioned so often for one reason or another. In any event, my
approach to the Webern/Mahler compositional relationship is one that I believe has not often been
remarked upon: their joint deployment of a positive deluge of dynamic markings. If one scrutinizes
almost any typical page from one of Mahler's symphonies, especially a highly active page, with a lot
going on, one has to conclude that the proliferation of teeming dynamics in fact represents — almost
— an independent compositional dimension. I am not just thinking of the distinctions of fortes and
pianos, but subtle gradations of sound that articulate distance, not just in an on-stage/off-stage
dichotomy but within the orchestra, e.g. the layering of dynamics between simultaneously combined
parts. This process, which I think was initiated and developed by Mahler across the decades,
undoubtedly left its mark on Webern, whose dynamics — often at the extreme end of the pianissimo,
for which Mahler again provided him with ample precedents — took the process several stages
further forward; and the result of that was the systematic ordering of dynamics to form an
independent compositional parameter along with all the other components of composition — pitch,
rhythm, motive, etc., etc. — an ultimate evolution which characterized the music of the European
avant-garde post-1945.
Having raised this issue of dynamics —but it was Mahler who raised it first! — it seems only
logical to pursue it for a moment in the context of the performances I still hope to hear as the twenty-
first century progresses. It has only been during the last few years, when I have had the good fortune
to be involved in performances with orchestras, conductors, soloists — the whole performing
apparatus — that I first became aware of the difficulties that Mahler's multiple dynamics pose. Trying
to persuade an orchestra to play really softly, achieving the triple or quadruple pianissimo that Mahler
sometimes calls for, is very hard work. The players may have the best of intentions and for a handful
of bars they may produce the ideal sound; but sustaining an intense pianissimo for any length of time
is one of the most challenging technical feats that they have to face: the rigour, the concentration,
slackens, and all too soon they revert to a blank, featureless mezzo piano or mezzo forte.
Mahler especially in his last years was a master of sighs and whispers, especially for the
strings. Just because these passages — the closing bars of the slow movement of the Ninth, for
instance — are dramatic, albeit the manifestation of a fragmenting interior or spiritual drama, and
because Mahler himself helps the players by his disposition of his fragments among divided strings,
the composer's dynamics are often scrupulously realized in performance. But to turn to a much
earlier work and to a relatively simple — in principle —example, how often have any of us heard the
final stanza of 'Das himmlische Leben' in which the orchestra — and the soloist too — deliver the
triple pianissimo that Mahler calls for? I'm sure that the performance of the Fourth we're going to
hear as part of this MahlerFest will not disappoint us; but I stress, this example I've chosen is not a
matter of pedantry or poetic sentiment but, rather, a crucial illustration of the overall narrative role
that Mahler's dynamics can play as integral part of his symphonic thinking, spelling out the
relationship between dynamics and overall form. This is, for sure, the transcendent movement in the
symphony, both a moment of revelation (so this is what heaven is going to be like) and the end of a
long and complex narrative initiated by the symphony's opening bars; the goal has been reached,
but it is not only the end that has been achieved but a final clarification and justification of the
otherwise ambiguous beginning, the point (B minor) we started from, embodied in the hushed
affirmation of E major which it is the business of the last stanza of the concluding song to render. In
all of this the role of the given but so often disregarded dynamics have a vital role to play. The more
we have to strain our ears to hear what that last stanza is telling us — and away with any notions of a
false naïveté or the importation of a child's treble — the closer we get I am convinced to what Mahler
wanted. I recognize that this demands a lot of time and hard slog from conductor, singer and players,
but the rewards of a barely audible pianissimo are transforming: it comes as a shock of a totally
unique kind. And it's because shock is almost always associated with loudness, an explosion, a
crescendo, that I deliberately focused in on the transfiguring pianissimo that should bring 'Das
himmlische Leben', and with it the symphony, to a close.
Mahler, I need hardly tell you, also knew how to summon up music of an exceptional intensity
that is also exceptionally loud, though here again there are multiple distinctions to be made between
the degrees of loudness that he calls for and which, no less than his pianos and pianissimos, demand
not just the closest scrutiny but precise realization if we are to hear his orchestration in depth; and
dynamics are intimately related to textural depth.
I emphasize once again the relationship in Mahler between organization of dynamics and
form. The first movement of the Ninth, one of the basic documents of twentieth century music, is built
I believe round a dynamic concept, the idea of a recurring crescendo that leads to a climax, each
repetition of which grows in dynamic intensity until, almost literally, the music — the movement —
explodes, detonates, and falls to pieces; the process of re-forming — picking up the pieces —
constitutes the movement's unforgettable transitions. In the case, then, of one of the formally most
innovative of all Mahler's first movements, its form is dictated by its dynamic. I might be accused of
over simplification, but it is my conviction that in this movement, my early schoolboy experience of
which left me physically shaken, shocked, such was the impact of it, Mahler, as no one else before
him — perhaps it is only in Wagner that we might uncover a precedent or two — systematically
exploits the hyper-expressive potentialities of just one dynamic marking — the hairpin — the
crescendo. That, ultimately, tells us all we need to know about the principle that generates the
movement's unique form.
You will have noticed that shock has been one of many sub-themes of this talk today; and it is
not surprising that I find I have returned to that topic in the context of Mahler's dynamics. That the
wheel seems to be turning full circle suggests that it is time to begin to draw this already long enough
session to a close. But before I do so, please bear with me while, with my last few examples, I try to
complete the circle. For a start, it seems to me that the capacity to shock was already part of
Mahler's burgeoning creative personality, already a weapon in his strategic armoury, at a very early
stage, in fact in his first major work, the cantata, Das klagende Lied. In recent years we've been able
to familiarize ourselves with the first version of the work, in performance and a recording, along with
the hitherto unpublished score of the Erstfassung. The passage I'm going to play you from the
original second part of the cantata is interesting judged by any standards, the more so if one bears in
mind that it is an eighteen-year-old composer we are listening to. Here already is Mahler exploring
the mobility of sound that figures high on my list of his contributions to twentieth-century music. But
in this particular instance, taken from the first version of Klagende Lied, he introduces something in
addition to mobility, in fact an engagement between two tonalities a semitone apart, C major, for the
off-stage ensemble of trumpets, timpani and cymbals, and C flat major, for the main orchestra. To be
sure, these are relatively brief confrontations and fall short of a fully fledged polytonal collision. John
Williamson has wisely remarked that the passage resists conventional analysis if only because of
Mahler's obvious intention that 'the two musical streams should not coalesce into a single harmonic
field'; and to add to the dis-synchronization, Mahler has the off-stage ensemble in 3/4 and the main-
stage orchestra in 4/4. Let's hear the early precedent for so much of what was to come later in
Mahler's music, the exploration by diverse means of acoustic space:
MUSIC EX. NO. 11
Das klagende Lied, Erstfassung, orch. score, Part II, 'Der Spielmann', fade in from bar 219, fade out bar 230 (interventions of off-stage ensemble).
These days we may not find that so much of a shock; but remember, that music belongs to 1878-
1880. What I wonder, or who, was Mahler's specific model? And if there were one group of people
(Brahms and Goldmark among them) it did shock, it was almost certainly the members of the
Beethoven Prize Committee to whom he submitted his score and by whom it was adjudicated and
rejected in 1881. It could well have been a passage like the one we have just heard that proved the
final straw. But we also know, fascinatingly, that when Mahler returned to the cantata to revise it, he
was astonished to find, in his own words, 'the Mahler whom you all know was already fully and
instantly developed at that time'; and promptly christened it his Opus 1. To be sure, that C major/C
flat bit he came to omit; it is my guess that when he came to look at it years later, he decided that if it
were going to be done at all, then it would have to be done substantially, not fleetingly; and revision
on that scale would have raised all kinds of other issues, proportion, duration, and above all the
coherence of the overall language, which, we must never forget, he had only finally arrived at while
he was still in the process of composing the cantata. But the passage remains evidence of Mahler's
bold, experimental spirit, even at so early an age, and I should not have been happy to ignore it.
Moreover, the off-stage/on-stage dichotomy he was to retain, reserving it for the finale of the cantata,
where the intrusion of the off-stage music — festive noises off — on the chilling moment of revenge,
of catastrophe, represents the first manifestation in Mahler of his ironic juxtaposition of two seemingly
mutually exclusive genres of music to comment on the tragic dénouement of the drama, to intensify it
indeed.
To follow that excerpt from Mahler's first major work, I want to end, yes, really end, with music
from Mahler's last symphony, his Tenth, so at least I can pretend to have traversed the full
chronological span of his life's work. When talking about the first movement of the Ninth I made the
point that Mahler raised the idea of the crescendo to new expressive and formal heights. In this last
paragraph and example, before I attempt to sum up, I want to concentrate on just one chord which to
my ears in itself represents in Mahler's oeuvre a unique attempt to concentrate within the scope of a
single vertical conflation of nine different pitches an expressivity that one might be forgiven for
thinking in earlier times would have demanded a whole movement to match the explosive discharge
of feeling that Mahler accomplishes in one massive vertical gesture, which — just in case we don't
get it first time round — he sustains. Dissonance abounds in Mahler; but this I think is the most
radical moment of dissonance we encounter in all of his music, and it fiercely articulates what was to
become, indeed was already becoming, the most revolutionary of the leading features of the music of
the new century: the Emancipation of the Dissonance, to use a famous phrase of Arnold
Schoenberg's, which heralded, for some at least, the eventual abandonment of tonality. Here in the
Tenth Mahler reveals himself in the throes of that process of Emancipation, which as it developed
was fundamentally to change the face, the sound, of music:
MUSIC EX. NO. 12
Symphony No. 10, first movement (Cooke edition), bars 203 – 213, quick fade.
The means by which Mahler achieves the intensity of that vertical explosion are themselves of
particular interest, given the preoccupations of the period in which the Tenth was written. For a start,
the chord conflates nine out of the available twelve pitches of the chromatic scale; I was amused only
the other day to read a respected music critic in London writing about Mahler's '12-note chord' in the
Tenth as evidence of his anticipatory genius. I think he can be forgiven his error, for there is no doubt
that the sonority the pitches produce remind one powerfully of similar gestures in the non-tonal
Expressionist period of Schoenberg's music, before the 12-tone system was born out of that historic
emancipation, a system itself born out of the need to impose order on the freedom that had been
unleashed.
It has interested me too that in this same movement Mahler's treatment of his melody,
especially in counterpoint with versions of itself, irresistibly bring to mind the treatment of the row —
the potentialities of the row — as spelled out in the 12-tone system. I am far from suggesting that
had Mahler lived longer, he would have found himself pursuing, consciously or unconsciously, strictly
Schoenbergian paths. But it remains remarkable, I think, that here and there in the Tenth one can
not but be aware of these anticipations of a future that, for a time at least — a time I believe that has
now passed — seemed to offer the possibility of a new language for music.
But that was a future Mahler was not to experience. Let me return to the chord for a moment,
the extreme, violent expressiveness of which brings Mahler into the style we identify as
Expressionism, one of the best definitions of which was made by Webern in 1912 when defining the
role of the theme in Expressionist composition. There can be no development, he claimed, no
repetition: 'Once stated, the theme expresses all it has to say'. Substitute 'chord' for 'theme' — 'once
stated, [the chord] expresses all it has to say' — and one understands precisely why Mahler's nine-
note chord makes the overwhelming impact it does. It is Mahler exploring the expressive possibilities
of radically heightened dissonance, embodying it in one overwhelming gesture, and undeniably
thereby making a bit of musical history at the same time. Perhaps we might hear it one last time?
MUSIC EX. NO 13
Symphony No. 10 (Repeat of Mus. Ex. No. 12)
Music of that order of surprise and power, demands silence rather than words. On the other
hand, what could be more appropriate to a Mahlerian occasion like this than a coda? So let me
attempt a summing up with as few repetitions as possible.
I'm conscious that there are many avenues I've left unexplored. But to try to cover a lifetime's
work and omit nothing would require a talk of a lifetime's duration. Mahler however has not only been
a generous enricher of generations of successor composers in terms of techniques, forms, and the
manipulation of sound, from near inaudibility to towering walls or waves of sound. He has in addition
— and I know that I speak for many here today —immeasurably enriched the lives of those of us,
who may not be composers or performers, but in whose lives his music has played a leading role.
For me, and I suspect many others, he has been one of the great interpreters of experience, that is,
the experience of being human and being alive, with all that implies in terms of triumph, tragedy,
sorrow, happiness, anger, despair, desolation, reconciliation, innocence, humour, love. Is there
indeed an aspect of the human condition that Mahler has not, as it were, translated for us into sound,
into music? That is a criterion by which we recognize genius and esteem it. Nonetheless, I can not
call to mind another composer quite so all-embracing in the sheer range of experience that Mahler so
astonishingly demonstrated from the Klagende Lied to the Tenth; and I am sure that it is that
comprehensiveness, along with the arsenal of techniques he invented to service it, that is responsible
for the phenomenal global reception his music now enjoys.
But for that to continue, at the level of comprehension and reception that I would fervently
wish to see it continue, we should, all of us, I believe, pay attention to some of the issues of
performance that I have raised as a subtext throughout this talk. It is one important thing to recognize
how profoundly creative and innovatory and fruitful was Mahler's influence on the preceding century;
it has proved to be a truly staggering legacy. The best way of trying to repay the consequent debt
that we owe his genius is now, I suggest, to give much more thought to how his works are performed,
above all to their interpretation.
I have long been convinced of the importance of the relationship between analysis and
interpretation and I believe there is a growing desire among conductors, among them some with a
special feel, a special talent, for Mahler, to bring off an 'authentic' interpretation. A much used and
abused word but I use it to mean the re-igniting, or perhaps better, re-discovery, so far as is humanly
possible, of the inspiration that originally gave birth to the work, and thereby established its unique
character. A lofty ambition I agree, but analysis must I believe be the first crucial step in the journey
towards achieving that end.
It has always seemed to me a great flaw in the training of musicians — at least, it is so in
Britain — that analysis, in the sense that I ascribe to it, plays a very minor role in the syllabus. The
unbridgeable gulf that supposedly separates performers from 'academics' is still very much an
inhibiting presence. In my ideal educational world, young conductors, and above all aspiring
conductors of Mahler, would have the chance to approach analysis conceived of, not as an
'academic' exercise, but as a means of practical enlightenment, the sole aim of which is to provide
the performer with the information which, will enable him or her first to comprehend and then to
realize the composer's intentions. That of course requires extensive study of the works, perhaps in
particular from angles and approaches some of which I have touched on in this talk, but also the
assimilation of information gleaned from reception history, from consideration of the culture in which
Mahler lived and worked, and from what knowledge we have of his practice as an interpreter of his
own works. A tall order you might say, but I promise you every detail of any syllabus in which I had a
hand would be oriented to the specific practicalities and problems with which in truth each individual
work of Mahler's confronts the performer, the conductor above all. Too much analysis today, to my
mind, is insufficiently music-directed to be of much help to the performer. And would it be too bold of
me to suggest that those who engage in the problematic business of music criticism, of assessing the
validity of a given performance, might benefit from such an initiative?
You will know that I have not attempted to disguise my resistance to the false beautification of
Mahler, to smoothness, the application of cosmetics, to routine, to blandness, to the reduction of the
shock that is so often integral to his aesthetic. I most earnestly hope that younger generations of
Mahler students, scholars, analysts and critics, indeed all who have direct contact with Mahler's
genius, will unite and campaign to find a way, perhaps through the collaboration of a sympathetically
inclined institution, to build this vital bridge of communication between analysis and interpretation. It
could form a brilliant future area of Mahler studies which would also attract much public attention.
Unless that happens, I am fearful of a future when Mahler may be performed not one whit less than
he is now, but when, in the wake of a thousand performances of this symphony or that, members of
the audiences might be heard asking themselves, homeward bound, 'I wonder what all the fuss was
about?'
© Donald Mitchell
November 2000 —
January 2001
(Bangkok – Horham – London)
MUSIC EXAMPLES *
- Symphony No. 3, Minuet (second movement), from Rehearsal Figure 4 (double bar), bar 70,
slowish fade from 107 onwards: > on flute triplets, bars 108 – 9.
- Symphony No. 3, first movement, from Rehearsal Figure 13 (double bar) to Figure 17, on trumpet
motive, bars 208 – 12.
- Symphony No. 8, Part II, Rehearsal Figure No. 199, bar 1421 to Rehearsal Figure No. 202 + 4,
fade on entry of chorus, 'Alles Vergängliche'.
- Symphony No. 9, Rondo – Burleske, from double bar, bar 180 to Fig. 34, whereupon >.
- Symphony No. 4, first movement, Rehearsal Figure 14 (double bar) bar 177 to Rehearsal Figure
16, > out by bar 211 or thereabouts.
- Das Lied von der Erde, 'Der Abschied', Rehearsal Figures 22 – 23, bars 158 – 165.
- Das Lied, 'Von der Jugend', from start to Fig. 4, bar 29 > .
- 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen . . .', Fig. 3 – Fig. 6 > on cor anglais.
- Das Lied, 'Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde', from Fig. 39 (double bar), upbeat to bar 325 to
Fig. 44 + 6 > on voice, out by bar 369.
- Symphony No. 1, slow movement, from start to 4 bars after Fig. 4. > on continuation of lower
strings' entry.
- Das klagende Lied, Erstfassung, orch. score, Part II, 'Der Spielmann', fade in from bar 219, fade
out bar 230 (interventions of off-stage ensemble).
- Symphony No. 10, first movement (Cooke edition), bars 203 – 213, quick fade.
- Symphony No. 10 (repeat of Ex. 12).
* > = diminuendo or fade
Return