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THE RISE & RISE OF
GUSTAVMAHLER
Norman Lebrecht
Where on earth did all this Mahler
come from? Half a century ago,
the symphonies were a concert
hall novelty, performed sparingly
to an audience composed of
continental émigrés and curiosity seekers. A quarter
century back, a Mahler cycle was an epochal
event, unlikely to be heard again in a lifetime—or
so Claudio Abbado and Klaus Tennstedt vociferously
maintained.
Today, Mahler has displaced
Beethoven as the
pole around which concert
seasons are
planned. In the coming
year, London’s South
Bank—Europe’s biggest
arts centre—will stage
no fewer than 27 performances.
China and Australia will hear their
first complete cycles. South Korea has organised a
cycle, by no means its first. The BBC Proms has
more Mahler than ever before. Even if it weren’t a
centennial year, orchestras would still be playing
Mahler. His is practically the only name in the
symphonic canon that sells the house within
days of going up on the billboards.
And it’s not just live performance. Over the
past 15 years, while the record industry has withered,
the number of Mahler recordings has doubled,
to a total of almost 2,000. Bearing in mind
that he only wrote 11 symphonies and six sets of
songs, that makes an average 100 discs for every
single score with Mahler’s name on it.
Mahler’s music has been featured in 47
movies, starting with Luchino Visconti’s Death in
» MY MAHLER
What brought me to Mahler was
the word, before the music.
Reading his widow Alma’s
memories and letters, published at a
time when his music was politically suppressed,
I was overwhelmed by the ferocity
of her ambivalence and needed to
know more about a man who could
inspire so tormented a commitment. The
music opened out, for me, like a herbaceous
maze, at once aesthetic and perplexing.
I knew I could spend the rest of
my life luxuriating in its beauties and
searching for the solution. At my lowest
moments I reach for Das Lied von der
Erde. At my happiest ones, too. NL
Venice back in 1971. Hollywood has hard-wired
him into the soundtrack lexicon; every time Harry
Potter achieves liftoff on his broom, you catch a
snatch of Mahler’s Resurrection.
He is played at state funerals and church weddings,
at political summits and atheistic convocations.
More than any of his coevals—more than
Strauss or Sibelius, Puccini or Rachmaninov, Elgar
or Stravinsky—Mahler’s is the music of our
millennial times.
Why Mahler? Why did this half-forgotten composer
rise from the grave to chime with a distant
future? Alive, Mahler was mocked, misunderstood,
racially abused and generally regarded as an inept
composer who could not or would not deliver the
satisfactions expected by a paying audience.
None of his works played by the rules. Sonata
form was distended into five or six movements.The
orchestra leader was made to lay down his precious
violin in the fourth symphony and screech a full
tone higher on a gypsy fiddle. Left and right of the
orchestra went out of phase in the 10th symphony,
like tectonic plates shifting beneath the audience’s
seats. It is easy to see how Mahler provoked discomfort
and outrage in 1910.‘My time will come,’ he
proclaimed, with uncanny prescience.
I have spent half my life studying the Mahler
phenomenon, searching for its causes. At first
impression, it struck me that Mahler was dealing
with issues I could recognize: racism, workplace
chaos, social conflict, relationship breakdown,
alienation, depression and the corrosive consequences
of self-inflicted stress. He seemed far
more relevant to my joys and anguish than the
imperial bluff of the Enigma Variations.
And nothing he did conformed to first impression.
Self-contradiction was everywhere. After his
earliest scratchings he never wrote for less than
full orchestra, often with voices and on one occasion
rising to 1,000 performers. Yet the forces that
he amassed expressed emotional intimacies that
are seldom whispered outside the marriage bed
or the consulting room. Message seemed to be at
war with medium.
Every phrase he wrote was susceptible to more
than one meaning. His most important innovation,
musical irony, allowed Mahler to get away with
voicing social criticism that could have cost him his
job. Later, and elsewhere, the same ambiguous
device allowed Dmitri Shostakovich to describe the
horrors of life under Stalin. Mahler enabled music to
function as political commentary.
But that was not his main purpose. Like Sigmund
Freud, whom he consulted in distress during a summer
of marital breakdown, Mahler used his own life
as a template for everything he wrote and ultimately
as a means of understanding the human condition.
His music is simultaneously text and exegesis,
sensual seduction and intellectual challenge, always
and above all an urge to heal the world.
Scholars who try to analyze Mahler through
the prism of his forebears, Bruckner and Brahms,
or of his followers Schoenberg and Shostakovich,
come crashing against the rock of his originality.
Never easily categorised, he held himself apart
from the conventions of his craft and the little
boxes that wiki-people like to tick.
‘I am three times homeless’, he declared, defining
not only his exclusion as a Jew but the externality
of his music, his outsider’s perspective.
Mahler, with the gypsy fiddle, ushered the
unmentionable into the middle-class concert
hall. In the sixth symphony, he was Jeremiah,
warning that the city would fall if it did not
repent its sins—as indeed it did in the First World
War, soon after his death.
These perceptions and ambitions ran far
beyond the norm for a symphonic composer. And
when Mahler in his three last symphonies contemplated
his own battle with poor health and a
failing marriage, there was a quality of self-observation
seldom seen outside the laboratories of
pioneering science. This, for me, is Mahler’s compelling
attraction: his blinding faith that, through
music, we can make sense of our world.
And make sense, even more cogently, of our
private lives. Mahler communicates one on one.
Among 3,000 other listeners at a concert, you are
always alone with Mahler. I have seen people
with tears trickling unawares down either side of
their nose. I have known some whose lives have
been redeemed by a Mahler experience. With
Mahler, it is always personal, always him and you.
From the funeral march that is revealed as a
nursery rhyme in the first symphony to the ‘catastrophe
chord’ of the tenth symphony, he flourishes
a kaleidoscope of parallel narratives and conflicting
agendas that are all too familiar to the 21 st century
citizen, struggling with a life-work balance in
an accelerating twitter of attention-seeking technologies.
The more complicated life becomes, the
more I need Mahler to help separate the strands
into the root priorities of love and truth.
Everyone has their own 'why Mahler' answer—
even if it's just 'why not?' But his unstoppable rise
over half a century suggests that Mahler has
tapped into an acute need in a fast-changing world,
a hole in the heart of our existence. I would not
know what to say if
Beethoven came knocking at
my door, let alone Mozart or
Bach. But if Mahler turned
up unannounced you would
know exactly who he was
and why he was there. He is
the composer of our lives. ■
Norman Lebrecht’s book Why
Mahler? is published by Faber and
Faber, £17.95
14 Juillet-Août 2010 July-August