response 1 of 46:

Mar 30 12:11 UTC 1998

First let me confess that I am not a big Mahler fan.  The ideal
Mahler fan (or for that matter the ideal anything fan) is someone
like Mary Remmers, who always makes it clear that Mahler's music
is a very personal experience for her.  She even tells us how she
enjoys it (she likes to listen to Mahler's 9th symphony on headphones
in a darkened room), and specifically what it means to her (it helps
her to understand death).  However Gustav Mahler imagined his music
affecting people, I can imagine his ghost leaning down out of 
whatever realm it inhabits to plant a big kiss on her cheek.  Because
humbly accepting a piece of music on its own terms and surrendering
your heart to it is the best response any composer can hope for in
his listeners.

Me, I've always had trouble hearing past the superficial sound of
Mahler.  All that muted brass gets predictable and monotonous after
a while.  And those landlers!  A landler, in case you didn't know,
is an Austrian folk-dance in triple rhythm.  Imagine plump sunburnt
girls with pale blonde braids and eyelashes, clopping their clogs
on the pavement in time to this really, really stupid middle-
European music.  Ja, ja, it's all sehr getmutlich.  You can taste
the beer and sausages (burp!).  And the emotion is too often like
Richard Strauss off his Prozac: manic-depressive semi-hysterical
broodings, ravings, broodings, ravings, broodings...  After a while
(a rather short while, in my case) you just scratch your head and
shrug and pop a Mozart piano concerto in the CD player.  In other
words, it's very hard for me to accept Mahler on his own terms.

When I do accept him on his own terms, and make myself accept on
faith that even the umpteenth muted trumpet, even a 12-minute
landler, *can* be brilliant if the composer is a genius, then I
turn into a Mahler fan myself.  But jeez it's hard for me.  It helps,
in my case, to have a fairly objective rendering of the music,
without a lot of conducter-added scmaltz.  

In this way, I've recently renewed my acquaintance with Mahler's 
6th symphony, which I sincerely love.  The 6th is a kind of novel-
in-tones.  Its view of life and death is much, much darker and
more pessimistic that the 9th symphony, but, in my opinion, it
makes for a thrilling ride.  The fact that the ride is a descent
into horror and darkness is part of the thrill.  This isn't a
vision of ethereal peace and acceptance like the 9th; there is no
message of hope at the end.  Musically, though, it's Mahler's
masterpiece.  Anyone else been captivated by the 6th?

response 3 of 46:

Apr 5 12:28 UTC 1998

Mahler is good with bass instruments.  There's a killer tuba
solo in the first movement of the 9th symphony.  (Starting at 
11'23 of the first track of the DG CD by Pierre Boulez.)

response 5 of 46:

Apr 6 17:39 UTC 1998

I hope Mahler doesn't reach down and kiss me on the cheek though.

response 7 of 46:

Apr 6 23:14 UTC 1998

Easy: most of them aren't playing.

response 9 of 46:

Apr 7 02:42 UTC 1998

At the very end? -- the final few minutes??  I think everybody
except a few of the strings are packing up their instruments and 
planning their routes home.  Anyway . . .

I don't hear the adagio of the 9th as being a musical depiction of
silence, especially.  And if I didn't know the story behind it, I'm
not even sure I'd hear anyone dying in it.  One thing about Mahler,
like any good composer, is that once you get past the exposition,
or whatever passes for it in a particular movement of Mahler's, you
won't hear anything really new.  That is, everything from that point
on arises somehow out of what came before.  (The occasional exception
in Mahler is the way he will insert a quote from one of his previous
works at just the right moment.  A theme from the andante of the
6th symphony puts in an appearance in the first movement of the 9th,
for example.  A nice touch.)  So, there is a sense of purely musical
working out of the composer's ideas.  Critics call it underdeveloped
or overdeveloped, and some of it is mere repetition; but you can't
deny the focused intelligence in it, and on a big scale, a huge
scale.  Whether you love the sound of it or not, whether you find
the emotions noble or cheap, you still find yourself nodding in
recognition -- yep, yep, that's it; not bad, Gustav.  Even his trick
in the first movement of the 9th of letting a big expressionist
climax die down to a few repeated notes, which gradually turn into
a gentle rocking figure, which gradually leads back to the "lullaby"
theme (as I think of it it) with which the movement started -- even 
that trick, that he liked so much he repeated in three or four 
times, is quite effective in its own way. 

(Btw, I suspect my favorite movement of the 9th will turn out to be 
the third-movement scherzo.  Even the critics who love the 9th don't
seem crazy about this movement, but I think it's nifty.)

response 11 of 46:

Apr 8 11:03 UTC 1998

There's lots of music that never repeats itself.  Much "modern"
music (pre-minimalist) sounds like that, although if you look at
the scores you'll sometimes see otherwise).  

response 13 of 46:

May 23 11:35 UTC 1998

Still trying to find time to get my mind around the 9th.  I find
I sometimes have the requisite time when I'm driving from place
to place, which is a far cry from Mary's darkened-room experience.
I wonder how such circumstances affect our appreciation of a work?

Anyway, I do really like that scherzo.  The "trio" section is like
a grainy black and white movie of the "death bed" scene in the last
movement; or maybe a group of philosophical men discussing death in
the abstract, and in the next movement one of them actually dies.
A very nice idea on Mahler's part, assuming the last movement really
does have anything to do with death.  (That's Leonard Bernstein's
theory, influenced by Mahler's state of health and by the ramblings
of his stupid widow, Alma.  As far as I know, poor Gustav never said
anything about it.  Das Lied von der Erde is much more to the point,
if death is what you're looking for.)  

If the 9th symphony *is* "about" death, then it's obvious that Mahler
was head over heels in love with death.  He reminds me of Walt Whitman 
in that one respect.  In that context, the trio section of the
scherzo is an abstract discussion of death, and Mahler then shows
it in all its naked beauty in the last movement.  Btw, has anyone
else noticed that the main theme of the last movement (apart from
the famous gruppetto, the 4-note ornamental figure that's all that
remains of the music at the end) is cribbed from the hymn "Abide
with Me"?  Supposedly, Mahler heard it when he was living in the
U.S. when he was conductor of the N.Y. Philharmonic.

response 15 of 46:

Sep 11 12:52 UTC 1999

Symphony #6, conducted by Pierre Boulez.

response 17 of 46:

Oct 18 21:56 UTC 1999

I am curious if that passage about the ape would have the same effect if you
were not told what it was supposed to be about.

response 19 of 46:

Oct 20 04:09 UTC 1999

I don't know. Perhaps I should conduct some experiments on my friends. Or
maybe not, if I want to keep them. ;-> I think it probably would have a similar
effect on me even without knowing the words, because one can tell that it is
the climactic point of the movement just from listening to the emotion in
the tenor's voice.

response 21 of 46:

Oct 21 03:50 UTC 1999

<grins> I agree with your last statement. It is why I find ballets
more difficult to understand, generally, than opera or musicals.
I had another thought after hanging up last night. Some people might
consider it "cheating" or diminishing the music itself (as distinct from the
words) to look at a translation, but nobody would argue that there is
something wrong with listening to the words of a song in English, 
or for a German speaker to listen to and understand the words of a piece
with German lyrics.
Actually, the words of _Das Lied von der Erde_ are themselves a translation 
of Japenese (or is it Chinese?) poetry into German.

response 23 of 46:

Aug 18 07:03 UTC 2000

Today at the secondhand cd store I found a disc (apparently originally
released packaged with a BBC music magazine) of a "realization" of Mahler's
unfinished tenth symphony. I haven't listened to it yet. Has anybody else
here heard it, and if so what did you think of it?