You gotta have a Mahler item, no matter what you think of him
or his music.  Has he changed your life?  Does he leave you cold?
What the heck was he up to, anyway?

46 responses total.

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?

I like Mahler.  But then, I htink I'm required to-- I'm a bass player.  And,
even ignoring the solo at the beginning of the third movement of his first,
he wrote some killer bass parts.  He's one of the few composers before teh
twentieth century to recognize teh bass and give it some fun stuff to do. 

Aside from that, I respect Mahler for his reaction to the fact that
Romantisisim was dying around him.  Wagner had taken tonality just about as
far is it could go, and composers folloing in his steps had a couple of
choices... and it took them a while to figure out what those choices were.
Mahler was doing is writing around the time that everyone was kind of milling
around aimlessly-- trying a bit of this, a bit of what Wagner had done, a bit
of something else, a trifle of expressionisim.... and Mahler took what Wagner
had done, and almost turned it into a characture-- as if Wagner's orchestras
weren't big enough, Mahler made them huge (leaving the only reaction of the
next generation of composers to shrink the instrumentation... the twentieth
century, espcially the early 20th cnetury has been a century of small
ensambles.)... I don't know....

What I particularly like about Mahler is the lush orchestestration he uses.
The downside of that, is occasionally, it is easier for the listener to get
lost in the thick textures and harmonies.

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.)

I especially like the broodings and ravings. My favorite symphony is the 
resurrection(2). The Landler is delicious. The finale is a masterpiece. 
In the final movement of the Titan(1), though, the brooding/raving 
alternation is most stark. 

I think I feel much like Mary does about his music. It gets to me at an 
emotional level. However, I do not respond to the 8th or 9th syphonies, 
but I do really well on almost any of the others.

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

(I find that a lovely thought. ;-) )

I had once heard the end of Mahler's 9th described as the
closest music gets to silence.  Not just a lack of sound,
or the end of the music, but something more active - silence.
Since I've been playing music I've come to more fully appreciate
how music is shaped by the musicians.  And more than even I'm
left utterly amazed at how a huge (and the 9th requires a lot
of chairs) orchestra can exhale to a final ppp sigh
all the while maintaining a clear and focused tone.  Amazing
stuff.

Easy: most of them aren't playing.

Are too.  (phttttttt)

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.)

Whenmusic gets as long as Mahler's (or even most of Bach's works, or Hyden's
symphonies), you have to bring back the old themes... if you kept adding new
themes and motives, there would be no continuity, and the audience would wind
up befuddled and somewhat lost... (perhaps I exaggerate)... the trick is to
balence continuity with interest.  
But I babble.

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).  

"there would be no continuity, and the audience would wind up befuddled and
somewhat lost" sums up a lot of that, Michael.

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.

I haven't heard a lot of Mahler, but I have a recording of "Das Lied von Der
Erde" with Kathleen Ferrier, Julius Patzak and Bruno Walter as conductor.
(hope I got the tenor's name right...)
I LOVE the first movement-the passage about the ape dancing in the graveyard
gives me the shivers  every time I hear it.

I should really get some more Mahler recordings. What would you all recommend?

Symphony #6, conducted by Pierre Boulez.

The 9th, Karajan.

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.

It's in German, so unless you know German or
have a translation in front of you, you would
visualize whatever the music alone brought to
your imagination.  I never pay as much attention 
to the words as I probably ought to.

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.

"Yep, this is sure emotional, but I haven't the faintest idea what it's 
being emotional _about_."

I'm of the opinion that specific emotional states can be conveyed, often 
very effectively, by pure music, but that intellectual content can't.

<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.

There are, however, those who would argue that to pay any attention to 
the words does diminish the music.  I've heard people say that they got 
more out of songs in foreign languages before they knew what the words 
meant.

I'm not sure I agree with that.  When I listen to music that explicitly 
tells a story, whether it has words or not, I feel like I'm missing 
something if I don't know the story.  Richard Strauss's tone poems do 
not work as abstract compositions.

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?

A number of musicologists have made stabs at "realizations" of Mahler's 
Tenth.  Deryck Cooke was the first, and recordings of his version have 
been around for about 30 years.  There have been others, too, but I 
can't assess their relative merits.

Cooke wrote that Mahler actually did complete his Tenth in the sense of 
putting together the entire structure and deciding what was going on, 
generally, in almost every bar.  What he didn't do was fill out the 
textures, nor did he clearly label everything; so both some fill-ins and 
a lot of scrutiny and research are necessary to make the work playable.

As for the work itself, I don't much care for it, but I'm not a Mahler 
fan.  It certainly sounded like Mahler's other late orchestral 
symphonies to me.

Pierre Boulez is about the worst Mahler conductor ever.  Hermann Scherchen
and Otto Klemperer are key here.

Also, the best Mahler symphony is the seventh, by far.

Pretending to like the 7th symphony is the sign of the true person who 
pretends to like Mahler. :)

Re Boulez conducting Mahler, it's like putting truffle sauce on 
haggis, I know. 

what !  I'd say people who say they like the eighth are faking it up.
I really do like the seventh!

Haggis is sausage, yes?  Truffle sauce is mushrooms, yes?

Hard to smell when your noise is pointed up like that, eh? ;-)

I probably should've said weiner schnitzel instead of haggis. You 
know, for authenticity.

Okay, that's just mean. 

Boulez conducting Mahler is like a flawless digital restoration of a 
movie that had been so badly damaged by time and mishandling that 
nobody's impression of it was even close to the truth. Whether the 
movie itself is any good is a matter of taste.

You've probably never listened to Boulez' recording of the seventh :(

No, I have the 1st (not good) the 6th (excellent) and the 9h (shrug).
Oh, and the 5th (shrug).

anyway, i listen to all my mahler with amazing slow downer, so i can basically
choose whatever tempo i want for a given piece.  it's great

Aside to Michael: I saw Lady Agnew of Lochnaw today and thought of 
you.  She is a beauty.

                    -Mary from Haggis Central-

Now why in heaven would Lady Agnew of Lochnaw make you think of me?

maybe you're very feminine ?

My mistake, I thought you'd said you admired Sargent's painting of 
Lady Agnew.  Something about her being a "hot toddie" or some such 
thing. Must be thinking of someone else.

Anyhow, she hangs in the Scottish Gallery, in Edinburgh.

Ah. Well, you know, I probably did say something about her because 
I've thought she's a hottie since I first set eyes on her (during the 
Kennedy administration).

Here's the way John Singer Sargent saw her:

http://www.jssgallery.org/Paintings/Lady_Agnew.htm

And here's what she actually looked like when she was still just 
Gertrude Vernon:

http://www.jssgallery.org/Resources/Photos/People/GertrudeVernon.htm

According to the text on the first web site, somebody has now written 
a book about the relationship between JSS and Lady Agnew. 

Btw, I think she'd be more at home in a discussion of Edward Elgar's 
music. Definitely not Mahler.

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