Gustav Mahler used to love walking in the countryside. One day he was with a friend, who pointed to the beautiful vista. ‘Don’t bother looking at the view,’ Mahler replied, ‘I’ve already composed it’.
Mahler’s concept of the symphony as an art form was that it should ‘be like the whole world, it must contain everything’. His genius lies in his ability to draw together wildly disparate elements – intense, rich orchestral textures and harmonies alongside sections of almost chamber-music simplicity, rustic Austrian folk melodies, child-like innocence and a morbid fascination with death – into totally compelling musical structures. He intensified the psychological tension in ‘romantic’ music, underpinning the bridge between post-romanticism and 20th century modernism and leading the way to Schoenberg and Shostakovich and the breakdown of tonality.
With country song and dance, bugle calls and even cow-bells woven into his symphonies; with his soaring Wagnerian melodies, lilting Viennese waltzes and grinding dissonances that stretch tonality to its limits, does Mahler succeed in representing the whole world in his symphonies? ‘No, I don’t think so’, says Vladimir Ashkenazy. ‘His symphonies contain “Mahler” first of all. It is his vision of the world, how miserable life is for him. He was introverted and obsessed with his own life. It’s all about “me, me, me”; it’s about how such an incredibly gifted human being, of the genius kind, reflects his view of his own tragic life. Everyone understands what he’s saying, we can all identify with him, the rest of the world shares a little bit of Mahler.’
Mahler’s symphonies were greeted with hostility at first, and concert promoters were reluctant to engage the huge forces required by his symphonies, especially when they weren’t popular and could not guarantee good box-office returns. However, with the advocacy of conductors such as Mengelberg and Walter, and the emergence of the recording industry, they are now recognised as the very height of the Austro-German symphonic tradition.
It’s very timely to perform the whole cycle this year and next, as 2010 celebrates the 150th anniversary of his birth, and 2011 commemorates the centenary of his death.
I ask Ashkenazy about his first impressions of Mahler’s music. ‘When I was first able to buy an LP, in New York in 1958, I suddenly had access to lots of music, music that simply wasn’t available in Russia – especially not Mahler! I spent all of my money on LPs. Most people bought suits and smart clothes and I bought a suitcase full of LPs. I remember the cover on the one I bought of Das Lied von der Erde with Kathleen Ferrier and Bruno Walter – there was a beautiful sunset on the cover, dark yellow and red, it fitted so perfectly with the music, as if it really depicted the end of the world.’
Ashkenazy continues humbly: ‘But how can I be any great judge of another human being’s endeavour? I cannot evaluate the influence of Mahler’s gift and his output. For me, there’s no point trying to describe Mahler’s music, because genius is beyond description. The thing is to listen. You could say that without Bach there would have been no Mozart or Beethoven, but you cannot say that of Mahler’s influence. Without Mahler music would have gone forward of course, but in a slightly different way’.
There’s a story of the young Mahler witnessing a particularly violent argument between his parents and running out into the street to escape, only to be immediately confronted by a hurdy-gurdy man playing a popular Viennese air. This is a portent of how high tragedy and light amusement became fixed as close partners in his mind. I ask Ashkenazy how a conductor can reconcile such enormous contrasts of mood within these symphonies, where the ugly sits uneasily alongside the sublime. How does one control the balance between the heaven-storming calls in the brass, the vigorous and sometimes violent scherzos, the ugliness of everyday life and the desolation of utter loneliness? ‘It’s very clear in the music,’ he says, ‘the conductor doesn’t have to do anything. A lot of the world is ugly, you’ve only got to go outside and see what people do to each other!’
Each time he performs the Mahler symphonic cycle, does he take a different approach? ‘Yes,’ he replies, ‘as it is with everything. I just try to think again what I have done before, and try to do it better. But I’ll tell you a true story abut the difficulty of conducting his music’, he continues. ‘When Mahler composed Das Lied von der Erde he pointed to a place in the score and asked Bruno Walter: “Bruno, how do you conduct this section in the last movement?” Bruno replied: “I’ve no idea, you wrote it”.’
‘In Mahler everything is difficult, everything is unique’, continues Ashkenazy. ‘If you identify with the music you’re already there, and with a good orchestra it always works.’ I notice that Ashkenazy gives the credit to the orchestra, never to himself. Within the Sydney Symphony he has banned the use of the word ‘Maestro’, preferring to regard the players as his collaborators in performance. In interview as on the concert platform, he is most reluctant to take any praise for himself. ‘Music speaks for itself’, he declares. ‘A work of a genius always keeps a listener interested, and it has the mystery of life.’
‘Mahler had a great capacity for self-absorption and also the capacity for self-assertion’, says Ashkenazy. ‘Such an incredible gift rises to great heights. In his music Beethoven rose above his personal suffering. He never heard, for example, his own Ninth Symphony or his last quartets, which are all above human suffering. In the finale of the op 109 Piano Sonata no 30 Beethoven has found absolute peace.’ I point out that Beethoven could often be cantankerous and rude. ‘That’s true of his everyday life, but not of his music’, replies Ashkenazy. ‘There lies the difference. But Mahler wasn’t able to achieve that serenity, except perhaps in the last movement of his Symphony no 3, where there’s a sense of peace attained through devastation and self-analysis, and one arrives at another plateau. It’s reached as the result of a struggle.’ I suggest the ending of Mahler’s Ninth is a similar plateau. ‘The end of the Ninth is a different story,’ he answers, ‘the ending of the Ninth is the very end, like the last strain of matter disappearing in the universe. The end of existence’.
We talk briefly about the most tragic of Mahler’s symphonies, the Sixth. ‘The slow movement is sublime,’ says Ashkenazy, ‘but you know, he was very afraid to listen to those hammer blows in the last movement.’ Ashkenazy shows me in the score where Mahler calls for a hammer to strike the side of the drum. ‘He was terrified of his own music! His first child died, his wife is unfaithful, and finally his own fatal heart condition was diagnosed. Nice life, huh? Are you surprised, this type of music a genius reacts to his own life – is it any wonder he wrote the music the way he did’.
While I am still pondering ‘the end of existence’ and how a composer could ever follow that, I ask Ashkenazy about Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony, of which the composer himself completed only the opening Adagio plus a few sketches in short-score. For many years Mahler’s wife, Alma, carefully guarded the unfinished score as she considered it to be a farewell love-letter to herself from her husband. Over the final bars Mahler wrote in the score: To live for you, to die for you, Alma. ‘The Adagio of the Tenth Symphony is very complex and moving very much away from tonality’, says Ashkenazy. ‘It could have been composed in the 1920s or 30s, it was so far ahead of its time. Mahler expanded tonality to its limits, and then Schoenberg changed the direction and introduced all this dodecaphonic nonsense, which thankfully died out a few decades later and was never resurrected.’ I refer to Ashkenazy’s comment that everything in Mahler is unique, and ask whether he thinks that Derek Cooke’s ‘performing version’ of the Tenth sounds like Mahler. ‘Cooke only imitated Mahler’, replies Ashkenazy, ‘he was very careful not to depart from Mahler’s scores. Clinton Carpenter (American composer) in 1943 decided to write exactly what he thought Mahler would have done in this symphony, and it’s that version that we’ll be playing, as it is probably the closest to Mahler’s spirit’.
How, I ask, can one trace the development of Mahler’s writing through from his first symphony to his last? ‘The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus the composer needs to use to express his thoughts, yet the similarities can also be traced from the beginning to the end. The first symphony is not convoluted, but the last – incredibly so!’ Is this an inevitable progression as a man matures in his life? Was Mahler earthbound in his approach to life or did he eventually attain a genuine religious belief? ‘I don’t know, I cannot say’, replies Ashkenazy; ‘I cannot answer that question’.
Bruckner seemed to have found God, perhaps [Richard] Strauss never really began the search, but the enigma of Gustav Mahler remains forever locked away within his music.
Article by Mike Smith, first published in 2MBS-FM 102.5 Fine Music magazine February 2010.