The Mahler Revival
Music History, Michaelmas Term, Oxford University, K.Ho
With a few exceptions, Gustav Mahler’s music remained relatively unchanged after Mahlers lifetime, and despite Mahler’s insistence that conductors adapt it to suit the circumstances, we hear it today as it was heard 100 years ago. The fact that we hear it at all is a testament historical oddity, for even though Mahler’s music is about 100 years old, it didn’t mean that audiences have been listening to it for the past 100 years. Therefore the so-called “Mahler- revival” of the 1950s and 60s didn’t have so much to do with Mahler’s music per sae, but it was more a reflection of a society that had become ready to hear it. Mahler composed during the time between the waning days of the romantic era and beginnings of the turbulent ones of the modern era. With a few exceptions, Mahler’s music did not occupy the reverent place that is does today. The “Mahler-revival” then was the critical threshold that pushed Mahler’s music into the concert repertoire that fulfilled Mahler’s own prophecy, that prophecy being:
In forty or fifty years, they will play my symphonies at orchestral concerts as they now play Beethoven’s.
Initially the revivial started with a different set of assumptions, as music writer Dereyk Cooke noted in 1967, Mahler and his music became an icon for a decade obsessed with itself. Mahler’s massive symphonic music required the resources of a huge orchestra and provided the mantle for would-be “huge” conductors to take Mahler’s music to the masses. As Einstein noted with Chopin, public music began to have very intimate and personal meanings attached for concert goers; the same case was true with Mahler, only this time it was due to the self-exertion of audiences that made this phenomena true. Music critic Philip Barford wrote of the “power” of Mahler’s music in 1957 and said that Mahler could not be “debunked” because there was something beyond reason that could not have been rejected because of its “pure beauty” which lies at the heart of this “real” music:
Every major Mahler-experience tends to produce the same basic effect—silence, an ultimately inarticulate amalgam of wistfulnesss, unease, aspiration, dejection and despair. Mahler’s serenity is not serene. It is a still stillness of the soul longingly imagined by one who knew not stillness.… And too often, when he rings down a curtain, it is all straining brass and clashing cymbal, and a rhythmical turgidity which paralyses your ability to anticipate the last crushing chords. When it does come, you withers have been rung. It is over; but you cannot applaud. (Barford 177-78)
Considered against this background of neurotic self-preoccupation that beset Western society in the early 60s, Mahler’s music satisfied a public void. It was only through the efforts of Cooke, and conductors like Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein that the “critical rehabilitation” of Mahler came about. Writing in 1967 Cooke started with the notion that Mahler was not an established composer and that the revival that started in the early 1960s was more of a product of society’s neurosis. Cooke urged the public to consider Mahler in his own right. With an almost sardonic wit, Cooke noted that Mahler’s music had been continually popular in Holland since the 1920s and stated that the Dutch certainly didn’t have an “early monopoly on the neurosis of the Sixties.” Therefore Cooke concluded that Mahler’s prowess ranked slightly behind Brahms, but no where near Beethoven’s. Granted that Cooke was making sweeping conclusions, he was, nevertheless, fighting to establish Mahler’s reputation as a credible composer. This was no easy task, as Mahler himself said that he only had a “few solitary ears” of corn to glean off of in the wake of Beethoven and Wagner’s “harvest” of music. To sum up Cooke:
When Mahler’s music, after half a century of neglect, suddenly achieved tremendous popularity with the advent of the Sixties, such a curious fact naturally called for an explanation; and so immediately an image was found—Mahler the precursor to Schoenberg, the prophet of the Angst of our time. Like all images, this leaves the situation totally uncertain, provisional. If the Angst should one day disappear, Mahler and his music would disappear with it into limbo, and he would no longer be even a candidate for a place in the hierarchy [of composers]. (Cooke)
This was the notion that Cooke sought to break, and history showed that his efforts were successful. So how did Mahler’s music come into its own right? Why did composers like Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein attach themselves to Mahler’s music? The answers are varied, but all emphasize something larger-than-life about Mahler’s music. Bernstein spoke of the social urgency that Mahler’s music had and in his biography of Mahler, Bruno Walter spoke of his own admiration at Mahler’s creative genius.
An elementary musical instinct lies at the bottom of Mahler’s creative work. While the spiritual undertone of his music was at first decidedly romantic one…his subsequent development shows the conflict and mixture of romantic and classical elements…but, above all, the intermixing of poetic and other subjects of conception with his musical imagination. It was a violently agitated world of music, passionate humanity, poetic imagination, philosophic thought, and religious feelings with which he wrestled. (Walter 90)
Walter said he was struck by Mahler’s competent, harsh, and professional manner of conducting that raised the levels of performance to new and higher standards. Walter said he “devoured” the sensation surrounding the First Symphony when it premiered. The conductor’s interest was sparked by Mahler’s “extraordinary” and “daring” nature and incorporation of the Funeral March in the Manner of Callot into the (eventual) third movement of his First Symphony. (Walter 3) Walter adds:
Only by looking upon his work as the musical manifestation of a great soul shall we have gained the correct point of view. Standards of humanity will have to be added to those of art if the creative work Mahler is to be fully appreciated. (Walter 107)
With ardent support like this coming from a well-known conductor, it’s no wonder how Mahler’s music managed to stay within the concert repertoire. Eventually, Walter was succeeded by Leonard Bernstein as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Interestingly enough, Bernstein also shared a “world-view” of spreading music. Bernstein seized upon Mahler’s music and advanced his own career on the back of Mahler’s music. Through emerging technologies of mass media Bernstein popularized the image of the conductor conducting masterpieces. Through Young People’s Concerts, and new recording media Bernstein managed to spread his own image. Obviously, such demanding music like Mahler’s would require the showmanship and skill of an able conductor. In the tradition of the Sixties, though, Bernstein took a more expansive view of Mahler’s music.
[Mahler] took all (all!) the basic elements of German music, including the cliches, and drove them to their ultimate limits…. Mahler’s marches are like heart attacks, his chorales like all Christendom gone mad. The old conventional four-bar phrases are delineated in steel; his most traditional cadences bless like the movement of remission from pain. Mahler is German music multiplied by n. (Bernstein)
The result of all this exaggeration is, of course, that neurotic intensity which for so many years was rejected as unendurable, and which we now find ourselves mirrored. And there are concomitant results: an irony almost too bitter to comprehend; excesses of sentimentality that still make some listeners wince; moments of utter despair of not being able to drive all this material even further into some kind of some para-music that might at least cleanse us. (Bernstein)
Music historian Constantin Floros makes the point of a potential parallel of Bernstein and Mahler both choosing to incorporate “lower” musical forms and material into their own works…
Mahler’s music was neglected for fifty years after his death, Bernstein believed, because the message of the Ninth Symphony was one the world did not want to hear. ‘What was it that Mahler saw?’ Bernstein asked, and answered’ Three kinds of death. First, was his own imminent death, of which he was acutely aware…. And second, the death of tonality, which for him meant the death of music itself, music as he knew it and loved it… And finally, his third and most important vision: the death of our society, of our Faustian culture.’ (Floros)
Beyond all the rosy effusions on Mahler’s music there lies a technical appeal to Mahler’s writing that influential Mahler historian Donald Mitchell writes about. Mitchell was still bound by the ’60s notion of portraying everthing in the terms of “Man versus…whatever [insert antagony here]” and emphasizes the “Artist as Hero” notion in his analysis of the “meaning” of Mahler’s writing:
Perhaps most fascinating of all, both young composers—[Richard] Strauss explicit so, Mahler more covertly—choose to depict the Artist as Hero as the principal subject matter of their symphonic poems. Very different artists, very different heroes, and of course, very different music; but the parallel is striking. Strauss and Mahler were to bend both the symphonic poem and symphony substantially towards autobiography, a development of profound significance for the future of music in the twentieth century. (Mitchell, Wunderhorn, 164-165)
Mitchell goes on to stress the song-like lyricism that are present within Mahler’s early symphonies, at one point even presenting a chart of song material that was eventually cycled into symphonic movements. The Lieder aus ein fahrender Geselle and the song text of Das Knaben Wunderhorn became favorite material to incorporate into symphonic movements. Technically, Mahler expanded the orchestra into an almost sprawling entity. However, as Mitchell notes with the “Symphony for a Thousand” despite having huge resources at his disposal, Mahler often created intimate settings through thin and intimate scoring. In terms of instrumentation, it can be heard that Mahler gave the upper woodwind sections of the orchestra greater weight than what previous composers did. Combinations of instruments oftentimes changed as well, as Mahler broke with traditional combinations and incorporated new elements in his music. However, Mahler was a product of the past as well and built upon traits of others before him. For example, Mahler built upon Brahms’s non-traditional obbligato use of the bass section. Like Chopin, Liszt and Brahms, Mahler incorporated folk music into his music as well. Citing Liszt’s precedent Mitchell dwells upon Mahler’s use variations:
His development sections expand, not sequence, but by variations. Sometimes he shuffles the motifs like a pack of cards, as it were, and makes them yield new melodies. The motives of the theme reappear, but in a different arrangement. (Mitchell, Wunderhorn, 28)
Stein was certainly right to emphasize Mahler’s variation technique, which was a top that Mahler often touched on, if not directly then at least by allusion. In 1899, for example, he said—inaccurately as it happens—of his songs: ‘In my writing from the very beginning you won’t find any more repetition from strophe to strophe; for music is governed by the law of eternal evolution, eternal development—just as the word, even in one and the same spot, is always changing, eternally fresh and new. (Mitchell, Wunderhorn, 29)
It is not long, however, before Mitchell returns to “larger” almost metaphysical considerations that make Mahler’s music compelling and urgent. Mitchell contends Mahler’s emphasis on nature as being an overriding factor in the appeal of his music. Combine this emphasis with an increased ecological awareness in contemporary society and popular culture, and another reason for Mahler’s staying power is demonstrated. Mitchell uses Mahler’s writings to prove this point:
First and foremost there is, throughout these turbulent, highly stung letters, ample evidence of Mahler’s extraordinary intense conception of the Earth (--all Nature, that is to say)as ‘Universal Mother” to whose bosom lonely forsaken man clings for consolation. Mahler’s love of Nature was profound and so far as his music is concerned mainly non-pictorial: there is nothing in his symphonies as pastorially evocative as, say, Beethoven’s Symphony VI…. There, was, in Mahler’s relation to Nature, something distinctly elemental, something religious, and little or nothing of the graphic—nor the head or sentimental heart. (Mitchell, Early Years, 86-87)
In the end, though, Mahler’s music had very personal meanings in the 1960s. Dahlhaus has repeatedly warned us about the difference between an alleged meaning versus a perceived reception of a piece. Referring again to Barford’s article the emphasis on Mahler in the Sixties can be seen:
As I see it, present-day interest in Mahler indicated that his conflict is unresolved, and that modernism is a phase within an overall romantic impulse not yet played out. The mental spiritual and psychic unrest which Mahler represents is a reality in our own time. Mahler there fore appears as a symbol of psychological upheavals of a kind still supremely active. (Barford 178)
Currently, we see Mahler in his own right. Extensive Mahler biographies and mass availability of his works speak to the fact that Mahler has become part of our musical heritage. All things being equal, though, Mahler’s music has withstood the test of time. What his music was “used” for, however, has changed, but the music remains on its own, which is what really matters. Mahler was very adamant about not conveying programmatic music, but rather, like Chopin and Brahms, set the mood and alluded to emotions and sentimentalities. Therefore, it is within the quasi-personal and public domain that we must judge Mahler’s music. However, this luxury has been afforded to us by the efforts of many who fought on Mahler’s behalf—the champion’s champions.
Works consulted:
Bernstein, Leonard. “Mahler: His Time Has Come.” Originally published in High Fidelity. April 1967.
Barford, Philip. “Mahler Today” in The Music Register v. 18 August 1957.
Cooke, Deryck. “The Measure of Mahler” in The Listener v. 78, 7 December 1967.
Franklin, Peter. The Life of Mahler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Kennedy, Michael. Mahler. London: Dent Group, 1990.
Mahler, Gustav. Symphonies 1-10. Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orkest Amsterdam, & the Vienna Philharmonic, Deutsche Grammophon, 1991. [Pamphlet was source of Bernstein essay and Floros article]
Mitchell, Donald. “Gustav Mahler” in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians: Ed. Stanley Sadie. Hong Kong, 1980.
Mitchell, Donald. Gustav Mahler: The Early Years. Los Angles: University of California Press, 1958 & 1980.
Mitchell, Donald. Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years. London: Faber & Faber, 1975.
Walter, Bruno. Gustav Mahler. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1938.