MAHLER’S TENTH SYMPHONY – AN INTRODUCTION BY DR JIM PRITCHARD

Adagio Scherzo Purgatorio: Allegretto moderato download pc games Scherzo: Allegro pesante. Nicht zu schnell [Not too fast] Finale: Introduction: Langsam, schwer [Slow, serious] – Allegro moderato Of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony Donald Mitchell has said ‘Mahler’s treatment of his melody … irresistibly bring to mind … the 12-tone system. I am far from suggesting that had Mahler lived longer, he would have found himself pursuing, consciously or unconsciously, strictly Schoenbergian paths. But it remains remarkable … that here and there in the Tenth one can not but be aware of these anticipations of a future that, for a time at least … seemed to offer the possibility of a new language for music.’ ‘Almschi, to live for you. To die for you’ wrote Mahler in conclusion on the score. He had sketched his Tenth Symphony whilst at Toblach in the summer of 1910 about the time he discovered Alma was having an affair with the architect Walter Gropius (whom she was to marry some years after Mahler's death). Gropius asked Alma to leave her husband, in a letter which he inadvertently (or possibly deliberately?) addressed to ‘Herr Gustav Mahler. Alma agreed to stay with her husband but his emotional turmoil found its way into this composition that he continued to work on up to his death in May 1911. Mahler’s eternal themes of love, death and redemption are ever present in the music. Death in the sound of the muffled bass drum and then in the reminiscence of the Fifth Symphony Adagietto in the closing passages, Mahler becomes resolved to Alma’s infidelity and everlasting love triumphs over pain and death. A feeling of renewed vitality is strongly present in the Scherzo that was almost certainly drafted before the crisis in the marriage occurred. It was Mahler's usual practice to sketch a symphony during his summer holidays and then revise and complete the score during the following winter. There never was an opportunity to complete the Tenth Symphony, during the winter of 1910–11 his time was taken up with extensive revisions to the Ninth Symphony, and then followed his final illness and early death. What was left behind was a five-movement draft in the following state: (i) Adagio, first movement, was as a draft full score that can be played more or less as it is but of course Mahler might have subsequently made changes to it. (ii) Scherzo, second movement, was a full score sketch. About half of it is fairly complete and the rest lacks detail. Commentators do not find its shape very convincing and undoubtedly Mahler would have revised this too. (iii) Purgatorio, the short third movement has the first 28 bars written out in full score, and then there is a short score that has enough detail for the instrumentation to allow it to be completed quite straightforwardly whilst for the first section repeat, Mahler just wrote 'da capo' in the draft. Deryck Cooke employs a literal repeat of the music though there is no Mahlerian precedence for this. (iv) For the last two movements however there is only a short score with precious few hints of the instrumentation required, despite this the fourth and fifth movements are convincing as structures, most notably the finale. --------------------------------------------------------- The ‘performing version of a draft’ derives from Mahler’s sketches and was initiated by Deryck Cooke with assistance from Berthold Goldschmidt in the 1960s. Subsequent revisions were made in collaboration with Colin and David Matthews to produce the score published in 1976 and dedicated to the memory of Alma Mahler. If Mahler accepts death in the Ninth Symphony here after one last heartrending cry believed to express musically ‘To live for you! To die for you! Almschi!’ he embraces it and his life ebbs away, his autobiographical journey through his symphonies conclusively at an end. All the collaborators were keen to avoid calling it a ‘completion’ as only Mahler himself of course could have completed the symphony. The Tenth Symphony was ‘premièred’ at a BBC Prom in August 1964, with Goldschmidt conducting (he had already presented the symphony, but with gaps, for a broadcast in 1960). The first performance in America followed in 1965 and was conducted by Eugene Ormandy, who went on to make the first recording. Colin and David Matthews heard the 1960 transmission and got to know Deryck Cooke in 1963, after Colin had pointed out to him some errors of transcription in his score and making some suggestions for changes in the orchestration. The 1964 version’s problem was that, though effective, the last two movements actually did not sound much like Mahler. They need to strive for a sound that was authentically Mahlerian. The first thing they did was to increase the size of the orchestra to quadruple wind, plus an extra clarinet, and quadruple brass. It was clear from Mahler’s manuscript that this was the size of the orchestra that he was going to use. Cooke and the Matthew brothers found that this directly resulted in an orchestral sound that was much more ‘authentic’. The symphony is in two parts with the first two movements in F sharp, and almost able to stand alone as a complete work in itself. The first movement is a 25-minute slow movement, an almost unique way to begin a symphony that follows directly on from the final movement of the Ninth. The whole movement is Parsifal-like, and the ending provides only the most fleeting respite. Midway through the movement there has been a great organ-like outburst in A flat minor culminating in a screamingly nine-note dissonant chord, which casts a giant shadow over the rest of the movement that seems from this point to lose the will to live, gently subsiding in a long reflective coda. The Scherzo however is entirely different and Mahler had not composed such a positive one since the Fifth Symphony. It has a dance-like Ländler trio and the coda, with the animated horns calls, recalls directly that Scherzo of his Fifth. These two movements were probably sketched-out before the marriage crisis that occurred at the end of July, his immediate musical response to this was a small B flat minor third movement that Mahler titled 'Purgatorio oder Inferno'. The last word is crossed out in the manuscript - probably by Alma. (The reference is certainly to a poem about betrayal written by his friend Siegfried Lipiner.) In several places Mahler also wrote anguished exclamations over the music, including 'Erbarmen!' ('Have mercy!' that Amfortas cries out in Parsifal) and, at another, 'Tod! Verk!’ At this point the music alludes to Wagner's fate motif in the Ring. In the Todesverkündigung ('Annunciation of Death') in Die Walküre the fate motif first appears and is followed by another motif for the brass, at first in F sharp minor, then in A flat minor. It is more than a coincidence that this motif is similar to the A flat minor brass chorale in the first movement's central outburst, which therefore is also an ‘Annunciation of Death’, and the passage seems to have been added as an afterthought. The deceptively brief third movement acts as a prelude to the last two movements, providing the germ of much of their thematic material. The fourth movement and second Scherzo is a lamenting yet brisk E minor waltz, similar in a number of ways to 'Trinklied' from Das Lied von der Erde. Scrawled on the title-page is 'Der Teufel tanzt es mit mir' ('The Devil dances it with me'). Under the weight of its climaxes the end the dance runs down to a standstill, finishing with the dead sounds of percussion (Mahler's instrumental instructions here) and, finally, a muffled bass drum stroke. 'Du allein weisst was es bedeutet' ('You alone know what it means'), is what he wrote to Alma over it on the score. They both had witnessed a fireman's funeral in New York, and Alma later described how as he watched it from his hotel window, his face was streaming with tears because the experience deeply affected Mahler’s death-obsessed mind. The Finale carries on from this drum stroke opening darkly in D minor but ultimately it brings redemption. Fragments of themes grope upwards from the depths of the orchestra, to be beaten down relentlessly by repeated strokes of the muffled drum. Then in sudden calm a solo flute plays an unearthly melody. After an agitated central Allegro the dissonant chord from the first movement returns, followed by the opening theme of the symphony in the horns. Back comes the flute theme and the climax to the work is serene, gentle and tender. Over the final passage that is like a concluding sigh Mahler writes those words of love to Alma ‘To live for you, to die for you!’ Again it is hardly coincidental that this music is all very reminiscent of the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony that was the first music that was inspired by Alma. To repeat it is clear Mahler was reconciled with the upheaval caused by her infidelity, and was ending his life's work with a triumph of love over death. It was only when the symphony was heard as a whole did it became possible to judge just how far Mahler had progressed since the Ninth. Deryck Cooke commented that Mahler's actual music, even in its unperfected and unelaborated state, has such significance, strength and beauty, that it dwarfs into insignificance the momentary uncertainties about notation and the occasional subsidiary pastiche-composing, and even survives being largely presented in conjectural orchestration, so long as Mahler's characteristic widely-spaced texture is faithfully preserved. After all, the thematic line throughout - and something like 90 per cent of the counterpoint and harmony - are pure Mahler, and vintage Mahler at that. Who knows what Mahler would have thought about it all? According to Henry-Louis de La Grange’s recently published OUP ‘A New Life Cut Short’ Mahler made it clear to his doctor during his last days that he wanted his sketches for the Tenth Symphony destroyed in the event of his death. Whilst according to Alma (not the most reliable of biographers) he still seems to have had time to change his mind and had begun to talk about the unfinished score, and said he was looking forward to orchestrating it during the coming summer (that he never lived to see). In Deryck Cooke’s 1976 performing version (or any ‘completion’ for that matter) the unfinished Tenth Symphony remains a historically interesting musical testament to Mahler’s final evolution as a composer. This has undoubtedly been described as ‘plastic surgery’ and who knows if this is what the composer envisioned but it remains nevertheless as Cooke believed, ‘A Mahlerian experience of value’. © Jim Pritchard

JASCHA HORENSTEIN – an appreciation by Chris Kettle

The last day of May, 1970; a Sunday. My last term at Oxford; less than a fortnight away, Finals loomed. But this was the day of my first-ever visit to a place that was to become in some respects a second home: the Royal Festival Hall. Awaiting me there were a much-expanded LSO, Helen Watts, choruses of ladies and children – and Jascha Horenstein. And Mahler’s Third Symphony.

My previous live Mahler experiences – the First in Bristol under Susskind, the Second in the Royal Albert Hall under Kubelik, both in 1967 – had knocked me out, but even they had not prepared me for the clarity and intensity of this experience. A few weeks later, Horenstein took his forces into the Fairfield Hall, Croydon (this time with Norma Procter as soloist) to make a famous Unicorn recording that many still consider the benchmark in this work. The live performance left me completely intoxicated: it provided a musical experience I have not had before or since. Over a decade (and several Mahler Threes) later, I recalled it thus: “It was a shattering, majestic performance, which for brilliance, intensity and control I have never heard equalled; an unforgettable musical and visual spectacle which held me literally spellbound from the first blast of the horns – I remember reeling from the sheer impact of the sound – to the splendour of the final page, dazzling but with the noble fullness of tone asked for by Mahler in the score. In addition to the scale and authority of the performance, I found the music’s physical immediacy and bite consistently overwhelming, and I have many vivid visual memories: the three pairs of cymbals at the recapitulation of the first movement; the perfect unanimity of the drummers at the end, their sticks moving through identical arcs as they sounded the rhythm through the sustained D Major chords with ceremonial precision; Horenstein immobile, both hands raised above his head as the flood of sound seemed to flow through him and out to us.”

Three years later: late May, 1973. Horenstein and the LSO were booked to appear at the RFH again, this time in Mahler Six. I looked forward to it for months: here were the perfect orchestra, the perfect interpreter, capable of the power and rigour to outmanoeuvre even Bernstein. In 1969 Horenstein had played the work in Bristol with my home orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony (a performance Rodney Newton has alluded to): I turned up on the wrong day, and had to settle for Haydn, Beethoven and Curzon playing the Brahms Second Piano Concerto. All very fine, but not quite the thing when you’re expecting Mahler Six.

Back to the eagerly anticipated LSO performance. A young American engineer had scratched up every available cent and booked the LSO and the RFH for four days to record it – John Goldsmith of Unicorn would have followed up his triumph with the Third by being a party to the deal. In April, Horenstein conducted a run of Parsifal at Covent Garden (with Goodall-like slowness, according to a friend who was on the Board of Governors at the time: the first Act took two and a quarter hours). Then, six weeks short of the scheduled Sixth, he died of a heart attack.

So my live experience of Horenstein in Mahler is confined to one symphony, and an autograph secured when I spotted him in the audience for an Abbado LSO Mahler Five. (I also heard him in magnificent performances of Bruckner Five and Nine, both of them now available on BBC Legends: not for nothing is Robert Simpson’s classic book, The Essence of Bruckner, dedicated “to Jascha Horenstein, who interprets Bruckner with love and authority”.)

Later in 1973, Christopher Ford wrote an article in The Guardian entitled “The Compleat Mahler”. In it, he wrote of Horenstein and his recorded legacy. Of the conductor he wrote: “Mahler is nowadays one of the handful of genuinely popular great composers who can fill a hall with their music rather than merely by virtue of who happens to be performing it; a growing number of people are coming to the belief that Horenstein was the finest of all Mahler interpreters – stronger than Walter and at least as sympathetic, steadier and ultimately more inspiring than Bernstein or Klemperer, more visionary and still more thoroughly musical than such latter-day exponents as Haitink, Kubelik and Solti.” He then surveyed Horenstein’s currently available recorded legacy and wrote excitedly of the “jungle of tape” which might eventually yield recordings of all the symphonies except the Second and Fifth (Goldsmith and no doubt others conducted an international hunt for these, but so far they have proved elusive).

I feel privileged that, over thirty years later, I can listen to this “jungle of tape”. In addition to the commercial recordings of the First and Third, Unicorn soon issued the Stockholm Sixth; Classics for Pleasure has reissued the Fourth; and in recent years the BBC has ridden to the rescue with the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth and Das Lied von der Erde. So this extraordinary man – born in Kiev, student in Vienna, pupil of Schreker, forced as a Jew to flee the Nazis, never after the war to have an orchestra of his own, only to become internationally celebrated on the crest of the Mahler revival in the last decade or so of his life, dying at the height of his powers – can now speak clearly and powerfully to generations who never saw him on the podium.

It would take too long to write of all these performances, and they are well enough known. The First has an authentic frisson; the riveting Third enjoys deserved fame; the Fourth, to my ears, is a little dry and strait-laced; the memorable Sixth easily survives some ordinary playing; the Seventh (a Philharmonia Prom) sounds rather muffled and distant – this of all works needs clarity and detail (though Horenstein gives many conductors an object-lesson in the right speed for the Fourth Movement Serenade).

These are my reflections on the last three completed works: I shall take these three performances – all of them on BBC Legends – in reverse order. The Ninth is an LSO Prom from 1966 – the second time Horenstein had conducted the piece with the LSO that year. It is a pity that his RPO performance from 1958 has not been preserved. It drew a famous review from Neville Cardus which is worth quoting at length: “An emphatic victory was won for the cause of Mahler, in the Festival Hall on Wednesday, by great conducting from Jascha Horenstein and by great playing on the part of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. I have heard many performances of the Ninth Symphony of Mahler, some under the direction of the renowned Mahler interpreters, Bruno Walter, Klemperer, Barbirolli, and Mengelberg. This one went deeper into the score than any of my recollection; and the playing was absolutely right in tone, in attack, in its vehement string tension, its snap of woodwind, and also its pathos of woodwind; and the brass and horns ranged from romantic evocation to sounds which seemed to come from the charnel house.

“By what marvels of hypnotism does a conductor conjure from an orchestra a tone the like of which it has seldom produced before? This was the voice of Mahler; it was more than that – it was the Mahler ectoplasm. At the end of the performance there was a scene of enthusiasm and tumult seldom equalled at concerts in this country… This performance has surely established Horenstein’s position among the very few great humane orchestral interpreters of our time.”

When the 1966 LSO performance was issued on Music & Arts many years ago, a reviewer began: “If I were forced to make a list of the dozen most important Mahler recordings currently available, I could not imagine omitting this one.” Whilst admitting that ensemble is not perfect, he stressed its superiority as a recording to Horenstein’s once-famous Vox discs and tried to put his finger on the nature of the conductor’s achievement: “Mahler’s music covers an enormous range of emotions and feelings: the sublime and the vulgar; the impassioned and the mundane; the tender and the angry. What made Horenstein a great Mahler conductor is the fact that he encompassed that huge range more thoroughly than most. Rarely have I heard such vehemence in the playing of the inner movements of this symphony, but not for its own sake nor for the sake of virtuosity. It is vehemence and intensity in a much larger context – a context to become apparent in Horenstein’s desolate, despairing reading of the Finale.”

In an interview with Alan Blyth, Horenstein ruefully recounted how as a boy in Vienna in 1912 he had the chance to attend a 3-concert music festival. His pocket-money would only stretch to two of them: he was particularly keen to see Nikisch (whom he cited as a major influence on his decision to become a conductor), and he chose Weingartner over Bruno Walter. The name Mahler meant nothing to him at the time: and so he missed the world premiere of the Ninth Symphony – a piece with which he was to become associated throughout his career (in the same interview he described it with a chuckle as his “warhorse”).

When the LSO Ninth appeared on BBC Legends it received a guarded welcome from the mainstream reviewers. In Gramophone the recent Tilson Thomas performance was received rhapsodically because of its beauty of sound: this is not on the agenda in Horenstein’s performance. Tough, unflinching, intensely wrought, with a discipline and fierce passion that sometimes makes Bernstein (whom I admire) sound theatrical. Bernstein described the first movement, with its huge dynamic and emotional range, its ebb and flow, its powerful surges, its remorseless progress, as like some great novel: in Horenstein’s measured and louring view, it is a Russian novel, epic and dark. Of course there is tenderness, made all the more poignant by the refusal to indulge. Listen to the climax, mit hochster gewalt: there is much more than mere volume to the blast of the brass and the thunder of the drums. It is overwhelming. Then listen to the succeeding funeral march, wie eine schwerer kondukt: wraithlike violins, the steely glint of muted trumpets, the hollow clang of bells, the muffled tread of drums, basses and bassoons. These are, as Cardus put it, sounds from the charnel house.

The middle movements are as vehement as the review quoted above claims: an ungainly, snarling Ländler, with sour woodwind and horns, and sneering trombones; and a Rondo Burleske which values weight over velocity – rather like Zander’s version: sacrificing the hurtling (and undeniably thrilling) virtuosity of Solti and others for a growling anger which (as in Zander’s case) aligns the movement more closely with the Scherzo of the Sixth: something which I for one find effective. As so often with Horenstein, the choice of relatively slow speeds over Mahler’s long time-spans generates a huge momentum. The ending has a savagery which eludes more breathless versions.

The opening of the Finale is extraordinary: the arching violins are racked with weariness and despair, and in the stark emotional landscape which unfolds, everything is tinged with these feelings. The movement is stalked by a horror that will not be shaken off. It is a disturbing and uncompromising reading, resolutely avoiding any kind of transfiguration. The climactic appearance of the hymn-like theme is anguished, and instead of reaching any kind of plateau (just a heartbreaking glimpse of Kindertotenlieder’s “heights” on the final page), the music seems to collapse in on itself out of sheer exhaustion. Rarely has Mahler’s final marking – ersterbend – seemed more appropriate.

Near the end of his life, Horenstein commented in an interview that one of the worst things about dying was never being able to hear Das Lied von der Erde again. His studio performance with what was then the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra, in late April 1972, was the last Mahler he ever performed. A year later he was dead. The first time I heard it was when it was re-broadcast in October 1974, and the poor-quality tape I made became one of my most treasured possessions. Eventually I picked up an Italian Intaglio off-air CD, and in 2000 it was finally officially released on BBC Legends.

Jack Diether, the American Mahler expert, greeted the original broadcast as “far and away the finest Mahler performance I have ever heard”. Strong words; and I can imagine stirrings among long-time admirers of Walter and Ferrier, Klemperer and Wunderlich, Bernstein and Fischer-Dieskau, and any of Janet Baker’s available versions; to say nothing of other classic performances of the symphonies. All I can say is that if, by some catastrophic chance, I were limited to only one Mahler recording, it would probably be this one – fighting off strong challenges from Abbado and from Horenstein himself (Haitink I have already paid tribute to: but my best experiences of his Mahler have been live.)

Why is this so? I don’t think this is the place to weary readers who have got this far with a long discussion, though this is a performance I could write pages on – and perhaps, one day, will. Everything about it seems right: and, as Cardus observed of the 1958 Ninth, Horenstein uses relatively broad tempi to go deeper into the score than others. Rather than beauty he achieves an almost hallucinatory clarity and intensity, and in this he is matched by his soloists. John Mitchinson could be coarse, but he is not here: he finds variety, fantasy and even delicacy in his songs. Alfreda Hodgson is, as Mahler surely intended, one strand in a spare instrumental fabric, almost a sound of nature; acutely responsive to mood and text but never histrionic. To hear her voice being subtly and simply woven into a texture of woodwind solos is to sense – Cardus again – the Mahlerian ectoplasm. Everything is so distinct, so charged, so alive. More overtly emotional readings cannot match the dividends which restraint brings here. One tiny example: listen to the clarinet leading into the climactic Die liebe Erde (Fig.58) in the final song.

In a radio interview (included in part on the BBC CD), Horenstein said that this performance had “a certain extraordinary quality by virtue of the fact that the orchestra never before had played this piece”. He admitted that this “freshness” brought disadvantages as well; but anyone hearing it can detect this special quality within a few bars. In addition to “very good soloists indeed” Horenstein was also pleased that he had had plenty of rehearsal time. So when Raymond Leppard came to conduct the BBCNSO in a famous performance of the work with Janet Baker and John Mitchinson five years later, the groundwork had been done. The same is true, of course, when Bernstein made his ground-breaking recording of the Eighth with the LSO in 1966; Horenstein had been there before him.

Which brings us to the Eighth? The circumstances surrounding Horenstein’s 1959 performance have passed into musical folklore; and the performance itself has often been credited with launching the British Mahler revival which continues unabated to this day. Frank Howes famously declared, only a few years earlier, “We don’t want Mahler here”; but Mahler’s music is now in our bloodstream. Horenstein, along with Bernstein and others, deserves some of the credit for this.

I never expected to be able to hear this performance. Back in 1973, confronting the “jungle of tape”, Christopher Ford wrote: “The most exciting story of all concerns the Eighth (the so-called “Symphony of a Thousand”) of which Horenstein’s only performance in a conducting career of 50 years, with the LSO in the Royal Albert Hall in 1959, sponsored by the BBC, clearly established Mahler’s reputation in Britain. The BBC and other radio stations have a terrible habit of erasing interesting tapes, says Goldsmith, and it had long been believed that this was the fate of the Horenstein Eighth. But the master tape still exists – almost unbelievably in stereo, which the BBC engineers had been testing privately since 1958 – and it is said to be of extremely high quality. The quality of the performance was always unforgettable.”
Unicorn wanted to release this as a Horenstein memorial, but the complex financial arrangements made this impossible. Finally, it appeared as the first release in the BBC Legends series.

There are some great Eighths on disc, from Bernstein’s pioneering account onwards – dramatic Solti, passionate Tennstedt, ecstatic Rattle and so on. So how does Horenstein’s historic performance measure up? I first heard it with some trepidation – would it prove to be one of those legends that shrink when brought into the light of day?

Robert Simpson concluded in his great book on Bruckner that the most important quality in Bruckner performance is patience, and that this quality is an aspect of love. Bruckner’s symphonies ultimately reveal a “blaze” of “calm fire”. The trajectory of a Mahler symphony is very different – an eventful journey, an effortful ascent. Yet Simpson’s words come to my mind when I hear the Horenstein Mahler Eight. To my ears, it bears out Christopher Ford’s comments, quoted near the beginning of this essay, comparing Horenstein with other conductors (I have heard all of them in Mahler, with the exception of Bruno Walter). It would be arid to conduct a point-by-point comparison with other versions; yet when it comes to its mighty and spacious conclusion, I find myself more moved and engulfed than by any other performance (Wyn Morris is not far behind, but that’s another story).

Of course there are glitches: a spectacular late entry by the fine tenor, Kenneth Neate, at amorem cordibus; the Mater Gloriosa torpedoed by a burst of coughing. But this is a performance where everything pays off. It is such a strange work: Part II, as has often been remarked, is the nearest Mahler came to writing an opera, and the unlikely names of Bellini and Meyerbeer have been invoked. Stylistically it can be seen as a dismaying retreat from the dazzling novelties of the Seventh: anomalous, anachronistic, a failed attempt to retrieve the religious and pantheistic glories of the Second and Third. Yet, as Andrew Porter once wrote, a fine performance can say just about everything that needs to be said. Nor is this a purely technical matter (it never is, of course): Richard Osborne, comparing two famous versions, remarked that Solti’s is the better performance, Bernstein’s the greater experience. In Horenstein’s visionary grip, an often ramshackle piece is perceived and presented as a mighty whole, culminating in an apotheosis of quite extraordinary grandeur.

Perhaps I only needed to hear Horenstein in Mahler once. I heard Klemperer once, in the Second; Bernstein once, in the Ninth; and I have fond memories of Bruno Maderna in the Seventh (wonderfully paired with Webern). Yet it is Horenstein who shines the brightest beam of light over the last 35 years’ concert-going and listening. The 21-year-old who darkened the doors of the Festival Hall for the first time on that distant May Sunday emerged two hours later changed for ever.

© Chris Kettle 2005/6

ZEMLINSKY’S EARLY LIFE AND THE MAHLERS

Forgive me if even before I begin I digress to a story about one time I drove into London.

What other country would put up with its capital city’s traffic problems like we do with London – you cannot really drive in during the week due to an exorbitant Congestion Charge and even on a Sunday there are road ‘improvements’ going on in East London that meant a modest journey by car in for a matinee Wagner opera performance began for me at 12.30 in the afternoon and I did not arrive home until a little short of 11 hours later! This was not helped by the ridiculously extended second interval of over 75 minutes I believe and longer than the entire Act 2. The excuse is the set change and ‘Health & Safety’ but it should not happen - something is very wrong when the tail wags the dog! In what other opera house in the world would the audience, realising they had been called back at least 15 minutes too soon sit uncomplainingly just applauding politely when the Fire Curtain finally went up or the lights at last dimmed? I wanted to shout ‘About Time!’ but feared the wrath of the Royal Opera House security and since I am the son of a Jewish refugee who came to England at around the same time as a certain Mr Wolfgang, I might have been forcibly ejected from Covent Garden as he was from the Labour Party Conference!

Well why do I begin with this anecdote … well my thoughts from returning from spending the weekend on the Mahler Pilgrimage organised by this Society recently and some research I did for this introduction reveals one cannot divorce Mahler from his Jewish heritage or the problems of being Jewish in his lifetime or in the decades following his death. This surrounded us in his Czech homeland. It followed Mahler – as we know - to Vienna and was a problem for all Jewish musicians of his time and who came after him such as Alexander von Zemlinsky who life and career I reflect on below. I feel I needed to mention my personal history in order to have the right to comment on this and see how some of my opening remarks are reflected in his background and his career.

In 1870 Adolf von Zemlinszky (1845-1900), son of Anton and Cäcilie von Zemlinszky (originally spelled Semlinsky), renounced his Catholicism and converts to Judaism to marry his Jewish fiancée, Clara Semo (1848-1912). Adolf's family is Catholic on both sides as far back as there are records. Adolf adopts a spurious von; neither he nor his forebears were ennobled.

Clara's father, Shem Tov Semo (c.1810-c.1880), is an assimilation-minded Sephardic Jew who marries a Muslim woman in Sarajevo, part of the Austrian Empire. Although essentially a Muslim city, there are harmonious cultural relations there among Muslims, Christians and Jews. Clara's mother either converts to Judaism, or more likely allows her daughter Clara to be raised in the religion of the child's father. None of this is known with any certainty but Clara raises her own children in the Sephardic tradition of Judaism.

In 1870, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy is a sprawling multi-national/multi-ethnic/multi-lingual empire consisting of areas better known (after 1918) by their twentieth century names: Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia (northern Yugoslavia), Transylvania (western Romania), Silesia (southern Poland), and Venice, Trentino-Alto Adige, and Trieste (northern and eastern Italy). The empire has within its borders many religions: Roman Catholicism (the Habsburg dynasty is Roman Catholic) and the separatist Old Catholic Church; several branches of Orthodoxy - Greek, Russian, and Serbian; Judaism; Islam; and a number of Protestant denominations including Calvinism.

Jews makeup 1.3% of the population of Vienna in 1857. By 1890, the number has increases to 12%. Many of the empire's Jewish inhabitants migrate to Vienna from other parts of Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, and elsewhere in the empire.

In 1871 on 14 October in Vienna: Clara von Zemlinszky gives birth to son Alexander who is circumcised a week later and whose name is inscribed in the records of the Sephardic Jewish community of Vienna. In 1877 Alexander leaves Sephardic school and is enrolled in a state-run primary school (The same year on August 31 Alma Schindler is born and for good measure on March 14 Albert Einstein had been born).

By 1880 (when Mahler was 20 and completes Das Klagende Lied) Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe, and especially in Vienna which has a large and growing Jewish community. This trend only increases during the 1880s and 1890s. Vocal right-wing newspapers have no brakes on expressing crude anti-Jewish sentiments in their pages. Vienna sees the establishment of an anti-Semitic political party, the Christian Socialists, which succeeds in electing a famous mayor, Karl Lueger, who runs on the party's specific anti-Jewish platform. He – in all likelihood – was Hitler’s inspiration.

In 1884 Alexander plays the organ in the synagogue on high holy days and holidays. In recognition of his musical ability, he is admitted to the Vienna Music Conservatory and enrolled in its preparatory school. In 1887 Alexander graduates to the Conservatory's senior school where he studies piano with Anton Door and attends theory classes of Robert Fuchs and Franz Krenn. Between 1887 and 1890, he composes short pieces. In 1890 Alexander wins the Conservatory's annual piano competition for which he is awarded a gold medal and a Bösendorfer grand piano. He is awarded the diploma for piano studies and enrols in the theory and composition courses of Johann Nepomuk Fuchs, brother of Robert, and Franz Krenn.

In 1892 Alex is called up for conscription. Between 1892 and 1894, Alex is given three physical examinations for military service; finally found ‘unsuitable’, probably because of his height and weight, and deferred. He is about 5' 2" tall and, by his own estimate, skinny and unimposing. In 1895 he forms an amateur orchestra, Polyhymnia, which he conducts in its first public performance. Alex meets a cellist who joins Polyhymnia, Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951), who later changes the spelling to Schoenberg. For a brief period Zemlinsky gives counterpoint lessons to Schönberg; Zemlinsky reviews with him Schönberg’s early compositions. In 1901, Schönberg leaves Vienna for Berlin but the two become, and remain, very close lifelong friends.

From 1887 to 1899, Zemlinsky composes songs, piano pieces, several piano sonatas, orchestral pieces, operas, string quartets and a quintet, and symphonies. In 1899 Alex is named Kapellmeister (music director) of Vienna's Carltheater (1899-1905). Alexander Zemlinsky (as he now calls himself, changing the spelling of his last name and dropping the von which he later reinstates as a possible shield against anti-Semitic attacks) withdraws his affiliation from the Jewish community.
He converts to Protestantism, which is a convenience for forging ahead with his career, as it was earlier for the Mahler who converted to Catholicism in order for the Catholic emperor to appoint him as director of the Vienna Hofoper (Court Opera). Alex begins a relationship with Melanie Guttmann (1872-1961), a Vienna Conservatory-trained soprano. They become engaged but it is broken off in 1901 when Melanie emigrates to America where she marries. It is said that Melanie left Alex after he met Alma Schindler. Despite the break, Melanie and Alex remain friends.

In 1900 he completed his opera Es war einmal (Once Upon a Time) and the premiere was conducted by Gustav Mahler at the Vienna Court Opera. It was at a soirée that year when Zemlinsky meets Alma Schindler (1879-1964) for the first time. Alma Schindler, the daughter of famous Viennese painter Emil Jakob Schindler (1842-1892), is later of course famous as Alma Mahler (and then as Alma Mahler-Gropius-Werfel). After Alma had shown Zemlinsky some of her songs, he regularly frequented the house of her stepfather painter Carl Moll (1861-1945) and became her piano and composition teacher. Zemlinsky works with Alma on her weak composing ability to improve the structure of her Lieder.

I read a phrase somewhere that said ‘it was more than teaching’ that took him to her house since he falls deeply in love with her and in one place you will read that ‘the attractive and self-assured Alma and the withdrawn Zemlinsky’ begin ‘a turbulent and problematic love affair’ or that although they become extremely close it is because of Alma's fear of pregnancy they never consummate the relationship. Anyway her family, especially her stepfather, is anti-Semitic and disapproves of the relationship; they warn her away from marriage with Zemlinsky.

Alma admired Zemlinsky’s music and intellect and fell for his apparently great erotic charisma but could not come to terms with his ‘lowly’ background nor his appearance. She writes several times in her diary of her physical passion for him but also of Zemlinsky's physical ugliness, and she tells him so. [‘He's dreadfully ugly, almost chinless - yet I found him quite enthralling.’] He is so devastated by having to acknowledge her feelings about his looks that he is affected for most of his adult life by her cruel and bruising words.

As hinted at - despite his looks - Alexander Zemlinsky leads a notorious erotic life (not at all uncommon in Vienna).

I originally edited out this passage here about how many times I have been to Vienna and have yet to find what is apparently ‘not at all common’!.

Apparently he never lacked for attractive woman drawn to him and he to them. This is the case both before and after he meets Alma. Alex is known as a brilliant writer and wit, a cigar-smoking, charming and roguish dandy always dressed as stylishly as he can afford. He thrives in Vienna's intellectual community of musicians, writers, poets, and artists.

In 1901 Alex’s sister Mathilde Zemlinsky withdraws her affiliation from the Jewish community and converts to Protestantism before her marriage during the year to Arnold Schönberg.

Alma suddenly breaks off her relationship with Alex. She has just met Gustav Mahler, and within a few months of their meeting Alma is engaged and soon marries him. Alex is devastated by the loss of Alma despite his realization, about which he writes to Alma, that she is emotionally shallow and has manipulated him for her own satisfaction.

In 1904 Zemlinsky and Schönberg found the Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler (Alliance of Creative Musicians) to encourage new forms in music and an outcome of that was a piano version of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony that was performed in 1906 by Mahler and Zemlinsky. In 1906 he is 35 and has completed his opera Der Traumgörge (George the Dreamer - Görge is a dialectical variant of the German name Georg). From 1906 to 1911, Zemlinsky is appointed First Kapellmeister at Vienna's new Volksoper, a so-called popular repertory opera house, privately owned and operated to present lower priced opera, operetta, and dramas. Zemlinsky is responsible for creating a highly proficient and professional new orchestral ensemble, which it is noted he does. This is a good enough point to leave Alex though much occurred in the remaining 31 years before his death in 1942.

Recommended recording – on Globe (GLO5199) there are the complete songs of Alma Mahler and Zemlinsky’s 1896 composition for soprano, two horns, harp and strings Waldgespräch. The soprano is Charlotte Margiono and the orchestra is The Brabant Orchestra with Julian Reynolds (who orchestrated Alma’s songs). Zemlinsky’s work is a delightful ballade to the words of Joseph von Eichendorff and in it are heard echoes of Wagner, Gustav Mahler and even Alma herself.
Footnote: I am grateful for Janet Wasserman’s Zemlinsky timeline for relevant information here.

© Jim Pritchard 2006

An Appreciation of Bernard Haitink

In last December’s The Wayfarer I completed my 2004 Mahler Odyssey with the Third, performed at the Barbican in September by Bernard Haitink and the Berlin Philharmonic. Writing the day after the performance, I was unable to do more than summarise it as ‘unforgettably luminous, beautiful and intense’ and to record the extraordinary silence with which it was greeted – de rigeur these days with performances of the Ninth, but remarkable after the resplendent conclusion to the Third. Absolutely right, though: unlike the spectacular final chord of the Second sharf abreissen, which invites an immediate storm of applause, the Third does not end with a decisive cut-off; the final D Major chords accumulate a Brucknerian resonance which seems not to stop but to pass out of hearing, sounding on into eternity.

Now that time has passed, I would like to dwell in a little more detail on this performance which has continued to resonate in my mind and memory. This often happens with Mahler. Craig Brown has recently given us an eloquent account of Mark Elder’s Sixth in Brighton in The Wayfarer. I went to the Royal Festival Hall performance and took my elder daughter – a very open-minded young lady, though her musical experience has been largely determined by her cultural affiliations as a Goth. The performance blew her away. It blew me away, too. Several weeks after that Sixth, my daughter and I are finding plenty to talk about.

Before looking in more detail in the next The Wayfarer at that memorable Third in the Barbican last September, I would like to reflect on the Haitink performances of this work that I have witnessed. I have heard him conduct the work seven times, and these occasions run like a thread through my concert-going experience. The first time was on St Cecilia’s Day, 1970, with Norma Procter and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. I spent my first pay packet as a tyro schoolteacher on taking a large party of family and friends to the RFH for this. My mother bought me the score for Christmas, inscribing it ‘Remember a perfect November day in 1970’. She was right. It was a day as clear and fine as summer; I wrote in my diary ‘The performance shone with splendour, colour and ardour, but was shot through with the utmost serenity and contentment which finally became, from the soft entry of the chorale treatment of the theme in the last movement, almost more than the human frame (or this one) could bear without, like Gloucester’s heart in King Lear, “bursting smilingly” ‘. I was impressionable and no doubt intense 22-year-old; but I still feel that way about that performance, 35 years later. For Joan Chissell in The Times, it was ‘a miracle’ and ‘one of those events that nobody is ever likely to forget for the rest of their lives’. For Gillian Widdicombe in the Financial Times, it was ‘one of those five or six concerts a year that send the critical lexicon of commendatory adjectives into a heady spin’.

Such was the success of this performance (in fact there were two), that the LPO, in addition to a repeat at the 1971 Proms, scheduled two more in November 1971. I had to rely on the radio for the Prom, but I took more friends to one of the November performances. This time conductor and orchestra seemed mellow and relaxed, and the performance was suffused with a golden glow which may have underplayed some of the darker and wilder elements in the score, but which was nevertheless richly satisfying. In 1978, the LPO opened their autumn season with two more performances, and I was there for the second, Sunday afternoon outing. This was a bold, big-boned performance, with ten double basses and four pairs of cymbals at the recapitulation in the first movement; the symphony was kept on a firm reign as it moved towards its majestic conclusion. Perhaps I missed a little of the magic of earlier performances; perhaps I needed to hear more of what other conductors made of the piece. It was, however, a fine performance and a stirring experience.

The following year, Haitink resigned his Principal Conductorship of the LPO, and in 1981 he was at the helm of the Philharmonia for two more performances: one at the RFH in February, one six months later at the Proms. The Festival Hall performance I remember for the enormous vitality and vividness of the orchestral sound: there was nothing bland or safe here (despite the odd critical canard about Haitink the dull, phlegmatic Dutchman). The rampant horn section and John Wallace’s trumpet must stand for the vigour and virtuosity of the whole orchestra. And again, whilst the symphony’s huge contrasts were exuberantly realised, the structure was held in a firm grip. As Barry Millington commented in The Times, ‘it is his sureness in transforming an assemblage of disparate elements into a coherent whole that makes Haitink one of the finest Mahler conductors of our time.’

If the RFH Philharmonia performance was memorable for (among other things) its dazzling immediacy and its physical excitement, the ensuing Prom performance was remarkable for its radiance, spiritual concentration and dedication: it was as though orchestra and audience were bound together and borne along for an hour and three-quarters in something more than a concert. Can Mahler 3 be a religious experience today, when few believe in an ordered cosmos and many dismiss Mahler’s fragile (though sometimes stentorian) religious affirmations as naïve and untenable, even by himself? Yes, I think it can. Once again, it is John Wallace I remember, managing a thrilling crescendo at the end of the enormously protracted final chord (unmarked, but perhaps in the spirit of Mahler’s instruction ohne diminuendo). And these two performances had another inestimable advantage in the presence of Alfreda Hodgson as soloist in the Nietzsche setting – surely one of the greatest (though not most celebrated) Mahler singers of her generation. After the Prom, I felt Meirion Bowen did in The Guardian: ‘It was the sort of performance after which one has to walk a few miles to come down to earth.’

For much of the next 18 years, Haitink was too busy and embattled at Covent Garden to give many orchestral concerts in London. I heard some impressive performances of the Third during that time, under the likes of Tennstedt, Rattle, Nagano and Tilson Thomas; high-gloss but disappointing ones from Mehta and Ozawa; a fine National Youth Orchestra Prom under Mark Elder; and equally fine performance by my local orchestra the Bournemouth Symphony, under their Principal Conductor, Yakov Kreizberg. So it was rather strange to be hearing Haitink again at the 1999 Proms, this time with the BBC Symphony Orchestra (five days after he had conducted a hugely impressive Mahler 7 with the European Union Youth Orchestra). Often it is possible to locate the ‘heart’ of this symphony in the fourth movement: here, it was in the rapt stillness of the posthorn solo in the third, floating down from the Royal Albert Hall gallery. Michelle de Young proved a reliable all-purpose Mahler singer in the following movement, though with nothing particular to say; and the fifth was wonderfully robust. For once, there were enough children to make their Bimm-bamms into a celebratory din; why do so many performances make do with thirty, or even fewer?

Above all, though, it was wonderful to hear the finale once more in Haitink’s hands. It was, as ever, entirely natural and eventually overwhelming. Geoffrey Norris ended an eloquent review in the Telegraph: ‘Haitink’s great skill was in drawing the symphony together, so that the slow finale emerged as the natural summation of all that had gone before, sublimely ecstatic, transcendent in beauty and radiant with awe.’

And so to 2004: a good year for Haitink admirers. I was able to hear him in four of Mahler’s symphonies and two of Bruckner’s – magnificent performances, all of them. The Berlin Philharmonic’s Third was for me the climax (though Rattle’s Birmingham Eighth ran it close) of a particularly rich concert-going year, not only for Mahler (am I alone in having found the BBC Barbican Maxwell Davies tribute, culminating in the wonderful Worldes Blis, one of the more memorable concerts I have ever attended?).

The Third, hailed by Hugh Canning in The Sunday Times as ‘one of the great symphonic events of my concert-going lifetime’, amazed me all over again with the freshness, power and brilliance of the Berlin sound and the perfection of Haitink’s control of this vast (though never, in his hands, sprawling) work. The opening horn call was bold, bright and springy: a real call to attention, not just a leonine roar. The playing in this movement was tremendously vivid, almost enough to burst the acoustic confines of the Barbican. The wonderful buzzing of the double basses just before Figure 18, gradually fading to nothing; an exuberant (and very large) tambourine held aloft; the huge, blistering climaxes – roistering horns with bells raised, shrieking trumpets, percussion rising to deafening levels. Power held in reserve made such moments all the more shattering. Enormous virtuosity in Das Gesindel (‘the mob’) too: to give one example, the hammering second timpanist in that tricky bar just before Figure 53.

After a perfectly poised Minuet, Haitink in the third movement proved unexpectedly good at the boisterous moments as well as the delicate ones: the return of the animal music after the magical posthorn solo was marvellous (Grob = coarse) and the reappearance of Pan at the end was frightening. The nocturnal fourth movement began with bell-like harps, louder than usual (they are marked p to the cellos’ and basses’ ppp): a striking effect, giving a distinct ictus to each quiet oscillation of the lower strings – a momentary gleam, raising the hair on the back of the neck, sensitising us for the bell-sounds soon to dispel the darkness. Surprisingly, Haitink adopted the controversially bluesy reading of Mahler’s oboe marking hinaufziehen (‘drawn up’) pioneered by Simon Rattle: I had expected him to be his usual conservative self, but this was characteristic of the performance’s sense of freshness and adventure. As for Anna Larsson’s singing, words fail me. Geoff Brown in The Times pleaded: ‘If you want to prevent global warming, please don’t let Anna Larsson sing.’ I will content myself with saying that her appearance on stage was a model of tact. Often, the spell of the music is broken by the entrance of the soloist after one of the middle movements to a scatter of applause; here, while we were recovering from the explosive ending of the first movement, her tall figure came on unobtrusively to take her seat among the orchestra between the eighth horn and the harps. She is a sensational Mahler singer, and I cannot wait to hear her Das Lied von der Erde.

After a bright fifth movement (too few children), we finally reached the finale; and as the violins began their hymn I marvelled again at Mahler’s judgement in leaving them out of the preceding movement entirely, so that this heart-stopping opening comes as a new inspiration. And here was a surprise: instead of the quiet but rich string sound, the movement began with a delicate tracery, like chamber music; perhaps recalling Mahler’s borrowing from Beethoven’s Opus 135. The texture was light, with a sense of frailty which made the first climax devastating and even shocking: the gradient of the movement’s ascent was not as smooth and preordained as in some Haitink performances. The sense of frailty as well as tenderness accompanied its progress right up to the climactic point of arrival: as a result, the last few minutes were more overwhelming than I have ever heard them. This, I felt, is as good as human music-making gets. The sheer beauty and translucence of sound prompted Andrew Clements in The Guardian to write aptly, ‘Every paragraph of that movement became more beautiful and transfiguring that the one before, as if the pages of an illuminated manuscript were being slowly turned, and the Berlin strings dug ever deeper into their tonal reserves, creating an extraordinarily luminous ending to an unforgettable performance.’

In addition to the heft and brilliance of the orchestral sound, the technique of individual players was fabulous. Each soloist seemed not just a virtuoso but a poet. An example: after the third and most anguished climax the finale, a tender flute solo over pianissimo tremolo strings prepares the way for a soft brass chorale. Emmanuel Pahud so breathed and phrased this that the sound emerged from silence with absolute imperceptibility (as did the clarinet a bar later, and then the first trumpet), fading just as gently.

When Ben Zander introduced his performance of this work at the Royal Festival Hall in January 2003, he rightly pointed out that in the closing bars the timpani are marked ff (woodwind fff); and he deplored the tendency of some conductors to increase the drums’ dynamics for effect, spoiling the organ-like homogeneity of the overall sound. Haitink is not the man to sensationalise the music at the expense of fidelity to the score; yet here the two timpanists mounted an emphatic and double-sticked tattoo. It was exciting, triumphant, but not crude: there was an element of ritual as they sliced the air in perfect unison, and the measured thunder of the drums seemed to provide what Mahler asked for: a noble fullness of tone.

And so to the final chord. Robert Maycock wrote in The Independent, ‘At the end, the audience let the final massive chord hang on into a silence as unexpected as it was affecting … It was a greeting more profound than all the subsequent ovations, a tribute not just to a concert but to a life.’ For Hugh Canning this was ‘the most uplifting account of Mahler’s expansive Third Symphony I’ve ever heard, surpassing even Claudio Abbado’s wonderful conducting of this work with the same band at the Festival Hall in 1999’. I count myself privileged to have heard both these performances: and though I hope to hear Haitink, as well as others, in this work again, I cannot imagine a performance that will surpass that September one. Yet who knows? As David Cairns wrote of one of those earlier performances, Haitink ‘reveals fresh wonders at every turn of the long and passionate pilgrimage’. And the work itself, of course, is endlessly self-renewing.

© Chris Kettle 2005

THE ‘RESURRECTION’ – composed 1888-1894
by Jim Pritchard

‘It’s not just a matter of life and death – it’s more important than that!’ is probably a quote from Woody Allen – and if it isn’t it should be! This just about sums up Mahler’s great exploration into the meaning of human existence that is his magnificent Second Symphony known to one and all as the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony. In fact there is even more of a parallel with the great film director since both men were Jewish, both were revered when young and dismissed in later life … and in Mahler’s case for many years after his death. In 1933 the Nazis banned his music because of his Jewish ‘roots’ and it was only in the 1960s that Mahler’s music assumed its rightful position in concert repertoires leading to him becoming one of the most popular composers of our time.

A recent performance of the Second Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by the Russian-born, Yakov Kreizberg, had a most intriguing post-performance epilogue when the GMS UK made its presence felt in the Letters page of The Times newspaper. A review (by Richard Morrison) of the concert in that newspaper had commented that ‘After the first movement Kreizberg left the platform, the orchestra retuned, the audience chattered, and far too long passed before he returned with the soloists’. It is true that ‘all sense of accumulated tension was dissipated’ and indeed this ‘interval’ may, in hindsight, have been handled better but it was the GMS UK membership secretary, Neil Rhind MBE, who subsequently informed readers of The Times that ‘Indeed Gustav Mahler did specify a five minute pause between the two blocks of his “Resurrection” Symphony. He also specified that the audience should keep quiet and that there should be no unnecessary noise or disturbance to interrupt solemn contemplation. The late Sir John Barbirolli shushed both chatterers and those who attempted to applaud the entrance of the soloists during the pause’. I do not expect this will be necessary tonight!

Is Mahler’s Second Symphony meant to be a quasi, or even real religious experience? The answer is no, of course not. Sometimes though it can get mighty close to one as Arnold Schoenberg once wrote: ‘The first time I heard Mahler’s Second Symphony I was seized, especially in certain passages, with an excitement which expressed itself even physically, in the violent throbbing of my heart. And I was overwhelmed, completely overwhelmed’.

Mahler generally, I believed, abhorred giving his music a ‘programme’ … a case of the expressible attempting to explain the existential … however we can consider the five movements as follows: Movement 1 (Allegro maestoso) contains music that is dominated by a funeral march as our ‘hero’ (Mahler himself since he was the hero of his very own 1888 First Symphony) is taken to his grave and his life, all he wished for himself and planned for, is re-evaluated. Movements 2 (Andante moderato) and 3 emphasise life’s trivialities and bring us reminiscences from our hero’s past – highlighting the good times expressed in the Ländler dance rhythms of the second that are overtaken by a symphonic Scherzo in the third to depict the futility and ups-and-downs of life in a grotesque, cynical waltz based on musical material from the Wunderhorn song ‘St Anthony’s Sermon to the Fishes’.

In the closing two movements there is a reconciliation effected between Man and God so that any despair at the pointlessness of existence is countered by the hope of salvation. ‘I am from God, and would go back to God!’ begins with the entry of the simple ‘chorale’, ‘Urlicht’ (‘Primal Light’ - another Wunderhorn song), which the solo mezzo-soprano sings as a voice of simple faith ushering in the fourth movement. This is just a moment of music drama that acts as a prelude to the finale. We have come at last to the Final Judgement – ‘The earth quakes, graves burst open, the dead arise’. Distant brass, ominous drum rolls, melodramatic penultimate and Last Trumps; surge forward and gain in intensity towards the cataclysmic final chorale. Time definitely seems to stand still and then ‘the last trump sounds again’, the soprano introduces warmth and humanity into the proceeding joining the chorus after their breathtaking ppp entry of ‘Aufersteh’n’ (‘Rise again’).

This finale was inspired by the funeral service for Hans von Bülow in Hamburg in 1894. The same von Bülow who, in 1891, had covered his ears when Mahler played him the opening movement and later commented: ‘If what I have heard is music, I understand nothing about music’. Yet Mahler was there at his funeral and later recalled ‘All of a sudden the choir, accompanied by the organ, intoned Klopstock’s Resurrection chorale. It was as if I had been struck by lightning, everything suddenly seemed crystal clear!’ This final movement shows us that doomsday is approaching. Mahler acknowledged that the finale to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was another inspiration to this music and like that seminal work Mahler too employs a division of this movement into many sections linked by apocalyptic-sounding fanfares with the most remote brass fanfares signalling the impending ‘Day of Judgement’. In fact only the first section of the text is Klopstock’s since Mahler has added a number of lines of his own. It all ends with the utterance ‘I shall die in order to live!’ which was a chilling prediction of Mahler’s own fate as an artist!

In the finale the chorus’s pianissimo first entry is truly thrilling and needs to be experienced to be believed. There is the mezzo-soprano’s final solo (‘O glaube, mein Herz, o glaube’ – ‘Believe, my heart, o believe!’) and then soloists and chorus unite as the symphony is brought to a gloriously joyful and valedictory conclusion. The final overwhelming ‘message’ of Mahler’s testament in this symphony is that no matter who your ‘God’ may be, no one should fear his or her own ‘Day of Judgement’ to come. The overall emotional impact of a great performance like the one I am sure we will hear tonight is often indescribable!

© 2005 Jim Pritchard

MAHLER’S THIRD
by Neil Rhind

Britain’s introduction to Mahler’s “last” symphony

It must be hard for younger members of the Society to imagine a time when concert programmes lacked a work by Mahler in a season, let alone in a month of performances. Radio Three (as I write) has a Mahler item almost every day and there is no easy way of checking how often Classic FM play the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony in some form or other, seemingly daily. Although the enthusiasm for Mahler had been very evident in England as far back as the 1930s, and has been thoroughly explored by Donald Mitchell in Chapter 26 of the Mahler Companion (Oxford University Press, 1999, 2002), public performances of the symphonies were quite rare until the late 1950s. You could buy Mahler 9 and Das Lied von der Erde on 78rpm shellac records in the UK before the war, and some of the songs. But real performances were hard to find although occasionally, there would be a presentation of a larger work, for which, usually, the BBC had to be thanked.

But gradually the gaps were filled – with the exception of the Third. It cannot have been the cost of the forces although the orchestral requirement is huge. The solo voice takes a modest part of the whole and the choral lines were clearly suitable for outstanding amateur choirs, of which England had (and has) many. After all according to Mitchell, the Eighth had been heard a number of times since Henry Wood urged the monster forces in the Royal Albert Hall to play and sing their hearts out on 15 April 1930. There was a performance of the Eighth in 1948 at which my London school choir (St Marylebone Grammar School) provided the ‘blessed boys’. Horenstein’s still definitive performance of the Eighth had triumphed on 20 March 1959 and this can be recaptured on a BBC Legends CD (BBCL 4001-7in).

I suspect that the Third was seen as far too long and, superficially, judged by some concert planners, as unlikely to attract an audience prepared to sit through 80-90 minutes non-stop, much of which was at a funeral pace. An ancient music critic told your correspondent once that if the first movement had been played at a proper march tempo it would take all day – the performances he heard were always played at the trot, a bit like the Italian Bersaglieri on parade.

As Bernard Haitink’s75th birthday celebrations continued in September with a performance of the Third Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra at the Barbican it must be remembered that the first time we were able to hear the Third in a full performance came in 1947 (a broadcast conducted by Adrian Boult) and the next (the first for most listeners) came on 17 January 1960, when the BBC engaged the Philharmonia under the baton of Berthold Goldschmidt. It was the first in a Mahler series, on what we still called the Third Programme, to mark the centenary celebrations; Deryck Cooke’s booklet was in print by this time and selling hugely.

Not everyone was appreciative. The Sunday Times man said of the 1960 radio performance: ‘….the forty-minute first movement is a really an artistic monstrosity; and the very fact that Mr Cooke admits it to be a “total failure” will encourage his readers to trust his judgement elsewhere’. Listeners with a good radio set could have picked up a stereophonic performance from Radio Hilversum by the Residentie Orchestra conducted by William van Otterloo, with Aafje Heynis and the Toonkunst Choir. That was in November 1960.

Astonishingly the next hearing in the UK was the first time it was played live in a public hall, and it took place in February 1961. The performers were the semi-professional band known as the Polyphonia Symphony Orchestra, conducted (as always at the time) by Bryan Fairfax. Fairfax had worked his way through the Bruckner symphonies and other then obscure parts of the orchestral repertoire and decided to risk all on Mahler 3 for his spot at the St Pancras Arts Festival, to be held in the Town Hall, on Euston Road, on 28 February 1961.

It was an outstanding artistic triumph and an astonishing evening: Felix Aprahamian wrote (Sunday Times, 5 March 1961) that: ‘Filled and besieged, St Pancras Town Hall presented a receptive atmosphere of a kind that was rare. The essentially youthful participants responded with a fervour and conviction which belied their years. Inevitably we shall hear tidier performances – when triplets will be heard as three distinct successive sounds, and double–basses will agree about the pitch of a note – but to carp about this, without admitting that these young people unfolded Mahler’s vast panorama thrillingly, would be churlish.’

There is no doubt that the public relations had been good. The event was trailed in The Times, in a long article by its Music Critic (almost certainly William Mann) on 24 February. He titled his piece: A Concordance to Mahler’s Genius. In it he gently lamented the fact that the Third was to be premièred by enthusiasts from the Wind Music Society and not by one the major symphony orchestras. While noting that the work had suffered harsh words from even Mahler’s admirers The Times man remained much taken ‘ … by the grand dimensions of the work, conceived as a hymn of the creation: life, below, and upon, and above the ground lies dormant until awoken by Pan, the life force … The whole symphony is so intensely fascinating and so utterly characteristic of Mahler’s unique, intriguing genius, that familiarity with the third symphony is a delightful obligation to anybody who wishes to appreciate Mahler.’

This encomium ensured a packed house when Fairfax and his team launched into ‘the gallant premier’. Perhaps encouraged by The Times man and the then critics’ mafia all the nationals made sure their man was present to record the event for posterity. Andrew Porter, for the Financial Times (‘One could feel nothing but heartfelt gratitude to Brian Fairfax … for putting it on … The performance was natural, and convincing; the work overwhelming’). Despite some minor criticisms and concessions for the pro/am desks the man from The Times noted: ‘ … Fairfax controlled his forces, and the exfoliation of this marvellous symphony, with remarkable effect.’

DCPM for the Daily Telegraph in a shortish review wrote that ‘ ... a heavy burden rested on the shoulders of Mr Fairfax, who acquitted himself most notably in the four shorter movements that precede the concluding Adagio … But in a very real sense Mahler’s Third Symphony still awaits its English première’. (DCPM is in fact our very own much-admired Donald Mitchell, trustee of the GMSUK!)

Neville Cardus, a totally committed Mahlerian since his youthful days under tutelage of the Manchester Guardian chief music critic, Samuel Langford, was the most enthusiastic. ‘The performance in the main was a credit to all concerned. We do not go to such a musical event expecting to hear a faultless technical exploration. The audience in the St Pancras Town Hall was made to feel the spirit of the work, the goodness of heart – and the genius. For this kind of homage to Mahler he would himself, I am pretty certain, have been deeply touched by so much devotion, offered to his music in the most unlikely of places.’

Only Peter Heyworth (The Observer) was really sniffy. ‘Yet even at its most straggling and flatulently rhetorical the music grips the attention … Mahler as a composer is frequently exasperating but never a bore.’ His closing paragraph was somewhat patronising: ‘Although Mr Bryan Fairfax conducted rather rigidly, he drew from an ad hoc orchestra a not unworthy performance; Miss Jean Evans was a promising soloist.’

Bryan Fairfax is still alive, well, and a professional musician both performing and academic. Speaking to him recently he says that he remembers the occasion with great affection but also that he had no idea that a professional performance had, as transpired, been planned for later that year. He also says that the interval they had put in after the long first movement was to give the orchestra a chance to recover. Fairfax subsequently conducted the World première of Havergal Brian's Gothic in the Central Hall Westminster (Boult directed the Royal Albert Hall performance on a later occasion).

Real enthusiasts could have picked another radio performance, on October 26 1961, by the French Orchestre National, conducted by George Sebastian, on France III (280 metres). Then in November 1961 came the triumphal conclusion to all that Fairfax had been working towards. The London Symphony Orchestra performed the Third Symphony under the inspirational baton of Jascha Horenstein, ‘… who clearly knows and loves it from the inside of the music outward, and who unfolded a deeply sympathetic conception with extraordinarily moving power.’ (The Times, 17 November 1961.)

A number of performances now followed: Norman del Mar made the work his ‘own’ in July 1962 at the BBC Prom (and subsequent performances). Afterwards Peter Heyworth (Observer) apologised in writing for the harsh things he had to say about the first movement in the Fairfax performance. Norman del Mar repeated the work when he had to take over desk and evening from an indisposed Pierre Boulez, in November 1962, and he and the work received further plaudits from the English music establishment.

Then came recordings: first, on Delta Records in 1962, by Charles Adler and the ‘Vienna Orchestra’, which was judged terrible at the time but a re-hearing after nearly 40 years reveals it to be not a bad effort. Bernstein, cashing in on the new craze, blazed away with the New York Philharmonic in December 1962 on CBS, and soon there were many more – Solti, Leinsdorf, quickly followed so that by the end of the Sixties there were eight or nine and the work was played with growing frequency. Constantin Silvestri was in charge of the LPO in September 1966, stretching the work to 96 minutes; Horenstein and del Mar added it to their repertory, with Barbirolli, Haitink, Kondrashin and Kubelik hot on their heels, some with recordings as well. But it was Horenstein’s recording for the Unicorn label that took most reviewers fancy at the time and has remained high on the best recordings lists despite the passing of the years.

Another reason for all this nostalgia is because my wife and I were there, at the St Pancras Town Hall, to hear the first performance. It did not quite grip as I had hoped but I then knew nothing of the work (except for an incomprehensible pocket score, its reputation for being over long and hearing the Goldschmidt broadcast) because I had not been able to ‘learn’ it from an LP or by frequent broadcasts. By the time I saw Horenstein lift the stick I knew the tunes and haven’t stopped being thrilled and inspirited by them ever since.

Copyright © 2004 – Neil Rhind

Mahler's Fifth: A Celebration
by Craig Brown

Everyone loves an anniversary. Hopefully this one doesn’t seem too contrived, but I note that 2004 marks the 100th anniversary of the first performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. This occasion gives us just cause to reflect upon the century of joy and hope and inspiration which this radiant work has offered us. Think about it: no-one with a brave heart and red blood in their veins ever walked away from a live Mahler Fifth without feeling, at least for a while, that maybe the world was not such a poor place, after all. Therein lies the scale of the legacy which Mahler has bequeathed to us.

The Fifth was first performed on 18 October, 1904 in Cologne. Although Mahler himself conducted the orchestra, as he did at six of the eight premières received by his own symphonies during his lifetime, the event does not seem to have been an unqualified success. Critics drew attention to the composer’s “predilection for dissonance and jarring harmonies”, and even the great Bruno Walter, arguably the staunchest advocate of the man and his music, found the performance unmemorable and some of Mahler’s instrumentation ineffective. This point was clearly not lost on Mahler, for he spent much of the rest of his life tinkering with the symphony’s orchestration, growling darkly about his inability to reconcile the innovative concept of the work with its instrumental demands. For all that it was completed and published during one of the happiest periods of his stormy life, the Fifth was to remain a musical bone of contention for Mahler until the year of his death – and yet audiences today revere it as probably his most rejuvenating and accessible work.

It was almost inevitable that the compact little gem of the Adagietto should fall prey to those who find a perverse pleasure in misrepresenting great music by editing it to suit a lesser purpose. Carl Orff, Richard Strauss and Wagner, to name but a few, have all suffered in this way, their creations plagiarized for film or TV commercial soundtracks, so why should Mahler expect to escape this indignity? Perhaps he would even have welcomed it. After all, Prokofiev and Shostakovich readily embraced other entertainment concepts, so it is quite conceivable that Mahler would have been equally open-minded.

In any case, it is part of this symphony’s enduring appeal that there is something in it for everyone. Those few minutes of repose within the fourth movement are an oasis of calm after the mercurial brilliance of the Scherzo and before the thrilling radiance of the Finale, Mahler’s alter ego striding resolutely towards the sunlight. Unforgettable, too, are the frisson of one of the composer’s most evocative openings and the third movement’s marvellous horn obbligato, which Sir Simon Rattle highlighted so effectively in his inaugural concert with the Berlin Philharmonic by bringing the orchestra’s principal horn to the front of the stage. Whether or not it is marked in the original score, this was a fine piece of theatre of which I am sure Mahler would have approved.

I wonder, too, if Mahler would have approved of Basingstoke. A curious question, perhaps, but there is some modest justification for it. In 2001 the Philharmonia under Lorin Maazel gave a splendid performance of the Fifth Symphony at The Anvil in Basingstoke, an attractive venue for those of us living in the southern counties, as it conveniently obviates the need for travelling into London. Maazel, predictably, elicited an inspired, exhilarating account from his players, and the hall has something of a reputation for its pleasant ambience and surprisingly clear acoustics. If you like the idea of a straight run down the M3 for some good music, check the programme at The Anvil.

The catalogue is crammed with more worthwhile Fifth Symphony recordings than you can, as they say, shake a stick at, and I leave it to David Littlewood to recommend the best. Incidentally – and I suppose I could be lynched for saying this – there seems to me to be a whiff of indecent haste about Rattle and the BPO as they hurtle headlong through the final bars of their debut recording. These are moments worth savouring, pleasures not to be rushed. So I turn once again to my venerable and much-loved CD of Barbirolli and the New Philharmonia in their heartfelt Mahler 5 recorded in Watford Town Hall as long ago as 1969. Perhaps one of the lessons to be learned from Barbirolli’s Mahler – this symphony and others – is that there can be a perfect marriage between elegance and excitement. If ever a document stood the test of time…

Already, journeying through his unique sound-world, Mahler had shown us the way out of the darkness into the light. In Resurrection he achieved that aim, that glorious destination, only after a harrowing expedition culminating in rugged grandeur. Three symphonies later, the path we follow may be less tortuous, but leads inexorably to another lofty plateau, where once again the sun is shining and we feel the urge to smile and punch the sky.

Happy Anniversary!

Copyright © 2004 – Craig Brown

Mahler's Sixth and Me
by Rodney Newton

RODNEY NEWTON, former principal timpanist of English National Opera, Music Consultant to London Film School, Features Editor of British Bandsman magazine, Composer-in-Residence with Fairey FP (Music) Band and Music Associate of Buy As You View Cory Band offers his personal thoughts and experiences regarding Mahler's 'Tragic' symphony.

I FIRST became aware of Mahler whilst at Lordswood Boys' Technical School in Birmingham in the 1950s. A couple of teachers in the German department, Barry Long and David Craig were enthusiasts, the latter actually producing a pamphlet on Mahler which contained contributions from Benjamin Britten and Sir Adrian Boult. Music was not taught at the school, so such activities were decidedly extra-curricular and, as far as I was concerned, I learned the repertoire via broadcasts, records and visits to hear the CBSO at the old Birmingham Town Hall.

The Sixth Symphony first came my way through a BBC Third Programme broadcast under the authoritative direction of Berthold Goldschmidt. The work made a very profound impression on me, despite the fact that I was just a teenager. I had always been affected by epic tragedy and already had become an enthusiastic Wagnerite (46 years later, I still am!). The huge scope of the work with its 'fate' motive in the timpani gripped me. I remember to this day thinking, as the trombones played their final funeral threnody: 'How on earth is Mahler going to end this incredible journey?' Then, as the 'fate' motive crashed out for the last time, I though: 'Of course - how else?'

My next encounter with the 'Tragic' came when Sir John Barbirolli broadcast it from the Royal Albert Hall with the Hallé on the night he received the Mahler Society medal. By that time I had borrowed a score from the Birmingham Central Library (the pages brown with age) and was probably as surprised as Sir John when the poor 2nd timpanist came in a bar too soon with the first statement of the 'fate' motive!

On leaving school I worked at a couple of non-musical jobs before entering Birmingham School of Music as a full-time student in 1965. It was during this period that I first bought the old Charles Adler recording of No. 6 and really started to learn the piece. Once more, the work gripped me and I played over and over again. Everything about it seemed wonderful - the vast structure, the harmonies, the orchestration and overall, that steady tread of fate which, no matter what he does, Mahler's hero cannot escape. I knew enough about music at that point to realise that the Vienna Symphony Orchestra were hopelessly under-rehearsed and some of Adler's tempo changes seemed to take them by surprise. However, the reading was thoroughly convincing - more so than the RCA Erich Leinsdorf/Boston Symphony recording which followed. Although thoroughly secure, this version seemed to lack the 'gravitas' evident on Adler's recording, the 'wrong' order of inner movements was used and the hammer blows in the finale were given to an anvil - the direct opposite of the sound specifically and clearly asked for by Mahler in the score.

The symphony slipped from me during my postgraduate years with the BBC Training Orchestra and I missed the CBSO performance in Birmingham under Hugo Rignold and, regrettably, the performances in Bristol and Bournemouth under Jascha Horenstein (about which a few funny anecdotes were told). Then, whilst freelancing from Birmingham shortly before my move to London, I heard Pierre Boulez perform the work in a BBC Symphony Orchestra broadcast from Maida Vale studios. His account was utterly compelling. Many years later, that doyen of British Wagner conductors, Sir Reginald Goodall, said to me: "...you see, Boulez is a composer and he can see the shape of large structures." That was certainly evident on this occasion and I thought it the finest performance of the 6th I had ever heard. A heavy, inevitable tread pervaded the whole thing which seemed to sum up the composer's intentions to perfection.

My first 'close encounter' with No. 6 came some years down the line when I had joined Sadlers Wells (English National) Opera Orchestra. My great friend, the estimable Jon Tolansky, invited me along to a play-through of the symphony with Trinity College of Music Orchestra under Bernard Keefe. I can remember little about the occasion, other than being entrusted with the bass drum part. However, some 15 years later, I became involved with the piece 'for real'. I had left ENO to freelance in films and television as a composer and musical director, but I still supplemented my income by playing. I was engaged to play percussion in a performance of No. 6 with the LSO under Giuseppe Sinopoli. It was his first (and, I think, only) appearance with the orchestra, which had recently performed the symphony on a foreign tour with Claudio Abbado, so it was firmly 'under their belts' so to speak.

I played the cowbells (on this occasion, played on stage with soft vibraphone beaters - not very effective I thought) and the deep bells (again, played on stage in contravention of the directions in the score). The experience proved somewhat disappointing, although the orchestra played magnificently. Sinopoli decided to lecture the LSO on the meaning of the work, interspersing rehearsals with helpful little remarks like: "...at this point we have a typical Austrian village funeral march - I have heard this myself." This wasn't at all necessary and succeeded in boring the orchestra. Furthermore, his interpretation of No. 6 seemed to involve him getting the whole thing over as soon as possible - indeed I think it was the swiftest Mahler 6 I have ever heard - devoid of any trace of 'the inevitability of fate'. The only thing I really remember from the single performance we gave at the Royal Festival Hall was the effectiveness of the 'hammer' - a contraption resembling a door frame laid horizontally (it was actually a gigantic 'slapstick'), with the 'door' being slammed hard at the appropriate moment by Jack Lees jnr (a Royal Marine during World War II). Jack certainly made it sound like the end of the world - marvellous! That was my only experience of actually hearing the piece from the inside of the orchestra - and what an experience it was - rather like being on a battleship going into action. Poor Mr. Sinopoli received unfavourably reviews for his LSO performance though, and followed this up with similar dismally-received accounts of other Mahler symphonies with the Philharmonia. I have never felt the urge to investigate his Mahler recordings with the latter orchestra, although I have no doubt that the playing is superb throughout.

My experience of No. 6 then relied on recordings. Kubelik first, with account for Deutsche Grammophon sporting a frantic first movement, after which things settle down agreeably. His last movement is excellently judged in my estimation. Next I acquired Szell and a live (posthumously issued) Cleveland performance which, although splendidly played, seemed to suffer from an urge to drive the music too fast. Wonderful playing, though.

Abbado's Chicago account followed in my record collection which I generally liked. Then came Karajan and his sleek Berlin Philharmonic account, followed by a most interesting document - a 1966 Berlin Philharmonic performance under Barbirolli (it has recently been reissued in improved sound). The Berliner' unfamiliarity with the music at that time is evident in some decidedly dodgy playing in places, although Gerd Sieffert's gorgeous horn playing is something to die for. Overall, this is probably one of the slowest accounts of the symphony on disc (although I should imagine Bernstein's ponderous old NY Philharmonic account, together with Sir John's own commercial recording for EMI which nearly grinds to a halt, must run it a close second), but in this live situation, Sir John manages to give a most satisfying account of a titanic struggle. His vocal contributions, including an appropriately anguished groan before the final A-minor cataclysm, actually enhance the sense of struggle so eloquently depicted in his reading of the score.

Finally, I acquired an account by Pierre Boulez with the Vienna Philharmonic which, for me, goes to the very top of the pile. This was reinforced a few years ago by a performance I attended at the Barbican by the LSO under his direction. This was one of the most shattering experiences of my 37 years in the music profession. I have never heard another live performance to date which so perfectly correlated every tempo and balanced the whole so superbly.

I was recently most impressed, however, by a terrific performance on the radio from Ilan Volkov and his BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. For a young man, he gave a very mature reading with that all-pervasive, heavy tread I feel is essential for a successful performance of the piece. I was also impressed by a broadcast given from Manchester by the BBC Philharmonic under my old friend, Sir Charles Mackerras, with the final hammer blow and the original scoring reinstated to devastating effect.

Another LSO performance at the Barbican under Mariss Jansons slightly disappointed by being driven too hard and, therefore, missing the point (this is the one issued on the LSO's own record label) whilst the latest Mahler 6 to come my way has been the LSO once more, in a Barbican performance under Bernard Haitink. Comparing this performance with his old Philips recording, Haitink has steadied his tempi considerably, opting for a strict march-tempo (metronome time of 120 beats to the minute) and taking a very broad view indeed of the piece. The LSO were on top form throughout the (very warm) evening, with the hammer blows performed with great conviction and aplomb by Neil Percy and the final bars beating everything into submission. A most satisfying culmination to my 40-odd year fascination with Mahler's great tragic masterpiece.

Copyright © 2004 Rodney Newton