calimac

(or, not quite a review of last night's San Francisco Symphony concert)

Sometimes our most lustrous appreciations have holes in them.

I know devoted Tolkienists who don't like The Hobbit. (Myself, if I hadn't loved The Hobbit I would never have discovered the rest.) I like folk music, but I just can't stand Bob Dylan. In classical music, that place is occupied for me by Gustav Mahler.

Mahler fans who know I revere Bruckner and Shostakovich find that odd, as they see those composers as occupying high slopes on the same mountain where Mahler resides at the summit. But apart from the superficial fact that they all wrote long works with strong emotional content, I hear Bruckner and Shostakovich as very different from Mahler. The adjectives I'd apply to Mahler are whiny, neurotic, over-wrought, over-spiced, incontinent, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing. Mahler said, "the symphony should contain the world," by which he meant it should contain the kitchen sink. He has no sense of shape or proportion. His works wander around incoherently, seeming even longer than they are. None of this is true of Bruckner, the most humble and self-effacing of all great composers, the creator of large but perfectly proportioned cathedrals of sound. Shostakovich had genuine troubles to express in music next to which Mahler's seem petty and over-personalized, and his sense of large proportions was so finely balanced he gets criticized for it (as does Bruckner).

The other composer who reminds me most of Mahler - they sound alike, and most of the adjectives apply - is Richard Strauss. Actually, Mahler was anxious to distinguish himself from Strauss. There would be reason for this: Strauss was cynical in his effulgence while Mahler was sincere. But perhaps Mahler's secret fear was that, if it were generally known that he wrote hidden plot programs of the kind that Strauss publicly pasted on his music, listeners would see through him.

Mahler's music was not very successful in his lifetime (though it wasn't ignored as much as his fans like to think), and he said, "My time will come." It did. For the last fifty years, since Leonard Bernstein began to make a cause of him, symphony-goers have been forcibly dipped in Mahler whether they like it or not. (Again, his fans like to pretend it's only been much more recently than that.) Isn't it time for Mahler's time to go away again? Please?

But in the meantime, we have programs like the San Francisco Symphony's opening Mahler festival this year. I went to one of these concerts last night because I had a ticket. I hoped I might learn something. What I learned is that I'd had enough Mahler. MTT talked, in his usual fashion so that even when amplified by a microphone, it's hard to make out what he's saying. The orchestra played and Thomas Hampson sang various works by Mahler. Too much for me.

When you could hear MTT, he said some interesting things. He described Mahler as immersed in the world he lived in, a world, it turns out, of Viennese schmaltz. (Strange, then, that Brahms and Bruckner, not to mention Schubert and Beethoven before them, could live in Vienna without getting schmaltzy.) Mahler, MTT says, reacted strongly to that world, with delight and appreciation as well as with angst and weltschmerz. (This is why he kept putting the kitchen sink in his music.) He had, MTT says, a "sense of wonder." That's an interesting phrase. The sense of wonder is what readers are supposed to get from science fiction. But it has to arise in the reader's mind, not just the author's. Mahler may have had his own sense of wonder about the world, but I don't get a sense of wonder from him. What I get is a pain in the back of my neck.