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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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 07:04 pm (UTC)Conductors ... and don't forget Walter, who was there all along. Nevertheless it was Bernstein who was the big trumpeter, at least in the U.S. The Mahler boom may look different from Britain.
Kitsch ... and Schubert and Beethoven had their kitschy veins too. But they and Brahms all kept it rigorously out of their serious, large-scale works. (Well, I grant the Pastorale. Parts of it.) The whole point of Mahler - and MTT specifically praised this - is that he mixed it in to everything.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 10:21 pm (UTC)And you know, I am not as sure as you that Brahms kept a clear divide between high seriousness and kitsch - there are moments even in the starkest music he wrote, like the passacaglia in the Fourth Symphony - I am thinking of that trembling flute solo just before the theme returns in all its terribilita - which those who don't like Brahms have accused just of that fault. Only, I don't think it a fault, on the whole.
I'm not sure also that MTT is right about this - it is not kitsch that Mahler mixes into everything, or even schmaltz. It is ironicised sentimentality as a component in real sensibility; it is passion that does not trust itself. I don't think that, say, the Ninth Symphony has much in it that could really be called kitsch, or Das Lied von der Erde, but I think that the phrases I have just used apply.
And it's not just the Fourth Symphony of Shostakovich that have Mahler moments, or even the start of the Fifteenth. It's the waltz in the Eighth Quartet or the carousel version of the theme of the slow movement of the Tenth. Not kitsch, but something complex that has a relationship with kitsch.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 11:16 pm (UTC)I am croggled at that interpretation of Brahms's flute solo.
My point was that Shostakovich's supposed "Mahlerian moments" don't have the flaws that make Mahler so irritating. I offered the 15th just as an example.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 11:35 pm (UTC)I think some of Shostakovich's 'Mahler' moments are precisely what others have seen as flaws, even if we don't - look at the reaction of Bartok to the march in the Seventh, for example.
I don't see Biedermeier as meaning quite that - it's a term I'd use for some of the more conventional note-spinning of Hummel or Spohr, or perhaps much later of Franz Schmidt in his chamber music - but not about Mahler.
On a vague tangent, how do you feel about Schoenberg's orchestration of the Brahms First Piano Quartet?