During
the Mahler anniversaries of 2010-11, Norman Lebrecht published a book called
Why Mahler? Now, as then, even the most fervent Mahlerian might well ask of any
book on this subject, “Why Another Book About Mahler?” Musicologist, author and
lapsed cellist, Stephen Johnson, has given us a compelling answer in the form
of his latest volume, The Eighth: Mahler and his World in 1910.
I am
sure I am not alone among musicians and Mahler aficionados in having an entire
large section in my library given over to books about Mahler. Almost all of
them fall into one of a handful of utilitarian archetypes of varying scope,
ambition and quality. There are, of course, the biographies, ranging from Henry-Louis
de La Grange’s magisterial four-volume masterpiece to svelte introductory
handbooks. There are overviews of Mahler’s music, whether covering only the
symphonies or everything, that range from common touch collections of program
notes to the exhaustive, and occasionally exhausting, analyses of Donald
Mitchell. There are first hand accounts from people who knew Mahler, including
Bruno Walter, Ernst Krenek, Alma Mahler and Natalie Bauer-Lechner, and
collections of essays of varying levels of quality and cohesion. There are even
some very fine book-length studies of individual works, notably Stephen
Hefling’s outstanding book about Das Lied von der Erde, and Peter Franklin’s
about the Third Symphony. In spite of its title, Johnson’s book is not simply another
of these. It is something richer and more wide-ranging. It marks a new and
different kind of book about Mahler. Now we know “why.”
But why
a book about the Eighth? Mahler was himself a composer of contradiction and
paradox. Johnson ends his book with a quotation from Beethoven which appears
throughout The Eighth like a Leitmotif, “sometimes the opposite is also true.”
The Eighth Symphony may well be Mahler’s most-loved work – it’s semi-annual
appearances at the BBC Proms are invariably sold out months in advance. And yet, among many Mahler listeners and
interpreters, it remains one of the perennial black sheep of his output
alongside the hugely misunderstood and under-valued Seventh. Many leading
Mahler conductors have either completely or largely avoided conducting it,
including Bernard Haitink (who put the work away after a 1988 performance at
the Concertgebouw), Iván Fischer and many others. It’s been called a backwards
step in Mahler’s development, an incoherent mishmash of different languages that
don’t work together, an unstructured non-symphony, and the musical analogue of
a Barnum and Bailey Circus. Most
often by Mahler’s otherwise most devoted
listeners.
Johnson
would have done us all a service to write a worthy explanation of, and apologia
for, Mahler’s last choral masterpiece, but he’s done much more. This is a book
‘about’ the Eighth, rather than ‘on’ the Eighth, with this work as the focal
point, rather than the subject, of this fascinating book. The piece and its
premiere serve a center of gravity for an exceptionally engaging and
wide-ranging exploration of Mahler’s late music, his fraught relationship with
his wife, his engagement with philosophy, his place in one of the richest
moments in cultural history, the emergence of psychoanalysis and much more.
There are insights to be found here into not only the life and work of Mahler,
but those of Alexander von Zemlinsky, Hans Gál, Stefan Zweig, Arnold
Schoenberg, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Klimt and others. Johnson writes
perceptively about everything from national identity, to Viennese Heurigen wine
bars, to sex.
For
those readers already well acquainted with Mahler’s life story, there are many
episodes described in the book with which they will already be familiar, such
as the extraordinary circumstances of the Eighth’s sensational premiere,
Mahler’s encounter with Freud, and the funeral procession of a New York fireman
which inspired the harrowing opening of the last movement of the Tenth
Symphony. And yet, I would think that for even more the most fanatical
Mahlerian, Johnson offers some new insight or some fresh interpretation of even
the most well-known events in every chapter.
There
are extended descriptions and discussions of not only the Eighth Symphony, but
of Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth and the Tenth (discussed mostly through the
prism of Derryck Cooke’s Performing version). Narrating musical events in prose
is, at best, an unsatisfying necessity. Without such descriptions of a work’s
unfolding, it’s more or less impossible to highlight the ideas in the music the
author wants to discuss, but if words could adequately describe music, we
wouldn’t need music. Johnson handles this inherent problem very well – he moves
from descriptions of musical events to exploration of musical meaning about as
elegantly and efficiently as one can. Mahler fans tend to be incredibly
possessive of his music and hugely opinionated about its meaning. Johnson has a
disarmingly easygoing way of suggesting new readings of Mahler’s works that I
think most will find refreshing rather than confrontational.
Will
Johnson’s book on the Eighth serve as an eye opener for those Mahlerian
listeners and performers who have always found the work to be a blind spot?
Well, as the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him
or her drink. But one hopes the doubters will, if nothing else, follow
Johnson’s own example. He most endearingly describes his somewhat negative
previous verdict on the Eighth Symphony, as presented in the book Companion to
the Symphony (1992) “monumentally wrong.” Sometimes, the opposite is also true.
Book
Review: The Eighth: Mahler and his World in 1910 by Stephen Johnson. B y
Kenneth Woods.
Kenneth Woods , April 23, 2020.
Stephen
Johnson ends this thrilling study of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 8, and much
else besides, with a quotation attributed to Beethoven, of which Oscar Wilde
would have approved: “Sometimes the opposite is also true.” The legends
attaching to Mahler’s life, especially in the final years, are treasured by
lovers of Mahler the Titan, and woe betide anyone daring to question them. But
Johnson, one of the finest contemporary musicologists, is also a demythologiser
of the gentler sort, and all the more persuasive for it.
Mahler
wrote the Eighth in 1906, in an astonishing eight weeks. The new symphony “was
to be his religious rite, his High Mass, but conceived and expressed in terms
that were both mystical and humanist”. He chose to set the words of the
ninth-century Christian hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus”, along with passages from
the close of the second part of Goethe’s Faust, and fashioned music meant to
match the grandeur of both texts. The result is either one of the triumphs of
20th-century musical composition, or an overwrought mess. Of course, it may
well be both – sometimes the opposite is also true.
The
symphony was premiered in Munich in 1910, at the new Musik-Festhalle. For
Mahler, the four years that had elapsed since the completion of the Eighth had
been fraught with trials and tragedies – and worse was to follow. In 1907, he
was forced from his position as director of the Vienna Court Opera; he
discovered, by accident, that his heart was defective; and his doted-on
four-year-old daughter Maria died of scarlet fever. Years afterwards, Alma
Mahler wrote that these were the “three hammer-blows” that marked the beginning
of the end for the composer, who was to die in 1911, at the age of 50. It makes
for a good story, in the true Viennese tradition that combines tragedy and
kitsch and then adds an Alp-size dollop of Schlagobers (whipped cream).
How much
truth is there in Alma’s version of Mahler’s final years, and how much of it
may be put down to her predilection for melodrama and self-promotion? Here, it
does well to tread carefully. Alma is a much-maligned woman, and rightly so, in
many instances. She was egotistical and self-aggrandising, certainly, but she
had much to battle against. Before they were married, Mahler sent her a long
“pre-nup” letter, informing her that henceforth she would have to forgo her own
musical ambitions – she was a passable composer, and might have been more than
that, given time and freedom – and devote herself to the all-consuming task of
making him happy.
In 1910,
she was to have her revenge on him, in part unwittingly, for his smothering of
her talent. The young architect Walter Gropius, with whom Alma was conducting
an affair, wrote a love letter to her at Toblach in the South Tyrol, where she
and Gustav were staying. Either calculatedly or by a Freudian slip, the hotly
impatient lover addressed the envelope not to “Frau Direktor Mahler”, but to
“Herr Direktor Mahler”. The composer innocently opened the letter, and the
hammer fell. Johnson throws doubt on two of Alma’s “hammer blows” – Mahler’s
ousting from the Vienna Opera turned out to be a blessing, and his faulty heart
did not prevent him from composing at least three more major works – but there
is no doubting the weight of this fourth blow.
These
amatory matters are entirely pertinent to the story of the Eighth Symphony and
the compositions that followed it, including the symphonic song cycle Das Lied
von der Erde – which many consider Mahler’s masterpiece – the Ninth Symphony,
and the unfinished Tenth. Johnson sees the essence of the Eighth not in
Christian iconography, but in its celebration of artistic and sexual
creativity.
The
creative spirit the symphony invokes, according to Johnson, is not the Holy
Ghost, nor the Blessed Virgin as she is figured in the Hollywood ending Goethe
tacked on to Faust, and the salvation it offers is not only spiritual but
carnal. The creator spiritus Mahler calls on is no other than Eros, the true “creator
of the world”. Johnson writes: “In the words of the ancient Latin hymn Mahler
had read the message that had evidently struck Goethe too: fired by love, real
erotic love rather than some disembodied ideal, we … can scale the Heavens.”
Yes, but
the niggling question remains: is the Eighth as good as Mahler thought it was,
and as many continue to insist it is? This symphony is unique among the 10 that
he composed but uniqueness does not ensure greatness. To some ears, the Eighth
suffers from the bombast and pomposity that infects so much of German music of
the Romantic era. Compared to, say, the Second, that truly revolutionary work,
the Eighth can sound not so much dramatic as panic-stricken, even hysterical.
Johnson makes a strong case for its quality, musically and philosophically, in
this magnificent, strongly argued and yet wonderfully subtle study. Whatever
our final judgment may be on the Eighth, having read Johnson, we shall never
listen to it in the same way again.
The
Eighth by Stephen Johnson review – Mahler and sexual creativity. By John
Banville. The Guardian, May 16, 2020.
Mahler’s
Eighth Symphony is an extraordinary creature, vast in its ambitions and almost
megalomaniacal in its demands. Eight top-rank vocal soloists; two large mixed
choirs and a boys’ choir; 22 woodwinds; 17 brass; an offstage brass band of
seven; nine percussion; celeste; piano; harmonium and organ; two harps;
mandolin; and full strings to match.
Mahler
even suggested that some of the parts might be doubled. No wonder it has become
known as the Symphony of a Thousand, a title invented by the impresario Emil
Gutmann, whom Mahler had engaged to make the 1910 premiere of his visionary
work a saleable proposition.
Sold it
had to be, in order to finance its excesses and to fill Munich’s spanking new
Musik-Festhalle. But Mahler was also worried and embarrassed — worried that
this was turning into a circus, “a catastrophic Barnum and Bailey show”, and
embarrassed to see the streets of Munich littered with images of himself as
great composer/conductor. A new biography was in the bookshops, and copies of
the score were casually left on café tables to lure punters. Our own sense of
the tension between PR and lofty spirituality was alive and kicking a century
ago. “There have been better symphonies that had less advertising,” wrote one
critic; another declared Mahler to be “our contemporary Christ”.
It was
as a conductor, rather than a composer, that Mahler was best known in 1910. His
career path, from provincial Bohemia to the Hofoper (the court opera in Vienna)
and the New York Philharmonic, was dazzling. Along the way, he invented many of
the customs and practices of today’s classical music and operatic world, not
least the tremendous figure of the conductor as magus. Yet as a composer, he
was less feted, somewhat in the shadow of his friend Richard Strauss.
In 1906,
Mahler attended the legendary Austrian premiere in Graz of Strauss’s supremely
provocative opera Salome and, on the train home, wondered if popular success
could be at one with artistic integrity. The Eighth, which he started sketching
in that same year, was perhaps the answer.
“All my
previous symphonies,” Mahler wrote, “are merely the preludes to this one. In
the other works everything still was subjective tragedy, but this one is a
source of great joy.” It was a huge success, crowds surging towards the
platform after it had finished.
Johnson’s
defence involves not only a journey through the piece itself, underlining the
subtlety and complexity that defy the overkill; but also a look at the world
from which it sprang and the extraordinary and tangled personal story which
somehow, despite all that objective joy, it still embodies. As a celebration of
Goethe’s Ewig-Weibliche — eternal feminine — it was a sonic pedestal for
Alma, Mahler’s wife, who was both drawn to his genius and suffocated by his
demands.
As a
singer, I come at Mahler from the intimate, supremely human and often painful
subjectivity of his extraordinary body of songs. In the midst of all the
Eighth’s high-mindedness and vast horizons, it’s somehow a relief to return to
the little details of Alma’s contemporaneous affair with the young architect
Walter Gropius — her escape from the Mahler machine — or to picture her high
romantic disappointment with Mahler as he arrived at their wedding wearing
galoshes.
The
Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910, by Stephen Johnson, Faber, RRP£14.99, 314
pages
The
Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910. By Ian Bostridge. The Financial Times,
April 17, 2020.
A kind
of gigantism took hold of the European mind in the years before the first world
war. It shaped everything, from empires to poetry. In the confidence of new
technology and new ideas, things could be attempted on a larger scale than ever
before. The mental power of the age could be measured in the sheer size of the
things it produced. This might be ‘Jacky’ Fisher’s Dreadnought in 1906, which
set off a European arms race in huge battleships, or a great construction — the
Victoria memorial in front of Buckingham Palace is nothing to the one built in
Kolkata.
Even
plays were being conceived on a scale beyond the capacity of any human audience
(to culminate in Karl Kraus’s Die Letzte Tage der Menschheit), and novels many
times the length of War and Peace, such as Proust’s. Not everything was
realised — Otto Wagner’s colossal projects for Vienna ran into the sand of the
imperial family’s implacable dislike of the architect — but an astonishing
amount was achieved, and still stands as an example of what confidence can do.
We might admire it; we might want to react against an overblown and bombastic
tendency; but there’s no escaping it.
One of
the areas where the appeal of size proved most seductive was music. Upscaling
could take two forms; in length of invention and size of ensemble. Composers
had often felt the appeal of masses of performers, and the challenge of
sustaining a single musical structure beyond the scale of, say, Beethoven’s
Eroica had been long appreciated.
After
Wagner’s massive extension of both orchestra and timespan in the seven music
dramas from Das Rheingold to Parsifal, a sort of arms race among composers
began. In theory there was nothing to prevent a composer from exploring an
expansion in only one aspect, and writing a short piece for a huge orchestra,
or a very long one for a chamber ensemble. In practice the two tended to go
together; Webern’s exquisite miniatures for a huge orchestra, the Six Pieces of
1909, were a rarity and, for economic reasons, remain rarely performed.
Mostly,
what we can see is a tendency for music to become longer and more opulent in
its demands. Piano concertos, which had stretched in Brahms’s hands from three
movements to a symphonic four, now went to five movements and a choral finale
(Busoni). It is thought that the largest musical forces pressed into action
were in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, premiered in 1913 — just as other large-scale
forces outside the concert hall were about to be called on, or called up.
Much of
the appeal to composers of these ensembles was in the possibility of exploring
myriad small combinations within a huge range of sounds; the appeal to
audiences, undoubtedly, was the overwhelming thrill of a huge ensemble at full
stretch. That appeal, whether in a Richard Strauss tone poem, The Rite of
Spring, or the splendid sound of a nine-member trumpet section in Janacek’s
later Sinfonietta, has never gone away.
Neither
has the association with other, more aggressive expansions. Gustav Mahler’s eighth
symphony, the subject of Stephen Johnson’s book, contains the pointed words
‘Drive the enemy far from us/And grant us lasting peace’, and was described by
its composer as a Geschenk der ganzen Nation — a ‘gift to the whole nation’.
Some unlikely people gave into these fantasies. Arnold Schoenberg, on creating
the 12-tone method in the early 1920s, told Josef Rufer that he had ‘made a
discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next 100
years’ — a very poignant thing for an Austrian Jewish composer to say
innocently in 1923.
Mahler
was one of the foremost architects of the colossal in music. Though his fame
was principally as a conductor and director of the Vienna opera house, he was
producing a series of symphonic works that had been stretching the boundaries
of the form in all directions — the six movements of the third symphony, the
inclusion of unheard-of symphonic instruments such as mandolins, guitars,
sledgehammers, retuned solo violins, and very large orchestral forces.
Even so,
the eighth symphony stands apart. It calls for eight vocal soloists and
multiple choirs, and an orchestra reinforced to the last degree, containing
such extravagant additions to the usual as piano, celesta, organ, harmonium,
two mandolins and four harps. It goes on for a very long time — and includes a
full setting of the last scene of Goethe’s Faust Part II.
It was
Mahler’s greatest triumph in his lifetime as a composer when it was premiered
in 1910, though interestingly, in a very pro-Mahler age, it is now his least
performed symphony. That is partly due to the expense and difficulty of putting
together all those forces (demanding two mandolin players is just asking for
trouble). But it may also reflect the general view that the eighth is too deliberate
a bid for greatness, riding on the coat-tails of the greatest classic in German
literature; too voulu.
It has
much elaborate sounding counterpoint —the highest claim to seriousness of
German music — but it is largely an illusion. The first movement is full of
moments that appear to be on the verge of launching a double fugue, one of the
greatest traditional challenges to a composer’s skill, but they almost never
come to anything. (The most ingenious fugue of the period is the outrageous and
very funny palindromic double fugue in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.) This is
not really what Mahler was good at, which you can see in the fourth, sixth and
ninth symphonies, and the miraculous shadowplay of fantasy in the middle
movements of the seventh. The eighth is a bit of a press release.
The
symphony was written at great speed in 1906, in his summer retreat on the
Worthersee in Carinthia. Its premiere, in 1910, handled by the impresario Emil
Gutmann, was held in Munich, in a newly built concert hall seating 3,200
people. Ticket prices were high, and Gutmann, without consultation, advertised
the piece under the screamingly vulgar slogan ‘Symphony of a Thousand’. Mahler
disapproved, but the epithet stuck. (Gutmann was being literal, too; the first
performance is believed to have called on 1,028 performers.)
The
audience was an omnium gatherum of cultural might: Thomas Mann, Hofmannsthal,
Richard Strauss, Arthur Schnitzler, Schoenberg, Webern, the young Korngold,
Stefan Zweig, Dukas and Saint-Saens were all bowled over by it (apart from
Saint-Saens). Mann was so overwhelmed he wrote a fan letter — and the following
year gave the hero of his novella Death in Venice Mahler’s face, exactly
described.
There
was a less public drama attached to the symphony. Mahler’s wife Alma was,
unusually, the dedicatee of the work. The summer of the premiere was also the
year of her enthusiastic affair with the young architect Walter Gropius. It was
the experience of the eighth symphony in those Munich performances that
persuaded Gropius that the affair must be broken off: this was a genius whose
life should not be troubled.
Johnson
has written an engaging and enthusiastic account of the eighth, but it is very
much a chronology of events. And it doesn’t quite live up to the suggestion of
its subtitle, as much more could have been said about the place of this
symphony in the general culture of its time. Symphonic music was central then;
any literary intellectual could follow a symphonic argument in detail, and — as
Mann’s Doktor Faustus was to show — keep up with the most advanced
developments.
Johnson
puts the symphony squarely in the context of Mahler’s musical career, and is
happy to share his passionate keenness for the music — which is all very well.
But I finished the book intrigued by the practicalities of the project, and
wondering about what the symphony inadvertently reveals, as well as what it so
energetically insists on saying.
Review
of the book : The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910 by Stephen Johnson
Gustav
Mahler’s bid for greatness: the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’. By Philip Hensher. The Spectator, March 18,
2020.
The 50
greatest Mahler recordings. Gramophone,
March 10 , 2020
Interested in
Gustav Mahler ?
No comments:
Post a Comment