I'm going to skip the rigid lesson plan today so we can celebrate the 150th birthday of late German romantic composer, Gustav Mahler, July 7, 1860. Happy birthday, dude! There will be cake enough for everybody.
Rico beseeched me last week to do something with Mahler, and although we're not officially ready for him, what the hell, I'm easy. I won't dissect any specific works, but I will talk about his general style and provide examples in the form of pretty youtubes. Next week, it's back to work. None of this will be on the test.
By the way, July 7 is also Ringo Starr's birthday. We love him even if he sings out of tune. And today, July 8 is my mother's 90th birthday. She seems more flabbergasted by it than anybody else. I'd make this diary about my mother's birthday, but you don't know her, so it would seem rather indulgent of me. But if you're curious, you can always read a top-recced diary I wrote about her three years ago, My Mother Baked Biscuits for Nazis.
Actually, it doesn't take much prodding to make me do this. I actually had my own "Mahler decade." My musical mind was held hostage, so completely bound that I was a pest to everybody. I've taken a lot of people to Mahler concerts, on dates, on group internet outings, on family events, and I've accumulated some anecdotes. I'll share the ones fit for mixed company, although the one about the angry husband is probably the best one; I'll have to save that for after hours.
Mahler has a reputation as being a "death-obsessed" composer, and I won't argue against that, although he was more than just that. In 1975, the late conductor Leonard Bernstein did a series of Harvard lectures about classical music, one of the great teaching events, something that used to be often replayed on PBS, although I haven't seen it for a while. One lecture of the series was about the music of the 20th century, the disintegration of tonal music, the "death of music" as we know it. Bernstein chose that lecture to spend a half hour talking just about Mahler, and another ninety minutes performing the whole Mahler Ninth Symphony. Bernstein drew a line connecting directly from Mahler's beautiful, passionate, late romanticism, music that most people can understand the first time, with the Twilight-Zone-theme-ish random-sounding serialism of Arnold Schoenberg and Webern and Berg. It's baffling to see, because those composers that came after Mahler saw themselves as part of an evolution from Mahler's music. Yet Mahler's music wasn't seen as being advanced or new at the time. It was seen at the time as being part of the romantic 19th century tradition, like Wagner or Tchaikovsky.
I managed to snag an audio copy of part of the fifth lecture of Bernstein's series, where he talks about Mahler, and uploaded it to Youtube yesterday. This is only Bernstein's voice, lecturing. Three parts, total 22 minutes.
Part 2 is here, and Part 3 is here.
Is Mahler "death-obsessed?" I prefer to describe Mahler's music as neurotic. The final three works of his life, the Ninth Symphony, the unfinished Tenth, and Das Lied von der Erde(The Song of the Earth), are extremely death-obsessed, and yet I feel as though it cheats the listener to come to those works with that expectation.
Bernstein claims on the tape that the finale of the Ninth is quote: "... the closest we have ever come in any work of art to the very act of dying, of giving it all up." That's about right. But let's be clear -- Mahler was not a ghost from beyond the grave when he composed these works. He was alive. We don't really hear death itself as expressed by one who has known it. Of course not. We hear the anxious coming to terms with the knowledge of death of a sensitive and fearful but very much alive human being. There are many musicians that have made similar attempts: for instance Mozart in his Requiem Mass, Beethoven in his Missa Solemnis or his Hymn of Thanksgiving. Mahler, though, lets us experience a mad mixture of conflicting emotions. Not just resignation, but struggle and fight, not just the terror, but the extreme beauty of acceptance.
Here is a small cut from my favorite Mahler work, Der Abschied, (Farewell), the final movement of his symphony Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). I thought about doing a minute by minute dissection, but we're not ready for that, so let's just focus on the general style, and then I'll tell you an anecdote.
I've listened to Das Lied in concert three times. If you ever attend once, be prepared, because people break out in tears during Das Lied. Once, on a date, a man a couple of rows from his broke down in wracking sobs. My date lost interest in the music (I don't think she ever got it, anyway) and had more entertainment watching the audience, in particular this old man. After the concert, I would have been happy to ignore him and make a happy dash for the parking lot, but she stopped to talk to this man and his wife. She was quite gregarious, and told us about how they both travel around the country by plane just to listen to Mahler and Wagner concerts, their two big obsessions. Mahler fans tend to be rather devoted. Wagner fans too, I suppose.
Listening to the music segment above, notice how it is able to alternate so quickly in tone from a sound like the pits of Mordor, to the beautiful, even searing mezzo-soprano voice of the middle. At about the 6:30 mark, we hear something that Mahler was exceptional at doing, which I think of as a false, failed climax: the music seems to be moving toward a beautiful crescendo, and then something goes wrong, the music becomes entangled, the harmonies come unglued... and it just fails and falls back.
Calling this "death obsessed" is far too simplistic. This is an emotionally complex tapestry of enormous creativity. And perhaps we can see what Bernstein was getting at in associating Mahler with the art of the 20th century rather than the romantic 19th century. Death-obsessed art in the 19th century was the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe or Lord Byron. The message of Mahler's music is more complex and modern, like the novels of J.D. Salinger or Herman Hesse, struggling without clear success to find meaning, bathed in alienation.
One more anecdote about Das Lied: When I was about 25, I dated two sisters (not at the same time!) who played as concert musicians and came from a family of serious musicians. The older one has a discography on Amazon now including, it appears, a Grammy for playing cello on a No Doubt album. (Please don't impress us with your Google abilities.) The other sister, however, when she found out what a fan I was of Mahler, told me that the rest of the family wanted to meet me officially. It was because of Das Lied, she told me. Her mother had worked for a famous European music publisher who was convinced that Das Lied was either one of or THE greatest piece of music ever composed, and she wanted to see this computer programmer who was so into Das Lied. I got a real grilling on music. It turned out the father was a huge fan of Beethoven.
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How Jewish was Mahler, anyway?
‘I am three times homeless,’ said Mahler, ‘as a Czech among Austrians, an Austrian among Germans and a Jew anywhere in the world.’
Early in his career, faced with the impossibility of pursuing a career in the anti-Semitic Vienna of his day, dominated by the ultra-right nationalist supporters of the late Richard Wagner, Mahler converted from Orthodox Judaism to Catholicism, a move that, no matter how genuine or not, seemed to do the trick as far as his career went, because not long after, with the backing of Wagner's late wife, Cosima, Mahler became the conductor of the prestigious Vienna Opera. It seems to me to have been genuine. Mahler had no hesitation in using Christian religious themes in his music, such as the Battle of Armageddon at the end of his Symphony Two, "Resurrection," or the entrance of the Virgin Mary as a character in his Symphony Eight, "The Symphony of a Thousand."
The Symphony #8 is such a startling contrast to the three last "death-obsessed" (I prefer to use quotes) works that follow it is quite amazing. It is his most life-affirming work. And it is strange for a number of reasons. For instance, it has only two movements: the first movement, a Latin Mass setting of Veni Creator Spiritus ("Come to me, Creative Spirit," wild and exultant, followed by a long second movement, in German, not Latin, based on text from the famous German poem Faust by Goethe. He chose for that only the last part, the part where Faust, in Purgatory, is redeemed by the love of a good woman and through the intervention of the Virgin Mary ("The Eternal Feminine," as Goethe described her), he ascends into heaven. And here, with a truly enormous orchestra -- the title says a thousand players, but it usually only just four hundred -- Mahler blows out the auditorium. And it is a true stereo buster for those who want to test their equipment with a real CD, not this Youtube crap.
Here is the ending of the eighth. How different it is from Das Lied, eh? And Simon Rattle is good.
Another anecdote. My daughter (and let me clarify -- she's my ex's daughter, but I raised her from two so I feel I have some proprietary interest) and I got together with her new boyfriend and my ex before we all went out to see Phantom. I gave her some CDs. As we talked about music, she told me that her favorite work was the Mahler 8th. Which surprised me. Why? "Because I like the story that goes along with it." The story? But it's all in German and Latin!
And here she told me, "Yes, but when we went to Hollywood Bowl, you told me the whole story while they were playing."
For the life of me, I can't remember doing it, (and something so terribly rude to others!) but, gee, it does sound like something I would do, so I'm sure of it. And truthfully, this is one of the sweetest things anybody has ever told me, because I thought, I may have done at least one thing right in my rather twisted life.
Despite all this, Mahler was one of the most Jewish of all composers. He may not have had much competition in this regard, before him, since only Mendelssohn was both famous and Jewish. But it has been argued by many people better than me that his music is intensely Jewish, even to the inclusion of Jewish folk music and klezmer cleverly embedded in his music.
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One last thing... Mahler's influence on Hollywood. Two words more than any other come to mind: Bernard Herrmann, the composer who did the music for a number of great movies including all of Hitchcock's big-budget films. Listen to the theme from Vertigo and see if you can hear Mahler's influence in it, not in any particular melody, but in the means of expression. It's Wagnerian, no question, and so you can compare it to Wagner as well, but Wagner couldn't express the same kind of uncertain turbulence that you hear in Mahler and in Vertigo.
Oh well, I can't get the HTML to embed for some finicky reason. Here's the direct link:
http://www.youtube.com/...
5:48pm. I'm late posting this again. Oh well. I need a fire under my ass to finish anything, I guess.