This blog is a 21st-century conductor’s perspective on orchestral music. So what better way for me to broaden my ongoing consideration of the music of Gustav Mahler than to bring in the voices of other contemporary conductors:
The music publisher Universal Edition has recorded a series of videos with leading conductors discussing their connections to Mahler’s music for a website celebrating the Mahler centennary in 2010/11. Here are all of the UE interviews, featuring Zubin Mehta, Pierre Boulez, Esa Pekka-Salonen, Kent Nagano, Jonathan Nott, Michael Tilson Thomas, Christoph Eschenbach, Daniel Barenboim, David Zinman, Ingo Metzmacher, Franz Welser-Möst, Daniel Gatti and Wolfgang Fink. View them individually at Vimeo.
By the time he began work on the Fifth Symphony in 1901 Mahler was becoming increasingly involved with a circle of pioneering modernist artists organized around the Vienna Secession. That year he courted Alma Schindler, daughter of one of the group’s founders, Karl Moll. Mahler’s closest artistic collaborator at the Court Opera, stage designer Alfred Roller, was also a member of the Secession.
In 1902 Mahler conducted his own arrangement of Beethoven’s music for the opening of a major Secession exhibit dedicated to the composer. Art historians have noted a facial resemblance between the heroic knight/Beethoven figure and Mahler in the frieze created by Gustav Klimt for the exhibit:
Over the next several weeks I’ll be devoting my posts to Gustav Mahler and his Fifth Symphony, ahead of a special presentation of that work at the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony. The starting point is Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, site of a complex nexus of art and politics and home to some of the world’s most sophisticated music making. The city’s most closely scrutinized and influential performer was Mahler, whose work as a conductor [particularly with the Court Opera] was central to Viennese concert life.
Mahler at the Vienna Court Opera, 1903
As a student I researched this period and Mahler’s role in it extensively and spent several months in Vienna on an academic research grant. My primary guide to the city and its turn-of-the-century life was one of the best cultural histories about any place or time, Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-siècle Vienna – highly recommended reading for anyone with an interest in the dawn of artistic modernism in the Austrian capitol. Schorske’s out-of-print essay Gustav Mahler: Formation and Transformation [below] includes an excellent consideration of Mahler’s work as an opera and orchestra conductor within the performance culture of Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century.
Following up on my last post about the record business, it seems the classical music segment of that industry has had something to offer after all – hideous album covers! Here is a particularly ghastly one, perfect for Halloween:
Discovered via a recent installment of the very funny ‘Greatest Classical CD Covers EVER’ series at Too Many Tristans, where it is suggested that ‘a generation of children were turned off classical music forever by this cover.’
As the program makes clear, nothing could be better for creatives and performers [not to mention listeners] than the complete breakdown of the twentieth-century music industry business model in the face of the persistent openness of the internets and digital media. The following exchange between Rick Karr and independent musician Amanda Palmer encapsulates the new reality for artists:
Rick Karr: You may be the only optimistic person we’ve talked to in the entire music business … ten years ago the industry was selling 13.5 billion dollars worth of records, last year … 8 billion. And we’ve heard people say that the live touring industry is collapsing because it’s consolidated to the point where it’s just unsustainable anymore. And yet, you’re sitting here and … you sound really optimistic.
Amanda Palmer: People don’t love music any less. There might be a lot less money out there in the industry, but maybe that’s a good thing … Are you doing this to be rich and famous or are you doing this because you really love music and you want to connect with people, and you’ll do it even if it just means you make a living wage? If that’s true, I’m a fan of the new system.
Classical musicians, who more than most in the music business are positioned to offer an unparalleled live listening experience and through it a special connection with listeners, have generally been slow to wholeheartedly embrace new and independent approaches to presentation, programming and media. It’s time for concert artists to put creative programming front and center and to acknowledge that the reduced relative value of media practically demands that we share it with our listeners in an effort to engage them in our live work.
And a thought related to my own interests as a music fan: If you’ve ever wondered why a contemporary classical musician would be as stimulated by hip hop as I am, consider the OTM segment on sampling and the way the technique’s obsession with musical material and influence echoes the very same process in art music throughout the centuries. Perhaps that internal musical logic is the reason why hip hop was initially misunderstood by monetization-obsessed record labels, and why it has turned out to be a hugely influential musical genre in the very era of the industry’s collapse.
