Gustav Mahler’s music is notoriously challenging for performers and listeners alike, and during and after his lifetime his symphonies and song cycles met with coolness and even hostility from both groups. Over the course of the twentieth century a number of committed performers helped to spark a wider embrace of his music among orchestras and audiences.
Leonard Bernstein was Mahler’s most notable advocate, in no small part due to the consonances between their professional lives – Mahler preceded Bernstein as music director of the New York Philharmonic, and both enjoyed great success as conductors but faced critical disparagement of their compositions. Both men also had rich but conflicted encounters with their mutual given religion, Judaism.
Musically, Bernstein’s ability to extend the emotional intensity of the orchestras he conducted made him an intriguing interpreter of the hyper-expressive sound world of Mahler. Here is an excerpt of Bernstein rehearsing the Fifth Symphony with another of Mahler’s orchestras, the Vienna Philharmonic, and searching for that special ‘Mahler Klang.’
One of the people who encouraged my interest in the music and life of Gustav Mahler is Gilbert Kaplan, a prominent businessman who has a singular passion for the composer. In addition to his career as a publisher Kaplan is a serious collector of Mahler-related documents and has published a variety of recordings, books and other material through his Kaplan Foundation, including the marvelous Mahler Album [currently out of print]. I had an opportunity to meet with Kaplan as I was undertaking my scholastic research on Mahler, and he generously gave me this facsimile of the Adagietto from Mahler’s autograph manuscript of the Fifth Symphony. Select the full-screen option above to view the score with audio.
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:
