I was suddenly seized by the compulsion to catch the final ten or 15 minutes of the symphony a second time.
Gustav Mahler stood five-foot-four.
That doesn’t quite place him at the absolute bottom of the Famous Composer Vertical Comparison Scale (Grieg was a tad shorter, as was Ravel), but it’s strange to think that the man who created some of the most thunderously colossal symphonies the world has ever known, who famously said that each symphony should “contain the whole world,” stood just a few centimeters above Mickey Rooney.
Permit me this and a few additional rambling, stream-of-consciousness thoughts about Mahler.
They are inspired by the fact that Mahler’s sparkling and, relatively speaking, affirmative Symphony No. 4 will be performed on the Hartford Symphony’s final set of Masterworks concerts, May 28 to 31, at theBushnell’sBeldingtheater. Carolyn Kuan will conduct.
The Lenny Effect
My personal awareness of Mahler began -- as was the case for most musical folk of my generation -- with Leonard Bernstein and his 1960s CBS recordings with the NY Phil. It’s hard to believe, I know, but prior to those LPs, Mahler was barely a footnote in the classical universe.
As a kid, I owned a thick, one-volume music encyclopedia that my grandfather had given me, and I remember that the entire Mahler entry was just a couple of sentences. It was shorter than the entry for Nikolai Medtner, whose article came a few pages later. I had never heard of either of them, of course, so I assumed based on the amount of space devoted to each that Medtner was the more significant figure of the two.
Lenny changed everything. At the time they appeared, Bernstein’s recordings of the symphonies (still blessedly available as a CD boxed set on Sony, CBS’s successor) were basically the only ones available in the United States.
I just looked this morning, and there are 196 recorded versions of the Symphony No. 1 alone.
Alma and Sam
Mahler died in 1911, at age 50, of complications resulting from a heart condition that had been diagnosed a few years earlier. Mahler’s wife, Alma, outlived her husband by more than 50 years, eventually passing on December 11, 1964, the same day that soul singer Sam Cooke was shot to death in a Los Angeles motel room.
The Arthur Effect
Arthur Winograd -- the Hartford Symphony Orchestra's music director from 1965 to 1984 -- chose Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”) to be the last piece he conducted before stepping down from that position after twenty years.
(Winograd was a fiercely devoted champion of Mahler. A few years before he stepped down, he had taken the orchestra to Carnegie Hall, and drew startlingly glowing reviews from the New York critics. The piece he chose to showcase was Mahler’s Symphony No. 7.)
In those days, the HSO played its Masterworks concerts twice -- on Friday and Saturday night, in the Mortensen Hall at the Bushnell. I was reviewing for the Courant, so I would always go on Friday.
I recall being so floored by that farewell performance that the following night -- the true final concert for Maestro Winograd -- I abruptly and no doubt rudely fled a dinner party because I was suddenly seized by the compulsion to catch the final ten or 15 minutes of the symphony a second time. And that’s just about exactly what I did manage to hear, standing in the back because there was literally not an empty seat anywhere.
I’m sure I have heard Mahler two a dozen or more times since then, played in some cases by the most celebrated conductors and orchestras in the world. But that night at the Bushnell somehow stays in my memory more vividly than any of the others.
Plus He Worked Pinter In, Too
My vote for the greatest example of working a classical composer into a song lyric, from Sondheim’s “The Ladies Who Lunch”:
Another long, exhausting day, Another thousand dollars, A matinee, a Pinter play, Perhaps a piece of Mahler’s…
Great, But Not For Every Occasion
As captivating as Mahler’s music can be, I learned years ago that it is not right for every occasion. In fact one of the most uncomfortable evenings I ever spent in a concert hall came on a warm May night in 1992.
The place was the Garde Arts Center in New London. The building had been undergoing extensive renovation and was now being reopened, to considerable civic fanfare. To help celebrate the center’s rebirth, the London Symphony Orchestra had been engaged.
The orchestra, with its then-music director Michael Tilson Thomas on the podium, was just starting a tour that would eventually wind up in Japan. It was a real coup for the city, and the venue, to land this major international ensemble.
A large and exceptionally well-dressed crowd -- including entire families, with young kids in tow -- expectantly poured into the hall. The pre-concert feeling was like a church social -- neighbors greeting one another, a little speechmaking from local pols, everybody happy to be a part of something special.
Painfully, however, the centerpiece of the evening was the Mahler Symphony No. 9. The piece is roughly 90 minutes long. I seem to remember that it was the only piece on the program.
Mahler Nine may not be the most “difficult” symphony in history, but it is probably the most intensely introspective.
As the first movement unfolded (it’s about a half hour all by itself), the sense of expectancy in the hall dimmed. The kids visibly wilted. People began to glance at their watches before the movement was over.
After the second movement, more than a few patrons tiptoed up the aisles and out.
After the third moment, an additional wave did so, a little less furtively.
By the end -- a hushed, protracted, broodingly inward-looking end -- the crowd could only summon a kind of resigned, dazed applause. People filed out in silence.
That evening has often made me think about one of the great questions facing classical music: the problem of matching the repertoire to the occasion. I wonder how many classical newcomers were in that New London crowd, and how many of them tried it a second time.
Norman Explains It All
There are several excellent biographies of Mahler, but if you really want to enter his world, there is no better place to start than Norman Lebrecht’s quirky, opinionated, affectionate book, Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World (Pantheon, 326 pp.).
A Letterman Top Five List
As if you haven’t had your fill of Letterman the past few days, the staff of WQXR, New York’s venerable classical radio station, has posted Dave’s top five classical music moments over the years:
They are:
- Luciano Pavarotti, doing Leoncavallo’s “La Mattinata”
- Yo-Yo Ma playing an excerpt from the Bach Cello Suite No. 3
- Trumpeter Alison Balsom playing a transcription of Marcello’s Oboe Concerto
- Members of the Metropolitan Opera doing a scene from “The Barber of Seville”
- Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and her then-husband Andre Previn playing Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
See the video clips here.
Steve Metcalf was The Hartford Courant’s fulltime classical music critic and reporter for over 20 years, beginning in 1982. He is currently the curator of the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series at The Hartt School. He can be reached at spmetcalf55@gmail.com.
