Artículos dedicados a los 150-100 años mahlerianos

Armando Iannucci: Why I love Mahler
The Thick of It writer and director explains how the music of Gustav Mahler, born 150 years ago, became a lifelong passion

Throughout 2010 we’ll be celebrating the music of Gustav Mahler as never before. Mahler was born 150 years ago, on July 7, 1860. Poignantly, he died only 51 years later, bringing to a sudden end a startling cycle of great symphonic works that journeyed from brilliant, ostentatious orchestral impressions of nature and folksong, through lengthy studies of emotional turmoil and finally, under the strain of the heart condition he knew was going to end his life still in middle age, in extraordinary last symphonies exploring the darker and more extreme reaches of what orchestral music can achieve.

I first came across Mahler’s music when I was around 14 and was in the habit of prowling through the least-used end of Glasgow Hillhead Library’s record collection to see what could shake me out of my musical torpor. The Who and Leonard Cohen just weren’t doing it for me and I sensed that classical music might be something I could get to like. Nevertheless, I hadn’t really found a way in.

Then I came across a curious thing: a symphony the length of a double album (we’re in the vinyl era here). Symphonies for me were 25-minute bursts of Mozart, not something the size of an Emerson, Lake and Palmer concept album. Yet here was Mahler’s Third Symphony, featuring not just orchestra but soloists, children’s choirs, additional brass orchestras off-stage, and lasting about 90 minutes. It looked crazy.

Actually, it sounded crazy too. Mahler’s Third is a vast, sprawling celebration of nature, starting off in with a long, earthy, deliberately untidy opening movement lasting around 40 minutes, then through a series of much shorter, more delicate pieces suggesting flowers, rivers, schoolchildren at play, churchbells and anything else that made a noise in the late 19th-century bohemian countryside. The symphony ends with a slow, lengthy movement sounding like a hymn or chorale, gradually ascending through whatever discord is thrown its way. The close is a mighty climax finally shaking free from all the earthiness before it to suggest a more heavenly triumph.

This was my way into classical music. Odd, ambitious, spectacular, only staying this side of the absurd. But always brilliantly memorable. I’ve been humming, whistling and tapping out themes from Mahler symphonies for the past 30 years. His melodies stay with you, his dramatic and emotional climaxes fix themselves in the mind. Mahler poured all of himself into his music; it’s the sound of romance and neurosis, joy and despair. And yet the effect is to throw relief on to the orchestra and the form of the symphony itself; to show you just what classical music can do, with its unimaginable potential to create new sounds and fresh dramatic contrasts.

Orchestras love playing Mahler, who was one of the most celebrated orchestral conductors of his day, and who brought a radical new technique to orchestral composition, splitting the melody from instrument to instrument, so a theme may start off in the strings but quickly continue in the clarinets only to be completed by a lone trumpet. Going to a Mahler concert is like going to the theatre because there’s a great drama to follow as the music darts across the orchestral stage, never quite settling in one area of instruments.

And following Mahler’s music, watching the evolution of his style across nine symphonies and an incompleted Tenth, is a thrilling journey. The First opens with a strange, glowing hum of harmony. The Tenth’s most memorable moment is a huge, shrill wail of discord from the whole orchestra, an enormous shriek of pain, ugly and atonal, like a scar across the world. What comes in between is an adventure.

Remarkably, with each symphony Mahler writes in a style that is always identifiably his own, and yet also creates a whole new sound world unique to that symphony. The Second is grand and defiant, the Fourth childlike and sparse. The Fifth is a celebration, the Sixth tragic and intense. The Seventh is mysterious, defying categorisation, an hour of unsettling “night music”.The Eighth is a great wall of sound, the Symphony of a Thousand, with many choirs, choruses and soloists daring to portray a vision of heavenly love. The Ninth is wide-ranging in emotion but rigorously written, beautifully structured and with a shattering ending in which, for the final three minutes, Mahler comes as close as anyone to composing a musical representation of silence.

His death was truly tragic because it ended an artistic career so clearly on the verge of a major innovative phase.

Mahler’s music baffled audiences when it was first performed. Actually, that’s not quite right: it thrilled audiences but baffled critics, who were confounded by its insistent experimentalism and apparently clumsy mix of high and low culture. His symphonies are either highly wrought epic journeys or great big messes, depending on your point of view. At the time of their composition they were admired by some, but treated with weary disdain by others.

This matches Mahler’s own position in Austrian musical society. Ostensibly, he was a mighty member of the Viennese Establishment. He had one of the most prestigious jobs in all music: director of the Vienna State Opera, where he had complete artistic control over the season’s productions, and which he ruled with an autocratic personality. But underneath it all lay great insecurity and lack of acceptance.

Mahler was born a Jew and, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that was a bar to any establishment position. He was also from a peasant family from Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). Mahler never lacked ambition (he conveniently became a Roman Catholic before getting his longed-for appointment to the State Opera) but underneath it all was a pride in his roots coupled with a fear that those roots separated him from the rest of establishment life.

The belligerent weirdness of his music, coupled with its ostentatious ambition, must have been seized upon by his detractors as proof that he was not quite one of them. As a result, it took some time for Mahler’s symphonies to become accepted as standard parts of the orchestral repertoire.

Perhaps, as we celebrate Mahler this year, we’ll hear more on the radio of his Adagietto for Strings and Harp, the middle movement of his Fifth Symphony made famous as the musical backdrop of Visconti’s film Death in Venice. If that’s your first Mahler, it’s no bad start. The Adagietto falls half-way between Mahler’s output, the perfect place from which to explore the intense romanticism that came before and the stark emotional honesty that was to follow.

Mahler’s symphonies: what you need to know

No1 Also known as: The Titan
Four years after Brahms’s Fourth, the symphony goes feral. Includes a funeral march with added klezmer.

No2 The Resurrection
Mahler’s most obvious response to Beethoven’s Ninth, as a ride to the abyss finishes with choral salvation

No3 The one with a poem by Nietzsche
Mahler’s response to, well, everything, including plants, animals, mankind and, ultimately, love itself.

No4 The shortest one
Mahler scales back and adds sleigh bells. Culminates in a “child’s view of heaven”, which apparently includes abundant asparagus.

No5 The one used in Death in Venice
High on the “best of” lists, with the swooingly gorgeous Adagietto.

No6 The Tragic
Mahler’s most tightly constructed symphony, with the rarity of a fatalistic conclusion.

No 7 The unpopular one
The weirdest and shadowiest, with two movements of “night music” Also has a part for a mandolin.

No 8 The Symphony of a Thousand
Intended for a thousand performers, the choral symphony is still a monster and concludes with a huge chunk from Goethe’s Faust.

No 9 The farewell to life (possibly)
Either saturated with death or full of affection for a life well lived, depending on your POV.

No 10 The unfinished
Possibly we shouldn’t even be performing it. Mahler only orchestrated the adagio, the rest was completed (twice) by the musicologist Deryck Cooke.

Neil Fisher

Robertino, no seas tacaño!!! envíale un SMS a Psanquin!!! Imagínate que a del Río le sucede lo mismo y se pierde el concierto de Chailly porque sencillamente se le pasó meterse en el foro y leer tu mensaje, le da un patatús . Bueno, da igual, mejor que no le envíes el mensajito, mira que es la Primera de Chailly, uno de los mejores somníferos que existen, no vaya a ser que Psanquin se duerma tan profundamente que luego se pierda la Octava con Thielemann.
Por cierto ¿No era este mismo individuo, me refiero a Thielemann, el que decía que Mahler era una m _ _ _ _ a?