Fuck Yeah! Gustav Mahler!

sambalele:

Gustav Mahler’s death mask.

ecrasonlinfame:

http://ecrasonlinfame11.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/on-mahler-and-the-gay-science/

k563:

Digitising my Mahler CDs this past week, I was reminded how rare it is to hear the famous Adagietto as it was intended, as the love letter of a passionate man, rather than the poignant reminiscences of an old philosopher.  

Bruno Walter, who worked closely with Mahler, made it a luminous, lyrical poem in 8 minutes in this first recording from 1938.  Bernstein’s use of the music for Bobby Kennedy’s funeral changed everything: he took 11 minutes for his 1987 recording, and Levine stretched it to 12. Others taking more than 10 minutes range include Karajan, Dudamel, Mehta, Tennstedt, Boulez, Dohnanyi. The fastest anyone since has dared perform the work since Bruno Walter is 9 minutes (Abbado, with Rattle and Barbirolli half a minute behind). 

Of course, different musicians feel the music in their own personal ways, but what I find odd is the frequency by which seriousness has overtaken sensuality in the interpretation of this Adagietto.  Listen to the Walter recording and see if you can maintain the view that this is funeral music.

k563:

There have been lots of new Mahler CDs in these two anniversary years, but this new release (DG 477 8988) is genuinely special: a performance of Das Lied von der Erde from the 1964 Vienna Festival, featuring Fritz Wunderlich (tenor) and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (baritone).  The Vienna Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Josef Krips.

The vocalists were the pre-eminent interpreters of Das Lied in their day. Arguably, neither has been bettered - though there have been many fine recordings made with the baritone’s part taken by a mezzo-soprano.  Both Wunderlich and Fischer-Dieskau were great Lieder singers, and both were native German speakers, with an instinctive sensitivity to nuance and mood.  This pays enormous dividends in the more contemplative moments, but it also invests the lighter-hearted songs with a natural buoyancy.

Wunderlich was the tenor in Klemperer’s famed 1965 recording; Fischer-Dieskau recorded it with Bernstein in 1966.  Even the latter was made only two years after the Vienna concert, but the differences are major, and we can ascribe this to Josef Krips (1902-74).

Krips was a noted conductor of the Viennese classics, and of opera. I still turn occasionally to his recording of the Schubert C major Symphony, and of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. His Beethoven symphonies were popular in their day. 

His approach to Das Lied is more clearly collaborative than with with stronger-willed conductors like Klemperer or Bernstein. This doesn’t imply weakness in characterisation, and the performance as a whole feels idiomatic, without any hint of emotional overload.  In general, Krips favours faster speeds in the first five songs. The most pronounced difference is in Fischer-Dieskau’s interpretation of the fourth song, “Von der Schonheit”.  With Krips in firm control of orchestral balances, Wunderlich also sounds fully at ease in the excesses of the first song “Das Trinklied von Jammer der Erde” (The Drinking Song of Earth’s Misery”). Admittedly he’s helped here by close miking. Things might have sounded differently in the hall, but you can’t deny his combination of vocal beauty, musical intelligence and power.  No tenor of recent times has come close.

Any performance of Das Lied stands or falls on the last and longest song, “Der Abschied” (The Farewell).  Here, Krips’ strategy becomes clear: the 31 minutes is similar to the Fischer-Dieskau/Bernstein recording, but the details and internal pacing are quite different, and the impact greater because of the lighter touch applied earlier. It’s not better - it’s just wonderfully different, and it works by keeping our attention focused on the poetry and the musical flow. Fischer-Dieskau’s genius for rhetoric is a major asset, adding dimensions that many merely-good vocalists only hint at, pointing us inevitably to those wonderful closing minutes where Mahler sets the words “Die liebe Erde…” - Everywhere the dear earth blossoms forth in spring”, before dissolving the poem into a meditation on the words “Ewig, ewig” - forever and ever.

My one regret is that they included the applause at the end, breaking the spell of the music and wrenching us back from that other world, all too soon.  There should be a law banning applause at the end of any performance of Das Lied von der Erde.

boysandbach:

Taken from Wikipedia:

Angst in serious musical composition has been a reflection of the times. Musical composition embodying angst as a primary theme have primarily come from European Jewish composers such as Gustav Mahler and Alban Berg, written during the period of great persecution of the Jewish people shortly before and during the period of Nazi activity in Europe. A notable exception is the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich whose symphonies use the theme of angst in post-World War II compositions depicting Russian strife during the war. However, it is the Jewish artists, Gustav Mahler and Franz Kafka in music and literature that have embraced the theme of angst so highly in their work that they have become synonymous with the term to the point of popular joking and cartoons today.

Angst appears to be absent from important French music. Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie and Maurice Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, composed before World War II, reflect melancholy sentiment without angst in soft, quiet compositions. The effect of angst is achieved by Shostakovich, Mahler and Berg in compositions of wide dynamic range, at times seemingly spinning out of control (Mahler), and atonal music using the twelve-tone row method of composition (Berg, Bartok and others) to create an angst ridden atmosphere of grotesque sound. The theme of angst is portrayed in Mahler’sSymphony No. 6 (“The Tragic”) and in Alban Berg’s poignant Violin Concerto dedicated, “To the memory of an angel”.

Source:

Source: kavachai

heliophilic:

mahler 3 sixth movement. leonard bernstein and vienna phil.

understated beauty. as usual, words cannot describe.

roboecop:

Gustav Mahler

Symphony No. 5: Adagietto

jasonweinberger:

The first page of Gustav Mahler’s autograph manuscript of the Adagietto from his Symphony no. 5 [click through for hi-res view]

A while back I posted a facsimile of this and the rest of the movement – now the manuscript of the entire symphony is indexed at the new Library of Congress Musical Treasures Consortium. The LOC catalogue includes documents from Harvard, Juilliard, and the British, New York Public and Morgan Libraries [the latter is home to the Mahler manuscript posted above]. Other highlights of the Musical Treasures index include significant collections of primary source material related to Brahms, Debussy and Barber.

[Too bad several of the participating archives employ clumsy flash-based viewers on their respective websites.]

Mahler 9: Not the music of a dying man

k563:

Twenty eight. That’s the number of recordings I have of Mahler’s 9th Symphony, all now safely stored in digital format: from Bruno Walter’s 1938 pre-Anschluss concert with the Vienna Philharmonic, through the angst-ridden Bernstein-influenced 1960s to the 1981 version by Karajan (surely his greatest symphonic recording, marked by a heart-rending intensity no one has quite matched in the final movement), past the emotional neutrality of some forgettable 1990s recordings, to another peak in 1999, when the recuperating Claudio Abbado set down a performance that was at once classically proportioned and expressively immense, a tremendous advance on his earlier recording. Does one need to experience suffering to really empathise with the emotional range and intensity of this symphony which, at its heart, is about life: its struggles, its joys, its heartaches, its bitterness as well as its moments of transcendence.

This, of all Mahler’s completed symphonies, invites interpretation, and it has evoked many different responses from great conductors. Mahler did not live to conduct it, and so the score did not go through the self-critical scrubbing that invariably followed each premiere. What we have is nevertheless a finished masterpiece, written in the shadow of illness and tragedy, but in the end radiating a calm optimism, a gratefulness for all that has been and may be to come.

At least that’s what I think it should be, but rarely is. Simplifying, one could say that everything hinges on the last movement. As with the Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony, there is a tendency to take it much too slowly. This trap proves too tempting for Levine, Chailly and Tilson Thomas, whom I admire for their other Mahler recordings. The “norm” in recent decades is around 24-26 minutes for this Adagio – Levine stretches past 30, the other two take 28– but this is very much slower than the 18 minutes of the 1938 Bruno Walter recording. Conductors of the 1950s and 60s, such as Kubelik, Scherchen, Mitropoulos and Rosbaud, worked their magic around 21 minutes, and even the young Bernstein clocked in at 22 minutes; twenty years later, he was at 27. Klemperer, who also knew Mahler but took a very different approach from Walter, played it in 24 minutes in a recording made very late in his Indian summer.

What’s wrong with slow? Well, it changes everything. The final movement is transformational, transcendental. It gradually leads us away from bittersweet anguish into something altogether different, a poignant leave-taking in its final minutes where all anger and fear has been leached out after it has been experienced. Walter’s 18 minutes does not sound at all like a sprint; it is paced perfectly for the emotional journey. Both he and some of his Viennese players (including the Jewish ones who would soon be fleeing for their lives) had worked closely with Mahler, and they knew how to inflect the music with a heart-rending warmth I have never heard since: it is only Karajan who comes close. Mahler did not write this as his own epitaph. He had his share of tragedy, and he had a heart illness that curtailed his active lifestyle. He did not know that he would be dead two years later. This is not the music of a dying man.

coreyhenderson:

this term right here is the reason i love music, and now more then ever, Gustav Mahler. you see, Mahler was a very neurotic sort of fellow. You would be too if everyone hated you for not being christian and still hated you, maybe even more, when you turned christian just for them. yeah, as life went on for Mahler, he never really found a place to be himself. unfortunately for him, and fortunately for us, he was also one of the greatest musical genius’ ever. i mean, the man wrote tuba solos into his symphonies! tuba solos! in symphonies!! this neurotic manner of his comes out in the fact that he writes so many directions and instructions into his music, so it can be played exactly like he wants it. this term in the title means ‘turbulent motion. with greatest vehemence’. now if that  does not scream musical genius, to be able to put something like that into words, i don’t know what is and i might as well hang up my academic cardigan forever.

k563:

Browsing the NYPO archives - Mahler 9 addendum

The NYPO archives are a real treasure house.  I checked on Mahler 9 performances and made a couple of interesting discoveries. The New York premiere was in 1945, conducted by Bruno Walter.  The audience sat through the 75 minute symphony, had drinks, then came back for a performance of Beethoven’s 3rd piano concerto.  A long evening.

Even more interesting was this 1960 programme by Dmitri Mitropoulos - only the second time it was played in NY.  Mitropoulos started with Webern’s Passacaglia - a Mahler-inflected work - but then split the symphony so that the first movement preceded the intermission.  There would probably be howls today if we tried to do that!

Alma and Gustav Mahler

memoriesofthesun:

Mahler - Kindertotenlieder: Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgeh’n

Kathleen Ferrier, contralto

 

Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgeh’n

Als sei kein Unglück die Nacht gescheh’n.

Das Unglück geschah nur mir allein.

Die Sonne, sie scheinet allgemein.

Du musst nicht die Nacht in dir verschränken

Musst sie ins ew’ge Licht versenken.

Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt,

Heil sei dem Freudenlicht der Welt.

Now the sun wants to rise as brightly

as if nothing terrible had happened during the night.

The misfortune had happened only to me,

but the sun shines equally on everyone.

You must not enfold the night in you.

You must sink it in eternal light.

A little star went out in my tent!

Greetings to the joyful light of the world.