“Mahler wanted to live, that’s the whole point of his symphonies! It’s the love of life, not the love of death.”

Mr. Pappano, do you remember when you heard the music of Gustav Mahler for the first time?

Pappano: My first encounter with the music of Gustav Mahler was of course the vocal music; the Rückert-Lieder – Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen had a huge impact on me, but you know, strangely enough, the song that stays with me is Liebst du um Schönheit. I know that this song was originally not part of the group, but it’s so specifically Mahlerian. Mahler’s identity is absolutely identifiable – in three notes. And this is what made such a huge impression on me; it couldn’t be anybody else.

It’s very popular to say that Mahler is influenced by this or that. He was a conductor, the greatest conductor of his generation, certainly for opera, and he had everything in his head, so of course his music can be a mish-mash of all different things, but what you do with this mish-mash and what you do with your influences and how you make them into something that is your own, this he did like nobody else. The Jewish thing, the barracks, the difficult home life, the fights between mother and father, the death of his brothers and sisters, this incredible talent to live with inside you – all this is somehow in his music. It’s an amazing compendium of feeling, coming together with the psychological research of Freud. Romantic music is not only about a romantic idea or a love triangle or a dramatic scene; it’s about how it makes you feel, it’s about identifying these feelings and Mahler was particularly good at being very precise about a feeling. This is very interesting, I find.

That’s a good expression – to be precise about a feeling.

Pappano: Yes, we say feelings are sometimes very elusive and ephemeral, but he’s very precise in trying to exactly distill a human feeling in his compositions – it’s like a bell that we can all hear, somehow.

Did the door to Mahler open up immediately for you personally?

Pappano: I didn’t conduct for many years. When I was young, it took a long time before I really started conducting, and the idea of conducting Mahler was foreign to me. When I was younger, I was much more enamored with the music of Bruckner, and these vast cathedrals somehow made a bigger impression on me. Mahler’s music made me a little bit nervous. All this fanfare in his music made me a little bit nervous. But today I understand a little bit better what he was trying to say. When something is almost too honest, too truthful, sometimes it hurts, you know … ‘Stay away!’ [laughs]. People identify with Mahler’s music because it’s very, very human. So, it took me a while. My first experience conducting Mahler was Das Lied von der Erde in 1994. I had just conducted my first Tristan and I conducted Das Lied von der Erde right afterwards or during and, my goodness, this first song made me crazy. Also, he was a composer who dared to write hardly any bass, especially in the first five songs. Das Lied von der Erde is based on, or comes near to, this influence of Chinese poetry, which is either extremely delicate or extremely biting. It grimaces in the first song, in the tenor songs especially. But there is very little bass, so this composition is all high in a way until we get to the last song, Der Abschied, and we finally hear the tam-tam and the contrabassoon. This really impressed me, I remember.

Mahler was the greatest opera conductor of his time. I, who conduct much opera, and have very important relationships to singers, live a little bit in the same world as he did. I am not the only one, of course [laughs]; many of my colleagues conduct opera. But when you come from the opera, you understand things maybe more easily. For instance, his love for words and the voice as the ultimate expression – when the orchestra can no more, the word must come, the voice must come. Of course, the initial influence is Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 as a template for when the orchestra is done and music abstractness is not enough and something precise must come. But Mahler takes this to incredible heights in different symphonies.

He was a great Wagner conductor.

Pappano: Yes!

How do you see Wagner’s influence on Mahler?

Pappano: Well, in his compositions there is quite little influence. You could say that chromatically, sometimes, there is a similarity; maybe to Tristan. In Tristan, of course, at the end of Act 1, you have the fanfare and the horns, and the menace of the horns from backstage in Act 2. But actually, Mahler’s music is very unlike Wagner’s. With a couple of exceptions – the beginning of Act 3 of Tristan and Isolde – this prelude made a big impression on Mahler, I think. How not only the chords, but how the violins in thirds leave the orchestra and, like a fog, go up very high into the ether of this grey sky, how the first and second violins go up, somehow. I think that this effect must have really made an impression on Mahler. And I think the third Act prelude of Parsifal probably made a huge impact, judging by the Adagio of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 – I don’t think the harmonies are the same, I don’t think Mahler’s harmonic world is the same, but there is something of the mystical and the reaching for something that is similar. But otherwise I don’t see the similarities so much.

You grew up in England. Was there a Mahler tradition created by Barbirolli, or who influenced you in these early years?

Pappano: Oh, I didn’t have many influences at all. When I started to conduct Mahler, I hadn’t heard many Mahler concerts. I remember hearing Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 with Sinopoli, I remember hearing recordings of No. 9 and No. 6 with Barbirolli, and of course, Lenny [Bernstein] and Kubelik and Gielen. But isn’t it interesting that every one of those conductors has a different approach to Mahler? Not one of the people I mentioned is like the other one, at all! That says a lot for the music, I think. I think that all of them will say that they are faithful to the score. But their sound worlds and their approaches are different. Some bring it back to the full romantic approach and others approach it as the predecessor of the Second Viennese School and create a skeleton almost of the music, which I find very interesting. I don’t think that it’s the whole story and I think that these tumultuous explosions in the brass need a string sound as a weight to support the rest of the orchestra, but I think all approaches are useful for different moments, you see. I think one has to have tremendous flexibility for his music because I don’t think the whole story is in one approach.

You mentioned Leonard Bernstein. He created the Mahler renaissance, he was responsible for it, but later he was blamed for overpowering Mahler, for being overly emotional. Would you say that there has been a change in the way Mahler is conducted in general nowadays?

Pappano: I think that maybe one of the problems with Lenny was his stage persona. I think it affected the way we listened. Because Lenny was a great musician, a wonderful pianist and actually his work is very transparent. It’s not all just … [makes an explosive noise] He is linear, he is very, very faithful to what’s going on. But of course you see somebody up there suffering and doing the whole show for you. But that was him, that was his personality, and it was very successful. I think that his approach was very, very honest. Again, I think Lenny was a part of a history of Mahler conducting and it had to go through that, to go to the extremes, to find out how far one can go and how far one can push this music. But I think that it’s important to find the balance, even in hysteria sometimes, to always have the architecture in mind, to create the big moments. It’s very difficult to find the balance with Mahler’s music because there are so many climaxes. To know which one is “the one” is tough.

So one of the biggest challenges is to connect these emotions to tell a story?

Pappano: Well, in a certain way. Whether it’s a story that Mahler talked about, or … Look, all his symphonies are somehow about struggle, but so is the sonata form. But I think that Mahler made it more personal [laughs]. The struggle and the resolution of the struggle and how it ends, this is what makes a symphonic argument. I don’t think that that’s any different from Mozart or Haydn or Beethoven, it’s just that he found a more modern way of showing this struggle, a much more extreme and much more daring way of showing really what’s underneath the skin.

Would you agree that he anticipated some of the catastrophes of the 20th century? This is a quote by Bernstein.

Pappano: Well, there are catastrophes in all his pieces. But like I said before, he suffered so many personal catastrophes that that was such a big part of his life. It’s as if he was destined to live through catastrophes. And one of the great things about Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, for instance, is that in the last movement it’s as if the hero is struggling against what is going to be death, let’s call it that, to be simple. And how many times he does not give up, even when he is hit. But it’s not only that, it’s a constant rebirth after being slammed down after catastrophe after catastrophe. What catastrophe brings out of the man, that’s what’s interesting. Not that there is a catastrophe and not that there is a symphony about a catastrophe, but what the issue is. The issue is trying to get over it, to conquer and to come out the other side. But sometimes you lose.

So this is a very personal statement by Mahler?

Pappano: Oh, definitely! Of course! I think that this idea of Nietzsche’s Superman, I think it’s man with Mahler, do you understand? It’s us, it’s you and me. Every life has a different set of struggles and he had a big set of struggles. Even his marriage, which was something that for him was so crucial, was difficult; to be betrayed and the loss of his children and the stress of the Staatsoper …

Do you think that Mahler perhaps became so popular because he touches upon these conditions of human beings, especially conditions of modern times, of the 20th century?

Pappano: Yes, but also I think the spectacular showcase in each symphony for the orchestra is what makes him so popular. It’s a spectacle in itself. The demands made on the orchestra, the grandeur is something unique, it’s another plane. I think this makes for good theatre. His symphonies are his little operas. He, the foremost conductor of opera ever, didn’t write operas. These are his operas.

Why didn’t he write operas?

Pappano: These are his operas … I don’t know. The symphonic form is somehow much more suited to convey this idea of struggle; it is much more useful to a composer like Mahler. The idea of different themes, contrasting themes, different ideas, the bringing together of ideas, the clash of ideas, the conflict … this is somehow better worked through with notes rather than words, also intellectually. I mean words come often, but …

Looking back on your career – has your approach changed over the years? What is the biggest technical challenge for you when you perform Mahler?

Pappano: My Mahler experience is still quite young. I’ve conducted ‘Das Lied von der Erde’, the Symphonies No. 9, No. 1 and No. 6, and in a couple of weeks’ time, I will be conducting No. 2 for the first time, and I am very, very excited. Yet, my approach hasn’t really changed, rather it’s still developing. The challenges are the dynamics. It’s very easy to let things get louder and louder, and they need to be very, very powerful, but I think it’s very important to create a balance in the orchestra and to create those moments of pianissimo and a real delicacy and chamber-music-like sonorities. And that’s more difficult to do. To go from one extreme to the other in a short period of time, that’s difficult to achieve. And to insist that the musicians learn to really appreciate that part of Mahler, the intimate, as well as the grandiose, as well as the ironic, as well as the sardonic, but the intimate and the loving and the caring. That’s beautiful.

The last question – what did Mahler want?

Pappano: Mahler is very, very precise in his scores. I have a feeling that every conductor says “Just do what’s in the score and it’s all there”. I think, in a way, the idea is that a conductor should try to show this struggle to the public. And they need to be honest about this struggle, and when it comes to the arrival, the resurrection if it need be, or the death if need be, or the heroic victory at the end of Act 1 [laughs and corrects himself] in Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, they need to have shown all the different sides of what it is to be human, to come out with a precise result at the end. I think that is what Mahler was looking for, in a sense. The idea of the human struggle and hopefully victory at the end of it or, if not, to die trying. And I think that’s a very important thing to always keep in mind.

So his message is a positive one?

Pappano: Oh, I think so! Very much so! You know, all this death talk: he didn’t want to die! The guy wanted to live, that’s the whole point! That’s the point of his symphonies; it’s the love of life, not the love of death. It’s why death is a part of our lives, yes, these are big questions, but it’s life as something wonderful, my goodness! That’s it, that’s all.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler
Transcript:  Agnes Vukovich
20.4.2010, Vienna
© Universal Edition