Was sind das für Manuskripte, die Sie da gerade vor sich liegen haben und studieren?

Das sind Anmerkungen von Alban Berg zu seiner „Lulu“-Suite, die ich neu bekommen habe. Eintragungen in die Partitur, die sehr interessant sind!

Sie haben diese Partitur von Berg seit 1964 schon so oft dirigiert. Ändern diese Eintragungen etwas an Ihrer Interpretation?

Ja, natürlich! Man findet immer etwas Neues. Sehen Sie zum Beispiel diese Bläserstelle: „leierkastenmäßig“ steht da. Das bedeutet für mich, dass dieses Thema etwas „wienerisch“ gespielt werden muss.

Sie studieren die Partituren sehr genau.

Ja, man lernt ungeheuer viel dadurch. Oft gerade auch durch die Korrekturen, die die Komponisten selbst eingefügt haben. Mahler schreibt in seinen Partituren ja über sein halbes Leben, über seine Eifersüchte und seine große Liebe. Das ist sehr aufschlussreich. Der arme Mahler hat so viel gelitten. Seine Ehefrau Alma war nicht so einfach . . .

In der jüngeren Zeit hat man ja ihre Kompositionen entdeckt und behauptet, sie sei von Gustav Mahler unterdrückt worden.

Wie finden Sie denn die Kompositionen von Alma Mahler?

Nicht wirklich bedeutend.

Eben. In Edinburgh habe ich früher einmal ein Mahler-Festival gemacht, wo auch einige Kompositionen von Alma gespielt wurden. Da ist mir klargeworden, dass sie eine gute Studentin war – aber mehr nicht. Sie glaubte jedoch wirklich, dass sie die Größte wäre. Das lag eher an ihrem Charakter als an ihrem Talent.

Hat das Mahler-Jahr neue Erkenntnisse für Sie gebracht?

Ja, aber so wie jedes andere Jahr auch. Jubiläen sind immer nur ein Anlass.

An Mahlers Musik hat sich immer wieder der musikologische Streit entzündet, ob es sich um „absolute“ oder um „Programmmusik“ handele. Hat diese Unterscheidung einen Sinn?

Meiner Ansicht nach kann das jeder so sehen, wie er möchte. Für mich ist das einfach wunderbare, große Musik, die ich liebe. Dafür brauche ich kein Etikett.

Und wie gehen Sie mit Mahlers programmatischen Eintragungen um? Nützen die etwas für die Interpretation?

Man kommt dadurch schon auf neue Ideen. Aber das ist ohnehin das Schöne an den großen Komponisten, dass man in ihren Werken unentwegt neue Aspekte entdeckt. Große Musik ist unerschöpflich. Es gibt in der Musik, genau wie im Leben, keine Grenzen. Daher versuche ich immer, eine Partitur jedes Mal wieder so studieren, wie beim ersten Mal. Alles andere wäre zu einfach – und auch sehr langweilig.

Bei der Endrunde zum Deutschen Dirigentenpreis ist mir gerade wieder aufgefallen, auf wie viele Dinge es beim Dirigieren gleichzeitig ankommt: Partiturkenntnis, Schlagtechnik, gestische und mimische Kommunikation. Wie lernt man das?

Der Wunsch, Karriere machen zu wollen, ist sicherlich die falsche Voraussetzung. Wichtig ist vor allem eine tiefe Liebe zur Musik. Mir hat Karajan, der wie ein Vater für mich war, sehr wichtige Ratschläge gegeben. Er hatte mich mit dem damaligen Radio Symphonie Orchester Berlin gehört und mich daraufhin nach Salzburg eingeladen. Dort führte ich mit den Wiener Philharmonikern auf meinen Wunsch hin die 2. Symphonie von Mahler auf. So fing alles an. Karajan hat mir immer geraten, nicht zu viel zu machen, nur zu dirigieren, wenn ich mir ganz sicher bin. Er warnte mich davor, einen Fehler zu begehen, den er als junger Mann einmal gemacht hatte: mit einem unsicheren Gefühl dennoch ans Pult zu treten.

Hören Sie sich Ihre alten Aufnahmen manchmal an?

Ja. Manchmal ist es nicht schlecht, manchmal schrecklich.

Ihr Verständnis von Mahler hat sich also verändert?

Natürlich. Ich bin immer tiefer eingedrungen.

Gibt es zeitgenössische Komponisten, die Sie interessieren?

Als ich das Festival „Wien Modern“ gründete, habe ich mit Nono, Boulez, Berio und Stockhausen zusammengearbeitet. Dann war da noch der junge Komponist Wolfgang Rihm. Auch mit ihm arbeite ich gerne. Er ist ein so intelligenter Komponist und ein so gebildeter Mensch. Auch mit Henze habe ich einiges gemacht.

All videos are now also available on YouTube. And they are still online for all to watch here and on Vimeo.com.

And finally, there are more coming soon. Watch this space …

Read the full interviews with Riccardo Chailly, Herbert Blomstedt, Manfred Honeck, Antonio Pappano, Valery Gergiev, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Andris Nelsons and many more.

The exhibition shows a fascinating collection of material from the archives of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna and the Médiathèque Musicale Mahler in Paris. Many of the objects are on display for the first time ever.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a facsimile of the complete manuscript score of the 4th Symphony. As the music plays from loudspeakers (Jascha Horenstein’s 1970 recording with the London Symphony Orchestra) lights illuminate the relevant page in the score.

Curator Pierre Korzilius spoke to Universal Edition about the exhibition.

The exhibition is on until 29 May 2011.

Press reports:

Naturbursche und Musiktyrann (Deutschlandradio Kultur)
Gustav Mahlers Leid an der Seine (Die Presse)

View the Orchestre de Paris’ video interview (in French) with Alain Galliari, director of the Médiathèque Musicale Mahler in Paris.

See also our video interview with Christoph Eschenbach on the music of Gustav Mahler.

Wolfgang Fink, General Manager of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra.

Read more about the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra’s
International Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition.

“Mahler pursues Schubert’s goals with Wagner’s techniques.”

Do you remember the first time you heard the music of Mahler?

Tilson Thomas: I remember very clearly the moment when Mahler’s music reached out and grabbed me, when I was 13 years old. I was waiting at the house of my parents’ friends for some reason or another, and they were very busy people and they said, “Would you like to listen to some music? For example, do you know Das Lied von der Erde by Mahler?”, which of course I did not. And they said, “Why don’t you listen to the last movement – it’s about 20 minutes long and your parents should be here by then”. And they put on this section, and really I divide my life between before I heard that recording – which was Ferrier and Walter – and after I heard it. The music made a stunning impression on me; it was as if it gave voice to all kinds of feelings that I had, that were part of my family, that were part of the whole connection that my family had to life in small villages in the Ukraine, and the presence of Jewish music – both secular and sacred music – in those villages, and the pull of those different cultures. But when this part [sings extract] came in, it went right into my heart. I could not believe that such symphonic music existed, and I never got over it.

And how did you proceed then?

Tilson Thomas: Well, I began to look into his symphonies – just with some scores and recordings, familiarising myself with them. I got a piano score of Das Lied von der Erde and began to play that, and that led me to some of the other songs. But of course as a very young conductor you don’t really have many opportunities to conduct Mahler Symphonies, so I maybe just accompanied some songs a few times.

But I had another experience with Mahler at Tanglewood: Bernstein was conducting the 2nd Symphony and I was still a kind of fellowship student at the Berkshire Music Center, as it was called then. It was a Sunday afternoon at about 12:30, and I got a call saying the assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony is sick, and someone has to conduct the offstage music in Bernstein’s performance of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony. You have been assigned to do this, and would you please go over there and talk to him. So I had heard Mahler’s 2nd Symphony a number of times – Walter’s recording, probably – but I had not studied it. Moreover, my responsibilities that summer were only to do with the contemporary music festival that was happening at Tanglewood; I had not been at any of the rehearsals – nothing. And I went over to see Bernstein, and of course he came at the last moment – I was waiting and waiting for him to show up – and he said “Oh yes, nice to meet you. I have a question for you, I need your advice.” And I said, “What, you need my advice?” And he said, “Yes, everyone thinks of me in terms of Mahler’s 2nd, like Mr. Mahler 2nd – people think I wrote the thing for heaven’s sake, but I’ve always conducted it with the score. I’ve never done it by heart in my entire life, but today I’m thinking of doing it by heart for the first time. What do you think of that idea?” And so I said, “What do I think of this idea? You must be joking!” But he was serious. Well you know the thing with those Mahler Symphonies is that you go along and there’s no problem, but then you always come to one of those transitions in the 2nd Symphony, and you can’t remember: Are there two bars of 3/2 and then a general pause, and then something starts? Or are there only two bars of 2/2, then a silence, and then something? And so you can really get mixed up. So he said, “Well I thought what I’d do is just conduct less and less, and finally I’d just stop and the music would stop, and then I’d go on.” And I said, “Okay, I’ll remember that.” And that’s what he did in the performance; I was watching backstage through a little spy-hole to see what he did.

Did you discuss Mahler with Bernstein later?

Tilson Thomas: Much later, but in the meantime I did suddenly, at the last moment, have an opportunity to conduct a Mahler Symphony, when I was 24 years old. The very first one I did was the 9th Symphony, which everyone thought was completely crazy but actually I think it was the symphony that spoke to me the most. Those were the two pieces that were the most natural for me at that point: Das Lied von der Erde and the 9th Symphony. And I did the piece and then I began to do many more of those pieces. Bernstein came to many of my early performances of those pieces and sometimes he would talk about, say, tempo relationships – like “that was exactly the right tempo relationship, that was good” or “you need to figure out this one” – but he wouldn’t really tell me anything, he would just encourage me to find my own way with the piece.

Besides this, Bernstein could see that I was on a particular track with the music, which was that I was going back to my first appreciation of the music to really investigate the possibilities of making the music sound idiomatic. So, although it’s part of a big structure, at particular moments the sound of some particular kind of music, some particular kind of ensemble comes through. It could be street music, or cabaret music, or religious music, or salon music, or military music, or whatever it is; but I really wanted to get the exact character of this music to be brought sharply into focus, so that the piece would be more like Mahler describes. He said, “I’m making my own worlds.” This is the kind of thing that a filmmaker would also say – you know, it’s like this big film and there are these different levels of activities. If it was a big Tarkovsky movie or something like that, you might have a scene where a large army is invading, and an enormous storm is taking place, and these big events are happening; and then on the side there’s this poor little old peddler, of pretzels or something like that, and he’s going along pushing his cart and saying, “Pretzels! Pretzels! Buy my pretzels!” And the cart has a broken wheel, and he has three unmarried daughters so he has to make a lot of money selling these pretzels. A director wouldn’t even use an actor for a part like that; he would probably go out – someone like Fellini or Tarkovsky – and find a real person on the street to come in and just do it.

And I think that’s part of the challenge of these big Mahler pieces, that there are moments when things really need to have a rough character, coming from one of these other genres. It’s a challenge for orchestral players to do that, because they have been trained to play everything as beautifully and perfectly and nobly as possible, and here Mahler is asking them from time to time to do something which is completely grotesque, and way beyond the boundaries what of good taste is supposed to be. And that is exactly what irritated performers in Mahler’s time so much, and it still does irritate them. They say, “there are too many instructions, there are all these sforzandos and accents, and this and that, and markings like grell or whatever. And he’s just asking for too much – he’s forcing us to do all of these things, many of which go against the way we would really like to play.” But of course Mahler really wants the symphony, his ‘world’ to represent worlds that he actually knew in his life. And his version of those worlds is in the music, and that is the challenge, to make that as vivid as possible whilst at the same time allowing the big shape, which is so powerful in this music, to emerge.

Would you say that Bernstein’s style of really emotionalising the music has influenced you?

Tilson Thomas: In some pieces, yes. For example, it was a shock for me to hear his performance of the 6th Symphony with the New York Philharmonic, which I think suited the nature of the orchestra and the nature of his energy in the early days: it was so powerful, so on the edge. And then later he went through a process of discovering the lyrical side of the music much more. But you know, Bernstein did not believe in musical absolutes so much; it was more like you were on a particular journey with the music – everybody is – and different things emerge from that. He once said to me, when I asked what he thought about something in one performance – in a much ruder way than this: “When you have totally made up your mind, you think it won’t make any difference to you what I think.”

You touched on the 6th Symphony; some people say that in the last movement of the 6th, Mahler anticipated the catastrophes of the 20th century. Would you agree with that?

Tilson Thomas: He certainly went through some enormous crisis; the mood of the piece is so pessimistic, it’s so unforgiving and driven. The whole piece is a kind of mania, isn’t it? It’s a kind of militaristic mania actually, and also the consequences of that. And we know that he was close to suicide, or certainly in a very desperate place – to write a piece like that is scary, I’m sure. We’re so lucky that he completed it, and in a way its message is optimistic in that he didn’t kill himself. And he had written this piece that says, this is something everybody is afraid of, we all have these fears and these observations where we wonder what is happening, with this unstoppable force of aggression inside society that none of us seem to be able to control. We all have those feelings. That was a very generous impulse on his part, to complete that.

And in that symphony there are also many aspects of a gesture that is fundamental to Mahler, which is to try very hard to do something, again and again, to achieve something, and finally to come to a point where he just has no more solutions and gives up. And in the earlier symphonies, of course that is the moment when the conclusion finally comes to him. So in the 2nd Symphony, the grosse Appell [The Great Call] winds down and only then, from that Ruhigkeit [tranquillity], that Schwachheit [frailty], does the [sings] “Auferstehen” [resurrection] emerge. Or in the 3rd Symphony, where he keeps trying to get to D major, and no matter what he does he always hits that B flat and suddenly it’s back to [sings theme] all over again. And finally it’s like he’s completely given up and then you have this little flute melody [sings], and then the piccolo [sings], and only then does the answer he’s been looking for finally come. It’s as if he’s saying, I can’t get this answer through my Kraft and Arbeit [strength and work] – it’s not possible – I can only get it from something that comes from somewhere else, and this is part of his pantheistic, spiritual conception of things. But that same thing happens in the 4th Symphony [sings extract]; it just disappears into nothing, before the entry, ‘Ich bin der Welt’, which he quotes so often. And only then can Das himmlische Leben start, when he’s said okay, no more, I can’t do any more. And in the 6th Symphony that really happens in two places: it happens in the extraordinary 2nd, or 3rd, movement – and we could talk about that for the rest of the day! – but in any case, in that andante con moto movement, which is one of the greatest examples of a climax which does not happen. It comes to this point [sings extract], and it goes and goes and goes, and then just kind of loses it and that’s all there is.

So he’s really masterful when it comes to understanding how these things work formally, and he gets better and better at it as he gets older. Just a couple of very obvious examples: in the 8th Symphony there are all these themes in the first movement, fine; they come back in the second movement – yes, of course we know that the second movement introduces this theme [sings] in the most tragic way, which becomes Alles Vergängliche with the big triumph at the end, fine. But what I find so interesting is that there’s this other theme [sings it], and with all of these themes we hear them set to many different texts in the course of the symphony, but that is actually not the case with this theme. It appears when the Ewige-Weibliche makes her appearance, in the violin solo [sings], but the only time we hear words set to it is when the spirit formerly known as Gretchen sees Faust coming into heaven, and she sings this ‘Neige, neige, du Ohnegleiche’; and then she sings ‘Der früh Geliebte, nicht mehr Getrübte. Er kommt zurück, er kommt zurück’ and so on. That’s the only time there’s a text to that theme, and I think that is because at the climax of the piece – the Chorus Mysticus – it’s the biggest climax and everyone is singing full-force and all the brass come in [sings extract], and I think this is Mahler’s way of suggesting that the love of this simple little girl is equal in majesty to the entire design of the universe. I think that’s what he means.

Is there a Mahler work that you feel particularly close to?

Tilson Thomas: Well, when I think about moments like that obviously I feel very close to it [the 8th]; I can’t think about it without being very emotional, because he takes such huge risks and he shows so much. Or another great moment is in the first movement of the 9th Symphony, where there is this little turn figure [sings]. I think it appears once in the first movement, at the climax. In the second movement it is altered [sings] and becomes part of the ländler. In the third movement, in the Burleske, it becomes a parody of the way Mahler imagines that people see him [sings extract] – it is a grotesque little scurrying tune, which is then transfigured in the middle part of the movement into a different melody [sings] that says, this is who I really am, these are what my intentions really are. And of course it is in the last movement [sings] and even the very, very last notes of the piece. So a motive that was introduced briefly in the first movement is made, step by step, to become the main idea of the piece, and the emotional ride that this takes you on is really big stuff: this is the kind of thing that Schubert dreamed of doing, and sometimes even did do. But it seems to me that there is a strong connection between Schubert and Mahler, because what Mahler really does is to pursue Schubert’s goals with Wagner’s techniques. Mahler’s music is like Schubert’s music, in that it is based much more on song forms and dance forms – he’s not doing the Wagner thing of abstraction, chromaticism, and so on. He’s not doing that, though of course he’s aware of it, and he knows it harmonically and in terms of orchestration from his experience as a great conductor. He knows exactly how it works but that’s not what he’s writing. His material is like this [sings extract]: that’s the world, it’s the Schubert world, the world of folksong. But Mahler is using this on a whole other level, he uses his own apparatus to build a bridge between Schubert’s time and his own time.

And what role does Bruckner play in this process?

Tilson Thomas: Well he’s obviously there, and Mahler knew his music so well and was a champion of his music to some extent – especially the 3rd Symphony, by means of writing a piano transcription of it; and the 6th Symphony, by performing it. Although, as usual, Mahler got himself into a lot of trouble by publishing this little pamphlet in which he explained that he really did love Bruckner, in spite of the fact that everyone knows that Bruckner’s modulations have problems, and the form has problems, and the orchestration is not perfect. He knows that Bruckner’s music is going to survive forever, especially if it’s done in his, Mahler’s, versions. So he makes the controversy even worse! He can’t stop jumping into the middle of these situations.

How much influence do you think Mahler’s life had on his music? I mean, the first movement of the 9th Symphony, does it really represent his heart condition?

Tilson Thomas: My feeling on that is that he had a vast set of associations, and some of this had to do with things that happened in Jihlava; and some of it was about what happened in Leipzig; and some of it was what happened in Budapest; and some of it was what happened when he met Alma; and some of it was when the woman for whom Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen was written turned him down; and some of it was when his brothers and sisters died. And later it was about when his daughter died, and his triumphs as an artist. I think it was all there all the time, and certainly the pieces are one piece, but with different priorities at different moments, it’s a question of where the story starts in that particular piece, but he’s aware of the whole picture the whole time.

Does Mahler’s music require a special technique of conducting?

Tilson Thomas: Yes, I mean as he goes on he gets more and more interested in very slow tempi, so some of the most difficult things are in the later pieces. For example, in the last movement of Das Lied von der Erde at the end of the Abschied you have this rubato of twos and threes and fours, and some pizzicato and some tenuto cantando, and somehow this all has to work. It can’t sound like it’s in a tempo Gefängnis [prison], it has to have a kind of flow and freedom within this organised rubato. And of course this has a strong influence on Berg, particularly – there are so many situations in Berg where you have minim equals 38 or whatever, and all sorts of things are going on – and subdividing this music doesn’t really work, you just have to be able to get this big, very slow pulse, while people are playing all sorts of different things. And the idea of the pulse does get slower.

The first movement of the 10th Symphony is one of the hardest things to learn in Mahler – for me, anyway – because there is no pulse really, just this sort of floating feel, although there is a pulse sometimes in the middle section. But a lot of is like I don’t know what, it’s like expressionistic Palestrina or something like that, it’s just these moving lines, and you have to develop your sense of where the cadences are and where the rubati are. The quality of the sound is not easy to absorb; it’s much easier to absorb these other lines, like this [sings extract].

In which direction would Mahler have proceeded?

Tilson Thomas: Well as you know, even if the 10th Symphony was deliberately written in these strange keys with so many sharps and flats and so on, it was because he wanted to avoid doing the same things he had done before. He felt that he knew all the moves inside certain keys very well, so forcing himself to think in a key like D sharp minor, for example – which just makes you think, What? What is D sharp minor for God’s sake?! – forced him to expand his thinking. And his music, like Schubert’s music, certainly deals with the question, is D sharp the same thing as E flat, is it the same note? On the piano it is but we know very well that it’s not the same note, and Berg and the others really exploited this idea even more. Debussy was certainly exploiting exactly that question. So I think Mahler was maybe on a road towards more lyrical music, but involving more subtle levels of harmonic ambiguity, perhaps with less sharp contrast. And yet it’s so striking, isn’t it, that there really are moments, even in the 10th Symphony, which you can link back as far as to the Piano Quartet in terms of particular harmonic instances.

Another thing that happened in Mahler’s life, in the beginning of his musical life, was that it was an important thing to figure out which notes not to write. If you think of the Piano Quintet, we all know it’s Mahler – you can tell in five seconds – but it also sounds like really terrible music, because it’s just so heavy. So the difference between this and Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen – which is only five, seven years later – is that he has now learned not to put all those chords there. So he just has two little duets and something in the bass and maybe something in the middle, but he’s learned that his listeners’ ears will fill in all of this other stuff. This is what he does in the first few Symphonies; and then in the middle Symphonies he reverses the process, it gets much more complicated; and then in the last pieces he goes back to the simpler direction again. That’s what is happening in those last pieces: it’s getting simpler, just as Berg’s music became simpler in the very last period.

So with the last page of the 9th Symphony did he probably open the door to modern music and new aesthetics – with the technique of collage for instance?

Tilson Thomas: Well, a lot of people were playing with that. I mean Ives, of course; from our perspective today we realise how many 20th century ideas, and even ideas which were not popular until the very end of the century, come from this. One of the people who I would say was very much influenced by Mahler was Stockhausen, and he even wrote an article in de La Grange’s book in which he says, this is the guy I’m paying attention to. And I don’t know what Stockhausen said about Ives, but certainly these pieces he did with electronics in the 70s are really doing the same kind of thing that these guys were doing. That is, they were trying to create this collage environment out of streams of different music from many different sources and somehow make them exist in one space.

Would you say that, as a conductor, your approach to particular works has changed, that your experience has given you the key to some works?

Tilson Thomas: Naturally [laughs]. Since half an hour ago I really understand it all!

Let me put it another way. Some conductors have told me that when they started to conduct Mahler they overpowered it, but their personal approach changed and developed. Would you say something similar?

Tilson Thomas: Well, I’ve always been very faithful to what the score actually asks for – of course that can mean many things – but particularly in the tempo relationships between one section and another. I mostly found that when I did things which I felt were more exciting or gutsier or gave me a chance to inhabit my ‘maestrodom’, I ultimately came to regret those things. As I understood more, I felt that they obscured some points which were better or stronger, and that he really knew what he was doing and knew very well what he was asking for.

In all of Mahler’s music I can think of a few places which just don’t add up, no matter what. One of these is the end of the song Um Mitternacht: no matter how hard you try to figure out a relationship you have to really work at it. Another one, which I think works much better once you’ve decided that’s the way it is – is the last movement of the 7th Symphony, which I so love. But I struggle and, my God, I’ve seen many of my colleagues struggle to figure out some way that this relates to this relates to this, and I think that really imprisons the music. I think the idea of that movement is very much discontinuity. It’s like it anticipates techniques in film or in sound editing, of just, Jump! Cut! Bang! [sings extract]. The more discontinuous it is, the better it works I think, and actually you discover that orchestras can learn and remember an exact place in tempo and in musical gesture, and they can just play it like that going from one to another, in a very exciting, if dangerous, way.

So this was probably one of the difficulties for the audience that made it hard for them to accept Mahler.

Tilson Thomas: Well, the audience were confounded by how long it was, how it seemed to be so many different things. They could accept that one part was very beautiful, but then what about this other part that was so noisy or confrontational, and they couldn’t work it out. Maybe this was one reason why the 4th Symphony was the Mahler piece that was liked the most by musicians and more traditional audience members, for a very, very long time. And then maybe Das Lied von der Erde joined it, but it took longer with some of these other pieces, like the 2nd Symphony. People were disturbed by the number of different things the music contained. And maybe they were also disturbed – and this was something that Mahler himself recognised – by his obsession with presenting music, and then presenting it again as a parody, in a way that went against what the mood of the music had been the first time. People couldn’t work that out, why somebody would be doing that – there was no space in the music for them to relax, which was very much what audiences wanted to be able to do. You probably know that as a conductor Mahler was criticised by the press in Vienna, because they said, he’s trying to show us his ideals, he’s trying to show us the moment of creative crisis when the composer – Beethoven or whoever – wrote this piece. And the critic who wrote this article says, that’s completely wrong. For example, in my sitting room at home I have a beautiful little niche in the wall and I’m going to commission a sculptor to create a beautiful marble statue of a young woman to go in this niche. And I understand that when the sculptor is doing this it’s a big crisis to make a statue: you can hammer too hard and the stone can break, and you can have a big crisis of fear and think do I dare do this, and all the tension that goes into making this statue – but I’m completely uninterested in that. I just want to sit in my sitting room and have this beautiful statue there, and it’s there and it’s smooth and decorative and it makes me feel good. That’s the same way I feel about these great musical masterpieces, so this critic wrote, I don’t want to be taken to this moment of crisis in which the piece was written. So this was a very daring thing that Mahler was doing, just from the standpoint of modern, interpretative impulse.

As a conductor of Mahler – the ‘Resurrection’, for example – is there a danger of being more emotionally involved than you should be?

Tilson Thomas: I tend to be the most emotionally involved in the rehearsals, or when I’m just thinking about or studying the music, because in the performance it’s very clear to me that it is the musicians who are giving the performance. I want to be as clear and supportive as possible, so that they can be the ones who are really out on the edge emotionally. I think that works best if you can achieve it.

Last question: what is Mahler’s greatest achievement?

Tilson Thomas: Oh, my God.

Yes, I know. The simple questions are the most difficult.

Tilson Thomas: I think that Mahler was one of those composers in the early 20th century who succeeded in making us appreciate the value of many different kinds of music and music-making. He made us appreciate the sincerity of people who, at whatever level, are making music. Mahler managed to find a way to put this music together into a world, a single view of the world, and to understand that there is a kind of shared spirit that all of this music-making witnesses. I’ve often said this in relation to other composers, like Ives for example, and to some extent Debussy. There is a wonderful poem by Walt Whitman – actually it’s not a poem, it’s something he was sketching, a poem about music. And he says in that poem, all the different songs in the world – the song the blacksmith sings, and the song the mother sings, and the song the soldier sings, and the song that the Chinaman sings – all these different songs pull in different directions, and seem to be in conflict with one another, yet, from another perspective, perhaps all merge into one great song of mankind. And there’s something of this in Mahler’s perspective. Perhaps also his feeling that the music is made and will come to an end, but that the feelings we have when the music is over – what we can take from the music into our lives and hearts – is maybe his most important message. He wants us to understand the way he feels about things, the way life tastes to him.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler
Transcript: Flora Death
3.7.2009, Munich
© Universal Edition

“Mahler is certainly the greatest symphonist ever.”

Do you remember the first time you heard the music of Gustav Mahler?

Eschenbach: In my childhood there was not very much Mahler in concerts in Germany, for obvious reasons: he was banned in the Hitler years. Only slowly did Mahler Symphonies get onto concert programmes. I was living in the countryside, in Schleswig-Holstein, so I did not have much access to concerts anyway, but I remember listening to Mahler on records. Friends of my parents gave me the first one, the 2nd Symphony. There was a very famous actor at this time, Gustav Gründgens, whom I knew, and he was the one who introduced me in 1961 to the 2nd Symphony. It’s very interesting that it was this man. And then the door opened and I listened to the 5th, and I listened to the 9th with Bruno Walter – the famous recording where he rehearses it – and the 4th; I love the 4th.

But the second overwhelming introduction to his music was the Scherzo of the 5th, where the counterpoint of the Ländler, of the happy music with the very sad trio – with the horn soli – and the pizzicato [sings rhythm]. And that struck me. That is probably the point where all Mahler music clicks in the listener; the immediate counterpoint of burlesque and sadness. So that’s how I came to Mahler.

What did Gründgens tell you about Mahler?

Eschenbach: Well, first of all he said that this is great music. And he talked of the trip, the voyage, from the first movement into all of the other movements, into the transcendent ending – which was already there with Beethoven’s 9th, but here it is extended in enormous measures and forms. He talked very much about form. He also particularly loved the Ländler movement and talked about that. I wasn’t so familiar with Austrian music, except that I played Schubert on the piano and loved it. So there is of course a connection between Schubert and Mahler.

At that time Mahler was not established in the repertoire. Was this for you a kind of new world you had discovered, because it was not part of your musical education? Did you feel from the beginning that, in some way, you had an understanding of this music?

Eschenbach: Yes, yes. The door opened very quickly. And there are other composers, for example, with whom I have struggled , not understanding them for years and years, and with whom the door then opened all of a sudden: Shostakovich for example. But with Mahler it went very, very fast.

When did you start to conduct Mahler?

Eschenbach: In the ’70s, when I began again to conduct. There were seven years when I didn’t conduct at all, where I played the piano, until ’72. And then in my first big concert, after my conservatory time, I conducted Bruckner’s Third, because he was a composer whom I loved too, and who had written nothing for piano, and I wanted to do this symphony, but then came Mahler’s 5th. The 5th was the first of the Mahler Symphonies I conducted. The next one was the first, and the next one was the 6th.

Conducting Mahler, what’s the main thing you have to take care of?

Eschenbach: [Laughs] ‘Take care’ is a good word. You have to try to understand everything. I mean, it’s not so easy to understand everything intellectually, and it shouldn’t be totally from an intellectual point of view in understanding Mahler. One shouldn’t forget that his music is written next door to Sigmund Freud, and that it is written in a time when psychoanalysis was ‘opening’. Therefore, this music, of course it deals with these big emotions – like Brahms, like Beethoven – but also the very miniscule insights into the soul. You can discover that intellectually, but it’s better if you go from the heart and from the soul itself, and try to figure out for yourself: Why is that phrase going like this? Why is that all of a sudden breaking off? Why is it changing all of a sudden into a totally different mood? Because inside there is so much happening; Mahler is going very much a step further, and also breaking forms, going further than Brahms for example.

You conducted Mahler’s 3rd in Prague recently, and you told me that you had to work on the sound very much. Is there a special sound required for Mahler?

Eschenbach: No, but the sound scope has enormous amplitude and can also change from a fortissimo outbreak to a pianissimo, intimate scene. And therefore the amplitude is enormous and you have to work on that. You cannot tolerate a mezzo piano where a pianissimo is necessary. You can’t tolerate that in any music, but in Mahler it would be senseless.

Did your personal approach to Mahler change over the years?

Eschenbach: No, it just developed more and more and more and more. I conduct a lot of symphonies, and every symphony is so different from the other. And even if you compare the 1st to the 6th, or the 4th to the 7th, or the 3rd to the 9th, they’re really different; every Symphony is different. Not one movement of the Symphonies is similar to the other, so you always discover new things to develop and extend your understanding. It’s the case with all music, but with Mahler it’s extremely manifold.

When Bernstein made Mahler popular, to me it seems that to emotionalise the music was state of the art at this time. Is there a danger of overpowering Mahler?

Eschenbach: Not to overpower, but there’s a danger of being on the fringe of tastelessness. If you don’t understand why certain things are called trivial, in quotation marks, which are not actually trivial, and you let them be trivial, but take away the quotation marks, then there’s a danger. There’s very much irony in Mahler; irony in the Aristotelian sense of things which are seen from two sides at the same time.

How can you perform this irony?

Eschenbach: You have to understand, you have to see it that way, you have to investigate that, and you also have to constantly ask questions: Why? Why? Why?

You mentioned Bruno Walter and the famous recordings. Are there conductors who influenced your Mahler understanding?

Eschenbach: Well, I’m a strange person. I listen very little to recordings. Especially when I perform pieces, I never listen to other people’s recordings, because I don’t want to be influenced.
Certainly Bernstein influenced me and brought me further into Mahler, but that’s a long time ago, and now I need myself – my insight – to listen to Mahler. I don’t need others to give me insights. It sounds a little pretentious but it is not, it is just how it is.

Did you talk with Bernstein about Mahler?

Eschenbach: Yes, very much. And he was very, very serious. He was somebody who also talked about this triviality which is not trivial, but which is seen by people as triviality. Those marches, for example, or those really obvious Ländlers, or the Bohemian dance in the 1st Symphony, 2nd movement. And of the danger of exaggerating these things: he did not. Often people say that he milked this music. It’s not true. He’s a wonderfully classic, ‘classical’ also, Mahler-conductor.

But the first, after Mengelberg and Walter, who was a Mahler-prophet for the people was Stokovsky. He brought Mahler to America. It was not Bernstein who was the first after Bruno Walter, it was Stokovsky. And he gave – even in Philadelphia – already in 1916 the first American performance of the 8th. And eight years later, I believe, once again the 8th, and then all of them. He was, anyway, one of the great conductors from my impressions.

What was the main advice of Bernstein on conducting Mahler?

Eschenbach: He didn’t give very much advice. Of course he talked very much about the emotional and conflicting emotional attitudes of his music.

He was very careful with advice actually and especially with Mahler, because he himself was always so overwhelmed after conducting a Mahler Symphony. And I remember the 9th symphony in Tanglewood where afterwards I went to ask him something, but he didn’t answer. He was just so totally overwhelmed, which I can understand.
Or after the 2nd. And so it was not that he didn’t want to give advice, but he just lived the music: how to be so intensely in the music, and identify so intensely with the music. That was his best lesson actually, that this man was so totally worn out afterwards, sweating. But he was not sweating with his body, it was his soul that was sweating, and that was his advice.

Did he talk with you about his understanding of the personality of Mahler?

Eschenbach: No, not in this way, but he always said he is Mahler. Yes, he identified with Mahler. He always said that when he was in Maiernigg in the house where Mahler composed, he had this vision that he himself was Mahler. It was of course a little bit exaggerated. But Bernstein was not pretentious, he was always true. He was such an honest man, so that even things which pour out of him like this, were right in the moment. So he gets this vision he was Mahler, and therefore he didn’t talk about Mahler – ‘that is me’ [laughs].

Would you say the struggles in Mahler’s life influenced his music?

Eschenbach: Well, yes and no. I’m always amazed by the contrast of composers like Beethoven, for example, who wrote his Symphony No. 8 – which was the happiest one – in his worst time of health; Schumann’s 2nd Symphony: same thing. It’s overcoming suffering, almost as a recipe, almost as a medicine, to think positively to overcome suffering. But of course the suffering is also there, and also composed, and also very, very much work to identify with for an interpreter.

But would you go so far, like Bernstein, that the first movement of the 9th Symphony deals with his heart conditions?

Eschenbach: Yes, it is obvious actually. I think his irregular heartbeat, at the beginning and then in the climaxes, in the fortissimo where it is really desperate, it is rather obvious and a bit like Shostakovich’s 2nd Cello Concerto, at the end, where the heart-and-lung machine was ticking.

Mahler writes about how to organise his symphonies, especially about the flexibility of the tempi. Are you influenced by such texts?

Eschenbach: Well, I’m for flexible tempi anyway, and I’m always attacked for dealing with flexible tempi and seeing flexible tempi in compositions. That’s like speaking or breathing; you don’t speak like a metronome, you don’t breathe like a machine, you don’t think like a machine, and you don’t sing like something or someone who doesn’t breathe. So tempi are flexible because phrases have to have space around themselves, and with Mahler especially, as he expressed so many thoughts, and so many emotions, and so many enigmatic things of the psyche. He needs space and time, and I think it’s very important that you deal with this as an interpreter, and don’t forget it. There’s no metronome.

You conduct Mahler in the States a lot, and here in Europe, especially in France – you have your own cycle there at the moment. Do you see a difference in orchestral cultures concerning Mahler?

Eschenbach: No, it’s just that you have to be very secure in what you want to say in your interpretation. The orchestra follows. And I have a wonderful time with the Orchestre de Paris, who have learned really to identify with this music intensely and very easily now, and I am therefore very happy to do this cycle for DVD. And with American orchestras it is the same, you just have to live it for them, as a person and as a musician, and then the interpretation shows and the orchestra follows on a certain level.

But do you still feel the fact that Mahler was not part of the French education, or is it not a subject anymore?

Eschenbach: No, you don’t feel it anymore. Orchestras anyway are not so different anymore as they were maybe 50 years ago: when American orchestras were brilliant but a bit cold, and European orchestras were warmer but a bit sloppy. That has changed because of the interchange of touring and information – so the American orchestras became more emotional and the European orchestras became more precise – and also due to the exchange of literature. Which European orchestra in the 50s played American music for example? None. And of course in America they always played European music, because there was no other music except a bit of American. So there was an advantage actually and they played Mahler earlier than the Europeans. But this has changed now and everywhere there is the possibility to play Mahler first-class.

How do you see the relation between Bruckner and Mahler?

Eschenbach: First of all: Mahler loved Bruckner. He did the first complete performance of Bruckner’s 6th Symphony. And I think it comes from Schubert, who influenced Bruckner enormously, and then Schubert who influenced Mahler enormously. He brought Austrian folk music into classical music for the first time, in his earlier works, which was very important; all these marches with trios, the trios were really from nature. And in his Ländlers, in his dances, and then further on in his symphonies: look at the Scherzo of the C major Symphony for example. Bruckner took very much of this landscape music into his style, and so did Mahler then from Bruckner: the Ländler from the 2nd Symphony comes from Schubert, then Bruckner, then Mahler. In this way I see the connection.

And in terms of masses, with this huge orchestra – was Mahler influenced by that?

Eschenbach: Yes. Bruckner was more erratic in constructing blocks. Mahler didn’t use that technique so much. But of course the lengths of the symphonic thought, that carried over into Mahler and Mahler even prolonged it. His symphonies are the biggest, longest symphonies, which use everything possible: singers, choruses, lacking only a narrator. Mahler is certainly the greatest symphonist ever.

How do you see Mahler’s influence on the Second Viennese school?

Eschenbach: Certainly there are hints, especially in the 9th, which suggest the role of these compositions. For example, at the end of the first movement of the 9th there comes this big flute solo, which is an eleven-tone row, an exact eleven-tone row, and the solution of the eleven-tone row, the twelfth tone, comes with the F sharp of the violin solo which resolves the schweben [floating], he writes schweben for this very enigmatic flute row in the second-to-last page of the score.
Schönberg claimed in his famous speech in Prague two years after Mahler’s death that Mahler was a saint: so he really confirmed him as a visionary, and a visionary who influenced him and certainly Berg.

This is highly speculative, but if Mahler had lived another 30 years, in which direction do you think he would have proceeded?

Eschenbach: In the direction of Berg I guess. And in which direction would Berg have proceeded after 1936, who knows that? But Berg’s Drei Orchesterstücke op.6 and Mahler’s 6th Symphony, that is almost the same composer.

Is there any Mahler work you feel especially close to?

Eschenbach: No, this is a question which I’m often asked, which is my favourite composer or something like that which I don’t like to answer. I’m totally against specialisation and totally against fixing myself on one thing, because I’m afraid that I would lose other things at the sides. Especially with Mahler; the symphonies are so different and give so much, every symphony gives so many valuable insights, in life and beyond life, that I cannot say that one of them is specially attractive to me. It’s the same thing with the song cycles. The Kindertotenlieder are for me as amazing as the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, which is a young piece, or the Wunderhorn-Lieder, which are in themselves so different. And they’re so important, every one; there is not one which is less good than the others.

You conducted the 8th in Paris, and you told me once that you tried to have as many singers as Mahler had in Munich in 1910. Have I remembered this episode rightly? Can you speak about this performance?

Eschenbach: Yes, it had to do with the location where we did it. It was in Le Grand Palais des Sports, which seats 12,000 people. So we took this oval, and we took one side of the oval as the stage, and we had one and a half orchestras – that means Orchestre de Paris plus all the members from our academy, the young people. Then we had three choruses: the Wiener Singverein, the London Symphony Chorus, the Orchestre de Paris chorus.
And we had 300 children from the banlieue, from the outskirts of Paris. This was a wonderful attitude, a wonderful effort that people made, to get underprivileged children to sing Mahler. And they rehearsed for three months, and one month before I had a rehearsal with these children, and I shiver when I tell you now; it was so wonderful, so overwhelming to see how these children were living this music, and wanted to do their best, and they did. At the end they were so fantastic. So, that filled the space for 800 people – it wasn’t a thousand, but anyway it was a little bit in that direction. And it was the relation between them; now we had 9,000 listeners, and in the other part of the hall were the performers, and there was a bit of space between them.

We will give a performance on the 18th of May 2011 in Prague of the 8th, with the NDR Orchestra and the Czech Philharmonic together, and several choruses, and a great cast of singers of course. We are planning it now.

Karajan hardly conducted Mahler. Did you speak with him about that?

Eschenbach: No, I didn’t. But he came very late to Mahler, that was the problem. When he began to conduct Mahler it was in the ’70s. Then he wanted to do one after another, but there wasn’t too much time left. He did 5, 6, 9 – a very, very wonderful 9 – and 4. 4 and 9 were his best.

In his early years Karajan was in Ulm and to do a Mahler Symphony there with eight first violins was impossible. And later on it took time to get into it, I guess. And the strange thing with Karajan is, it came at the same time that he was studying and conducting, I think, everything of the Second Viennese school, and recording it also. So Karajan was certainly open to it.

I regret it, because I think that if Karajan had come earlier to Mahler he would have been a great Mahler conductor. But it was too late.

Conducting Mahler, is this possible to bring his monumentality and his structural modernity together?

Eschenbach: Yes, of course. These symphonies are masterpieces in composition. Sheer hand-craftsmanship. They are monuments of craftsmanship. Everything is clear with Mahler, there is nothing which is questionable, or where you say, oh, this is not so well composed – it’s perfect, perfect.

When I asked you earlier about the acceptance of Mahler, I really wondered why it was so hard for the audience of Mahler’s own time to accept his music.

Eschenbach: Well, in Mahler’s time, he himself said, “My time will come”. These were monsters for the audience, this had never been heard. But the 8th was actually the greatest success. The others were kind of semi-successes. He conducted them in Essen, the 6th, in Krefeld, and these are not really musical capitals. And he didn’t dare to conduct them in Vienna because he already had so many enemies. That was terrible for him. But then came the people who were really involved in performing his music, like Bruno Walter and like Mengelberg, for example. Mengelberg, Stokovski, and other people who emigrated, like Leinsdorf, conducted Mahler; and then of course Bernstein. The second renaissance came with Bernstein.

What frightened people at the time of Mahler?

Eschenbach: Well, it was just the lengths of the pieces and the complexity of texture, and the complexity of emotions also. As I said before, it’s like being on the sofa of Freud and opening your soul, you know, and identifying with it. Today, I think it’s very healthy to identify with this music, and to find similarities in certain traits and trends and movements of the soul: it’s a cycle.

So if you suffer, listening to Mahler can help you?

Eschenbach: Yes, because it’s like a minus and a minus makes a plus. Certainly it could help, because you have the reasons for his own suffering, and then it’s a relief.

Would you agree that in his music Mahler anticipated the catastrophes of the 20th century?

Eschenbach: Yes. Oh yes. In a non-outspoken way, but, for example, if you have the last movement of the 6th Symphony, this is a catastrophic movement, and therefore there is a connection to Berg’s Orchestral Pieces, which are written just before the outbreak of the First World War. And they are certainly visionary of the catastrophe, and not the catastrophe of a war – there were many wars – but of that very First World War, which was so different from the other wars before, because it was the first modern war in a horrible sense. And I think Mahler, especially with the movements of the 6th, captures that same thing . Because, from the beginning of the 20th century, there was something in the air that was in many, many ways opening minds, opening the whole way of thinking of mankind, and with it the possibility of the destructive catastrophe. The opening of abstract art, of psychoanalysis, of modern theatre, and at the same time, the evil force, which – not always, but often – goes with a creative destructive force. And one would hopefully learn from this, but mankind and learning is a problematic matter to say the least.

After the experiences of the Holocaust, and after all other catastrophes in the 20th century, do we have a different understanding, or a better understanding, or a deeper understanding of Mahler?

Eschenbach: Probably, yes. Because understanding the music of Mahler came with the developments in the 20th century. When he said, “my time will come”, he meant that: he meant that we have to go through so many difficulties, which he foresaw, and which he envisioned as a visionary – which he absolutely was. And therefore we see, and hear, and interpret his music differently than before. And also, on the other hand, it is easier for us to understand his music because we have suffered so, so much; we have gone through so much historically. And so it’s at the same time easier and even more complex, because there are more complex sides that we see in the music, and we have to wake them and fill them into our interpretations.

When Mahler met Strauss, he asks himself: “Am I made of different material?” How do you see his character?

Eschenbach: He was a very courageous man actually, very courageous in any aspect: courageous fighting against anti-Semitism in Vienna, for example; courageous in going to a new continent, to America, to create there something new; and courageous in seeing himself as a loner in creation. But Strauss was actually conservative, or turned to conservatism when he saw that things were difficult in the reception of his music. So he went from Elektra and Salome to Rosenkavalier. In my view it’s a pity. Mahler, in the short time he lived, went so much further. He died in 1911 and touched the whole century, the 21st century as well. Mahler is so modern today. No wonder people like Boulez conduct Mahler all the time.

Zeitgenosse der Zukunft.

Eschenbach: Exactly.

If you could try to explain in a few words: what did Mahler want to tell us?

Eschenbach: I think Mahler wants to tell us to be aware, to receive, and even to enjoy every instant of life. Because his life was so short, he certainly did it, and he expressed it in music. And he wants us to discover that alertness to every instant of life: whether it’s people, whether it’s nature, whether it’s transcendent things, whether it’s metaphysics, and also whether it’s simply the physical and metaphysical in oneself.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler, Universal Edition
Transcript: Flora Death, Universal Edition
26.6.2009, Schwarzenberg
© Universal Edition