“When the New York Philharmonic plays Mahler, I enjoy this deep feeling of pathos”

The first question is always the same – if you remember the first time you heard the music of Gustav Mahler?

Gilbert: I couldn’t swear that it was the first time I heard his music, but my first memory of Mahler is very clear. I was nine years old and my parents decided that it was time for me to hear all the symphonies of Mahler. The New York Philharmonic was playing a Mahler festival in Carnegie Hall, I think it was in September or October of 1976. They bought me a ticket and I heard all the symphonies of Mahler. I think that the first symphony that was performed was the 5th and – maybe because it was the first or maybe because there was this incredible trumpet solo that really struck my nine-year-old fancy – that’s the one that stayed with me. But I did hear all the symphonies. It was back when the seats in Carnegie Hall were not reserved for the boxes, so whoever came first had the front seat in the box – now they are numbered and you have to sit in your numbered seat – so I would make my father get me to the concert early and I would run up the stairs, and there was one other young guy who wanted to be in the front as well and we would race up the stairs and it was always the two of us in the front of the box. That was probably a life-changing experience for me, to hear Mahler’s symphonies… I certainly have loved Mahler since then, and it’s incredible to me now to think that I am actually conducting these pieces that I heard at such a young age.

As a nine-year-old hearing this complex music, do you remember your emotions? Was it just overwhelmingly loud?

Gilbert: You know, I liked music and I liked going to concerts, and there was something about the music of Mahler that really struck my fancy. For my tenth birthday, which was a few months after that, my piano teacher gave me a pocket score of the 5th Symphony. I didn’t think about it then, but it must have been because I had spoken about the experience – obviously, it had made a great impression on me. I still have the score, it’s a treasure… it was the first score that was my own, and it was the 5th Symphony of Mahler, which is a piece we just conducted the other night in the Musikverein.

And when did you start to conduct Mahler?

Gilbert: I guess my first Mahler symphony came soon after I started conducting professionally, it must have been in 1995. I think that Mahler’s 1st Symphony was the first one I did, in Tokyo.

Do you remember who was conducting in 1976?

Gilbert: Absolutely. In this festival the symphonies were split and they also did most of the orchestral songs – it was a major Mahler event in New York. Erich Leinsdorf, James Levine and Pierre Boulez shared the nine symphonies. Actually, they did the Adagio from the 10th as well.

Very different approaches, then…

Gilbert: Yes, completely!

There is such a huge Mahler tradition in New York, as we experienced two days ago, could you define this kind of tradition?

Gilbert: Well, I have always felt that the New York Philharmonic has an innate understanding of the music of Mahler. What I like about them is that they really bring great feeling to everything they do. The thing that I find amazing about the music of Mahler is that it can really withstand many different approaches. You can hear convincing performances of Mahler that sound very different.

Some conductors say that with Mahler all you need to do is follow the directions, because the scores are so carefully noted and because he was such a wonderful conductor himself that he actually knew what he wanted. So, if he says ‘slow down’, then you slow down and if he says ‘don’t slow down’, then you don’t slow down – it’s very clear what he wanted.

But that having been said, there is an incredible range of possibilities in the way you approach Mahler. Let me just talk about performances that I have heard: I have enjoyed performances of Mahler by the Vienna Philharmonic – you somehow feel that the folk aspect and the traditional Austrian dances are just so natural here. Then you might hear a British orchestra play and you don’t have that same sense, but there’s a clarity that might be really telling for the music. When the New York Philharmonic plays Mahler I think that there’s a wonderful mixture of this; there is a probably intuitive understanding of the folk side, but it is not as pronounced as when you hear, say, the Vienna Philharmonic. But in New York I do appreciate this deep feeling of pathos and of the life experience that I think the orchestra really imbues every note with.

Your parents are or were members of the orchestra. Did they know anyone who played under the baton of Mahler?

Gilbert: I don’t think so; I think that was too far back. You know, it was of course Leonard Bernstein who really was responsible for the Mahler Renaissance in the United States and the symphonies, back in the 1960s when he was conducting them, were not so well known and not so commonly played. That is, I think, the history of Mahler performances, he was obviously an incredibly important musician in Vienna, in Prague and Hamburg and all the places where he was chief conductor, and then finally in New York, but for various reasons he suffered an unjust neglect for a while. Then came Leonard Bernstein and I think he thought he was Mahler. He not only conducted the music brilliantly, but he really identified with the soul of the music and he made an incredibly convincing case for it. I think for a long time there were a lot of musicians who felt that the only way to do Mahler was the way Lenny did it. Now, of course, I think, as I was saying earlier, that there is a myriad number of ways that the music can be played. But I really am grateful, and I think we are all grateful to him for championing the music the way he did.

At the same time he was blamed for over-powering Mahler. Is there a danger to over-power his music?

Gilbert: I think so, although you cannot really argue against his interpretations of Mahler because they were his interpretations and he was such a great musician and such a great man that you were convinced when you heard him conduct the music.

I have to say that many of the experiences I had with Mahler were first with him, not counting that early Mahler cycle I heard when I was nine. But when I was really starting to become a conscious musician, if I can say that, Lenny was conducting the Mahler symphonies with the New York Philharmonic. I heard him play and record most of the symphonies, if not all of them, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th… and it wasn’t until much later that I started to realize that there was another way to go about it. He imbued every note with such importance that sometimes – and this is not a criticism, only something I realized when I studied the music subsequently – sometimes you lost track of where you were in the piece, the form wasn’t necessarily as clear as it might be. What I try to do when I study a piece, although I would never presume to compare myself to Bernstein, is to remember how important it can feel at any moment, but also to try and remember where I am in the piece and actually follow the long line.

You just defined your approach – is it more that you have a pulse and that you take care of the structure, while the emotion is written in the piece and you don’t have to pay that much attention to it?

Gilbert: No, I wouldn’t say that at all, because I think that ultimately Mahler’s music is about life as he saw it, it’s kind of a lens through which you can see his philosophy and his metaphysical and philosophical approach. He was obviously a great musician, but he was also very interested in the great metaphysical thinkers.

He tried, I think, to create a picture of the world through his music and he obviously was a very emotional person. I think you obviously need to play his music with deep feeling, but I think if you get lost in that side, then it’s not so effective. So, you have to make sure that it is balanced with a kind of clarity of structure, because it is very detailed music and he took the trouble to create all these details and all these layers and I, for one, find it very exciting when you can hear them. I have admired, for example, the Mahler performances of Pierre Boulez, which could not be more different from those of Leonard Bernstein – they are very dispassionate, but very revealing.

Bernstein said that Mahler anticipated the catastrophes of the 20th century – would you agree?

Gilbert: You know, that’s an interesting way to look at it, but I would rather say that within each person there is a microcosm or a miniature version of the world, and Mahler had such an interesting and eventful life that he is actually writing about all people, even though his symphonies were autobiographical.

So you see a close connection between his life and his music?

Gilbert: Absolutely. I think he was consciously attempting to reveal his life and what life is about in his music.

So you think that the problems of anti-Semitism, for example, which he faced in this city, can be found in some way in his music?

Gilbert: Maybe I wouldn’t go so far to be so literal, but I do feel that there is a very Jewish sensibility to a lot of his music and I am sure that he was trying to find a way to express this. Even though he superficially and publicly renounced Judaism in order to gain acceptance in Vienna, I think that it couldn’t be hidden or suppressed in his music. There are Klezmer elements and he blends Judaic folk elements with protestant hymns. It is like a kaleidoscopic picture of life in Vienna at the time.

Going back to New York and Mahler’s time there and his relationship with Arturo Toscanini, who felt that Mahler could be dangerous for him because he was such a tremendous conductor. Have you researched this topic?

Gilbert: Well, I have read a great deal about Mahler and it appears that every place he went he was competitive with the other big musicians in the area. He must have been a difficult man in a way and there was some kind of need to be the only one. Toscanini also had some of this, I am sure – he famously said to one soprano who proclaimed herself a star that when the sun is out you don’t see the stars. And I am sure that was a little bit the way Mahler felt. When you have two such giants in the same city… just imagine what a time it must have been to hear Toscanini conducting the ‘Ring’ and then to hear Mahler conduct Wagner operas – what an amazing chance New York City had.

But for me it seems that in New York, Mahler stopped fighting to be number one.

Gilbert: Well, I think he was kind of giving up, he was letting go of life. He seemed to have lost his spirit then. He was a hypochondriac and I think that while he wanted to remain hopeful, somehow there was a pessimism that crept in, which is a sad way to live. I feel sorry that he lived only some 50 years and it wasn’t really long enough, as he seemed to only just get going as a composer.

The Mahler Renaissance started very late in Europe, during the 1960s, already 50 years after his death, but it probably would have started earlier had it not been for the Second World War. Why do you think it took so long for Mahler to become popular in the States?

Gilbert: Who can say? There are other composers who have been neglected and who finally come back. Bach was neglected for a long time in Germany. Maybe Mahler was ahead of his time, maybe he really did foreshadow in a way that was not graspable. He was so brilliant and he had such an imagination for what an orchestra could be. I think even since Mahler there has been no composer who has really exploited the possibilities of an orchestra quite the way he did. If you listen to the power and the richness of experience that he could create, with a large orchestra, yes, but with an essentially traditional orchestra – there was nothing unusual about the instruments he used. Okay, he put an organ in his pieces and he used eight horns rather than four, but essentially it’s a traditional orchestra and the colors and the power and the richness of texture that he could create I don’t think were ever equaled before or since. And the message he was trying to convey – he was so consciously trying to say something and that’s perhaps why he started to use voice and songs in his music, because he must have felt that there was a limit, eventually, to what he could express with only instruments. He was trying to say so much that maybe it was more of a jump than people were able to take. He was there himself, at first, to champion his own works and to be his own advocate, but after that maybe there was no one else who was able to pick it up at that time.

But in New York he didn’t conduct his own music that much…

Gilbert: That’s true, he didn’t do his own music and I get excited when I read about the range of his repertoire and the music that he liked – Italian Opera and, of course, a lot of German music, but composers that we have never heard of. And he really knew these scores; he would revise them and rewrite them. He was obviously intimately and deeply involved in an incredible amount of repertoire, so I am sure a lot of people didn’t even think of him as a composer.

Have you studied Mahler’s scores, which are now in the archives of the New York Philharmonic?

Gilbert: Study, no, but I have seen many of the scores and it’s fascinating to see his own markings. Even in his own scores there are changes which haven’t appeared in even the latest editions, and it’s not clear whether he wanted them to be definitive changes or if they were based on the moment. He was above all a practical musician, so if there was one musician in the orchestra who may not have been up to a particular line, he would put it in another instrument or if he felt some instrument wasn’t playing loud enough, he would double it somewhere else or add a percussion impact to emphasize something. It’s not clear, and I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure, whether he wanted these markings to remain or whether they were just based on one particular week when he wanted to get the best performance he could. But it’s amazing to see his brain, and his writing is so neat and meticulous. He was obviously an incredibly thoughtful composer.

Almost all the chief conductors of the New York Philharmonic were great Mahler conductors – Bernstein, Boulez, Mehta, Maazel. Do you feel the tradition of this heritage in the orchestra, in the sound, in the articulation?

Gilbert: Absolutely! And that’s not only true for Mahler and the New York Philharmonic. Great orchestras bring something to the music they play that really affects conductors. I think the challenge and the secret to working with orchestras like these is knowing how to accept what is offered and not to let it completely drown you. I have enjoyed conducting many composers, but with Mahler there is definitely a special will that the orchestra has and there is a current that you can’t help but be swept along by. It’s really a pleasure to conduct music that the orchestra feels so strongly about. I think they love to play Mahler and they know that they sound good when they play Mahler, so there is always a special energy. No matter who conducts Mahler with the New York Philharmonic, and I have heard different conductors do it, you can still feel the personality of the orchestra coming through very, very strongly. This is true for a number of composers, but maybe above all for Gustav Mahler.

What advice would you give young conductors who have their first experiences with Mahler?

Gilbert: I would tell them to spend enough time studying the scores. It’s very easy to listen to recordings these days and to hear what other people have done, and this can be informative and educational, but I do think that it is important, with any composer but maybe particularly with Mahler, to look at what he wrote, since he actually knew what he wanted. And he was practical enough as a composer and musician to make really useful markings in his scores. To really know what he put down is absolutely crucial. You don’t really have that with other composers, as great as they are. Schumann, for instance, when he had a certain effect in mind, he would write something that you have to interpret. You really have to figure out what he means, for example, when he writes ‘fortissimo’ for the whole orchestra – if everybody plays fortissimo, or what they consider to be fortissimo, you may not get the right effect, so it’s important for each person to know what fortissimo means for him or her. Mahler, on the other hand, is very clear that this instrument is supposed to play mezzo forte with molto crescendo and the person next to him, who has the same notes, is meant to play, for instance, sempre piano, senza crescendo. He knows what the effect of the instrument is supposed to be. So, for the low register of the harp he’ll write forte when the prevailing dynamic is pianissimo – he writes forte because he wants to make sure that it is heard. The character doesn’t become forte, but it’s the balance that he is going for. And you can find examples of this all over the place – in a huge passage, he’ll write that the brass suddenly have subito mezzo forte and you hear many orchestras who simply ignore that because they think that this is exciting music and he must not have meant that, but he actually did mean that because there are other things that he wants to hear. So, you can’t only go on tradition and you really have to go straight to the score. That’s probably the main piece of advice that I would give to myself as well as to younger conductors.

Mahler often wrote comments like ‘Nicht eilen’ that seem to me to be comments for himself. He knew that when he conducted his pieces he could be so affected that he reminded himself not to rush. Do you adhere to all these pieces of advice one hundred percent?

Gilbert: Well, I try to notice everything that he writes. And if he writes ‘Nicht eilen’ then it just doesn’t make sense to me when you hear a performance that suddenly makes a molto accelerando. This happens, you hear that all the time. I really do think that it can be very useful to just follow the directions.

What did Mahler want?

Gilbert: [laughs] What did Mahler want? I think that’s a very hard question and I certainly don’t think that I can answer it. But I guess that he wanted music to be really important to people and he was a total musician in that he performed himself and he performed his own music. He composed in a genius way, but I also really admire that he recognized the value and the quality of so many other composers throughout history. I think that, to him, music and life was basically the same thing. He wanted happiness and he obviously experienced tragedy in his life and while he wanted to express that through music, he also wanted to transcend that through music. He must have deeply believed in the power of music to not only represent life, but also to enhance it. And I am guessing and hoping that this was what he wanted, that he wanted music to really be meaningful to people in their lives.

Did he want to show himself as well?

Gilbert: Well, on some level, composition is a narcissistic act, but I can’t think that this was ultimately his goal. I said earlier in this interview that his music was autobiographical and in that sense, I do think that it was about himself, but I think that it jumps to a higher order of expression very quickly. It really was about more than himself. So, while Mahler was clearly a very self-centered, needy man, I think he was also very generous with what he created in his music.

Was his music referring to his time, to the fact that everything collapsed soon after he died?

Gilbert: Undoubtedly. The fin-de-siècle, especially in Vienna, was obviously an incredibly fraught, difficult time where the old was going out and the new was coming in. And I think that Mahler is a very emblematic composer in that way, because he took the symphony and kind of destroyed it and turned it into something absolutely brand new. This makes him a very crucial figure in the history of music.

Is there a symphony you feel closest to?

Gilbert: You know, I have a very soft spot in my heart for the 7th Symphony; I love the 7th a lot. You seem surprised by that answer. I find it just so mysterious, and sometimes I think that it is my favorite one. I know that this is a provocative answer, but I really mean it. There is something about it that just draws me in, in a very bizarre way. But the 1st Symphony is also an amazing work. It was written earlier, obviously, and it is such an explosion of energy. It reminds me of ‘Don Juan’ in that it’s an early work by a younger composer who has this well of experience and life-force that somehow just has to come out in a completely fresh and new way. The 1st Symphony is amazing to me in that way, what he was able to do in that symphony. I think that the 9th Symphony maybe goes the farthest emotionally and philosophically. It’s not quite as bizarre and twisted as, say, the 6th, 7th and 8th. I think he goes back to a more direct and more sincere musical language. So, I would say maybe the 1st and the 9th in that way, with a special dispensation for the 7th.

And where would Mahler have gone?

Gilbert: It’s hard to say. I don’t know. He didn’t write that many pieces and his oeuvre is relatively limited in terms of genre, compared to other composers, and he did seem to create a kind of ‘closed arch’ in his work. I really couldn’t say where he would have gone. He didn’t seem interested in writing opera, which is strange, because people say that he may have been the greatest opera conductor ever. He also wrote hardly any instrumental or chamber music, except for maybe one piece. But symphonically he made a very convincing statement through his works and it’s a real canon… I wish I knew.

You are a great Berg conductor. How do you see Mahler’s influence on the Second Viennese School?

Gilbert: I think it’s enormous. And that’s why I have often programmed Mahler and Berg together. I think it’s very instructive if you hear, for example, the unfinished 10th Symphony and then go straight into Berg’s ‘Three Pieces’, because it really could be a completion of that symphony. Berg took this sensibility of Mahler and took it one step further. I don’t know if Mahler himself would have gone there had he continued to compose, but Berg and then even Schönberg with his highly serial music – I think that this disintegration of the traditional approach to composition started with Mahler. You can hear this in the 9th Symphony which becomes virtually atonal and is completely off the map as far as traditional harmony goes. Maybe the next step was what was picked up by Berg, Webern and Schönberg.

What would you have asked Mahler?

Gilbert: I am always interested in what may be a very mundane, musician, insider-type question, but I am always curious about the tempos – what tempos he would have taken, for example, the Adagietto in the 5th Symphony. If it’s a love song, should it sound drippingly sentimental and pathetic or should it have a freshness and eager, young, spring-like character? The tempo can affect that a lot and it’s hard to read that from the score. He says molto adagio, extremely slow, and I just wonder what those things mean, because ‘slow’ is obviously a relative concept. I’d be very interested to ask him first of all what he thought the right tempo was, but also how much latitude he would offer other performers. He didn’t hear other people perform his music and so I don’t know if he thought of his music as free to be interpreted and I am curious what he would make of the variety of approaches that you see today in interpreting his music. So, I would ask him what he thinks about that.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler
Transcript: Agnes Vukovich
17.5.2011, Vienna
© Universal Edition

]]> http://mahler.universaledition.com/alan-gilbert-gustav-mahler/feed/ 0 http://mahler.universaledition.com/herbert-blomstedt-on-gustav-mahler/ http://mahler.universaledition.com/herbert-blomstedt-on-gustav-mahler/#comments Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:41:04 +0000 Universal Edition http://mahler.universaledition.com/?p=1132

“Mahler must have been a great man!”

Mr. Blomstedt, do you remember when you heard Mahler’s music for the first time?

Blomstedt: I think so. It was the 1st Symphony and I didn’t like it particularly. I was 14 or 15 and I thought it was vulgar. It was in Gothenburg. I am sure it was very well played by Issay Dobrowen, but I was right in my Bach/Beethoven late quartets phase of my development, so anything that diverged too much from that I felt was not really worth my attention [laughs]. It took quite a few years before I realized that this was great music.

Did Mahler feature in your musical education?

Blomstedt: Not really … what I know about Mahler I learnt myself at a later age, when I was 30 or 40. I was not interested in Mahler when I was young. It was too big a challenge to come close to Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Brahms – Bruckner was very close to me from the beginning. I only started to really become fascinated by Mahler’s music when I was in Dresden, which was when I was 50 years old. I played my first Mahler symphony in Dresden with the Staatskapelle. It was the 2nd Symphony and I loved it, and I was disappointed that the orchestra did not like it. This was in 1975, 1977 or 1978, perhaps, I don’t remember exactly. The orchestra played wonderfully and the choir was also wonderful – I think it was a very good performance. But I noted that the orchestra was like ‘Mmm, yes, yes, not bad, but not really great.’ The orchestra had no feelings for it – it mirrored a little bit my own experience as a young man. But it was in Dresden that I started to understand more why his music was the way it was. You can say what you want about the GDR; it was not a very nice country, but they did a few nice things, also in terms of culture. One of them was that they published quite a lot of Yiddish literature. It was part of their propaganda. They wanted to distance themselves from the Nazis of course – who wouldn’t want to do that [laughs]? So they wanted to repair that part of their history and they were interested in Yiddish culture and literature and published a lot of it. This was when I read Yiddish literature for the first time by Sholem Aleichem and there were wonderful illustrations of these stories by mostly Russian Jews who were supported in the GDR, like Anatoli Kaplan – wonderful illustrations. And when I saw these illustrations and read these stories, I recognized what I had heard in the 1st Symphony [sings Jewish melody], which I thought was so utterly vulgar and terrible – how could a serious man write something like that? – now I suddenly understood that this was what he had heard when he was a young man in the Ghetto; country fiddlers playing for weddings and funerals, the same musicians playing with a great feeling of sorrow and tragedy. Suddenly, I understood that it wasn’t that he didn’t know how to write decent music, but it was more or less a quote from his experience. And of course it was a tragic experience and I sympathize with people who have tragic backgrounds, so I started to love this music. And I think that today, the Staatskapelle is playing Mahler symphonies with great understanding and with great love, I am sure. But it took time for them too, as it took time for me. So that was the background of my coming to Mahler.

The difficulties were only the exotic materials or were there other reasons why you didn’t like Mahler at first?

Blomstedt: No, that was my main objection [laughs]. Of course, when I studied the scores more closely, I realized what great compositions they were and how clever he was as a musician and as a composer. These so-called “vulgar” quotations were part of his world and he wanted to bring that whole world into his music, sort of like confessions. I think this is the case for most composers; their works are confessions of their lives. I felt sympathy for his background.

But how utterly different that was from other big symphonies written at the same time – by Jean Sibelius who would never have written something like that and still wrote symphonies with enormous integrity. But Sibelius never quoted folk melodies, there is something similar in his work and his music is of course very influenced by his Finnish background, but as personal as his symphonies are, they are objective truths. They are not only outpourings of his sentiments. It’s not less personal than Mahler’s music, but it’s personal on another level. For Sibelius the big Gods were Bach and Beethoven, and he wrote his symphonies with the same spirit as Beethoven – they are very different from Beethoven’s, but written in the same spirit; not telling the whole world about his anxieties, his hopes and his visions, but more in a dream world where he tries to combine his impressions of Finnish nature with the symphonic greatness of a Beethoven symphony. Sibelius was a synesthetic – when he saw colors he heard notes and music, and vice versa; when he heard music he went ‘Oh, that’s green’ and ‘that’s blue’. This is something that is difficult to imagine for someone who does not have these experiences, but I think it’s good to know that about Sibelius – his impressions of nature gave him immediate musical impressions.

They met, as you know, Sibelius and Mahler early in the 20th century, in 1907. They had a meeting, but of course they had completely different views. I think they respected each other very much as great musicians, but Mahler said: ‘No, that’s not my world! I want my symphonies to take in the whole world; also the vulgar, also the country fiddler has a place there, alongside the most lofty visions and thoughts about philosophical themes, about God, about eternity and resurrection and all this. Sibelius created an ideal world of his own that is very separate from the streets of Helsinki or the streets of Vienna, while in Mahler’s music you can hear very well what is going on in the street, in the pubs as well as in the Musikverein and in the churches. He takes it all in, it’s all there. And since it is so extremely emotional, I think it appeals to the public of today to a very great extent.

Recently Simon Rattle said that in the late 1960s, Mahler was considered to be somewhat of a joke in Britain. You conducted a lot in the States, do you remember this time when Mahler was not taken seriously?

Blomstedt: Not from America, but I remember it from my youth in Sweden. I was not dissimilar to my contemporaries; nobody really liked Mahler. They thought his music was interesting, but not really touching. I think this started to change in 1960, the 100th anniversary of Mahler, with the big Mahler festival here in Vienna. This was the beginning of a fantastic odyssey of his music all around the world. In America, his music caught on very fast, no doubt because so many Jews were living there. They felt very close to this music, the great Jewish musicians who had emigrated to America, and that helped to bring it close to the public. Also, great parts of the audience are Jewish; it’s a wonderful audience with a great sensitivity for music. And from there it spread to everywhere. Today, the love of Mahler is not a Jewish thing [laughs], it’s universal. I am very happy that it is like that and of course Mahler prophesized that himself – he said ‘My time will come!’, and he was right.

The name of Leonard Bernstein is closely associated with the Mahler renaissance and at the same time he has been blamed for overpowering his music. What would you say about this overly emotional style of interpreting Mahler? What is the right approach to Mahler?

Blomstedt: Well, I am not the one to judge this, but I think Mahler can easily be misused if one is ultra-emotional. Certainly, Bernstein was an artist who was enormously emotional and he had a right to be like that; that was Mr. Bernstein! I knew him pretty well personally and he was not a showman, but a naturally theatrical person. He did not put on something to create an effect, he was like that! He was completely genuine! And in this respect I think he was the ideal Mahler interpreter and he did very much to foster the Mahler ‘Triumphzug’, the triumphal development of Mahler in the greater public.

I think that Mahler’s own way of conducting was not like that. Of course, I think that the young Mahler was different from the mature Mahler, but the mature Mahler was an extremely well-controlled conductor. No gymnastics, no histrionics on the stage; he was calm, but with an enormous methodology – he asked for the orchestra to completely give themselves over to the music and to the demands of him as a conductor. And it was natural for him to get exactly what he wanted because of his stature as a person; not only as a fascinating performer, but as a person. He must have simply been a great man. Many of the observations one hears or reads about Mahler’s conducting go in this direction. The young Mahler is said not to have been extremely gymnastical and so on, but remember, Mahler died when he was 51. So he was not an old man; you cannot say that as an old man he got calmer or finally calmed down – he was in the prime of his life. And even then he was a well-composed conductor.

I have been asked on some occasions to act as a judge in competitions and I hear young conductors conduct Mahler – it’s almost always a catastrophe. They make a big impression by being extremely emotional and in the next round they play a Haydn menuetto or movements from a Haydn symphony and they absolutely do not know what to do with it [laughs] – they can only bathe in their emotions … and they don’t know the music very well. I think one should rather have Haydn competitions instead of Mahler competitions to really train conductors to conduct the music and not only use it as a vehicle to show their emotions. Certainly, Mahler must be played with a complete understanding, with a great personal involvement, also emotionally. But in order to get the control and the relations between the different parts of this great music, you have to keep a cool head and at the same time be completely involved.

Did you talk with Bernstein about Mahler?

Blomstedt: Not about Mahler, no.

Did you talk with other conductors about Mahler? Or are there other conductors that influenced you? You probably listened to Willem Mengelberg or Bruno Walter?

Blomstedt: No, I didn’t. What I know about Mahler comes only from my studying the score. I did not study Mahler with a teacher. It was so late in my career, I started studying Mahler when I was 50 – I was as old as Mahler was when he died. I love his music; I am very much involved with it. I have not played so much Mahler in the last 4 to 5 years because I conducted so much Bruckner. Perhaps that is a little bit the missionary part of me – everybody plays Mahler, they don’t need me, but Bruckner is still so little understood. So I have concentrated on Bruckner these past few years, but I have also done some Mahler and I love it, especially the 9th Symphony, the 6th Symphony, the 2nd Symphony and the 1st Symphony and the songs, of course – they are fabulous, I think he is almost at his greatest in his early songs, they are fantastic, the ‘Kindertotenlieder’, ‘Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen’ – that appeals very much to me and shows another side of Mahler that is perhaps less known; the more restricted Mahler, the more internal Mahler. Remember, they are very small; no cowbells, no hammers, no choirs of a thousand people. They are very, very small and still there is an enormously intense expression. This moves me very much – when a composer with small means can say the maximum. When you have enormous means, it doesn’t appeal to me as much, compared with little means. For that reason I love the ‘Kindertotenlieder’ much more than the 8th Symphony, for instance. I have done the 8th Symphony a few times and I love it, but when I conduct these early songs afterwards, I think ‘This is the real great Mahler’.

So would you agree that Mahler comes from the song?

Blomstedt: I think so, yes. He was one with the voice. He wrote very little chamber music, as we know, he was an orchestra man, but he was also a man of the opera. He constantly worked with singers, and I am sure he worked with some wonderful singers who gave him ideas about what the human voice can express. It’s so moving, this music …

When you started to study Mahler you were already a great Bruckner conductor and you knew the Bruckner scores very well. Do you think Bruckner influenced Mahler, bearing in mind that Mahler wanted to study with Bruckner and did indeed study briefly with him?

Blomstedt: We know of course that Mahler studied with Bruckner, but it must have been for a very short time. I think that Mahler’s symphonies would have been impossible without Bruckner’s music. The scope, the greatness of thought surely influenced Mahler, and Mahler of course performed some of Bruckner’s music, in his own way, with lots of changes and cuts, which was the standard at that time. Today, it would be a crime to do that, but we should not judge Mahler by today’s standards, but by the standards of his own day. And after all, he was one of the first conductors to perform the 6th Symphony, although he didn’t perform all the movements and made big cuts.

When I compare the two, what surprises me is how modern Bruckner was compared to Mahler. What Bruckner wrote in 1868 is much more daring than what Mahler wrote in 1890, harmonically speaking. And he did it with the same orchestra as Beethoven used; not more instruments. The harmonically daring language of his 1st Symphony is just unbelievable. When you hear Mahler’s 1st Symphony, it sounds very commonplace, harmonically speaking. It has of course lots of new kinds of expressions and there is a whole new world opening up already in the 1st Symphony that Bruckner would never have written, but, harmonically speaking, Bruckner is much more advanced than Mahler. Mahler perhaps in 1908, 1909, 1910, 1911, by the 10th Symphony, would have approached something like this, maybe also in the 9th Symphony there were some harmonically daring progressions. But the Mahler of the 1890s was not going in that direction. He developed other parts of his musical language that really made up Mahler. Mahler did not have to be more modern; he had to be more Mahler [laughs]. So it’s not that Mahler was not as advanced as Bruckner, but, harmonically speaking, Bruckner was very innovative and daring. The clashes in the 9th Symphony are unbelievable!

But I am so glad that we have both. As different as they are, we love them both and we cannot do without them.

From a practical point of view, are there differences when you rehearse Mahler and Bruckner?

Blomstedt: There are enormous differences. When I conduct Bruckner, I always feel that this is the truth, some objective truth. It’s very personal music and it’s full of emotions, but it’s not Bruckner’s emotions. It’s like Beethoven’s music – he speaks for us all. Beethoven was not telling us about his being afraid, about becoming deaf or of his anguish. He speaks for man as a species. I feel the same with Bruckner; he speaks for man as a species. Whereas Mahler speaks absolutely for himself and he shows us that this is also part of you. We can have sympathy for him and he appeals to us ‘Oh, yes, I have something similar in me’. And that’s why we like him so much; ‘He suffered just as I do’. But Bruckner’s music is on another kind of level. It’s very personal, but it is not so subjective. This is why I feel with Bruckner’s music you get a sense of the truth; this is like it is. It is real. One of the most wonderful passages in Mahler’s music is the one where he gives an idea of an ideal world, of ideal happiness, in heaven – in his ‘Wunderhorn-Lieder’, ‘I long to be in heaven’. And you have a wonderful feeling that this is where you want to be. But with Bruckner’s music, you are there! And it’s real, you know! It’s not only a vision that you forget three bars later. Mahler’s says that it’s something to be hopeful for, but it’s not real, it doesn’t exist, but you must not forget to dream about it and hope for it and work towards it, but really, it does not exist. Whereas Bruckner creates a situation where it does exist, and it’s here!

They are very different these composers and they appeal to different sides of our personalities.

But when you rehearse, are you looking for the wide bow with Bruckner and for the mosaic with Mahler? Or is the technical aspect almost the same with both composers?

Blomstedt: Well, with both composers you have to have the view of the whole thing before you start painting details. This is as true for Mahler as it is for Bruckner. Mahler’s music may seem to be more kaleidoscopic, a series of snapshots. Perhaps this is also why it appeals so much to today’s public. Today’s public doesn’t have so much patience; they want to be excited all the time. It’s like when you’re watching TV – you have three seconds of this and two seconds of that, and when you have ten seconds of something, you think it’s boring [laughs]. Mahler’s music is always changing and this is part of why it fascinates us so much. Because we know that our existence is so fragmental and so torn. But Bruckner’s music tells us there is also a line, that there is a vision there, that there is a hope for eternity. For Mahler, eternity is only a dream, but for Bruckner it’s real.

But in order to conduct both composers’ work, you have to be completely familiar with the whole scope before you even start rehearsing it.

Did Mahler anticipate the catastrophes of the 20th century?

Blomstedt: I think so, but I think Bruckner did too. Listen to the Adagio of the 9th Symphony – you have all the catastrophes of World War I and II in it. These clashes – Bruckner was of course no Marxist, but his music shows that if you follow this direction it will end in utter pain and catastrophe. Like close to the end of the Adagio of the 9th Symphony, where with utter consequence the lines clash in a painful expression [lets out a loud shriek], and it breaks together. The beginning of this movement sounds like Schönberg [sings a passage], it’s almost twelve-tone music, it’s remarkable – in 1890, 1892, 1894. He died in 1896. It’s amazing how close this is to atonal music. So in this respect, Bruckner was also very forward-looking. But Mahler, with his special psyche, was so much torn between extremes. Not being at home any place, always a foreigner. Here in Vienna he was not an Austrian, he was a Bohemian; he was not really Austrian, he was a Jew, he was always different and didn’t belong anywhere. And this feeling of estrangement is perhaps typical of the whole century that followed. So in that way, he was prefiguring a century when people were torn from their existence in the most awful way. The Holocaust is the most dramatic example, but there are many other examples of people being thrown out and being murdered, for instance in Turkey. And it continues even today. So I think even Mahler’s fate as an individual was very much prefiguring all the tragedies of the 20th century.

Do you see a connection between his life and his art?

Blomstedt: Sure. He would not have composed the way he did if he hadn’t had this background.

How do you see his personality?

Blomstedt: He must have been a wonderful man. He was a difficult man when it came to art; he demanded absolute fidelity to what he was aiming at, and he was not prepared to make any compromises in art. Of course, life taught him that things don’t always develop the way you want them to. He felt great tragedies in his personal life – children died, his wife deserted him; everybody was against him in Vienna, but still loved him. It was a terrible, terrible fate. That a person with his background could create such great music is a miracle. Just as it’s a miracle that Bruckner created such great music being the man that he was – in many ways a very simple man, not at all with the urban excesses that were available to Mahler. Bruckner was basically a monastery man. But in the monastery he had fantastic visions. And of course he would not have been able to write these symphonies had he not been an idealist with Beethoven’s symphonies in mind. I think the influence of Wagner is spoken of so much and it is obvious, but the influence of Beethoven, although it is not spoken of so much, is also very, very obvious. His symphonies are ethical confessions [laughs], like Beethoven’s symphonies. A document of humans striving towards affection, with all the limitations we have, but with an uncompromising attitude to this ambition.

Do you see a Wagner influence on Mahler as well?

Blomstedt: Yes, of course, without Wagner there would be no Mahler. And I am sure he was a great Wagner conductor and he knew his works very well. But it’s interesting that both these composers, since we are pairing them all the time, were not really opera composers [laughs]. Wagner played a great role for them, but Mahler only had some curious attempts at arranging opera and his world was the symphony. And so was Bruckner’s. Bruckner was in the monastery, he was an organist, but his world was the symphony. He has written some wonderful church music, but compared with his symphonies this is a minor part of his output. It’s great music, wonderful, he was a wonderful organist, but he wrote no organ music; he improvised. There are only a few pieces left that could be played even on a harmonium – some very simple pieces.

His organ was the orchestra …

Blomstedt: His world was the orchestra! And he had this vision without having an orchestra at his disposal. Mahler had an orchestra at his disposal, it was his everyday work. He heard what was possible, he was a fantastic conductor. During his lifetime, he was an admired conductor, I think he was also hated by some who didn’t like him, but generally he was a very admired and feared leader, so it was quite natural for him that he would make his best efforts in symphonies. But with Bruckner you would never predict that he would develop into a man of the symphony. I think this is also important to bear in mind when you judge Bruckner. You put him into a corner – he was a church man, he was very religious, he was very pious; we admire that and we would like to be like that ourselves, but unfortunately we cannot, this is time past … Bruckner was a real genius with the orchestra. To say something of this quality with the same orchestra that Beethoven used … It’s true that he used some tubas at the end, but generally his symphonies had just a pair of woodwinds, three trumpets and four horns and three trombones, and that’s it. And it sounds completely different to the symphonies of his predecessors.

Mahler was of course an extreme romantic and as a conductor he also wanted to see what is possible. There are things in his orchestra which he found that nobody else did, he enlarged the orchestra and felt no bounds there; he felt no shame in using the most diverse instruments – he was simply experimenting. In this respect, he was also a child of his time. He said to his students ‘If something in my works does not work in terms of balance, change it’, or ‘If you feel that the oboe is too weak here, use the clarinet instead, and if it’s still too weak, double it, triple it, or put the piccolo on top’ and he did not only give his students free hand to do it, but he said that they must do it! This is completely foreign to our feeling today where everything Mahler wrote is sacrosanct – you don’t change a note, you don’t change one instrument. The job of the conductor is to change the sound balances so that everything can be maximally clearly heard and so on, but you don’t change the colours; that’s a crime!

So when we judge Mahler we have to take him as he was at his time; this was normal at his time. Remember, Brahms did similar things. Brahms, in this house, was the editor of the Schubert symphonies and he did not hesitate to put in some extra bars of his own in Schubert’s music, without telling anybody [laughs]. There was no critical commentary explaining why he had made certain choices. He just did it. That was part of the standard of his time. You do what you think is in the interest of the composer. We think differently today.

And I think this is interesting and in no way diminishes the value of what they did.

In today’s newspaper, you read about Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg – he copied a journalist in his doctoral dissertation. What a crime! And he didn’t tell it [laughs]! At the time of Brahms and Mahler that would have been customary and happened every day [laughs]. So it’s good to have a historical overview of these things, to calm you down a little bit. I respect these men very much, they were great models for us and I am glad we had them. This was more than a hundred years ago as for Bruckner and this year it’s exactly one hundred years ago that we lost Mahler … where are they today?

What would you have asked Mahler?

Blomstedt: I don’t have nearly as many questions for Mahler as I’d have for Bruckner because Mahler was much more detailed when he wrote his scores. There is hardly one note that doesn’t have a special marking – a dot, an accent, a wedge or a dynamic marking. Sometimes there are two, three or even four markings for one note. So you can pretty well read his thoughts when you read the score. Bruckner was not so detailed in some of his works, but perhaps more than many people – much more detailed than Beethoven or Mozart and so on. But for me, Bruckner is more enigmatic than Mahler. I feel that Mahler’s message is pretty clear to me. This does not mean that I know it for all times. Tomorrow, I might have other ideas. It’s like that with any great music; you can never come close enough to it.

Of course, I would have loved to meet both of them. But I am afraid if I had the privilege of meeting them, I would just get numb and admire them … ‘Is this really you?’ [laughs].

What did Mahler want?

Blomstedt: Well, he certainly wanted to stir our emotions and to make us take part in his world, which was very intense. And to share his loneliness. He was not really an outcast because he had many admirers, but I think he never completely felt at home. Only when making music could he really express himself and only then was his world complete. As soon as the rehearsal or the concert was over, he felt that he was lonely – ‘only me and a few people that perhaps sympathize with me’ – it might have been a thousand or 3000 or 5000 people, but not many that really understood him. I think that he wanted to try to communicate with people.

This feeling of loneliness I think is not foreign to any musician – we are so specialized, we can share our world with very few people. We are happy when a thousand, 2000, 3000 people listen to us, or when 100,000 buy our recordings, but it does not really make us less lonely. After the concert, there is this emptiness there – after we’ve had a great emotional experience, a great intellectual experience coupled with an emotional experience, there is this great feeling of excitement and fulfilment, but when it’s over, after 10 minutes or 15 minutes, you’re alone. I think that is the basics of any musician. And we’re so happy when we can find one person or three other people, when we can play quartets and we have more or less the same idea of the same music and we can share this with at least three other people. Or in a great orchestra, when you understand everybody likes this music – they might have different ideas about it – but they love to be together and are happy that even just these one hundred people have found each other for these few hours to have this experience. And when that’s over, you are alone again.

I think it was Goethe who said in a wonderful commentary that he felt that the whole world was like a desert. But then suddenly you find somebody with whom you can share your thoughts and feelings on special subjects, and suddenly the desert starts to bloom and is like an oasis [laughs]. And when this person is not there anymore, then it’s a desert again.

The basic temperament of a musician is melancholic. He’s happy when others are happy, he’s sad when others are sad; he is very influenceable. He has to have a lot of empathy. Without this empathy you cannot be a musician, you cannot really be an interpreter of somebody else’s thoughts. But the other side of the coin is that you’re lonely.

I experienced that myself. I came to Sweden when I was 2 years old. But when I was 5 years old, I went to Finland. And in Finland in the 1930s, Swedes were considered people that you wanted to get rid of. The cultural elite of Finland at the time was Swedish because Finland had been a Swedish province for a hundred or so years. Remember, Sibelius spoke practically no Finnish, he spoke Swedish. The cultural leadership was all Swedish. Finnish was spoken by the peasants in the provinces. Today, it’s completely different, but in the 1930s, Finland was a young country. When I came to Finland it had been independent for 15 years. It was a young country and wanted to be Finnish! So I, as a Swede, was pushed out. I went to a Swedish school and I was afraid of the Finnish boys; I felt persecuted. After 5 years in Finland, we moved back to Sweden and then of course I spoke with a Finnish accent, so they called me ‘the Finn’ [laughs]. I felt so bad; I was never really at home. In Finland, I didn’t belong because I was the Swede and in Sweden, I didn’t belong because I was the Finn, and then at school, I didn’t like the music that others liked. I liked symphonies and quartets – ‘what a strange person’ – and I went to church when nobody else went to church there. This feeling of being alone is very close to me, I know it very well. So I can sympathize with Mahler who was always alone, he was never really at home – only when he was in his own world. I feel great sympathy with that and today I can easily identify with Mahler’s world.

We know that during his childhood, Mahler would hide for days in the woods because he was afraid of his violent father. Could we say that his music echoes these experiences?

Blomstedt: I am sure it left its marks on him, also in his extreme desire to please, to be at one with his surroundings and to be accepted. This is also a great difference to Bruckner, which is very interesting. I don’t think Bruckner ever, in his innermost, wanted to be accepted. It was something that his friends and students talked him into: ‘You must do it like this in order to be more popular. You should change your scores to be more like Wagner. And if you don’t do it, we’ll do it for you!’ and Bruckner said ‘Fine, you may do it, but that’s not valid for later times. As I have done, this is the original text. You may do it, but I wash my hands of it. What I have written, I have written’. So I think Bruckner did not have this desire to please his surroundings. And the reason of course was that he wanted to please God. That was his only authority; it was not society, it was not the opera public, it was not even the symphony public – he wanted to please his God. That made for another kind of person. It didn’t make him a saint, but another kind of person than Mahler. It’s very interesting to compare this. I think they were both extremely religious persons, but in very different ways. Mahler longed for God, as he once wrote ‘I belong to Heaven! I came from there, you must let me in!’ There was this certain longing for him to be accepted, to belong. He certainly had his longings and desires that were also driving him to work like he did.

Whom did Mahler want to please?

Blomstedt: I think really himself, which is not bad. I think that in art, he was a great egoist. And I think an artist has to be an egoist to a certain extent in his art, he must believe in himself in order to have the self-confidence to create something great. But I think Mahler was also a great person. He loved people, he loved his family. Not only his wonderful wife, with a passionate love, but he was also very attached to his family. He lost great parts of his family; I think some of his brothers and sisters died at a young age. He was always close to death.

Where would Mahler have gone?

Blomstedt: That’s an interesting question. Judging by what we know from the 10th Symphony, he was certainly going into a period of an extended harmonic language. I don’t think he would have reached the same dead end as Sibelius who simply felt he could not go on any longer and just stopped. His own self-criticism became too great and destroyed the 8th Symphony. Mahler had an even bigger ego than Sibelius and he was so convinced by his own talent. It is not possible to predict, but I think he would have continued all the time. One cannot predict that. But it’s an interesting question because that was the time when Schönberg had his solution, Stravinsky had his solution and today, simply everything is allowed.

It’s interesting that the 9th Symphony is an ‘Abschieds’-Symphony, a farewell symphony. It’s not clear that Mahler knew at the time that he was going to die so soon. Some conductors say that the 9th Symphony is a symphony of death …

Blomstedt: It’s definitely a farewell symphony. ‘Leb wohl, leb wohl, leb wohl’. This ending, and not only the ending, the whole fourth movement, from the very start, is so emotional, you cannot go any further. It’s so rich, exploring even just the string sounds … After the first movement, and from the very outset, it’s a farewell [sings] ‘Leb wohl’. But he was accustomed to saying goodbye all his life; goodbye to his brothers and sisters who died; goodbye to his wife who went astray; goodbye to his child that died; goodbye to Vienna; goodbye to his wonderful opera house and wonderful singers; to the orchestra; goodbye, goodbye. And also the American episode was so short.

So it’s a comment on his personal life?

Blomstedt: It fits perfectly with his fate [laughs]. Do you know this novel by Bernhard Kellermann; it’s called ‘Der Tunnel’ [The Tunnel]? It was very popular in the early 1920s. It was a bestseller and perchance I got a copy. It’s a love story about a young lady who marries a civil engineer who dreams about building a tunnel under the Atlantic, from New York to Paris, the whole way – a fantastic project, of course, and they start to do it. That’s why it’s called ‘The Tunnel’. But the first chapter is a musical chapter. They are newly married, this lady who loves music and this civil engineer who doesn’t understand music at all but goes with his wife, and they go for their first concert to Madison Square Garden, which is this enormous place, and Mahler is conducting. The background is true. And according to the novel, they sit in a loge and the lady is fascinated by the music and by Mahler’s conducting, but the engineer has no feeling for music and instead looks at the building. When he sees how these loges are built, he figures out how they are constructed and how various problems are solved, so he’s not hearing the music at all. Different worlds [laughs]! Very, very interesting!

And Mahler is conducting …

Blomstedt: Yes, Mahler is conducting.

What a waste!

Blomstedt: You should read the first chapter … [laughs].

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler, Universal Edition
Transcript: Agnes Vukovich
17.2.2011, Vienna
© Universal Edition

]]> http://mahler.universaledition.com/herbert-blomstedt-on-gustav-mahler/feed/ 0 http://mahler.universaledition.com/simon-rattle-gustav-mahler/ http://mahler.universaledition.com/simon-rattle-gustav-mahler/#comments Wed, 02 Feb 2011 11:52:51 +0000 Universal Edition http://mahler.universaledition.com/?p=1116

“Mahler completely knocked me sideways … and that’s the reason why I’m a conductor today.”

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

I am not sure. I grew up in Liverpool when they were doing what was actually the first European Mahler-cycle with the same orchestra and conductor. It’s extraordinary to think of that – this was the middle of the ‘60s. But no-one in Europe had played all the symphonies with the same conductor at this time. It had only been done in Utah, by the Utah Symphony Orchestra. And look – one forgets how off-centre Mahler was at this time, before Bernstein, before etc. etc. Berthold Goldschmidt had only just performed the Mahler Third for the first time in Britain; that was in 1962. I have still a magnificent tape of that. So, Sir Charles Groves and the Liverpool Philharmonic, they did two a year for five and a half years, because they also did Das Lied von der Erde, they also did the early version of the completed Tenth. And I can remember, because I was studying: violin with one player in the orchestra, percussion with another, and they said: “Ah! We’re on our twice-yearly struggle with Mahler”.

So I remember hearing all kinds of bits, and I remember that actually the Tenth must have been one of the very first I heard. Of course, the thing that completely knocked me sideways when I was eleven or twelve, was hearing the Second Symphony, live, and that’s the reason why I’m a conductor today. But all of us, we were early teenagers, or kind of music students, or crazy about it, and we were going in and hearing these pieces for the first time and being simply swept off our feet.

And we could see the orchestra find it very, very difficult. But we were kids, we were just hearing it. And I can remember the impact of the first movement of the Third, for instance – it must have been around the same time. There was an interval after the first movement. It was considered too long to play. I can remember all of this … walking out in a trance.

For us, it was as though we had found our music. And this is just exactly as Mahler said it would be. And then of course I bought whatever records I could afford. My father was travelling in America; he brought me back this extraordinary performance of Bruno Walter conducting the Fifth Symphony, the fastest performance on record, almost, of any piece. We were the generation who were given it, and had no doubts about it: we were blessed. And I remember reading famous books about the symphonies, saying: well, of course only the First and Fourth Symphonies by Mahler are of any interest at all, others are just monstrosities. It’s weird – I’m old enough to remember when he was a type of joke.

Mahler?

Yes.

In Britain?

Even.

Even in Britain?

Yes. I remember also when I first met the Berlin Philharmonic. I can remember very well all the members of the Berlin Philharmonic saying to me ‘Well, of course, Strauss is the much greater composer’, as taken for granted. Nowadays, maybe we tend to undervalue Strauss. Fashion is a strange thing.

How was the role of Sir John Barbirolli in this time? Did he influence you?

Here we have a really cultural point. When you ask if Barbirolli influenced me – you have to understand: I come from Liverpool. And Manchester, as far as anyone from Liverpool is concerned, Manchester doesn’t exist. We are two warring cities. Now, I’ve been deeply ironic, but of course, if you are talking about religion, by which I mean football. But it is no joke. They are so close together. And if you’ve lived in either city, you had almost nothing to do with the other. It’s like Glasgow and Edinburgh, in Scotland, are the same. And it’s fascinating. We knew things were going on in Manchester, but we paid no heed to them.

Yes, probably, I could have taken the train over there and also heard extraordinary things. Sometimes the Hallé Orchestra would come … But when Barbirolli was still alive and working, I was very young. I remember hearing him conduct Bruckner’s Eighth in Liverpool, but I was, I think, eleven or twelve when he died. So, in a way, I missed this. What I found completely fascinating is, wherever I went, as a younger conductor, first to Berlin or first to Boston, everybody wanted to talk to me about Barbirolli. The older people in the Berlin Philharmonic adored him, everybody had stories about him, everybody loved him. And, in a strange way, he gave the Berlin Philharmonic Mahler.

It’s very interesting, in the way that Bernstein gave it to the Vienna Philharmonic. And then Karajan – Karajan followed, although it was never music that was very naturally close to him. And these testaments … of what Barbirolli did in Berlin are still very powerful, because it’s so much from the heart.

And it was only thanks to a music critic, it was thanks to Neville Cardus – the Great – who was at the same time the cricket correspondent and the music critic of the Manchester Guardian, and one of the most cultured men in Britain. He introduced Mahler to Barbirolli and he said ‘John, it’s your music. You must do it’. And he went, and went, and went … and so, Barbirolli took it up. That’s a wonderful story and people now don’t know it.

You started conducting Mahler’s Second in December 1973. With a student orchestra…

The very first we did was the Fourth. The Second was much more official, because, also when I realised, who was playing in the orchestra, and who was singing in the chorus.  The idea of having Felicity Lott singing in the chorus – it looked as if they were all students together – Felicity Lott, David Rendell … these people. Why wasn’t Felicity singing the soprano solo, I asked myself. But the Arditti Quartet, Christopher Warren-Green, the leader of the Philharmonia. Chris was 17, he was at the back of the seconds. Anybody I could persuade, cajole, bribe, threaten to come and play – I do not know how we did it. We must have been out of our minds. Mahler was considered too strange and too difficult for music students. And we were just angry. We wanted to play this music. So we all got together to learn it. And then – it’s not something you ever forget.

If you would make recommendations to young students in their first approach to Mahler, with your Mahler experience: Conducting Mahler – where are the dangers?

It’s so funny because I just nicely spread this time from when Mahler was almost unplayed to when Mahler is played, far, almost far too much. And of course the huge shape of Mahler is something, but there is a terrible danger of generality in this music.

First of all, you have to believe what he says. And if you have an instinct for the music, particularly the scores he conducted, there is the extraordinary point where you think ‘Oh God, this feels good’, or ‘I could move into larger beats now, because it seems to be flowing. And at that point, you look at the score and he says ‘stay in four’. You think: I should move this on, and absolutely at that moment he says ‘Nicht eilen’. He also knew his own instincts as a conductor. Because there was never probably before a great composer, who was such a great conductor – maybe Wagner, we don’t know –, but who conducted so many other people’s music, who was so curious. I mean, when you look at the programmes he was playing in the last years in New York: Elgar, Debussy, D’Indy, all these things … Rachmaninoff Third, with Rachmaninoff playing. He knew the Dream of Gerontius, he had the score – he had programmed Elgar’s Second Symphony. In fact, even people – since he used the same copyist as Charles Ives – people think it’s not out of the question. He knew of course, he would have been fascinated by all this. I mean, he was one of the most open-minded musicians that have ever been.

First of all: believe him. Secondly: when you believe him, think what it means…. A few Great Old Men like Berthold Goldschmidt, who was the first conductor of the Third Symphony in Britain and conducted the first performance of the completed Tenth. He was Kleiber’s assistant for the first performance of Wozzeck in 1925, in Berlin. He said so many interesting things to me… For instance: ‘Simon, will you please remember what the phrase ‘Ohne Hast’ [without haste] means in a time when there were no automobiles?’

Berthold said: ‘When we were growing up in the late ‘teens and the ‘twenties, those of us who were composers, we went to hear performances of Mahler wherever they were. But this means: there was one performance a year of a Mahler Symphony somewhere in Europe, and we travelled’. He remembers in his… when the oboists stopped playing the glissando in the Third Symphony in the fifth movement. When the oboes changed, when the extra key came and it was considered too high. Just for instance, he was the person who said: ‘Look, when Mahler writes the word glissando on the trombone, he uses the same word that he uses for the oboe. And I used to hear this, and people stopped doing this.’

What is a ‘Naturlaut’? It makes a whole difference, if it is played as he says. But I remember I was given so much heat for doing this, for instance. Which was simply an elderly composer’s memory of how it used to be. Berthold explaining to me, taking me patiently through all the different versions of the beginning of the Fourth Symphony. To say: what is the tempo relation. From the very first version, where there was no rubato of any type, where everything was in one tempo. From the first tempo being faster and the second slower, and then changing that… All the different versions. So you have to be very careful how you read it. But I would say, what is incredibly important is first of all the mosaic, detail. Is first to put this in place and then to look at the wider world. Is simply not to play it as… in the way that people often mistakenly play Tchaikovsky. And not to play it as familiar romantic music, but to play it absolutely as its own creature.

Again Berthold, in the First Symphony, the finale, said: ‘Simon, when he says molto rubato, all of you forget the fact that everybody played everything molto rubato. That if he says rubato at that point, this means something extraordinary. Because Mahler, a conductor of his generation, is staggered how very stiff people are and how little freedom they would give the music – how little ebb and flow. As he said, the ebb and flow that was natural, was the ebb and flow of great Wagner conductors, which never changed. But in Mahler, the instructions are so very, very precise that one can think that that is all the instructions mean. And so you come back to this Harnoncourt thing: it’s not only what it says, it’s what it means.

When you say Mahler was immediately your world – you discovered, this is somehow ,my composer’, and he made you to become a conductor: Where was the difference to other composers? Why did Mahler capture you with this intensity?

Who knows what love at first sight is? At slightly different times in my life, Mahler and Haydn, both, simply … they came to live with me. Whether that means you conduct it well or not. That’s another matter, that’s not the same thing. But they came to live in my house. Whatever it is – these were people for whom I felt I didn’t need a translation. That really doesn’t necessarily affect what comes out, but it does mean a slightly different feeling. Can be dangerous maybe, then you feel you have more licence to kill – in the music. And I think it was a generational thing, also, with Mahler, because there was the feeling of new ground being broken. Hard to believe. In the way that other things which are forgotten – well, I’ve been a little bit late in the discovery of Rameau for instance… it was the people who were involved in this. It was a kind of new dawn.

Would you agree that Mahler, especially in the Ninth Symphony in the last pages, opens somehow the door to everything that came later in the 20^th century?

Oh, I think Mahler always did. The Tenth Symphony even more so. The first movement of the Tenth there is Lulu, the second movement of the Tenth there is Hindemith. In the last movement Mahler was going in a completely other direction than even he hadn’t. Strangely a direction of more simplicity. He was only 51.

At 51, Janácek was writing Jenufa – his first mature score. You imagine what might have been. The only composer for whom there are no minor works is Mahler. What he did write was of immense importance. But of course he opened up new worlds.

Wozzeck is really made up of Mahler Ninth and Salome and Elektra, and all in this different way, these very opposite people were finding a new world. And obviously Mahler was embracing it and, rather fast, Strauss moved away from it. But they were finding a new world. And when you think of all the people who went to hear Salome at the first performance and coming back – and the arguments on the train coming back… It’s wonderful thing that Mahler was so concerned, he said: ‘How can this be a wonderful piece and a popular success – at the same time?’ – fighting with himself about that. And Mahler’s wonderful naïvety about … that he was so staggered that people loathed the first symphony. Because he was absolutely convinced that this would be a huge success and he could retire from conducting the next day and make his living as a composer. He was simply not expecting because of course the music was so natural to him. It’s so without artifice, he thought if he just showed himself to the world, that they would understand. Some things take time.

Why did it take so long?

Why does music always take so long? Why did Weber walk out of the first performance of Beethoven’s Seventh, saying: ‘This man is ripe for the madhouse, he’s no longer writing music’. I mean, Weber. Some things take time.

Did Mahler anticipate the catastrophes of the 20th century?

I’m very divided about that. Part of me feels that’s a dangerously sentimental thing to say about the kind of catastrophes we had in the 20th century. But part of me also feels that it’s impossible not to listen to the Resurrection Symphony without thinking of it as a prefiguration – whatever this meant. But composers don’t also always know what they are writing, and what it will mean. We have to remember that Mahler really felt that the most unshadowedly joyful music he had ever written was the finale of the Seventh Symphony, which sounds to all of us like people marching towards hell. It’s one of the strangest and the most miserable and wildest C majors you can possibly imagine.

So who knows? All great composers have such a degree of depth that we cannot help feeling that they are prophets as well. Whether this is true or not – who knows? But it’s a sign of the importance we attach to the really great composers, that we can’t help feeling that they had some foreknowledge.

Is there a connection between his life and his art?

For someone who was trying to write the whole world in his pieces, there has to be a connection. On the other hand, when you think of his schedule as a conductor, what he did in such a short time … Nobody, not even a crazy workaholic like Valery Gergiev could touch the sheer amount he was doing. And yet, in the holiday times, he was able to write these things. I have the feeling, it must have been, as for Wordsworth, a kind of compulsion. Wordsworth wrote his poems with very long thought, and then almost vomited them out. They were written so fast. And with Mahler, somehow, it must have been the same, it must have been cooking in his head in these months he was working.

And of course you do also hear the operas. In the Seventh Symphony, you really do hear Seraglio, you really do hear Boris Godunov. You hear all the things he was studying. When you hear the Eighth Symphony, you have to realise immediately, he’d seen Elgar. These are fascinating things. Of course that is there. But I have the feeling that when he actually composed, it was done almost in a rage. And sometimes he describes that, in his little house, seeing the great God Pan looking at him. He’s obviously indivisible from his music but … here we are, almost today as we speak I can touch Schumann – the Second, of course.

In a way, Schumann is the great link, because also there you have a man unsparingly picturing himself and not as some kind of hero but in all his frailty and weakness, and sickness, and generosity, and humour. And there is in the fineness of both of those composers an enormous link. Because of course, although Mahler takes things to enormous proportions, that is, it starts always from fineness and from the blade of grass. The mountain has a hyper-real sense of what every component part is. That’s why it’s always such a mistake to put Bruckner and Mahler together. Or these pairings Haydn–Mozart, Debussy–Ravel, Schumann–Brahms… just simply mistaken.

Everywhere Mahler went he was an outsider, a kind of alien. But, I feel he chose this life-style. Probably to have more inner freedom?

You really think a Jewish person in this time had an option? To be inside? That’s very naïve of us if we think that. I think, of course he embraced it. But I don’t think he always had a choice. Who knows what the conversion to Catholicism actually meant? Open verdict.

For many listeners Mahler seem to be a contemporary composer because he touches our life, our problems our daily living conditions like nobody else from this period.

You go just outside the Concertgebouw and you can go and still sit in the place where he had coffee every morning, this little restaurant around the corner. And they still say: ‘This was the corner he sat’.

A few years ago I toured the Beethoven Symphony cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic. And we were in Japan and we were looking for an encore. I thought, how wonderful to do the Fidelio overture. And they said: ‘But that’s really funny, because we haven’t played the Fidelio overture without the opera, in anyone’s living memory.’ Because actually, the Vienna Philharmonic, they normally don’t play overtures in their concerts. But I thought… well, they’re exaggerating. And I looked at the part and it was very, very old material. And God help me if the rehearsal numbers and extra dynamics were not in Mahler’s handwriting. He’d marked them in himself. And it looked as though, simply, nobody else had used the material since that time. But his writing of course is unmistakable.

He himself?

He himself. Before the days of assistant conductors. And when I was last here with the Vienna Philharmonic and doing Tristan, Peter Poltun, the librarian, said: ‘Well, I thought you might like to have this for a couple of weeks.’ And I said: ‘What is it?’, and he said: ‘Just look at it.’ Mahler’s conducting score of Tristan, with all his marks, with all his ironic comments. What he had seen other conductors do, sardonic comments about Strauss conducting it, one 4/4 bar he marked ‘Strauss ? – in 5??’

Every dynamic he had made, what choices he had made … and it was like having Mahler in the room.  So, here we are, in this city … These people, they still walk here. Now, I was so deeply touched by having that. But of course, we’re still using the productions he had made into the ’40s of Tristan in Vienna, they were still playing it. But to see his score … And also to see how a composer like that makes the decisions you have to make. Some things I really learned, and I actually told the orchestra about them: Let us try what he did there … and so I had something completely different but also very beautiful, which was very practical. Fascinating.

Do you think the sound of the Vienna Philharmonic influenced his orchestration, his sound imagination?

Of course. And the qualities of the Musikverein, in particular. The balances for his symphonies, the way he writes dynamics are for the Musikverein. Where the strings are louder than they are in other halls. And when you come here you realize that immediately. But of course, it’s enormously tied up with that character of pine, also, even if they hated it at that time.

What did Mahler want?

You know, sometimes we forget that composers are human beings like the rest of us. I don’t think there was an overriding plan. I think that’s the exception. Wagner is the exception. And even he changed what his ideas, and what his plans, and what his philosophies were, over life.

I think Mahler wanted a life and creativity in its totality. I don’t think he was a calculating musician, or a calculating person. Strauss filled that corner very nicely. And they were polar opposites. The story of Strauss going in after the first performance of the Sixth Symphony and saying: ‘But why is everybody looking so sad? It was a big success!’, and simply not understanding the import of the music. Shows you what you were talking about.

Strauss couldn’t understand Mahler obsession on suffering and redemption. This was not his road obviously.

No, absolutely not. Made no sense there. Not at that time in his life.

There is the refined Mahler and the ‘bombastic’ Mahler … To which Mahler do you feel the closest?

No, there is only one Mahler. He takes in everything. And the fact is that Mahler has an irony about himself. He said about the Third Symphony ‘I know I’ve always had an addiction to triviality but in this piece I’ve really gone too far. You might think you’re in a barnyard or a tavern, half the time’. He had an irony about himself. Include everything. They are all part of the same.

Mahler revised his pieces up until the end of his life …

Yes, and this is part of the confusion about some of the early pieces. So, suddenly now, this is kind of ludicrous fight over whether it’s one bass playing the solo in the First Symphony, or the whole section. It’s on the edge of being silly. Of course because, like Debussy, he kept to the end of his life changing things. We are still in a state of flux, and even with the new editions, you still have to make many decisions.

But of course, Mahler was one of the most practical musicians in the world. But in my experience it’s only the really, really great orchestrators who think they can’t orchestrate. I remember the late and much-missed Toru Takemitsu saying: “Oh – if only I could learn to write for the orchestra!” I don’t know if there was anyone in my lifetime who had a more extraordinary grasp of sonority – but Mahler would say: ‘How could I be so stupid, how could I know so little about orchestration… how could I so overwrite the Fifth Symphony’, for instance. And of course, every time Mahler finds a new style – in the Fifth Symphony, particularly, is such a new contrapuntal style –, he has to find a new way of clothing it. Not that one forgets how new all his solutions, even to using the orchestra, were. And you know – thank God, even someone like that could make miscalculations!

What would you have asked Mahler?

Well, I think Bruno Walter was the luckiest conductor who ever lived. This is my answer to that question. Because he just got to imbibe it. Straight there. Of course, everybody’s dream would have been to be there and take it in, without asking questions. If you had asked me that question thirty years ago, I would have told you ten questions I would ask immediately. I’m a little bit older and wiser now and I know that is not how you gain knowledge.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler
Transcript: Angelika Worseg
27.1.2011, Vienna
© Universal Edition

In our latest Mahler interview, journalist, broadcaster and musicologist Norman Lebrecht talks to UE about Gustav Mahler’s life and music.

Read Norman Lebrecht’s blog: Slipped disc

“In Mahler you have to find the balance between chamber music and explosions”

The first question is always the same – if you remember when you heard the music of Gustav Mahler for the first time?

Nelsons: You know, it’s very interesting. The first time I consciously heard the music of Gustav Mahler – I’m sure I must have heard it earlier, but the first time I was aware that it was Gustav Mahler – was when I heard his Symphony No. 1 on a tape. At the time I was very interested in nature sounds, in music about nature. I had recordings of water sounds and of bird songs, and one day I asked somebody what music they could recommend to listen to if I liked that kind of music, just out of interest. This person was not a musician, but he gave me a tape and said ‘There is this one composer …’ He had forgotten the name, but it was Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. The beginning, this chord of strings, it is also a sound of nature, absolutely … [sings]. This was the first piece by Mahler that I heard, I think I was maybe 11 or 12 years old, and I fell in love with Mahler’s music. It’s interesting that it grew out of my love to, and interest in, nature. It also came because I was doing martial arts at the time, I started quite early and I wanted to meditate to different music, to think and to relax [laughs]… Afterwards, in music school, we studied all the symphonies, and then of course I started to play them myself in the orchestra. So I played the Symphony No. 1 and other symphonies and then conducted them myself. But the first influence was Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, and it was through a love of nature that I encountered his music.

When you started to conduct Mahler, which piece did you choose and what was the real challenge?

Nelsons: I always wanted to be involved in Mahler’s music since I was studying conducting, and of course I realized, as I realize still, that his music is so very difficult … how much emotion, how much power, how much love, how much of everything is required to perform this music, to bring it honestly to the audience. I remember that the first symphony I conducted of Mahler was the Symphony No. 2, actually. This was in Riga, and although I was the chief conductor of the Opera House, I conducted it with a symphony orchestra, and I remember that this was an extremely great experience. You know the Resurrection Symphony – we had a wonderful choir in Riga – this ending, it’s unbelievable [laughs], I still get goose bumps when I think about it … [sings Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n]. Later I conducted the Symphonies No. 3, 5, 6 and 8. I have conducted all of the symphonies so far, except for the Symphony No. 7. I will be conducting the No. 9 for the first time next month in February. I know I am only 31 years old, but this music speaks so closely to me that I find it hard to agree with people who say that you have to be careful with Mahler, you shouldn’t touch it because you don’t understand it, or that you should take it very late … I mean, I partly agree because of course you understand more and more it with the experience of life, the experience of conducting and the experience of meeting orchestras, but doubt that there is a limitation regarding age, nationality or even religion for his music. There is everything in his music, ranging from naïve childishness to the biggest catastrophes, the biggest cataclysms, apocalypses … everything is right there in his symphonies, a whole world to experience. For people who are very emotional, who think that music is the essence of emotions – maybe people like me, so to say – they find everything in his music for their souls. And the people who think music is about mathematics and about the brain, they also find everything in Mahler’s music [laughs]. So it’s very interesting, you can look at his music from different perspectives; there is a combination of so many things in his music. In a way, it’s an eclectic thing: compare this to Russia, there is Shostakovich – and I think it is Mahler in Western Europe and the Western world, it is he who is a particular composer, who everybody, at any age and any nationality, will find interesting. I don’t know anyone who hates Mahler, I must say … I know there are some people who don’t understand his music at first, or who find it too brutal, but after a while they always say “Oh, yes, I start to understand it more” because there are no boundaries. I think he goes beyond the etiquette in his music [laughs], he shows his soul in moments in which others probably would not reveal it to everyone. If he has a problem, he shows it to the world. Even if it’s something very brutal or exaggerated, but he shares it with us in all of his music, in each bar, he is sharing his feelings, his suffering, his idea of what humanity is about and why we live. Then he doubts why things are like this, and then you have this [sings dramatically] … and everything collapses. Consider the Adagietto, which is the most beautiful music ever written, and the Symphonies No. 6 and 8, and you can just see the personality who is struggling and looking for the questions of life every day. But I think it’s the same with all the big composers, the big artists, conductors or musicians – if you are really deeply looking for, let’s say, a reason for living, for a way of making music, you’ll find the solution for maybe one or two days, and then you get up and you think “Oh my God, I don’t know anything” and you have to start again from zero. I think it’s the same with the Mahler symphonies, in the Symphonies No. 1, 2 and 3, he develops a certain vision and with No. 5 it all collapses. Then there is the Trauermarsch in the 6th, and followed by the 7th. Then, with the 8th you think “Oh finally, he has got the answers to these questions!”, but of course, you realize that he hasn’t, when you hear the Symphony No. 9.

He was maybe the happiest in his life when he composed the Symphony No. 6, it was a wonderful time for him with Alma, but he composed this tragic symphony and you always think “Why is that?” It always reminds me of the great conductor Carlos Kleiber. He was so amazing, everybody adored him, but he was so self-critical, so unsure and unhappy, and we don’t know why. It’s the same with Mahler, he was a successful composer and conductor, and yet he was struggling with these questions of “To Be or Not to Be?” or why we live. It’s so interesting. I think there will always be artists or people who face these struggles and I think it is the curse [laughs] or mission of us artists to have this kind of obsession. In order to let the audience enjoy the music, we go through enjoyment, but we also have to go through a certain pain and doubt, the same as Mahler went through with his symphonies. I found it very personal at this point in my life and when you look, for instance, to Bernstein conducting Mahler, I think it’s an amazing example of what it meant to Bernstein, needing to squeeze out every note, as he himself put it. From every note he needed to squeeze out the tension and the drama and suffering or love, every note is very important for Mahler, otherwise it doesn’t work. There are of course such different ways as well, such different conductors conducting, and it all works. When you see Maestro Boulez or Bernstein or Mariss Jansons or Simon Rattle or Barenboim or Haitink, all these great, fantastic conductors, they all do it differently. You can’t say this is right and this is wrong, because it is all great, they all have personal relationships with Mahler. I think that’s the most important thing, that Mahler gives us this. I think he wants every artist and every conductor to have a personal relationship with his music, and I think that you can never say “this is the right or wrong way”, I have always believed that. There will always be somebody who will not agree with the way you do things, and there will always be those who think differently, but this is absolutely normal, I think. It’s a testament to the richness of the vision of his music. But you know, he was a great conductor and he gives enormous help in his scores. In a moment when you want to slow down, musically you think “oh, it needs time”, he says “nicht schleppen”. He doesn’t want you to slow down; it’s like he knows what you’re going to do. And then when you want to rush, he says “nicht eilen” or “etwas ruhiger” and it’s so interesting. He, being a great conductor, already knows how you’re going to feel! He is a big help, but at the same time I think that this is very personal, and that’s why we have these amazing different conductors interpreting Mahler in different ways and it all works.

If you would speak about your Mahler style; who influenced you?

Nelsons: I’d say that it’s a combination of great personalities. I think maybe one of the biggest personalities for Mahler was Bernstein. I think it was his great passion for Mahler and his great love for Mahler’s music that is very contagious. You watch him and it infects you. You might not accept some things, but it still infects you, it makes you think “this is music for life and death”, so I think he’s an extremely important personality. Of course there are also other great conductors, for instance Bruno Walter, who personally knew Mahler, and also the interpretations from the younger generation, Mariss Jansons or Simon Rattle or Barenboim. Then there was Karajan, who again did it absolutely differently. I think all these personalities have influenced me. But you can’t name one and say their interpretation is the perfect one, because there is no right or wrong way. I am not the one who can judge this, I just enjoy these great interpretations and I personally like to listen to a lot of recordings and to analyze why one is doing it like this and the other one is doing it like that. I think this is very important for us, for young conductors and young artists, to study the older generation, to listen to the old recordings and to analyze and study the orchestra sound, for instance when you listen to Mahler symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Concertgebouw or the New York Philharmonic. There are many different ways of playing, and you can study why they are playing it like that and what kind of sound it provides. Then you can come to a conclusion for yourself, which is what Mahler wants. He doesn’t want there to be a right way of doing things, or only one way of doing things, he wants you, as a musician, to be involved in the questions that he was involved in, questions about life and death and about meaning, why we live … I believe that every note in Mahler’s music is so alive, that you need to bring your passion and your heart into it. This is my belief and at the same time, purely from a technical and compositional point of view, there are such amazing instrumentations, such a structure and such an amazing feel of form. And even if you don’t take the emotional side into consideration, what he succeeded in doing harmonically is so amazing. It’s almost a twelve-tone system. I think that if he had lived longer, he would have reached the twelve-tone system, like Schönberg. This is already apparent in his Symphony No. 10, and I think this always goes together with an emotional feeling, it’s a combination. Maybe that’s the reason why so many different conductors conduct Mahler: some may prefer a more pragmatic approach, others a more emotional approach, but it all works and they are all great in their own way. In the end, it’s a combination of both things, even for Mahler himself.

From a technical point of view, what is the biggest challenge when you conduct Mahler?

Nelsons: As Mahler was a great conductor, he is helping a lot, putting the markings in the score. He is really great at balancing. Let’s say there is a place where everything sounds very loud, and you conduct a big gesture: then everything might become a little too loud, you might not understand what happens. However, he writes in the score. Let’s say, for the trumpets he writes ‘forte piano’, for the first violins he writes ‘forte’, for the cellos he writes ‘mezzo piano’, so he balances the orchestra himself. It’s a challenge to find the right balance when you’re conducting, because if you don’t manage to encourage the musicians to play the music the way it’s written, then everything can become extremely loud and extremely thick. But he was such a genius at instrumentation; he put so many markings in the score. That’s one of the difficulties for conducting, I think. On the other hand, the combination of chamber music, which is so present in all his symphonies, with these huge, gigantic culminations, these explosions … that is also a technical challenge when you’re conducting, to see and encourage the difference when there is a chamber music moment, where you shouldn’t disturb the music – you should never disturb the music as a conductor [laughs] – and where you need to mobilize the orchestra and go for a dramatic culmination. Also, it’s a challenge to find out where the individual culminations are, and where the goal is, and indeed, whether there is a goal: because sometimes he doesn’t reach his goal, sometimes he is looking for answers, but he can’t find them, and at the last moment, it just fades out.

For example?

Nelsons: Sorry, you want me to be more specific. I think that in all of his symphonies there are a lot of culminations. For example, the last symphony of Mahler I conducted was No. 8, we did it in Birmingham for the opening of the season. It is a fantastic orchestra, a fantastic concert hall, which is great for such a symphony. And in the first movement particularly there are so many culminations. You have one culmination, the fortissimo, another, a third, a fourth … And if you think that this is the goal, each time, then you will soon find out, that it just doesn’t work that way. I think Mahler doesn’t want you to go to the end. I have found that for myself. I think he wants you to almost succeed, but not yet, and only at the very end you succeed. So you have a certain difficulty in balancing the culminations, both emotionally and purely technically, it’s the same also with Rachmaninoff’s music, or with Wagner’s. I think this is a challenge. I remember a lot of moments in the Symphony No. 8 when you almost make an explosion too early, and I doubt that he wants you to do that. The music provokes. The same is true for the last movement of the Symphony No. 5. You think “this is the finale”, but not yet, he still goes back. You need to find the right moment. There is one moment towards the very end when he really writes ‘crescendo’ and it really explodes and you need to know for yourself that that’s the explosion. If you don’t divide it, it doesn’t work, because even though it sounds almost the same dynamically, psychologically, if you are not clear which culmination to emphasize, you might get misled and you don’t find the answer. It’s very easy to get confused, not to know what to do or where to go, because his symphonies are so long, which doesn’t make things easier.

What would you have asked Mahler?

Nelsons: [chuckles] That’s an interesting question. And it is actually a very relevant question at the moment, because I am about to conduct his Symphony No. 5 – this year I am doing the Symphonies No. 5 and 9 – and I would ask him about the Adagietto, about the timing of it, and what he really meant with it. There are so many discussions about this at the moment, some say that he was performing it on the piano in just over seven minutes, but there is a recording with Bernstein, which lasts thirteen minutes, if I am not mistaken. Of course there is this tradition to play it very slowly and very romantically, which is beautiful, and it may be that the body and the soul prefer it this way, but when you consider that he performed it on the piano in under eight minutes, then you really have to question this. I am questioning myself about this, pondering about what the right way is, particularly with regards to the Adagietto; I want to find an answer.

Either way, it would be something very personal, whether it was intended as a love song to Alma or whether it actually refers to an even more intimate and sad inner world of Mahler that has nothing to do with Alma, but is even more personal than love, deeper than love. I don’t know. There has always been a discussion about it, but nobody knows for sure. I would like to ask him about this, but there are also other things that I would ask him if I could. I would ask him a lot of things, certainly. But this is something that intrigues me at the moment, I am often thinking about it, and I have tried the Symphony No. 5 in different ways. I would be happy to ask him about this. Actually, I would be happy to meet him – to meet him as a personality. It is interesting how, on the one hand, his letters to Alma are very sweet, and how on the other hand, you read about him, that he was actually a quite nervous and yet tough man. In his symphonies you can see this struggle between an extremely sincere man who loves and a man who is explosive. I would like to be able to meet him, because I think that if I could talk to him, just for a minute, it would help so much to understand the approach to his symphonies. All of us who are conducting or playing Mahler, we try to find the right approach and we hope that it is the approach that is closest to his intention and his soul. But we might be mistaken [laughs], because everybody tries to be most true to his music. So if I could meet him and speak to him for a minute, I could ask him what he really meant. And he might either say “Oh, everything is so relative” or maybe he might say “Oh, it’s so important, every note is so important”. You’re just curious as to what he would say, because at the moment there are so many different approaches to his music.

You already answered this question, but how do you see his personality and the influence of his difficult life on his work. Do you see a connection?

Nelsons: I think that there is an obvious connection. On the one hand, his life was very successful, he was a great conductor and the director of the Opera, and he was mostly also a successful composer. Not all the symphonies were accepted as great, still, he was different from Bruckner, for example, or from other composers. So from that point of view, you could say that he was a successful composer. He had Alma; although he had her and then almost didn’t have her [laughs] … it was complicated. But still, he surely led an emotional life, he had children. At the same time, of course, we know about his heart disease, his problems with Alma, the death of one of his children and about his struggles with the Opera House, the administrative problems and so on. These things were troubling him. However, in life, there have always been and will always be people who face similar problems, but what is important is to accept these challenges. You know, life is difficult, there are nice moments and sad moments, but we accept this and we live with it. Brahms, for example – he accepted life, for him it was more about religion and about nature. But Mahler did not accept life how it really is. He enjoyed life when he was happy, and then he wrote, for instance, the Adagietto, or the last movement of the Symphony No. 5, or the first movement of the Symphony No. 8. In these pieces he is laughing, he can even be sarcastic. But then there are days when he can be the saddest or the most romantic person, for instance, the first movement of the Symphony No. 5 and the Symphony No. 6, or any of the ‘Trauermärsche’. In these works you can see that he was most unhappy, that he did not accept life, rather he was asking questions like “Why are things like this? Why am I in a situation in which I am not happy? Why do I have these problems and how can I escape them?” and “What is wrong with life, what is wrong with religion and our attitude towards life, what is wrong with the political world? Why can’t everything be great?” I think he basically did not accept life for what it is and he was struggling. His personality was so colourful [laughs]. I think there were many people who had similar problems, but they would accept life for what it is, they would not complain so loudly. But he was knocking and saying “Listen, this is a problem!” I think he was a revolutionist; he would say “We should fight!” He surely was convinced that people shouldn’t accept things like an economic crisis; he would have wanted them to do something about it. I think if he lived now, and if he were to write a symphony in the present economic climate, it would be a great symphony! Some people just accept that we are going through a financial crisis, that it’s difficult economically. Yet he wouldn’t have accepted this, I think [laughs]. This doesn’t necessarily mean that he his life was worse than other people’s. But he just couldn’t accept it. That’s what he expressed in his symphonies.

So his character was revolutionary?

Nelsons: In a way, definitely. There are some people who like to be melancholic or nostalgic and they enjoy that feeling. Consider Puccini’s music: he always kills the characters he loved the most, for example, Tosca, Butterfly, Liu … he loved them, but he always killed them, it’s almost as if he enjoyed killing them, squeezing out the tears with his music. And I think it’s the same with Mahler, even if he did it subconsciously. He liked to talk about the things that were hurting him. It hurt, but he showed that and he wrote about it, which was a big stress for his heart. I think he wanted to share his problems; he wanted to show the world “I have a problem! I don’t know the meaning of life!” [sings dramatically]. Brahms wouldn’t say this, for example, but Mahler was not too shy to express these things. He even enjoyed it somehow. The slow movement of the Symphony No. 4, for instance, really squeezes out the nostalgia and the melancholy, in a good way. You can almost get a heart attack when you listen to his music, because it’s so beautiful and so touching. Consider the last movement of the Symphony No. 3 – it is touching and emotional in a deadly way, he knew that he was destroying his heart with this music, because listening to it makes you feel sick! Not in a bad sense, but really, you are exhausted, you can’t sleep at night. Maybe this contributed to his heart problem. It surely was not the sole reason for it, obviously, but he was living 100 percent with his emotions, unable to relax. This is my opinion, but I also like very much what I heard Maestro Haitink say about this – that we are always talking a lot about composers and we analyze them, but actually we don’t know anything, really. We can only guess and read about them, and we need to know about them and read about them. But in the end, the music goes beyond the personalities of these composers. They have a gift from God which sometimes even they can’t explain. The music is much more than we can explain. These composers are geniuses and we will never know exactly what they felt and where their genius came from. We should just enjoy the music and perform it [laughs].

But Mahler himself said that a mystery remains even for him as a composer.

Nelsons: Yes, that’s also interesting. I think in the end, it has to do with a higher spirit; it has to do with God. I think that Mahler was disappointed with certain religions, but I think he was never disappointed with God. He was disappointed with certain religions and certain dogmas, but he was always searching for God, for example, in his Resurrection Symphony, the Symphony No. 8. He knew that there was something after death, but he couldn’t find it in the different religions and at the time in which he lived, it was probably even more difficult. So he had this gift from God which even he himself realized was a mystery. I think this is the highest spirit of music, as we all feel it when we perform. At these moments we all have something coming from God which helps us to perform. When you watch these conductors performing, you can just see that it comes from above.

One last question – what did he want?

Nelsons: What Mahler wanted? I think in his soul, very subconsciously, he wanted to be happy, he wanted to be loved and to love. He wanted to know the answers to a lot of questions, he wanted to know, for instance, why we live. He honestly wanted to know. Maybe it was because he was searching so hard for these answers that he never really succeeded. He wanted to be happy, philosophically speaking; he wanted to find happiness, to be loved, to find out what love is and what eternity means. I think he wanted that, but he didn’t find it. He would almost succeed, but then it would all collapse again. And then, of course, he died from his heart problems.

Would you say it was a tragic life?

Nelsons: I think for him personally, it was quite a tragic life, although it was not as tragic as for many other composers, whose lives were much more tragic. Beethoven’s life, I think, was much more tragic. But I think that Mahler was, due to his obsession with these questions, very unhappy inside – and through his symphonies he screams about this. That’s my personal feeling.

I absolutely agree with you! He is screaming through his music.

Nelsons: Screaming. Exclaiming – just like Shostakovich.

I think that’s why he’s touching us. His music is not abstract, it’s a personal statement: “I am suffering, listen to it”

Nelsons: Yes, that’s what he wanted. “Listen to me, I am suffering! Help me! Understand me!” Yes.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler
Transcript: Agnes Vukovich
22.10.2010, Vienna
© Universal Edition

Interview language: Spanish

Transcript of full interview available soon.

“Life, death. Love, no love. Hope, no hope.”

Do you remember when you heard Mahler’s music for the first time.

Dudamel: This was years ago. It is funny how I got to know Mahler’s music. My father played the trombone in a Salsa group and he was also playing with an orchestra. I remember finding the trombone part of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 for the third trombone. I recall taking my father’s trombone and trying to play [imitates a trombone]… I was maybe 11 or 12 years old at the time, and I was playing the violin. But I remember a recording of the Symphony No. 1, I received it as a gift from an uncle. This was the first piece by Mahler that I ever listened to. It was a very special experience, because, even though I found it difficult to understand at the beginning, later when I started conducting, it was the first big piece that I conducted. It was amazing, because this was maybe three or four years later. I was 16 when I had that first experience with a Mahler symphony. So this was how I got into Mahler, listening to the orchestra playing Mahler in my home town, but especially through that recording that I received from an uncle. It was very special.

Did Mahler’s world open up to you immediately?

Dudamel: I think that the kind of atmosphere created by Mahler’s music is very special. The kinds of colors of the nature, the animals or that feeling of space that you have with Mahler are very unusual. It’s almost a kind of 3D music [laughs]. Not only do you hear things, but you feel them, feel how these elements surround you. This is what’s so special about Mahler. The first experience of this was really strange because first you listen to Beethoven and to Mozart, to the classics. Then you arrive at Mahler’s music, and to experience all these elements is very special, almost crazy. It’s like 3D music that you can see and hear coming to you.

You told me that you worked with Claudio Abbado on Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in Caracas.

Dudamel: Yes!

Can you tell me about that?

Dudamel: I was conducting Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 for the first time in 2001, or maybe in 2000. I was conducting the first and the last movement. I was rehearsing at the time with the National Children’s Orchestra, which would later become the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra. Then, in 2003, I conducted the symphony around October or November. And then I went to the Mahler competition for which Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 was the principal piece to conduct. So, I was conducting Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 and I won the competition. The most beautiful thing about that was the experience with the orchestra, especially with a German orchestra that has a Mahler tradition and a tradition of that sound. I feel like I received a gift from heaven when Claudio came to Caracas to conduct the Simón Bolívar Orchestra, performing Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. I was already familiar with his interpretation of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 from before, but to have the chance to study the score with him was amazing. A lot of things opened up for me then. I thought that I knew the score, that I knew this piece very well – but I was mistaken. When I watched Claudio studying the score and when he told me all the details that one has to work on, I thought ‘Oh my God! This is the real world; this is the real Mahler world!’ So, this was in January 2005 and it was an amazing experience. All of these details, they are what it is all about; every note and every phrase.

Conducting Mahler is difficult and not difficult. It is difficult to find every detail, but to find the essence of the piece is not difficult, because it is always there, it is so clear. It’s like when you see somebody and you can immediately understand their personality. It was like that when I worked on this piece with Claudio. I was thinking that I knew everything about this symphony, but then I discovered the details, that this element here is related to another symphony, which could be from Symphony No. 1 all the way to No. 9. Mahler’s music follows one line, it is a complete symphony. All his music is one complete symphony.

Then I remember I went to Israel to conduct this symphony. It is a symphony that has become a part of my life. I was conducting it with the Bolívar Orchestra as part of a huge tour, during which I performed it 20 to 25 times. Later I conducted it in New York with the New York Philharmonic and in London with the Philharmonia Orchestra. So, it’s amazing.

Did he talk to you about technical aspects of conducting, how to organize some difficult parts of the symphony?

Dudamel: No, he didn’t. He was telling me, for example, about Mengelberg. I think he had copies of Mengelberg’s score, and when you see the Mengelberg scores, every bar and every note has a mark – every note, it is really crazy. Sometimes you cannot even read the score because there are so many marks. For instance, I remember the beginning of the second movement [sings], where you have a ritenuto [sings the same phrase again]. And he told me the best way to do it, which, to my knowing, he had seen in Mengelberg’s score. He said that it was too difficult to do the ritenuto [repeats the phrase] … ‘Let’s do a misurato’ [repeats the phrase slightly differently]. Having three instead of the two [sings the phrase again]. These kinds of technical elements were wonderful. So, he told me things like that. I think you can learn a lot from seeing Claudio conducting [laughs]. Because this music is to phrase, to express, and I think you have to have the ideas, but also the gestures to conduct this kind of music so freely. Of course a lot of conductors have this, but having this close relationship with Abbado was a very important thing in my life.

There was a big Mahler renaissance starting with Leonard Bernstein. Later, he was blamed for overpowering Mahler, for exaggerating. What is your approach to Mahler?

Dudamel: It’s funny, actually. It reminds of what Barbirolli once said, not about Mahler, but about Jacqueline du Pré. He said that if you don’t exaggerate when you’re young, then what are you going to do when you’re old [laughs]? So, sometimes people feel differently to others. Of course I cannot feel things like a 50 or 60-year-old conductor would because I need time for that. And time will tell me the things that I have to do.

I think all these elements in Mahler’s music, in a way, are there in a way that is perfect. It is not like a Mozart symphony where you have only forte and piano, and when you have a mezzo forte there, it’s almost like a miracle. Whereas with Mahler, you have a pianissimo in one line that is the same and a fortissimo in the other line and then subito crescendo and then subito diminuendo. These kinds of things in his music are very special. And you don’t have to exaggerate that because that is perfect. That is in the music.

I think Mahler was very passionate. I don’t think Mahler was a conductor who was distant to the music and to the passion and life of the music. Even when he was conducting opera and conducting other music, you can see these sketches of him making faces, jumping and moving and moving his hands. This is an example of how his music has to be. And as distant and as serious as his music is, I think there is a lot of passion there.

I think that there was always a child inside of Mahler that people sometimes don’t see. They only see Mahler thinking of death, they see him thinking in a tragic way. But even in Mahler’s tragic approach to life, there is this child part of Mahler, which is made up of his memories, the memories of his land and the atmosphere of where he was growing up. That is why it is very special.

One week ago, I was conducting the Symphony No. 6 for the first time and yes, it is a tragic symphony, but it is tragic in a theatrical way. It’s very theatrical. I love how Bernstein described it when he wrote in his score that it is an ‘Opera Symphonica’. With Mahler’s music it is difficult to pick one piece because they are all amazing, but I feel the Symphony No. 6 to be the most sincere. He put everything into this piece. It is very long, only symphonic, with a lot of elements that are repeated all the time. But he repeats them each time with a different color, sounding even more dramatic and tragic, even though I think that he was a happy man at the time. He was married, he had his first child, I think. He was living in Vienna, the most important place to be conducting at that time and he was the most famous conductor. He had the world at his feet. So why a tragic symphony [laughs]?

This kind of duality is always there in his music, these constant shifts between major and minor in this symphony [sings], happening all the time. This duality would stay with him for the rest of his life, culminating for example in the amazing Adagio of the Symphony No. 10, when you see all these elements, all these leitmotifs changing to the modern music. In terms of the elements present the music is very modern – the cowbells, the sound of bells all around, the cellist imitating the hammer and all that. The tonality is always important. But then you see the development of his life, culminating in the Symphony No. 10. Somebody said that if Mahler had lived for a few more years, he would have arrived at the new atonality that came after his death. It’s the same with Mozart. Can you imagine if Mozart had lived twenty years more? We will never know.

Together with Beethoven?

Dudamel: Together with Beethoven! Both Mozart and Mahler were very young. But yes, it is really tragic.

You are conducting the Symphony No. 9 now. Can you talk about your relationship to this symphony? You seem to show everything in this symphony.

Dudamel: It’s a very special kind of music, my God! It’s breathtaking, it’s like someone taking your heart and all the time you go … [gasping]. I feel this symphony is like time. It is as if somebody said ‘I will give you five minutes more of life’ and you can do with that whatever you want. When you arrive at the Adagissimo on the last page of the score, it is the last two minutes that you can do something with your life. But it is continuing from before because all of the last movement is about trying to find something. He is trying to embrace a hope that you cannot find. And you have to go, having this hope, but you don’t know if you will have this eternity after death.

The music is perfect. You don’t have to do anything. The notes are there and the indications, ‘faster’, ‘slower’, pianissimo’, ‘sostenuto’, ‘marcato’, everything. Everything is there. The only thing you can give is the energy and the vision. I love how Bernstein used to give titles to each movement. And I love the name he gave to the last movement, which he called ‘Let It Go’. You know, let it go, it is ok. This is what I have now; let’s try to suffer a little bit more. Because there is love at the end, Alma is there. It is not only his physical death, but also the spiritual death. He was not having a good time with Alma in his relationship. And the most tragic thing is that he knew that it was his fault. It is often like this with relationships. You are doing this or that wrong, and then, when the relationship finishes, you know that it was your fault. And this happened to Mahler. And you can feel it in the symphony. He is pleading ‘Please, please, I am giving you my soul!’. But nobody is listening, because he didn’t tell it to her with words. He was in his little room, writing this music and trying to say it in private, screaming. When you visit these places, these little houses where he was writing, you can feel that he was screaming ‘Please, please, I am here! I love you!’ But he was telling it to his music, to himself. This is the duality of his music. Life, death. Love, no love. Hope, no hope.

I waited a long time to conduct this symphony. I have done almost all the symphonies, and only this year I was thinking ‘Ok, I am “ready”’. Not like [puts on a mocking voice] ‘Oh my God, I am the Mahler conductor; I know everything now!’ Rather, I feel that I may be ready now to say something with this music or to try to say something to Mahler. So now I am doing this symphony a lot and will continue to do it throughout the coming tour. Of course I have done it in Gothenburg and in Caracas before, and it has become a piece that I really, really love.

If you had met Mahler, what would you have asked him?

Dudamel: I don’t know. To see him conducting or talking or walking … I don’t know. Sometimes you don’t need words with these kinds of personalities. You only have to watch and to enjoy … ‘Wow, Mahler’. It would be so terrible to ask him ‘Maestro, do you think this is in fours or in threes?’ [laughs] It’s very difficult to say what I would ask Mahler. What could I ask Mahler? Many things or nothing. But I would have liked the chance to be close to him.

What do you think Mahler wanted with his music?

Dudamel: Let me give you an example – let’s say it is like with Pablo Neruda, the famous poet. We now know his letters, not just his books. Mahler was a huge conductor of course. But let us say that his performances were like Neruda’s books, while when he was composing, it was a private thing. With his music, it’s like with Neruda’s letters. His compositions were his private letters, his love letters. Writing music was his only way of communicating with the world, through his music, his notes, his approach to music. Already with the Symphony No. 1, or even before that with his songs, he wanted to express something. In the beginning, he expressed memories from his childhood. Then he composed the Resurrection Symphony, which came too early, but it is there. And then the other symphonies. I think he was trying to show his soul, his vision of the world. Many people will say his vision of the world was political, but it was not – it was love. His music is an obsession [sings] … all these notes, always this melody! The same theme appearing in every symphony; it was like an obsession! He was saying ‘I am here! Maybe I am ashamed, maybe I am distant, but I am here! This is what my life is about, this is my soul!’ And you can interpret this in many ways. You can approach the symphonies in a tragic way or in a happy way. And you are allowed to do that. But it is very important to know what he wanted to say. ‘I am living for you, I am dying for you’ is what he wrote in his score. It’s incredible. Everything is there in his music, everything that he wanted to say. You can see that and you can feel it.

So even in his life there was this duality? One the one hand he was this powerful conductor, the director of the State Opera, he had to be a kind of tyrant to hold the orchestra together, he was firing singers, all his fights against journalists here – and on the other hand he had an incredibly sensitive personality. Did he have to navigate his life between these two extremes?

Dudamel: Look, this is probably because of the power he had. He was so powerful. He became Mahler, he became the boss. And he had a very strong personality, I think. He brought about big changes, not just in Vienna, but also for conductors. Back then, the profession of the conductor did not exist. It was the composers who were conducting their own pieces. Maybe there were a few conductors at the time, but Mahler was like the emperor of the conductors. Out of that emerged our profession, for all of us today and for the maestros of the past. He created the conductor as a maestro. It is amazing. Dealing with his intimate life, his compositions, his home life and being the most famous person … this is part of his life. If you have this kind of power, you have to deal with it. And he was dealing with it, but he was suffering a lot. All these fights, all of these problems that he was having were doing a lot of bad things to his life. But he was very strong. He was having all these problems and tensions arriving at his table, sweeping over him like a wave.

The very last question – for your first concert with the Vienna Philharmonic you conducted Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. I really admired your courage. Was it your choice?

Dudamel: Yes! We were thinking a lot about what to do. And of course it was a challenge. Mahler Symphony No. 1 with the Vienna Philharmonic! It was amazing when one of the players came up to me and said ‘You know, my grandfather played with Mahler, when Mahler was conducting’. I learnt a lot, just from the Viennese sound. It is a tradition that has developed over hundreds of years. And this tradition has been preserved, not because it is the same players, that would be impossible, but because the tradition is passed on from one player to another. Many of today’s players are pupils of the generation of musicians before them and so on. But it was amazing. What an experience!

Also, Barenboim was around. He was my soloist with Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 1. He is also close to Mahler and he was also helping me, in a way. It is a symphony that I had conducted a lot before. It was my very first piece and I had been building on that interpretation for seven years before I conducted the Vienna Philharmonic. So, what an experience!

I enjoyed it very much!

Dudamel: You cannot image how much I enjoyed it! It was like a dream come true.

I liked so much how, during rehearsals, you even told the first violins how to use the G string in a specific section [sings]. I thought that this was exactly what they needed.

Dudamel: Yes [laughs]. Of course you have the orchestra there and they play. They have a level and so on. But sometimes you have to create the sound that you have in mind – of course with respect to the tradition and to the sound of the individual orchestra. It’s like when you have a Stradivari, you cannot push the instrument because the instrument has its own sound. But you have to do it in your own way to create the sound that you want to have with the instrument. This is the life of a conductor [laughs]!

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler
Transcript: Agnes Vukovich
8.9.2010, Vienna
© Universal Edition

“Mahlers first symphony is the great emotion of my youth!”

Do you remember the first time you heard Gustav Mahler’s music?

Chailly: The first time, yes, very clearly: it was in the very early 1960s in Rome, at the Auditorium del Foro Italico with the RAI-Rome orchestra. I attended a rehearsal of the Symphony No. 1, conducted by Zubin Mehta, who was very young at that time. I was there because my father was working in the programming of the classical music at RAI-Rome, and he had a meeting that day. He couldn’t stay with me, he left me completely alone in the last row of the hall of the parquet, of the parterre, and he said: “Stay there for one hour and just don’t move, don’t talk, don’t do anything!” And of course, when I heard the power of the music, of this symphony – I would only later discover that it was Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 – it left me with this feeling of complete standstill. I didn’t know what to do, how to react … Whether to cry, to shout, or to be overwhelmed by emotions … I was very, very young at that time – eight or nine years old. It is not only the great power of Mahler’s music, but it is also the great emotion of my youth.

And how did you proceed then, later? When did you start to study the scores?

Chailly: Well, much later. Even though I started with my first concert in Padua when I was thirteen, with I Solisti Veneti, this was anything but professional. I would say that I started ten years later, with the conviction of becoming a conductor. Mahler was very complicated at that time for me to study and to understand, so that I sort of deliberately postponed it until the late 1970s, when I really started studying the music of Mahler. I was with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra when Peter Ruzicka was the intendant. He almost forced me to start the Mahler Cycle there. And with great insecurity I started from the Symphony No. 10, completed by Deryck Cooke. So, in a way, I started from the most difficult one. And slowly then, I approached them one by one, in many years to follow.

Would you say that you immediately opened up to Mahler, that you had instant access?

Chailly: When I decided to try to know the universe of the ten symphonies, and strangely enough, I did start very, very early with the Ninth and the Tenth, it did disclose an universe which had no barriers any more for me. I didn’t find a sort of a blockade or a stop from his own ‘Sprache’, his own language. Starting with the latest style of his music almost helped me. Much later though, I became close to Das Lied von der Erde – that’s another story. But I think the key for me was really the Tenth, the Ninth and the Eighth Symphonies, and then to move backwards. And it’s very curious, because when I was studying in Milan, I did happen to be at a rehearsal, at La Scala, of Maestro Ozawa with the Symphony No. 8, which, until that time, I had never heard in a live performance. This was a kind of repeat of the same emotion that I had live with an orchestra rehearsal, like when I was younger and with the Symphony No. 1. So the Symphony No. 8, in spite of being so complicated and then so difficult to realise, is one of the symphonies I have conducted the most, so far. And I am happy to say that this year, when we will do the Mahler Festival in Leipzig with the complete cycle of the ten symphonies in about twelve or thirteen days, I will open the Festival with the Gewandhausorchester, with the Symphony No. 2, and we will close it with the Symphony No. 8. The two choral symphonies are somehow very representative for me – also to be part of the Mahler Festival with the most prestigious orchestra in the world, which really belongs to the Mahler Tradition nowadays.

In Amsterdam you were chief conductor of an orchestra with a huge, tremendous Mahler Tradition. When you started to conduct Mahler there, did you feel something of this tradition?

Chailly: Very strongly. You can still feel it with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. The orchestra is incredible with regards to the pauses, the culture and the tradition in the silences between the notes written by Mahler, the so-called lengthening of the tempo, where he wants a fermata not to be a real fermata, but just a broadening of one note. They are very clear and unique. For example, when you start the concert with any Mahler music, you see the orchestra placing themselves on the chairs in a way that they will not move for the remaining hour, or hour–and-a-half, to follow. There is a unique kind of collectivity, members participate even when they are not playing the music, sometimes they have to wait minutes and minutes, because only one section is moving along. This is an example of a complete commitment to music, both spiritual and physical. And last but not least, we have to consider the tradition of the chief conductors: For half a century, Willem Mengelberg brought Mahler regularly, almost daily, in the orchestra’s programmes. Maestro Van Beinum and Maestro Haitink really followed this great tradition of superior quality.

Why Amsterdam? Mahler was accepted in Amsterdam long before he was accepted in Vienna.

Chailly: Yes, that was, I think, a sort of destiny of his life. Firstly, in a way he was rejected and yet admired at the same time. He was, somehow, the representative composer of the extremes, even in the way his music was received, certainly with regards to the modernity of his language at the time it was written.

Secondly, I figure he represented the idea of a man who wants to embody the symphonies as his own major undertaking, at the same time enlarging the form, the shape of the symphony up to the point of breaking it, like the Symphony No. 8. In my way of looking at and playing his music, the theatrical element is, to me, always a very “focused point”. Of course I can see theatrical elements in his music, but I also see elements that come from the theatre, especially the Gesang, the singing line, the voice, the human being singing to the instruments of the orchestra. In my opinion, this is a very, very attractive element, because you can see how great he was, also as a conductor of opera. We know how admired he was worldwide as an interpreter of operas.

Was Amsterdam at this time a more tolerant city? Or was it just the personality of Willem Mengelberg …?

Chailly: I don’t regard Amsterdam as being tolerant at all. The city is very demanding in music, with art in general, because of its broad culture. I think it was certainly the initial drive, a conviction of Mengelberg, which helped Mahler, but then the quality of the music took its turn, and Mahler came to conduct his symphonies there. And that was of course a connection, stronger and stronger, for the image of music-making in Holland and in Amsterdam especially. But I would say that the quality of this triumph is, in the end, only the consequence of the greatness of his music.

Did you listen to Mengelberg’s recordings?

Chailly: Yes, those there are. Unfortunately, just the Adagietto of the Fifth, the complete Fourth and the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. It certainly is fascinating to hear, even in these few pieces, how extreme his way of conducting Mahler was. But also how flexible it was. The word rubato had a different meaning in those years than today’s ‘rigore filologico’. Consider the freedom and the attitude of taking this music in its own way by talking and living with the composer himself – and also the quality and the flexibility of the Concertgebouw Orchestra of those years. The confidence is very clear. When you hear the recording of the Adagietto of the Fifth, the quality that Mengelberg achieved in those years is pretty astonishing.

If you compare these few recordings with Bruno Walter’s, we see that even in the beginning of a Mahler tradition, the approaches were very different.

Chailly: I think Bruno Walter can be seen as the opposite of Mengelberg – the man of rigore, the man with the neoclassical thoughts, the man who was coming from the Vienna School in a rigid way – from the Classic to the Romantic tradition. I think this also added a very clean vision of the shape of the music of Mahler, which was necessary because of the expansion of his form. That meant a lot of rigore, if not some kind of rigidity, not to get lost sometimes with the approach of freedom and libertà interpretativa.

Bruno Walter, still today, is a reference performance conductor – I would say, Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer. The only recording by Oskar Fried of the Symphony No. 2, of course, is a very important document too, because we know that at the time when he conducted the piece in Berlin, there was a lot of discussion between Oskar Fried and Mahler, who described his own way of interpretation and his choice of tempi. So, in a way, the recording of the Symphony No. 2 is the result of such a strong, complicated discussion between Fried and Mahler. Those are, I think, very important documentations.

But what is the right approach today, when there have been such extremes from the very beginning?

Chailly: I doubt that there are limits when you are talking about an ingenious composer like Mahler. We know that Leonard Bernstein, who is one of the most representative Mahler conductors, took extremes. Those interpretational extremes always matched the spirit of his own way of interpreting Mahler. When considering the half of a century that separates Mengelberg from Bernstein, those extremes somehow make sense. In my way of conducting Mahler I am not too loud; maybe in the future I will tend to such an extreme. Yet it is a matter of impulsive nature that gives you the idea to take such a liberty in such an extreme. Still, in the case of Bernstein, we have an example of one of the greatest interpreters ever to live. I still remember a performance with the Vienna Philharmonic of the Symphony No. 9 at La Scala in Milan, where the finale reached degrees of emotion which are indescribable. And Bernstein’s courage, even though the acoustic for concerts is pretty dry in La Scala, to extremely stretch the last two or three pages of the piece more and more, making the piece slower and slower. The power and the tension that he achieved are still very strong in my memory.

Is there a danger of overpowering Mahler?

Chailly: Mahler, as only a genius can, has overcome that. Because the inner power of his music speaks loudly enough, it is not necessary to overpower Mahler. At least it would not be my approach. Composers like Rossini are sometimes completely wrong and non-idiomatic. And you suffer, listening to that – but in the end, you say ‘Oh, what a bad interpretation’, not ‘What bad music’ – the music survived. He made it. In the end he wins la guerra de la composizione e l’interprete (the war between the composition and the interpreter). With a genius like Mahler, the composer always wins against the performer. I remember a talk I had with Donald Mitchell, a man who spent all his life studying Mahler’s music and writing about him, about il rigore interpretativo of Gustav Mahler. We discussed the importance of sometimes not indulging in excesses. I remember specifically, for instance, the very end of the Symphony No. 1. Usually you hear a pulling in and out from the main tempo in three different scales, in three different regions of tempo. Yet I think that the end should have a sort of unity of tempo moving along, only one of the many instances that should be reconsidered by contemporary conductors.

And even on the last pages, or rather the last two pages, of the Symphony No. 3 there is written something like ‘Gediegen [dignified] im Ton’, but not fortississimo…

Chailly: Yes, that is another example. The whole first movement of the Eighth is a kingdom of one forte, not fortissimo gridato. This is very different. First of all, you have to find out where the real highpoints are, the climaxes to reach – and around them, you build your own interpretation, your own musical dramaturgy. To build the shape of the movement, I think is a very important point. And there is always a danger of exceeding too soon, or too much after those climaxes, which will then misguide the listener as to where the music is pointing. Mahler never fails; he had a fabulous sense of perspective between departure and arrival. This is absolutely above all question to me.

Has your approach to Mahler changed over the years?

Chailly: I am not sure, because I do not fanatically listen to my recordings. Normally when I end a project, I like to just leave it. It is a sort of period of my life that has its testimony. Probably the older I grow, the more confidence and the less tension are in my music, because I was relatively young when I started to conduct Mahler. The complexity and the responsibility that are linked to his music charge the conductor with an enormous tension. And nowadays, I feel that this great tension is over because of my heightened confidence, which surely alters my approach to the performance and the way the orchestra is supposed to play. However, I am more interested in studying and being more analytical of somebody else’s interpretation than of my own.

Would you say that there is a specific Mahler sound you want to create when you conduct Mahler in Leipzig, or in Amsterdam, or in Berlin?

Chailly: That depends on the nature of the orchestra’s sound. However, I think that, with regards to Mahler, it is always important to have a Romantic sound. “Romantic sound” in the sense of the depths of the sound, the culture of vibrato, the culture of portamenti, which is becoming more and more, worldwide, a rarity in symphony orchestras. This is an extremely delicate matter in Mahler’s music, where you can easily be tasteless or too puristic. It would be easy to abolish the existence of the portamento, but it would also be wrong. Of course Mahler has a very strong impact when you work with an orchestra like the Gewandhausorchester, which is one of the greatest German Romantic orchestras, with regards to sound. And whenever I do a Mahler symphony in Leipzig, there is a very, very deep emotional collaboration, which is always translated into the expression of the sound. The Gewandhausorchester really tries to give the best in expression of sound. Yet each orchestra has its own sound identity. Just think about the Viennese and the New York Philharmonics, the Gewandhausorchester, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the London Symphony and so on – I could go on mentioning orchestras that have almost daily been carrying on the tradition of Mahler’s music. And each one has its own sound identity, which is reflected in the interpretation – and, without a doubt, all of this on a very, very high level.

Why did it take so long for Mahler to be accepted?

Chailly: I am not sure, but I think that it might have something to do with the regime at that time, with his Jewish family. Of course he paid for that very, very heavily in his own destiny – for his own life and his own person. I think we should not forget that at the end of his, unfortunately far too short life his music was really bringing him tremendous satisfaction. Amsterdam was, as many letters document, surely the best place for him to receive a kind of positive wave from the public, from the outside world. But the reaction in Munich to the Symphony No. 8– this has to have been one of the most glorious moments of his life. There is a testimony as well, in a very interesting written documentation by Alfredo Casellla, the composer who was present at the performance as well as at the Mahler Festival in Amsterdam in 1920 under Willem Mengelberg. He describes how pleased, although exhausted, Mahler looked and sounded in the conductor’s room at the end of the Symphony No. 8. Finally, there was a positive reception of his music in Germany. And this was, I think, 1910, one year before his death. So he saw that things were finally going in a different direction.

How do you see the relationship between his difficult life and his music?

Chailly: I doubt that the relationship with Alma, although she was an interesting and very musical lady, made his life easier at the end, for too many reasons. But I also think that his inner conflicts stemmed from the world around him, from the way European culture perceived music. He kept studying and even conducting important scores, important operas by his colleague composers. He kept informing himself very much about what the universe around him was doing. His relationship with Arnold Schoenberg is also interesting. I think he consciously decided to follow his own way, to go down his own path – fortunately! The famous dinner in Vienna, where Schoenberg described the concept of the Klangfarbenmelodie to Mahler, which, according to Alma’s diary, left Mahler apparently totally indifferent, comes to mind. However, when you look at the final pages of Das Lied von der Erde, you see that the Klangfarbenmelodie is already there. I think he was constantly trying to increase his musical vocabulary, to explore a new way of music-making. But at the same time he kept very faithful to his own style until the end. You see a unique unity of language when you look at the opus 1, Das klagende Lied, and then you make a jump to Das Lied von der Erde. In this context, I always compare him to Puccini, it is unavoidable for me. The “linguistic” development from Le Villi to Turandot is, in a good sense, catastrophic, it is completely unpredictable. With Mahler, to start with Das klagende Lied and to arrive at the geniality and the modernity of Das Lied von der Erde, is, of course, not foreseeable, but a unity exists nevertheless which is unbelievable. I am a particular fan of looking at the teatralità della musica pucciniana in comparison to the theatrical moments in Mahler’s music. There are many common elements, for instance the introduction of the third act of Tosca, where you have the Roman bells playing. This is one of the things which can really be connected to the cowbells of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, however in a completely different environment of sound and music. But there are many moments where I can somehow see one composer having an influence on the other.

They met in Graz at the premiere of Salome, 1905, when Strauss and Mahler met too. There is that famous photo when they come out of the opera house.

Chailly: I remember …

And Strauss the tall, slim man …

Chailly: … and that was the last time Puccini and Mahler met, in Graz; but I think that there certainly was always a discrepancy of character between the two people. It is a great shame that Mahler never composed an opera. Would it have been similar to Weber’s interesting approach to the opera house and the theatre with Die drei Pintos? A man who lived all his life there and did not want to compose an opera – this is absolutely astonishing, I have to say.

Why?

Chailly: The reason is very difficult to find. I think it’s a pity, because he was very elaborate at writing for the human voice as well as at embedding a sense of drama in his music. It reminds me of Johann Sebastian Bach, who also didn’t write an opera.

Well, you could say the St. Matthew Passion is a drama in itself.

Chailly: Yes, that is a valid argument. Still, those two composers left a big question mark to the universe of music.

Where would Mahler have gone if he had lived longer?

Chailly: Look at the Adagio of the Symphony No. 10, it think that’s the answer: the vertical chord of nine pitches – there are three missing to become twelve-tone music. I would say that he would have certainly gone beyond harmony, beyond the burden of the harmonic system, and that he would have reached the twelve-tone system by himself. Puccini did the same with Turandot, by the way. In the sketches that Luciano Berio showed me of the finale, there were pages which show a twelve-tone series, which unfortunately Berio did not include in this Orchesterfassung in the end. With Puccini and Mahler, I see two composers who were so interested in the new, always moving forward on their own, different ways, always expanding their musical vocabulary.

Do you think Mahler would have adapted the twelve-tone system?

Chailly: Probably. Maybe not in the way Schönberg did, maybe in a more tolerable or somehow milder approach. But who knows, this will remain an open question.

We’ve talked about Bernstein, who said that Mahler anticipated the catastrophes of the 20th century. Would you go so far?

Chailly: I don’t like to romanticise too much about what is behind the music of Mahler because too much has already been written and said. Remember what happened in Amsterdam: Mengelberg asked Mahler to write a presentation for the programme about what was behind the meaning of his music. And he did, because of Mengelberg. The reaction of Mahler was that the day after the concert, he heard so much nonsense commenting on his introduction, or what is behind his music, that he gave Mengelberg a veto on printing the introductions again and said: “From now on, my music should be played as it is, without one line to describe what’s behind it”. And, in a way, I agree with that. There is already enough of Sturm und Drang, of emotions, of shocks, of poesia, brutality in his music, all these extremes. I think it would be superfluous to start searching for particular connections. We know his biography, we know what was behind every symphony he has written, what was going on in his private life, we know about the tragedy of his life. Of course these things are connected. But I would still like to look at Mahler in a more and more distant, if not puristic, light. I would focus on what his music brings by just listening to it. To me, this would be the approach of today.

You are conducting Bruckner’s Fourth here at the Salzburg Festival. Would Mahler have been possible without Bruckner?

Chailly: That is a very difficult question to answer, but it is, clearly, almost provoking a ‘no’. He would probably not have been if he had not studied with Bruckner and learned from him how to master the shape of the enlarged sonata form of the symphony. È stato il viatico della costruzione nuova: The new building of his music would have not been possible without the teaching of Bruckner. I think Bruckner was the ideal bridge from the so-called Brahmsche Tradition, Schumann and Brahms, to the expansion of the symphony. And I think the fact that Mahler often conducted Bruckner’s symphonies, especially the Symphony No. 8, which he adored, has been one of the examples of how to build this idea into a new form.

Why did you come so late to Das Lied von der Erde?

Chailly: Because I think it is absolutely his most difficult score. I doubt that there is any other piece in Mahler’s oeuvre that is as complicated. And there is always, to any conductor, a guarantee that there are many corners unresolved. Next year, after a gap of more than ten years, I will go back to Das Lied von der Erde in Munich with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra. Somehow, the complication of his music, which moves sometimes vertically into different tempi, creates more freedom than might be expected. However, some things surely will remain unresolved. And the non-solution of those questions is probably the consequence of the fact that he never heard the piece. If he had heard the piece and learned how difficult it was to conduct and to interpret, he might have made it somehow easier.

Look, jumping back to opus 1, Das klagende Lied, in the Urfassung there is a Fernorchester, which goes on in a completely different tempo, it is written in three beats against the orchestra in four beats. This kind of overlapping of two different independent tempi, which is extremely complicated to realise in the performance, happens in the orchestration of Das Lied von der Erde many times, especially in the Abschied, especially in the last, the fifth, movement. Although the intuition of Mahler to do that is fantastic, it is, in a practical sense – for a conductor – extremely complicated.

Yet Das klagende Lied shows that he had the same dramatic ideas when he was very young as he had at the end, which is very astounding..

Chailly: Sure, absolutely true. I think it is his most delicate, complex and difficult piece. And last but not least: how to cope with human voices. Because of the way he used the power of the sound of the orchestra, it is very difficult for the Tenorlied to balance things out. I am sure that he would have revised the dynamics of the Tenorlieder.

He did not hear the Symphony No. 9 either. Do you think he would have revised some pages there?

Chailly: I most definitely hope not. Because even if I have my doubts with regards to Das Lied von der Erde, I don’t have any, not even in one bar, with regards to the Ninth. I think the Ninth is a complete perfection of beauty. And even in its extremes, like when we are confronted with the climax of the first movement, the way it was composed is perfect. I perform the Ninth a lot. As I told you, I started from the end. The one I’ve conducted the least is the Symphony No. 4, which is strange. But going back to the Symphony No. 9 – I think that in a way his language was almost moving towards the Kammersymphonien of Schoenberg. There are many passages that are similar to that, especially the language of the first and second Kammersymphonie.

Would you say that with the last pages of the Ninth he somehow opened the door to a new aesthetic?

Chailly: The assumption of many musicologists that every symphony is the preparation for the following one, is surely right, also in a dramaturgical way. But regarding the question of what would follow after the Symphony No. 9: I think, the major triola of the violas, which end the Ninth after a Luftpause, is exactly of the same colour as the opening of the Symphony No. 10. So it is very well connected, I think, also in the sense of colouring. And the catastrophe, which has been described in the first movement of the Ninth, is reinforced in an even more dramatic way in the first movement of the Tenth, where you get this famous tragic chord after the long, long shout of the solo trumpet of this vertical nine-pitch chord.

What did Mahler want to express, what did he want achieve with his art?

Chailly: I think he was more than aware that he would leave masterpieces of composition, not just ‘very good music’, behind. Music that was unique, of a kind that, at that time, was not composed by any other colleague. Mahler did something unbelievably big: he really opened up a universe of a new language. And I think that is what would answer your question, this is what he wanted, what he achieved.

However, the most important question is: being so young when he died, what did the world of music lose with his death? Because I think he was a man who still had so much to say with regards to European culture.

What about the influence on Alban Berg?

Chailly: Sure, this was always underlined by Berg.

I think this would have been a tremendous influence if they had worked concurrently for ten more years.

Chailly: Sure. That would have been probably even more creative than his personal friendship with Schoenberg, in a way.

Schoenberg built the fundamental things, but from his emotions and from his understanding of the world, I think Berg and Mahler were much closer.

Chailly: I agree with that. You can clearly hear how Mahler influenced Berg in Wozzeck. We know how much Berg studied the symphonies of Mahler, and that he made transcriptions for piano.

Which parts of Wozzeck do you mean?

Chailly: The famous interlude in the third act, before the Hopp, hopp! scene. This is really not Berg composing, this is Gustav Mahler, it is so clear. Many other places, but that is the most obvious one.

Or the marches …

Chailly: For sure, the marches are fundamental to both composers, in a way they were obsessed with marches. If you look at Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 for instance, after the very first introductory bars, you can already hear a march. The Third even starts with a march, with the horn and then what follows. Then the Fifth starts with a march, the Sixth starts with a march, the Seventh with the Trauermarsch – it is unbelievable. The obsession of Mahler has often been described, as has his kind of rhythmical form.

But how does one deal with his irony?

Chailly: I think that he was a man for smiles, not for laughs, as you can see in his pictures. That’s a major difference, his irony is always provoking a smile. The witty character of Mahler is expressed in the Lieder like in Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, where you can occasionally see moments of it. However, it is even more clear in Des Knaben Wunderhorn – this is the cycle where you don’t even have to search for pleasure, for there are countless moments of serenity and also wit. We call it in Italian the sorriso, the smile. Non la risata, ma il sorriso [not laughter, but a smile]. Something more contained, in a way.

How do you see his personality?

Chailly: There is a new book by Gastón Fournier-Facio which shows a different kind of Mahler, the book presents us with many anecdotes by his friends and acquaintances. We get to know a side of him that was full of humour; he was always ready for jokes. This is a sort of Mahler that we hardly ever see. The book also provides us with a different physical description of when he was younger, how fit he was physically, including the muscular system and the muscular structure and so on. It is very interesting that we can look back at Mahler today, and we see a Mahler who is so very different from the one that has been described for so many years.

This is, for me, very interesting to discover: he was not a sportsman, yet he had a trained physique.

Chailly: Absolutely.

He was not always weak and suffering from heart issues.

Chailly: No, no. This was a very important new chapter for me to read and to learn.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler
Transcript: Angelika Worseg
5.8.2010, Salzburg
© Universal Edition

“Conducting Mahler the rubato is essential”

Maestro Honeck, the first question is always the same – do you remember when you heard the music of Gustav Mahler for the first time?

Honeck: I remember it very well. I was a member of the Austrian Youth Orchestra and we went to Berlin to participate in the Karajan Competition. Several youth orchestras from all over Europe were taking part and I heard the German Youth Orchestra ‘Junge Deutsche Philharmonie’ performing Mahler’s 1st Symphony. I was extremely impressed right away, not only by the big sound – other symphonies also have a big sound – but what impressed me very much was the way Mahler treated the darkness and also the special meaning of his music, for example in the third movement. It might have something to do with my own experience because I lost my mother. She was the mother of nine children. I took part in the funeral, of course, and the way this funeral was conducted reminded me a little bit of this music. It might have been connected to this. I must have been 13 or 14 years old at the time and it was remarkable for me. It was probably one of the most important moments for me. I was almost shocked that this can happen with music, that it came into my life and into my heart. Since then, Mahler has been a part of my inner heart.

So you would say that Mahler’s world opened up immediately to you?

Honeck: I would say so. I didn’t understand it, really. I only learned that later on. But I already felt the world of Mahler and his way of expression – that he could go very deep into the darkness, deeper and darker and wider than any other composer I had experienced before. At that time, it was like a modern film that I saw for the first time; a programme that, as a young kid, I couldn’t understand. Now I understand the story, hopefully [laughs]. But at that time, it was very new for me. How he treated the brass, how he treated the lower instruments and how he conveyed his message through Volksmusik [folk music]. I love Volksmusik very much, but I didn’t understand the background or, as Mahler put it, ‘what is behind the music because this is much more important than what I have written’. It’s more important what he did not write. I felt this immediately, but, at the time, I didn’t fully understand it.

We are here in Vienna where Mahler enjoyed great success at the Staatsoper. At the same time, he was attacked in a way composers rarely are. He faced such struggles. Where did these conflicts come from?

Honeck: Well, it was partly his personality, for sure. He was an extremely professional conductor and he wanted everything to be perfect – he demanded this from himself and also from the musicians and singers who he worked with. So, in a way, he was very radical. And the other thing that always amazes me when you go back to the time in which Mahler lived is what happened to the symphony. The symphony was still the Holy Grail – Beethoven, the hero, of course Mozart and Haydn, Schubert and Schumann, Brahms and Bruckner – they treated the symphony as a whole and as a ‘Heilige Kunst’, a ‘holy art’, so to speak. And now there was a composer who started to write music that one hears in a salon orchestra. We have to bear in mind that at this time, and also later on, many of the musicians of the Vienna Philharmonic, of the ‘Hoforchester’ [Court Orchestra], spent their free time in wonderful summer retreats, playing in salon orchestras. There they played music by Johann Strauss, transcriptions of ‘Tannhäuser’ for example, all the marches, gallops, polkas, waltzes, everything. When they came back from holiday and played once more with the Vienna Philharmonic, they suddenly experienced a composer who put all these elements into his compositions. So you can image that the musicians at the time thought that this was something cheap and trivial, unlike their holy art. They probably didn’t understand what kind of a connection he had built with the society, with the way people lived their lives, with the holy art and the Volksmusik. Nowadays, we understand it, but at that time they didn’t. And even now, when I was playing in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, some members told me that they didn’t like Mahler because they found his music too trivial. They found it too normal.

That’s a very interesting story about Gustav Mahler and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. As you said, you played a lot of Mahler with the Vienna Philharmonic – can you tell me about the experiences you’ve had with different conductors and about who influenced you?

Honeck: Well, when you play in a wonderful orchestra like the Vienna Philharmonic, you have the opportunity to watch all the best conductors in the world. And it’s true that you can learn a lot from all of these conductors, no matter how different their approaches might be. I still remember wonderful concerts, and especially rehearsals, with Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Carlos Kleiber and also with Riccardo Muti, Claudio Abbado and other great conductors, including James Levine. There are a number of conductors I could mention in this context. Almost all of them treated the music very seriously, within their own means of expression and of conducting orchestras. It was very impressive for me to observe that, in order to make music and to bring across a message and the content of the music, you have to believe in the music. I was always amazed watching Carlos Kleiber conduct because I always felt that he believed in what he was doing. I should probably also mention Nikolaus Harnoncourt, he knows exactly what he is doing and believes in it, just like Leonard Bernstein did.

I also had the wonderful opportunity to talk with Leonard Bernstein personally when I was offered a job with the Zurich Opera House. I asked him ‘What do you think about this? Should I leave or should I stay here? What is your opinion?’ And we talked for a whole hour after a rehearsal. This was amazing for me, how this great conductor treated musicians. He was always the kind of person who wanted to help others, especially young people.

Do you remember any specific Mahler experiences during your time as a musician in the orchestra that were important to you?

Honeck: I played Mahler’s 6th Symphony under the direction of Leonard Bernstein – that was very impressive for me. I also played the 7th Symphony under Lorin Maazel’s baton and he has an exceptional love for Mahler’s music. Then there was also Claudio Abbado’s love for Mahler’s music that impressed me tremendously. I had the opportunity to organize the first concerts of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra in my capacity as Claudio Abbado’s assistant.

So I’ve had many experiences with the music of Gustav Maher that I would not want to miss.

Can you compare these different approaches to Mahler and also compare them to your own?

Honeck: I think that it’s like a puzzle that you have to put together. First of all, you have to understand his music; you have to concentrate on the score and try to figure out the background and the meaning of the music – what kind of atmosphere and mood prevailed when Gustav Mahler composed his music, what the circumstances were. And also what the difficulties are – we have the great privilege that Gustav Mahler was a conductor himself, so he wrote down a lot of things. But I would say one of my approaches, after I heard all these different interpretations and played and conducted Mahler myself, was that I developed an increasingly strong interest in the old Austrian Bohemian Volksmusik. I was forced by my father, who was a very simple music lover and did not have a big knowledge of music, to play the zither – an Austrian folk instrument. I didn’t like it very much, but because my father wanted me to, I played it. I spent two years with a teacher who could hardly read the notes. I had already had lessons at the Hochschule [University of Music and Performing Arts] in Vienna as a violinist. So this teacher always wanted me to play in a certain way and I protested ‘But it doesn’t say that in the music’ and he persisted ‘You have to play it in this rhythm’, and so on. So we had this little battle going on. I played all the minuets, all the marches, all the waltzes on the left hand, learned how to produce the sound on the zither, the bass and to accompany too early or later. He was very stubborn, this teacher. He said ‘That is our tradition!’ So after two years, I stopped. Later on, when I was working and studying Mahler’s scores, I was back in this world and I realized that these two years had been very important for understanding Mahler’s music. Because the Viennese way of playing is very different sometimes to what we hear and experience even here in Vienna. You don’t play what is written in the score, but you mustn’t improvise too much either. So how does one do it? What I had learnt was the art of rubato playing. And this is also in the music of Gustav Mahler! The way that musicians a hundred years ago played in the salon orchestras – it was natural for them because they were trained in those salon orchestras to play the waltzes of Johann Strauss in a certain way; they didn’t have to write it down. And neither did Gustav Mahler. He wrote a lot of things down in his scores that are very important, but this he didn’t because the musicians played it anyway.

So for my interpretation and my understanding of Mahler, this is very important. Recently, someone told me ‘Your recording of Mahler’s 1st Symphony sounds so extremely modern and new’, and I said ‘No, it’s not really new. I was simply trying to go back a hundred years and to think about how the rubato was to be played.’ To our ears, a hundred years later, this actually sounds new and modern, but it’s not really modern.

Taking about different interpretations – Leonard Bernstein, who made Mahler very popular, is often blamed for overpowering Mahler’s music and for showing his own emotions too much. On the other hand, there is a kind of school that plays a very humble and dry Mahler. Where does your way fit in?

Honeck: I always try to work out the meaning of the music. The music tells you what you have to do. I am a big fan of chamber music, I have always loved it. I grew up with chamber music; Haydn quartets, Schubert and even the Bruckner Adagios – this is great music for listening to each other and exploring the depths of the music.

When Mahler asks for a certain dynamic and a certain way of reading the music, you have to always think of chamber music, in my opinion. How can you make an explosion, how far can you go? If everything is loud, then what is left? If everything is soft, what is left? So you have to point out the climaxes, and, just so that there is no misunderstanding, climaxes don’t equal loudness for me. Climaxes can also mean softness. And there are hundreds of moments in Mahler’s music when you have the climaxes in the silences, which is great. And I would like to work this out. In the first movement, for example, it’s not only the beginning; it’s not only like the third movement in the trio which describes a countryside idyll, it’s also in the last movement when the first moments of the first movement are suddenly coming back. But they come back as an idea, like a memory of things that happened in your childhood, so it must sound like it’s far away. This is one of those incredible moments – the softer you get it, the better it is and the stronger it is. On the other hand, some of these explosions that describe his desperation also need to work out. Or the beginning of the second movement of Mahler’s 1st Symphony – this cannot sound rustic enough because he wanted to establish a heavily rural ländler in this music, so I would not feel that it is light and joyful circus music, rather it has to have a deep understanding of the ‘Lederhosen-sound’ that we experienced in the old salon music.

So this is the way I see it and this is the way that I think Mahler’s music should be treated. But Leonard Bernstein is one of my heroes and he was so honest in his music-making, he felt it like that. And it was always convincing, I think. It was great.

Would you say that Mahler’s complicated personal life influenced his music?

Honeck: Definitely, because Mahler was honest himself. He brought all his different emotions to his music – his desperation as well as his feelings of exaltation. You will feel his childhood experiences everywhere in his music. For instance, in the fourth movement of the 4th Symphony, with the angles and ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’, the boyish element in it …

So all these childhood experiences are there in his music – his disappointment with love, his first loves as well as a sense of desperation. Also, he was thinking about the meaning of life, at a time of transition, at the turn of the century, when Vienna played a very important role, also politically. There was this feeling that the world would be destroyed, this apocalyptic view of the future. But he also incorporated a feeling of being in heaven; he put everything into his music that was in his heart, in the heart of someone I would call a great human being. But then again, he demanded so much that he could also be a little bit arrogant and nasty to other people. But what a thinker! My personal view is that he loved humans very much and he demanded a lot from them.

He, together with Anton Bruckner, anticipated the entire 20th century. What we experience now, in 2010 and 2011 which are both Mahler years, with our problems with nature and with the environment – isn’t there something of this already in his music, all these apocalyptic elements? I think so, and I find that this is what makes it so modern and I think that this is what’s so fascinating in his music, what makes it sound so recent, even though it was composed a hundred years ago.

So you agree with Bernstein who said that Mahler anticipated the catastrophes of the 20^th century …

Honeck: … and the beauty of the 20th century – we must not forget this. The catastrophes are very important because they create this sort of effect, but the beauty is also there. I myself was born after the war; there has not been a war, isn’t it great? But many people experienced wars. There was probably no time in history that was as terrible as the 20th century. But in the second part of the 20th century we have experienced the beauty of life – a great life with its technological advancements and developments.

What would you have asked Mahler?

Honeck: That’s a very difficult question, but I would probably have asked him to compose more music, especially for soloists. I would like there to be a Mahler violin concerto, or cello concerto or a piano concerto. Or better still, an opera by him – we know that he loved opera very much and that he conducted a lot of opera. He was the director of the Vienna State Opera, so why not compose an opera?

On a more personal note, I would have asked him what he thought about the meaning of life, about death, about what happens after we die – this would have been a very interesting conversation, I think. He already gives a lot of answers in his music, but answers that we first have to search for.

Let me ask you another question that might be difficult to answer – what did Mahler want?

Honeck: Well, first of all, he describes his own life in his music, which has led some people to think that there was too much of his own ego in his music and that he didn’t write for the people. I don’t think that this is really true. He was so honest to describe his own feelings. He wanted, and he probably needed, to write down what was in his head, like all great composers, just like Beethoven described it. All great composers wanted to impart a message to the people – Mahler wanted to have people share his own experiences and he also wanted to give an answer to problems people might be experiencing. For instance, how many people tell me that they start to cry when they listen to the 2nd Symphony, the ‘Resurrection’? Why do they cry? Because Mahler was able to create an atmosphere of heaven, an expectation of a glorious life after death. The same thing that Mozart described once in a letter to his father ‘Don’t be afraid of death. Death is my best friend. I never go to bed without thinking that I might not wake up again the next day.’

So Mahler was extremely interested in these questions and he probably knew that every human being was born to ask these questions. There is no person in the world who does not ask these questions at some point in their lives. But a lot of people don’t want to give answers or look for the answers. And I think Mahler realized that he could give answers through his music and that’s what he wanted to present to the audience. And he knew that at the time in which he lived, people probably wouldn’t understand his music, so he wrote his music not only for himself and the people that did understand him, but also for future generations.

He knew that we would understand him. And don’t we understand him now? We understand a lot. To me, he is so wonderfully close when I am studying the score that it feels as if he was sitting next me.

‘My time will come’ as he put it [laughs] …

Honeck: [laughs] Yes, exactly! ‘My time will come’.

Which side of Mahler can you most relate to – the bombastic Mahler or the more refined Mahler?

Honeck: I just conducted Mahler’s 4th Symphony and I am very impressed by this piece because he reduced the orchestration – he didn’t use any trombones. His approach to it was like Haydn’s style, in a neoclassicist way. I was so impressed that he could convey the same message with this reduced orchestra as he was able to do with the 8th Symphony or his impressive 5th Symphony or with the 2nd Symphony or 1st Symphony. The climaxes have this very bombastic sound; they don’t have to be bombastic, but they can be. And I am very impressed that he could convey his message through this simplicity. And it also shows that there is always something behind the music – you just have to listen to the second movement where he tuned the solo violin one tone higher, creating a new colour, where he used the upbeats of Volksmusik in a way that you feel it’s not true that it’s simple, cheap salon music – you feel that there is something more sinister, describing the world of devils and the world of angels, like in the last movement. This is also the reason why I use a sort of boyish voice for the singer because it says ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’ as opposed to a woman’s Wunderhorn. I wanted to use this because the innocence of a child’s voice creates a stark contrast to this sharp Austrian traditional music.

These moments are incredible for me and if it’s possible to work it out, then it can be a great experience.

Of course, the ending of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony – who would like to miss this ending, this climax? Who would like to miss the climaxes in the 5th Symphony which he goes on to destroy again and again, when you feel he couldn’t find the answer? Everything in Mahler’s music is there for a reason. The climaxes need to be there, but the simple music, or the not really simple, but rather very chamber-music like passages, have to have the same quality as the impressive and loud music.

What is the biggest technical challenge for a conductor performing Mahler?

Honeck: Conducting the rubato. We know that conducting, for instance, ‘Parsifal’ or other music by Wagner – although it has many challenges, don’t get me wrong – can be much easier than conducting Johann Strauss. Strauss is extremely difficult because you have to move a hundred people at any moment in a different direction, and if you make a mistake, it results in an unnatural and artificial interpretation. I think that the same is true for Mahler’s music. The challenge of conducting rubato is immense with Mahler’s music, but it also gives me the possibility to give the musicians a certain freedom, and also to allow myself to maybe find another way in the very moment that I am conducting a concert, provided that I find the right way to play and conduct the rubato. This makes Mahler’s music an extremely great adventure, if you can do this.

Of course, you can rehearse everything and you don’t need a conductor, so to say. But then it is rehearsed and the audience will probably hear that it is rehearsed. In my concerts, I would like people to feel that everything is coming naturally and feels very Viennese or Czech or Hungarian – like the old Austrian tradition. It’s true in the moment and it’s right to do it, but it takes a lot of effort.

Do you think that the sound of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra influenced Mahler?

Honeck: I am sure that it did because they were a great orchestra. We know that Mahler was in Kassel and had another orchestra in Germany, in Hamburg; that he also heard the Czech Philharmonic and that he came to Vienna and worked with the great musicians of the time. I am sure there were many moments when he was thinking about certain Viennese instruments that we still have today. But we also have to bear in mind that he worked in Amsterdam and in New York, where some different instruments were used. So I am sure that Mahler’s main interest was to get out the message in his compositions.

By the way, he probably needed to rehearse a lot more than we do today because nowadays, musicians are technically much more advanced than they could have been at that time. I think Mahler would have been overjoyed with the standard of today. That might also be a reason why he sometimes got a little bit angry during rehearsals or attacked individual players in the orchestra personally. It was because he could not get the result that he wanted. If somebody didn’t use the whole bow, he attacked them.

There is one other thing that is very important to me personally which has nothing to do with the interpretation – the set-up of the orchestra. For Mahler I use the original set-up, how he would have heard his symphonies, with the second violins on the right hand side and the celli and bassi, together with the first violins, on the left hand side. It’s fascinating how Mahler’s music becomes more transparent because of this. He once wrote in a letter ‘Why don’t the second violins play more? I have composed it in this way’. This means that if you sit in the audience, you will have a stereo effect, with the first violins on the left side and the second violins on the right side, so if they enter into a conversation with each other, the music will come from two different positions. This is very interesting, especially for Mahler’s music. This set-up changed after the 1920s or 1930s into what we know today. So I think to hear Mahler in that way might also be a very nice experience.

One last question – why did it take so long for Mahler’s music to become popular?

Honeck: I think that it definitely has to do with his Jewish background. As we know, anti-Semitic sentiments were growing in Vienna at the time. And during the terrible time in the 1920s and 1930s, there was no way that Mahler’s music could have grown in popularity. We have to be really thankful to Leonard Bernstein and especially to Rafael Kubelik – we must not forget this wonderful conductor who started the Mahler renaissance even earlier than Leonard Bernstein.

The second reason is that his symphonies were misunderstood. They still have this reputation of being trivial, of not really constituting high art or of containing too much Volksmusik, as I described before. This probably prevented some people from loving his music, especially in the German and Austrian cultural society where Beethoven was revered as a hero, and Schubert, Brahms and Bruckner were those who created symphonies. Gustav Mahler went too far in their opinion. That was a big misunderstanding, but good music, particularly the best music, will have its time, and this time was in the 1960s.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler
Transcript: Agnes Vukovich
25.5.2010, Vienna
© Universal Edition

“What Mahler wrote is so clear that it is nearly impossible to move away from it.”

Maestro, do you remember when you heard the music of Gustav Mahler for the first time?

Gergiev: I remember it very vaguely. It was the 1^st Symphony. Obviously, I was a very, very young man, but I remember this final movement when the horn section suddenly stands up and continues to play while standing. It’s a very powerful statement of lust in this symphony. That was very memorable. I don’t think that it is now my favorite memory of all the symphonies that Mahler composed, but it was my first one. That was a long time ago and of course it was also a long time before I started to look at Mahler’s symphonies – although when I was preparing to participate in the Herbert von Karajan Competition for young conductors, I saw that Mahler’s 1^st Symphony was proposed for young conductors to prepare. This means that if you prepare it, you could be asked to conduct the second movement, part of the finale, part of the first movement or just a couple of tempo transitions at the end – they don’t give you the entire symphony to conduct. So you have to know it and I knowingly started to study the symphony and played it for myself, if not to get to the heart of it, then to be able to conduct it, should I be given the chance to conduct it in the second round of the competition. This symphony was not for the first round, the beginning of the competition was very classical. I remember conducting maybe Beethoven’s 2^nd Symphony – the repertoire was very classical. Somehow I got into the second round and then into the third and then I got to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic which was a dream come true for a young man like me.

Mahler was not very regularly played at the time in Leningrad where I grew up. Occasionally, a great conductor would conduct Mahler – Kondrashin conducted Mahler’s symphonies, but Mravinsky did not conduct Mahler. But there were of course guest conductors – I remember very well Leinsdorf with the New York Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta, who is now a good colleague of mine, again with the New York Philharmonic, conducting the 9^th Symphony. It was long ago and we looked at this repertoire as being relatively unknown, although the 2^nd Symphony was performed, maybe because of this huge choir and voice – it was somehow considered to be very grand and successful.

Only later, when I was developing through Shostakovich, could I travel back and start to think about what it is that links Shostakovich’s works to this great cycle of Mahler symphonies and why Mahler’s symphonies can be better understood or better heard if you already have this experience of Shostakovich’s symphonies, especially the 4^th Symphony. In my case, it helped me.

When I started to record Mahler symphonies, the very thought of recording the 7^th Symphony was most daunting and difficult for me. I had conducted this symphony maybe six or seven times with the Rotterdam Philharmonic and with the Mariinsky Orchestra, and I was never happy with myself. What was even more frightening was that I listened to two or three recordings by very famous conductors and I didn’t want to confess, even to myself, that I didn’t feel very impressed. There was some problem with this symphony for me when I conducted it, always at some point in the final movement. We went with the Rotterdam Philharmonic to perform in several cities and I remember very well a concert in Prague, in the Rudolphinum. It’s a good hall with a good acoustic, even if it may be slightly small for Mahler. And the Rotterdam Orchestra is a pretty good orchestra and I was already a pretty experienced conductor, including performances of Mahler’s symphonies, and yet, even after this concert which was good acoustically and I couldn’t possibly complain about anything, the public was there, there was a feeling of a big occasion, but again I felt that I still didn’t have a key to understanding this certainly problematic symphony. So, to be honest, I spent a sleepless night in London before the recording and I made some very radical decisions because I felt I had to stop trying to present this symphony like a gigantic work. I wanted the finale to sound, in a very simple way, like something you could call a Rondo-finale – although it is orchestrated much more powerfully than famous finales of Haydn trios or symphonies, it is after all a Rondo-finale. And I felt that I had to find a combination of power and intensity with a strange feeling of lightness, not extremely thoughtful, not with an extremely important statement. Because sometimes a final movement can be going away from an important statement, like going back to normal from a dramatic moment in your life – looking forward to something else. That’s how I saw it myself. If you start with this famous solo – it is of course very intense and psychologically dark, the beginning of the 7^th Symphony. In many ways you can compare it with the final movement of the 5^th Symphony, except that the 5^th Symphony is shaped in such a way that you don’t want to add anything and you don’t want to take anything away from it because it’s just perfect. With the 7^th Symphony you have to spend some time on it and maybe be the nastiest critic of yourself. So that’s what happened to me, this was my experience of this symphony. Finally, when this recording in London took place, I felt for the first time that I was close to it starting to work. This was maybe one and a half years ago or nearly two years ago. That was quite a story with this symphony.

I have not only a big sense of curiosity, but I also have a strong desire to play these symphonies in different halls. Acoustics matter a lot. You can create a miraculous feeling of being one with nature or an even more miraculous feeling of one genius musician being able to portray an entire universe – this is a phenomenal quality in Mahler’s symphonies. Sometimes, there are moments when you think that you can see all the planets and all this space that is somehow given to us – we do not own this space, but we can describe it, we can think about it, we can maybe explore it with our minds, with our imagination, with our hopes, with our dreams and also with our fears. Because Mahler wrote these symphonies in Austria in the summertime and he was what I call ‘one with nature’ or a part of nature – there were all these cowbells and this fantastic feeling of being on top of the world, in a sense. Mountains give you this feeling. I personally find it hard to decide which I like best – mountains or oceans that you can spend hours looking at, thinking how incredible our universe is, how incredible this nature is that we are constantly trying to destroy.

Another thing that you feel when you are inside practically any of Mahler’s symphonies is the noise of the city, the chaos; they are very urban. And even before World War I there was this increasingly strong feeling of an imminent catastrophe. If Mahler had lived for another five years, he could have given us something shockingly different even to the last Adagio of the 10^th Symphony. But he already heard this painful, catastrophic, chaotic, crazy, abnormal and screaming intensity of those cities in Europe where the political protests and tensions were mounting and mounting. I think that composers have this incredible ability.

Also, Shostakovich’s 4^th Symphony doesn’t describe 1931, but possibly 1937. Shostakovich anticipated what happened after he composed this symphony. You can already hear Shostakovich being full of fear. Not the fear of being afraid of somebody, but the fear of an entire country, of millions of people. There is something coming, you can just feel it. It’s incredibly big and incredibly frightening, it is catastrophic, with terrible consequences, but it’s coming.

The same is true for Mahler. They both lived before World War I and Mahler composed some of his most tense symphonies then. And Shostakovich composed his ‘War Symphonies’ which are basically the strongest statement about World War II made by any musician in the world, I think.

It is both easy and difficult to talk about Mahler symphonies because now everybody knows these symphonies. There are wonderful performances and one has to try to make Mahler’s music more easily accessible to a generation of people who are now maybe 15 or even 20 years old. They should now be ready to move forward and to discover what is so incredible about Mahler and his symphonies. For my generation, there were not that many recordings or books or different great conductors who made all these statements about all these symphonies. It was largely unknown what people thought about the cycle of Mahler symphonies. Of course, there were great people like Leonard Bernstein, Tennstedt, Solti or Kubelik, but it took many decades before the cycle of Mahler symphonies became what you can call the property of many great orchestras and audiences here and there. It took time. Even in Vienna it took time and it was not that easy for Mahler in Vienna, as we all know. But I suspect that there will be room for new interpretations which will be quite different from even the most famous ones. I think it will come in the next ten, 15 or 20 years.

Mahler was a great conductor, so he made it nearly impossible for conductors to bring their own personality into the performances, to take like a white sheet of paper and start to improvise. It is so structured and clear that it is next to impossible to distance yourself from it. But still there is room and, again, it is very important in which hall any given symphony is performed because the acoustical sensation is needed. It has to be a miraculous feeling when you listen to those adagios, for example. It has to be ultra, ultra special in terms of the kind of sonority one can achieve. And this is where we have to know in what direction it should go and how it can be even more incredible and successful.

The Musikverein is a great hall. Maybe it’s slightly dangerous for a Mahler symphony because if you play the 6^th Symphony here, which I actually did once, it is almost impossible to play, with all this huge brass in the final movement. The Musikverein is more suited to the 4^th Symphony. You need the acoustics of the Musikverein for the quiet moments, for these wonderful silences, which are almost non-existent, these silences which become music, and at the same time you need room for these big, dramatic statements. It’s very difficult to combine.

Mahler went to Saint Petersburg. Can you compare the Mahler tradition in Saint Petersburg with the Mahler tradition in Amsterdam where he also performed?

Gergiev: Well, he went to Saint Petersburg twice. He conducted music by other composers, especially Beethoven, but he also conducted his own 5^th Symphony. It seems that he was extremely impressed with the orchestra and his words are known; he had a good response and he was given a very good reception. When he went to Saint Petersburg, he was a happy man. It was not an unhappy period of his life.

On the other hand, in Amsterdam, he had Willem Mengelberg. Mengelberg was not only one of the most loyal and one of the most gifted conductors, but also one of the most powerful because he already had a huge following. He was in a position to do what he found most interesting and most important. Also, Saint Petersburg was already heading towards disaster. Things were already looking slightly dangerous in 1905. There had already been a famous bloody event which was followed by maybe smaller but equally dangerous incidents. The system was already shaken. The Mariinsky Theatre, of which I have been artistic director for 22 years, was one of the strongest, if not the strongest, theatres in the world. All these composers were there – Schönberg, Debussy, Richard Strauss, Mahler, Bartok or Hindemith and of course all the big Russian composers. Stravinsky was there all the time because his father played leading bass at the Mariinsky Theatre, so he came to the rehearsals as a boy and heard many great performances. Prokofiev heard many great performances at the Mariinsky, including ‘Kitezh’ and some Wagner operas. So they were all practically children of this tradition. At the same time, Czarist Russia was reaching perhaps its most dangerous period for centuries. The last years were the most difficult for the Romanovs. The Imperial Theatre was becoming increasingly popular and after the death of Tchaikovsky, when Rimsky-Korsakov was still alive, Saint Petersburg was practically flooded with the great musical names, everyone was coming – Nikisch, Bülow, Hans Richter, not just for single concerts, but they were performing entire festivals. Hans Richter twice conducted the Festival for Wagner Operas, as it was then called. And of course there were also others, like Karl Muck, Felix Mottl, Weingartner – to name them all would make for a long list. But it was a fantastic time in Saint Petersburg – Petrograd, as it was called – before the Revolution. It still continued, even when the Bolsheviks were there, until the late 1920s, early 1930s. Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Alexander von Zemlinsky, they all came. Unfortunately, Mahler had already been dead for a long time, but Zemlinsky continued to come; Erich Kleiber came several times and had a lot of work there. And some of those conductors would perform Mahler symphonies. They were big scholars, especially Sollertinsky who was one of the first influences on Shostakovich, making him open his eyes and ears to the cycle of Mahler symphonies. That was very important.

I am sorry that I talk about Russians or the history of Saint Petersburg, but your question was directly linked to the history of the Mariinsky Theatre and Orchestra which now plays all these symphonies. And we have young players now who learn very quickly how to play Mahler symphonies and how to find the right sound, but it is terribly important that the best American, Austrian or German orchestras, the best London orchestras or the best Russian orchestras play Mahler’s symphonies; this is the way it should go, the way it happened with Brahms’s or Beethoven’s symphonies. Because you cannot claim that the only one way to play a Brahms symphony is this way; there is no Berlin Philharmonic way – there is a Berlin Philharmonic way with Karajan or with Furtwängler or with Abbado and so on. So there is not only one way. And it seems that the same can now be said about the Vienna Philharmonic tradition, they have a fantastic sonority, the golden sound, but it can be quite different from what it was like 30 years ago or 15 years ago, or what it will be like in ten years time.

I myself find it very interesting and important to work with young musicians in Russia and to find a way to make these symphonies tell us more than we think we know. We have a fantastic hall now in Saint Petersburg; it’s a new hall, only three years old. And Mahler’s symphonies, even great powerful ones like the 8^th Symphony, can sound incredibly good there. I have experience with this, which is also documented on records. I recorded the 8^th Symphony in St Paul’s Cathedral in London. On the one hand, the acoustics in one of the biggest cathedrals in the world was of course a big problem as there was a huge echo, but, on the other hand, it also offered something that you cannot find in any concert hall. There was this space and in some passages it sounded so magical. The atmosphere makes you treat the symphony, the sound and the tempi in a different way. That was my experience. And I think it’s not only the 8^th Symphony, in some way you could also do it with the 2^nd Symphony, as it has this magical choir of human voices. It was very important and very risky. But it was a very important experience for me and instead of refusing, I would maybe sometime request that the 8^th Symphony should again be performed in a huge space, maybe in one of the biggest cathedrals in the US or in Europe. I don’t think it’s only problematic, because towards the end of this symphony there are certain passages with the orchestra, with children in the choir, with the human voice and of course this soprano – in some ways you shouldn’t really understand where the voice comes from. This sensation or feeling actually works very well in a cathedral.

Technically speaking, when you teach, what is the biggest challenge when conducting Mahler?

Gergiev: I don’t teach – I try to help some conductors and give them opportunities to conduct. I myself never forget that I was a winner of the Herbert von Karajan Competition; I was 24 years old at the time. But it took me another ten, maybe even eleven years before I was standing in front of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra – the orchestra which in my eyes and for my ear was the orchestra that brought me to this high society of great performers, great conductors and great orchestras. Because it was a sensational orchestra – it is a great orchestra now, but then it was a sensational combination of conductor and orchestra. I am speaking about Mravinsky. But I still cannot explain why I was never able to conduct them when I was 25 or 27. For some strange reason, which had nothing to do with music, I couldn’t do it. Now I don’t regret this, I think I needed to grow and do a lot of other things before I was able to deservedly stand in front of the best orchestra in my country.

You are speaking generally, not only about Mahler?

Gergiev: No, it has nothing to do with Mahler. You create an environment for young conductors to help them grow. They have to grow. How do they grow? Sitting at home is good, but learning the scores is even better. Listening to somebody’s recordings may also be informative, but unless you conduct yourself you will not be growing very rapidly, even if you are very gifted. I experienced this myself in my own life, I don’t have to hear these stories, I can tell this story myself. It took me eleven years before I conducted this orchestra and it was with a very unusual program. However, I was already the music director of the Kirov Orchestra which is another very good orchestra in Saint Petersburg, they are competitors. And I was standing in front of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra which was the orchestra of my youth and of my student years and the orchestra of our biggest idol, for all of us conductors, Yevgeny Mravinsky – an unbelievable conductor. In many ways one can easily compare him to Furtwängler or Mengelberg because in his own way he was as important as any other conductor of the century. And we shouldn’t forget that he was close to Shostakovich and gave many first readings of his symphonies. He also knew Prokofiev and performed many great symphonies by him and he was also a great ballet conductor. He never gave up his love for ballets such as ‘The Nutcracker’ or ‘Sleeping Beauty’, or ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by Prokofiev. It was not only well known that he loved the ballet, but he also continued to conduct ballets. And how he did this, you cannot imagine! Mravinsky’s performance of excerpts of ‘The Nutcracker’ could be a life changing experience. And one thinks that ‘The Nutcracker’ is music for children, but with a big maestro it becomes even more than a symphony.

You told me once that you admired Kubelik and Solti and their Mahler interpretations …

Gergiev: I cannot say that I admire only them. I think you can learn from many conductors, so today I wouldn’t say that it’s only Kubelik and Solti. Actually, I listened a long, long time ago to Kubelik’s performance of Mahler’s 7^th Symphony and it did not support my desire to conduct this symphony. I thought that if it didn’t immediately impress me even with Kubelik, then I was even more skeptical of my own ability to do it well. But that was long ago, really long ago.

Which was the first Mahler symphony that you conducted?

Gergiev: It was probably the final movement of the 1^st Symphony. I was probably given the final movement to conduct, but it was long ago and you forget these things. But then I found that it was the 2^nd Symphony that I most wanted to conduct. It was strange that it was not the 5^th Symphony, but rather the 2^nd. Then I immediately wanted to conduct the 6^th Symphony. For a young conductor, it is clear that the 6^th Symphony has so much power. I don’t know how tragic the symphony is, but it is clearly so emotionally charged. I remember trying it maybe 17 or 18 years ago. And I conducted it in Sweden with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra; it was not even in Saint Petersburg.

Which Mahler symphony do you feel closest to?

Gergiev: That is very difficult to say now. I somehow do not feel that there is one symphony that I can call my favorite. Recording the cycle was something that I not only took very seriously, but you try to be as close as possible to each symphony that you conduct, and since I conducted all of them, I like them equally. I recently conducted the 10^th Symphony and I spent a lot of time trying to make it sound like a piece of music composed by a composer who was mysteriously approaching his last months; his death was imminent. But when I am performing this music, I still make a big effort to incorporate the composer’s smile, if not his laughter. Because even if it is not completely hopeful, it is still somewhat hopeful music. You see the difference between complete hopelessness and some sense of hope. I also always do this with Shostakovich’s music – I refuse to think that Shostakovich had anything to do with propaganda or dictators, Stalin or Hitler, and that’s why he composed his symphonies. Shostakovich composed his symphonies because he wanted to compose music. And I always try to find the music in his music. Sometimes I am asked to participate in discussions and answer questions and sometimes there are two to three hundred people in a hall and you talk about certain composers or certain music and Shostakovich faces this problem. Stravinsky, in contrast, said that his music should not be interpreted or tied to any historical events. Obviously, you can say that if Stravinsky insisted that not even World War II had any influence on his music, then this is not quite true, since the ‘Symphony in Three Movements’ is in a way a war symphony. It remains a theatrical symphony; there are three movements and you don’t think of them in terms of tempo. Maybe not only Balanchine felt that it is strongly linked to the theatre, to dance and the movement and language of the human body. But I think it’s also linked to the tensions during the middle of the century and World War II. But he didn’t want to talk about it and he was right.

If Mahler had written his autobiography, if he had lived another ten or 15 years, maybe he would have given us explanations and would have made it easier for us to understand why he composed this, in many ways, strange Adagio. Strange to us, but then the music of Berg or Webern or Schönberg and many others makes it sound like perhaps a first statement of the New Viennese School, instead of waiting for Schönberg to theoretically explain what the New Viennese School is, what the compositional technique of atonal music is. So we are still not entirely clear on this and I think this Adagio should sound like yet another statement about human life, about nature and this huge musical world in which you constantly want to progress, even we small people. You go from yesterday’s concert to today’s concert and you think how you can progress, how you can improve upon something and make it more interesting or quieter. So that’s the nature of music and musicians. It’s a process of living elements; we’re all living creatures, living, changing. And Mahler, of course, couldn’t possibly repeat in his 10^th Symphony what he had done in the 7^th Symphony or even in the 9^th Symphony. Although there is of course a feeling that the Adagio in the last movement recreates the atmosphere of the Adagio in the 9^th Symphony, when he was still thinking that he was not out of this world – the atmosphere of this Adagio somehow reminds you of that of the 10^th Symphony.

One week ago, I conducted the 10^th Symphony, in our new hall, and it never sounded so human and so elegant in my hands, in a way. It never felt more natural. It had been very painful for me before and it is always very difficult, even for very good orchestras, to capture the nature of this Adagio, I think.

What would you have asked Mahler?

Gergiev: Well, I would certainly have asked him to conduct at least one of his symphonies for us. And I certainly wouldn’t have missed it, if he had been in a position to agree.

Are there any questions that you would have liked to ask him about the scores?

Gergiev: When I see the score of a Mahler symphony, I just have to continue to ask myself why he said, for instance, ‘kräftig’ – OK, it’s clear; he wanted it to be powerful. Then he will warn you not to go too fast or not to drag, ‘nicht schleppen’, so that you don’t make the audience feel like they’ve just taken a sleeping pill. These are very famous remarks made by Mahler and everyone knows about them. But to name certain movements of certain symphonies, to give them an indication, like the Rondo-finale, is something we don’t think about very much in case of a finale. But a Rondo-finale is something else, there has never been a rondo which is tragic – it somehow proposes that it will be repetitive, that it will mostly be funny, like with Mozart or Beethoven, but it will be relatively short. If you don’t find the key, these repetitions in the 7^th Symphony can be really torturous – it’s not really about how fast you play it, but it’s a lot to do with how pushy and how aggressive the statements are and how frequently you make these statements about your power. Otherwise it’s like someone incessantly shouting something into your ear that you have already understood. If they continue to tell you the same thing, then you will start to lose interest or become irritated. And this can also happen with performances of Mahler’s symphonies, so the conductor has to find a way to let the music breathe and make these statements most powerful – very often it even screams. One has to sometimes control one’s own energy and be reserved, rather than to sweat and make people suffer. Because very often conductors don’t even realize how painful it can be for the audience to listen to a concert where the percussion or the brass are forced to scream. It’s like with singers who are not polished and then you see them in a Wagner opera and in order to just be heard over the orchestra, they have to scream rather than continue to sing.

That’s one of the most intriguing moments and I would love to see this happen, even if it’s just in a dream, that Gustav Mahler is suddenly there and conducts at least one of the movements of his symphonies. I am sure that the orchestra would sound very powerful, but he doesn’t try to be the busiest composer – busy in the sense that there are so many things going on at the same time in his symphonies that you can’t figure out what is actually important, what the composer wants to achieve. It’s just so much, it’s like people talking and screaming and it just goes on and on for 20 minutes. And that’s just one final movement. That’s one of the difficulties about reading Mahler, so you need a certain amount of experience and to have conducted big compositions like ‘Götterdämmerung’, for instance, which lasts for five or six hours with intermissions. You have to know how to shape this last opera in the ‘Ring’ cycle. Even ‘Siegfried’ can be torturous, just to figure out how to shape it. Maybe it’s not Wagner’s fault and it’s certainly not Mahler’s fault, but due to their repetitive nature, certain compositions can have quite uncomfortable lengths. But with a good artist on the podium it’s possible, and I am sure Mahler knew better than anyone how to shape it.

He wrote about the flexibility of tempi which is so important for him…

Gergiev: Look, there is never only one decision for any composition with regards to the tempo. I will conduct ‘Tristan’ in one theatre and then in another and the total time difference can be five minutes. The distances also matter, if the theatre is very big. To keep the energy in the slow tempo and to feel the space, so that it feels like the whole space is filled with the music, like with the beginning of ‘Lohengrin’. You need a great orchestra, but you also need a space which responds to you so that you feel that everybody should be happy now because it sounds so gorgeous. But sometimes it sounds dry and small and then you cannot say that you know the tempi. You just have to do what you can so that the sound becomes a little more alive. Sometimes you just raise your voice or you have to move forward a little. But it’s a secret which is normally God-given. It’s very difficult to explain these things because they’re natural. But the most attentive listener to the orchestra is normally the conductor. Of course the audience listens, but people forget that the conductor also listens. He does not sing. Of course he moves his hands, although Mravinsky’s gestures were very small. He looked all the time, everything was in the eyes.

What did Mahler want?

Gergiev: Look, he was a famous director of the Staatsoper, but he never composed operas. Maybe this was because of the greatness of the operas that he conducted. His 8^th Symphony is maybe his only opera, in a way. I sometimes feel this way. I was talking about this to one very famous artist, who happens to be my friend, and I was thinking about how to bring this composition, the 8^th Symphony, to the stage. Of course without a ridiculous staging, but still to make it a very powerful performance, what we call a ‘mystery’. It can be an opera or some sort of movement on stage, not exactly a ballet, but some ‘mystery’ – ‘Mysteria’ we call it in Russia. We have compositions, which are sometimes very successful, that you can move to the theatre stage, away from the concert hall. Because even if you are in a cathedral, it’s already like a theatre – what you see is already far from the concert hall. I don’t know if Mahler ever wanted to compose operas, but he conducted Mozart or Beethoven or Wagner or Tchaikovsky’s ‘Onegin’, ‘Pikovaya Dama’ and ‘Iolanta’. Mahler conducted ‘Iolanta’. I conducted ‘Iolanta’ in Vienna in 1992; it was one of my very first performances here. And Marcel Prawy came to this concert and he told me ‘You are the second conductor to conduct ‘Iolanta’ in Vienna. You know who the first was?’ And he didn’t even give me time to think and said ‘It was Gustav Mahler’.

That’s interesting… What did Mahler want philosophically speaking?

Gergiev: Well, maybe it’s my turn now to ask you what you would have asked Gustav Mahler if you were given the chance to talk to him. Maybe you should ask him this question. It’s very difficult for me to talk about music and especially to talk about Gustav Mahler and his deepest thoughts. I am quite sure that he wanted to be a happy man and a happy musician. He was a man who sometimes went so far beyond what you routinely hear that, famously, some of the musicians, especially in New York, simply didn’t understand him. Being a gigantic musician, it was the highest caliber of music making. And if anyone could, then it was he who could explain things and demand from any orchestra in the world certain things in order to constantly raise the quality. There is no doubt that he knew everything about any instrument, about orchestration and so on. But the truth is that even very experienced musicians found it difficult to understand him – I just conducted the New York Philharmonic, which is now of course totally changed, but they are a wonderful orchestra, they can play anything. But Mahler had trouble just making himself understood. Sometimes, they made this known in an uncomfortable way, maybe even in a rude way. But they just didn’t know what the conductor was talking about. A lot of them didn’t care whether he was a composer or not because his symphonies were not performed. But sometimes a conductor is what I call so far ahead of the average level of his colleagues. Maybe this was his little tragedy. Maybe it was not that often that he had a hundred musicians who would share everything with him, who would put some love and some warmth and their whole heart into the symphonies.

I think that this was most probably a very painful experience for him. Because it is enough even if you conduct a Beethoven symphony and you see that your colleagues on stage do not understand your intentions, but for this to happen with your own music, for it not to be understood, not to be supported… It could in the best case be ironic, but in the worst case it could be interpreted as aggression against his compositions and against him. So this might have strongly influenced his early death.

He was of course very emotional and, famously, his relationships with orchestras, with musicians, with his colleagues were not always very easy. Your nerves either give you a balance or make you feel completely out of balance.

One last question: Do you think that Mahler is now completely understood and accepted in Russia?

Gergiev: I think Mahler is respected in Russia and I think I and my orchestra contribute to this more than any other conductor or orchestra in Russia. We played maybe in ten cities. This is a big number because we talk about cities with maybe a million and a half or two million people living there. The Mariinsky Orchestra is one of the better known Russian orchestras worldwide; it is quite well known. We played for instance in Kazan, performing the 8^th Symphony. We used not only our choir, but also a local choir. It was a massive event and it was great to see how many young musicians were there, practically hanging from the chandeliers. It was more than full and there were a lot of young people sitting and standing. In Yekaterinburg it was the same story and also in my native city of Vladikavkaz where we played Mahler’s 5^th Symphony. That was also very special. We gave a massive performance in Nizhny Novgorod, in Moscow and in Saint Petersburg… So it started to look like a tradition or even a movement. Every two to three months we performed and now our concerts are relatively widely watched and heard. Normally they take place in the center of Russian musical life, in Moscow or Saint Petersburg. Anything I do with the Mariinsky Orchestra is right in the center of public attention. We don’t have any peripheral corners. It’s exactly what I remember Kondrashin or Mravinsky doing; every concert with Mravinsky was an event.

Would you say that the audiences understand Mahler because of their Shostakovich experience?

Gergiev: I think I am helped myself; maybe some other people are as well. I certainly feel much more protected when I approach Mahler’s score with all my experience of Shostakovich. I hear certain things which maybe people do not find immediately. And it’s not about which interval or what tonality, it’s to do with the musical intensity – the way the music tries to express what is in your heart or on your mind. There is a way, musically, to speak out. This is where Shostakovich and Mahler are in some ways similar. Of course, Shostakovich was someone who followed, someone who heard his, if not mentors, then certainly his big predecessors. Brahms famously composed his 1^st Symphony and it turned out as Beethoven’s 10^th Symphony, correct? Maybe Shostakovich’s 4^th Symphony is closest to Mahler. He didn’t really borrow the musical material; it is really quite different, much more dissonant. It is a fantastic symphony and we actually performed it in Vienna not so long ago. It’s a fantastic symphony, but I strongly believe that Shostakovich, although he was a very Russian composer, couldn’t avoid, or maybe didn’t want to avoid, the most fundamental emotional power he was given by Mahler and his cycle. Maybe Shostakovich did not want to distance himself from it; he knew that it was a great musical statement, that this was the pinnacle, so to speak. Similarly to the Beethoven cycle or the Tchaikovsky cycle – Tchaikovsky was a great symphonic composer. His opera ‘The Queen of Spades’ is one of the most symphonic operas ever written, and also one of the best operas.

So Shostakovich was helped by his own tradition, the Russian tradition, as well as by Mahler and this enabled him to become one of the most powerful symphonists of all time, like Mahler.

And he said that if he could take only one record to a desert island that he would choose ‘Das Lied von der Erde’…

Gergiev: Sure, sure. It was absolutely clear that they spent a lot of time in the late 1920s analyzing Mahler. They probably also had a chance to look at some of his scores when visitors were coming. I am sure they talked about Mahler, not only with Klemperer, but also with many others coming from Germany or Czechoslovakia or Austria. This was clearly the case.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler
Transcript: Agnes Vukovich
29.5.2010, Vienna
© Universal Edition