“For conductors Mahler seems to be to be the most personal composer”

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

Gatti: I began at nine, ten to study music. And of course the names of the composers who were familiar to me were Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Rossini, Verdi – Mahler was totally unknown to me. Then I heard my father say ‘Mahler, Mahler – there is a symphony of Mahler on the radio’. And I said ‘But who is this composer?’. He said ‘It’s fantastic music, listen!’ I didn’t want to listen. Then, growing up, at twelve, thirteen, almost every evening he brought home a (very cheap) record. It was the whole repertoire, from Mozart to Stravinsky; he just wanted to introduce me to the orchestral sound. I remember he bought the 1st Symphony conducted by Bruno Walter, and so the first time I listened to the music of Mahler was with my father in our sitting room – at least 20 minutes of the 1st Symphony. And there I was, listening, without any particular emotion at that moment, but it was important that subconsciously I was absorbing his style.

How did you proceed?

Gatti: The second impact was much stronger. It was when I was studying at the conservatory in Milan. I listened to the 6th Symphony performed by the European Community Youth Orchestra conducted by Claudio Abbado. That I think was at the end of the 70s. The concert was fantastic – the experience! I think I was fourteen or fifteen. I remember that the next day I went to the library of the conservatory to borrow the score of the 6th. I bought the record and spent weeks and weeks listening to the record with headphones on, reading the score at the same time. This was my first, really serious impression of Mahler. Since then I began to buy scores, records, and to listen carefully – the 6th, the 1st, the 4th, the 5th. Then came the 9th, afterwards the 2nd and 3rd, then the others. I studied in Milan and was able to listen to concerts by the Radio Symphony Orchestra at the conservatory as well as at La Scala. I heard a lot of Mahler live and very well conducted.

What is the right approach for a conductor to Mahler’s world?

Gatti: For conductors today Mahler seems to be the most personal composer. Everybody has his own ideas about Mahler’s music. Sometimes – I don’t want to be hard with what I say –, sometimes there is too much, because: why are we sometimes so afraid to play Beethoven, a symphony of Mozart or Beethoven, and take so much care with the text? With Mahler we take so many liberties. Instead I think that Mahler wrote all those notes, the “Anmerkungen”, in the scores in order to instruct the conductor carefully. Probably because of this kind of romantic idea of being a performer, i.e. to ‘eat the music’ and to create a new piece, this can become a bit extreme, as it did in his time. We know that Wagner brought a lot of freedom into the conducting style; a lot of new ideas. And on the other hand, during Mahler’s time, Toscanini began to bring back more purity to the music. Not so histrionic, not so much personal feeling, but just trying to find what is behind the notes.

When did you start to conduct Mahler?

Gatti: The first Mahler symphony I conducted was the 4th, in Venice 1989, at La Fenice. For this concert I had decided to try a Mahler Symphony – I was 27 then. I remember that during the first half hour of the rehearsal I did not understand a thing – just a lot of noise that came from here and there. I didn’t have the feeling of being in control of the situation. I remember that during the break I went to the dressing room. I was alone and I thought ‘I have to change the programme’. I was supposed to be in control of Mahler, I had studied that symphony day and night, it was in my blood, but I could not control it! During this fifteen-minute break I said: ‘No, no – I have to control the situation’. So I returned and began to rehearse almost bar by bar. The feeling of being in control of this new way of composing – I confess that until then I had conducted Tchaikovsky, Mozart, some Beethoven symphonies, but not the complex polyphony of Mahler. It was a shock but also so useful for it to have this kind of impact on me – and then to gain control of it.

How did you proceed?

Gatti: Since then I have conducted the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th and 9th symphonies as well as the Adagio of the 10th, all the Lieder except Das Lied von der Erde and Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. And time after time I have tried to understand what Mahler is saying with his notes. Recently I attended a concert of Mahler’s 5th. It was a good performance, but no one, to my mind, had real respect for the notes. The first triplets are marked “flüchtig”, just to leave a sort of freedom. It was totally pushed up in tempo. Then, when Mahler marks “vorwärts” or “schwungvoll”, I heard a ritardando. I was a bit annoyed about this, because I could not understand why the personality of a conductor was imposing another kind of image onto the music. We have to take off our masks, I think, and especially with Mahler return to the essence of the tension that the music can create.

Which Mahler-conductors have influenced you?

Gatti: I am more attracted today by interpretations of Mahler like those of Kubelik, Klemperer … really dry, humble interpretations, but rather deep interpretations that are totally respectful. Or the new Boulez which I absolutely adore. The Third is outstanding. And Pierre made a new discovery of the music, it sounds really almost like a modern composer.

We can talk about the nostalgia of his music. But sometimes the nostalgia is confused, like molasses, like honey. It’s clear that he wanted the Adagietto to be conducted in seven minutes, or in seven and a half minutes. I am not able to do so. I manage it in nine minutes, or no more than ten. I also thought: why is the Adagietto so slow in performances? It becomes an adagio grave. Instead, according to the notes, it seems that it was actually a sort of Lied to Alma, a sort of love-letter. Also, the position of the Adagietto in the second half of the symphony, if we split it in two parts, the first two movements are a really dramatically desperate world. And then, when the scherzo is starting, it is like opening a window in the morning and listening to the postilion’s horn. It is a totally new symphony, it seems composed by another hand. The adagietto takes place after the third movement; it seems like a little island of peace. And because it is the meaning of adagietto, Love Letters, it is just a parenthesis of that. I think that conducting it in seven or eight minutes is today a great risk but it is right. I don’t know if the slow tempi are taken because we are also influenced by the famous Visconti movie – but it is a sort of autumnal nostalgia in the Visconti and in my opinion it was used improperly. Even if the magic nevertheless works quite well, in terms of cinematic results.

You said that Mahler was a prophet of the 20th century. Would you agree that he anticipated the catastrophes of this century? Or would that go too far? In which sense might he be a prophet in your opinion?

Gatti: It is very difficult for me to understand. Mahler like all composers starts from one sort of style and then develops. He did so quite fast, because he died at 50. What I feel in his music is a sort of depression. And there is a sort of depression also when he wins. He is an overwhelming winner. If I compare him, and sorry if I do, with Beethoven when he is winning, in the finales of his symphonies, everybody knows that he is a real winner. Mahler needs to say ‘You see, I’m winning. You see, I am here, I am still alive’. And in some overwhelming finales like the 5th, like the 7th, like the 1st, it seems he probably wants show even more that he is a happy person. But behind, also in the fortissimi, in the brightness there is a sort of depression, of ‘tristesse’. It’s like in our time today, if only we have time to enjoy what we have. But we are living in a moment in which the internet is the metronome of our life. And we are unable to stop time and to think for a moment about our life. Today we cannot enjoy the progression because the progression is eating us. And in humans I think there is also a sort of depression, because if you are able to obtain and to arrive at something, if you take a step, there will still be something else that you have to reach. This is just a race against time.

I am a man of this century – I don’t know what happened during the last century, in Mahler’s time. It was another time, but probably it also had crises like ours. I think that his music makes me unhappy in a way, and there is sometimes a feeling of eating a cake that is too sweet. Then you need to drink water to wash out your mouth. But if we take the last page of the 9th symphony, that is a page that Anton Webern could have been able to write. And also, for instance, the first movement of the 4th – the problem for me is to tell what is a homage. The whole symphony is a trip to paradise.

And also the idea of transfiguration in Mahler: the 4th symphony has this kind of trip. The first movement is the present life, then the dance, then the third movement that opens the gate to the last one. You have this trip to go to paradise. The 5th symphony starts with the funeral march, the second movement, which is also more dramatic, and then you go up with that. The first movement of the 4th symphony has this kind of scent of a homage to Haydn. But in the development Mahler began to return to being Mahler. He used horn ‘gestopft’ or with mute, he used strings with ‘legno battuto’ (‘geschlagenem Holz’) he used the mute, he wrote ‘Schalltrichter auf’ – so he used all the colours typical for his style.

But today we are living in a moment of crises. How did Mahler anticipate that? He probably did, but we don’t know how it was at Mahler’s time and we hope it was better than today. So Mahler probably thought that in time it would better than in his days. The answer is his development in the 4th – written at the beginning of the 20th century, using the new colours that he discovered with the orchestra.

To which music you feel the closest?

Gatti: Probably the 9th, probably his last symphony. I waited to conduct it. I conducted it for the first time when I was 37, and probably I was still too young. Because now I am 47 and getting older and older … I’m happy to have done it at that age because it is one of the scores that you live your life for. And it’s nice to see how it can develop. But it was probably a bit too risky for me to conduct it at the age of 37. I had the chance to conduct it for the first time in Rome, with my own orchestra. I was a bit protected. Of course my approach is always very humble, but sometimes this is not enough. I think that Mahler is sometimes used by performers to show how good they are as performers. We have to think carefully about that, because he is a man who suffered so much. When he was two years old he lost all his brothers! We cannot use his music just to show that we are fantastic.

So I am waiting to do the 7th, to do the 3rd. Now it is time to do them, but only after more than 20 years of conducting. I think it is time to try to say something about his music.

Sometimes I think it is a shame that he did not compose an opera. I like to find the theatre in his symphonies. There is always a tension between characters. One character and the other – and you see the two, three, four themes. It really works, as one of the greatest opera conductors that he was. All the time, when I work with the orchestra and there are a lot of string portamenti that Mahler asked for, if the orchestra is unable to understand this kind of portamenti, I say ‘Don’t play the portamenti as a technical thing but just as a result of vocal thinking’. If you sing the passage as a singer, and a singer makes a portamento, it’s probably what Mahler desired. He knew the voices very well, he knew the repertoire, he knew the singers. There is this connection between the human voice and the music he has written.

Pierre Boulez told us that he found a way to Mahler through Alban Berg. If you look at it from the other direction, in which way did Mahler open the doors to the Second Viennese School?

Gatti: The first answer, technically, is the twelve-tone-chords in the 10th symphony, the adagio, when he uses this chord for the fist time. We can also go back to the last Beethoven quartet if we are looking for a kind of technical solution. Of the three composers of the Vienna School, Berg is probably closest to Mahler – for this sense of nostalgia. And as Berg is typically Viennese, Mahler was here as guest of this town. I think they are very close because there is a sort of lyricism in the music of both the composers – still the harmony is unclear but there is some kind of island in the sense of cadenzas.

For me Lulu is much more tonal than Wozzeck. Of course you have in image of a B-minor chord … then it suddenly disappears … then you find a relation to another and another chord. But the series of the Violin Concertos is a 3rd, 5th, all together. There is a return to harmony, this sort of tonality, but which can be seen through a sort of fog. This is probably the key between late Mahler and the music of Alban Berg. When Mahler showed with the Scherzo Burlesque that he knew counterpoint, he had written a double fugue for it. He wanted to show that he was able to write counterpoint.

The background of the Second Viennese School is probably coming from the Bach-lessons, fugues and canons. I see Berg and Brahms more related in the sense of control of the form and the way they are able to work on the ancient form: the form of the variation, the passacaglia form and also the sonata form, how they are able to squeeze the material they have. Mahler, on the other hand, did not use the variation form in his symphonies.

In Wozzeck, with the mono rhythm in Lulu in act 1,  I think the composer is more related to the composers of the Classical School, the First Viennese School; more than the late Romantic composers. Leaving the technical point of view, listening to Brahms and Berg shows the music going fluently, although it is built up note by note, mathematically. From my point of view, this is the connection between the two composers. Listening to that music seems as if it comes so fluidly from the pencil. And instead it is the result of utmost work à la Beethoven in a way.

Mahler probably had a different impact on technical composition. The sonata form dominates, then he goes to the dance, with several ‘Lieder’, and the rondo form. And the only movement he had written in counterpoint was the Rondo Burlesque.

How do you see the relation between Mahler and Berg?

Gatti: Berg fills up his score with indications like ‘Ausbruch’, espressivi, crescendi, diminuendi. Every bar is indicated with a sort of ‘up-and-down’-dynamic. This is quite closer to Mahler. Sometimes in Mahler’s bars there are too many indications, the same with Berg. And sometimes there are indications that aren’t obvious – a line is going up, going down, naturally, the human feeling is just to open and to close. They mark open to close. If we are talking about sound – orchestral sound – Berg and Mahler are probably more or less of the same characteristic. One could say that Mahler is more trivial sometimes – but this is what he wanted to be. Berg showed more classical orchestration. If you look at the last pages of the Drei Orchesterstücke, this is really chaos. Before the hammer-blow it’s really chaotic.

But he didn’t have a chance to check the last works: the Violin Concerto, the suite of Lulu and the opera itself, because he died. The Violin Concerto and Lulu (he only heard Lulu suite once here in Vienna) are a miracle of orchestration. We then have ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ and the 9th Symphony that Mahler didn’t have the chance to hear. This is even more problematic with Bruckner, i.e. his 9th symphony, which he also didn’t have the chance to listen to. I find it sometimes difficult to make the score sound properly.

Would Mahler have revised his 9th? This was the only symphony he did not hear.

Gatti: Probably yes. I don’t know exactly where, but it already sounds very good. Some parts in the Rondo Burlesque are also quite strong and heavy. Just to get the transparency of the voices you really must have a super orchestra to play it properly. I never retouched that. Some conductors for instance take the last movement of the finale in the 1st symphony, the very last bar, and put the bass drum on the second note. I totally disagree with this because it is only the finale which is orchestrated with percussion. It’s not an echo but a very empty sound, just strings and the winds that are playing the second D, without percussion.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler, Universal Edition
Transcript: Angelika Worseg
13.5.2009, Vienna
© Universal Edition