“Mahler wanted to describe all of life, he wanted his music to be a universe in itself.”

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

Zinman: Yes I do, but I didn’t know it was Mahler at the time. It was in New York City when I was about thirteen years old, and I was taken to a rehearsal of the New York Philharmonic in New York City which Mitropoulos was conducting. And he was something which I had never heard before and didn’t know at all: I had studied the violin from the age of 6 and I played a lot of music, but I’d never heard this music before. And I thought maybe it was something Spanish, I didn’t know what it was – it was probably something from the 4th Symphony that was a little bit Spanish – and I was quite impressed by the sound of it, and I remember thinking ‘what is this?’ But I never found out. So after that I heard some Mahler on the radio, conducted by Bruno Walter, and I think it was probably the 4th, or the 1st, or the 9th Symphony, but I still didn’t know any Mahler so I just thought, yes, this is great music. Then later I went to the Oberlin Conservatory and there was a society called the Mahler Bruckner Society. I knew nothing about Bruckner and even less about Mahler, and the guys who were members of this fellowship were very weird people and so we kind of kept away from them. But this was in 1954, and there was already a Mahler Bruckner Society. And then, while I was at the Conservatory, we played Kindertotenlieder with a mezzo-soprano, and I played in the orchestra for that and it was really very important for me. I immediately got a score and I got records of the Symphonies and started listening to Mahler.

Then of course the most important time for me was when I finally left America, and I went first to England. And in England I heard Horenstein conduct the 3rd Symphony and I heard Solti conduct the 4th Symphony, and a lot of conductors were beginning to play more and more Mahler – this was in ’60 and ’61. And then I moved to Holland, where there is a tremendous Mahler tradition of course, and I got to hear all the Symphonies conducted by Haitink, who was very young. And I also conducted some Mahler myself; the first time I conducted the Concertgebouw Orchestra I played some of the Rückertlieder as part of the programme. And once when I replaced Haitink in a concert I did all of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, with Jessye Norman. And so then I became more and more steeped in Mahler, so when I got my own orchestra – the Rochester Philharmonic – I started to do all the Symphonies, and then when I went to Baltimore I did all the Symphonies there as well, sometimes twice. And now here I am doing all the Symphonies again.

Can you explain what it was that captured you in Mahler’s music?

Zinman: Well, at first you are attracted to it in the same way that you are attracted to the music of Berlioz, in that you are attracted by the kind of bizarre qualities of it. But then I began more and more to see the human qualities of it; how it really expresses human emotion, human thought, humanity’s striving for utopia. And as I got older and older of course I began to see more of that side of it. In my opinion the most impressive parts of Mahler are the calm parts and the contemplative parts, rather than the activity and freneticism of it. For me it is music that you can listen to over and over again, and find more and more and more in it. Like Beethoven’s music, it struggles and it speaks about questions that are very deep and important to humanity. Not only does it take into account the search for God and for the meaning of existence, but it deals with the frivolities of human life and what human life is, with all its warts and blemishes and so on: that’s all there in the music. It’s an amazing use of long form; he has a way of getting you through immense stretches of time without your being aware of it. So that’s what really attracts me to Mahler. And maybe I identify a little with Mahler, so…

In what way?

Zinman: Well I am also a conductor, and a lot of his music is about what a conductor does; how he balances ideas of texture and layer in an orchestra, and how to create balance. All of these things are very much present in his orchestration and in the way he uses the orchestra. He uses it in a very unique way – it’s much harder to play than Strauss for instance, because it requires all these chamber music elements, and opposing forces against each other, and people sometimes playing forte at the same time as others are playing piano, and so on. So it’s very fascinating as a conductor to look at this music and understand how great a conductor he was.

In the 60s there was the big Mahler renaissance connected with Bernstein. On the one hand he made Mahler popular, on the other hand he was accused of overpowering Mahler. Is there a danger of overpowering him?

Zinman: Yes, I think there is. I think the thing is that if you only see him as a neurotic, you’re missing a lot of what Mahler is, because he was also a very pure soul, and if you read about his conducting you can see what kind of a musician he was. He was a very exact musician, a very precise musician, and he was extremely interested in making sure that he was not overpowering everybody. Sometimes you have to overpower it, but these contrasts have to be there and they have to be layered in various ways; there is so much more to it than these elements. A piece like the 9th Symphony, which I’m doing tonight, has so many contrasts in it and so many layers and so many levels, and the most desperate feeling of crying out, and yet it has the most calm, beautiful moments. I think that all these ‘valleys’ and ‘peaks’ in the pieces need to be very carefully judged, you can’t just go for climax after climax.

Bernstein felt he was Mahler, so of course he believed greatly in everything that he did. And what’s very interesting to me about Mahler interpretations is that you can hear ten performances of any Mahler Symphony and they will be completely different from each other, whereas you hear ten performances of a Beethoven Symphony and they’re all the same. Mahler wrote down precise instructions for everything that he wanted, and Beethoven wrote nothing, yet they all end up playing it the same, and the Mahler performances are completely varied and different: various ideas of tempi, various ideas of balance, various ideas of expression, and so on. It really lets you get into that world. So when you hear Boulez conduct Mahler, or you hear Horenstein conduct Mahler, or you hear Bruno Walter conduct Mahler, or you hear Mitropoulos, or Abbado, or Karajan, or whoever, they’re all imposing their own very strong point of view on the music. But I also believe that the details in a Mahler score are very, very important, and if those can really be realised I think you get a very clear picture of what the music is.

Would you say that your approach to Mahler, in terms of your technical approach as a conductor, has changed?

Zinman: Yes. When I first started out with Mahler it was full of this wildness and so on, and now I leave the wildness to the orchestra and really concentrate on the line, and what I want to happen, and not on spontaneous combustion. And of course I have recorded the pieces, and it really helps to hear back what I was doing, and what the balance was like; it gets you to try to go for the little details as well as the big picture. And so we’ve almost finished [Zinman’s Mahler cycle with the Zürich Tonhalle Orchester] – we have 9 still to do, and then in January we will do the 10th Symphony, in the Carpenter version.

You mentioned that you had heard recordings of Bruno Walter; would you say that Walter came very close, and Klemperer as well? Did you meet either of these conductors? Or did you hear them conduct?

Zinman: I heard Klemperer when I was living in London. I heard him do the ‘Auferstehung’ [‘Resurrection’] Symphony, and that was very monumental. I can’t say that I knew enough Mahler then to really appreciate what he did, but I’ve heard some recordings since. In my opinion it’s a Klemperer-Mahler, whether it’s Mahler-Mahler or not. I’ll tell you an interesting story: I was the pupil of a French conductor called Pierre Monteux, and when I was studying with him I once asked him ‘Did you ever meet Mahler?’ And he said ‘Yes, I met Mahler, but I don’t like his music.’ And I asked what he was like, and he said, ‘Well, when Mahler came to Paris I was the first viola in the orchestra, and he came to do his 2nd Symphony. I was the assistant conductor of the orchestra, so I was hired to prepare the chorus and orchestra for him. So I prepared the 2nd Symphony, and he came and he conducted it, and I didn’t like it, but he was a great conductor.’ And I said, ‘But what was he like?’, and he said “Well, he was a little like George Szell, very precise, very strong, very small gestures”. But this was towards the end of Mahler’s life of course. But Monteux said he was a very exact person, and he said really he didn’t like him because Mahler hadn’t thanked him for preparing the chorus, so it was a very sad day in a way. And of course he wasn’t French, and the French tended to stand together. Monteux was not a Mahler person, but I became one in spite of that.

I heard that you once described the Mahler Symphonies as chapters of one big novel.

Zinman: Yes, well it’s a story that starts with this youthful idea of Jean Paul, the ‘Titan’, and so on. Each Symphony takes elements from the other Symphony and transforms them. So the 2nd deals with the idea of suddenly starting to struggle with these ideas: What does life mean? What are we given in life? Is there something after life? So the 2nd Symphony is all about that, that there will be a resurrection after death. The 3rd Symphony is about what nature and life give us, what flowers tell us, what love tells us, what God tells us, what children tell us, and all of these things. The 4th Symphony is another view of trying to get to God, but maybe through the eyes of a child. The 5th Symphony is a less religious idea, but still contains this idea of death and conquering death; and then of course the 6th is all about death, and the horrible idea that there is nothing after death, and the fear of death essentially. The 7th to me is a bit about war, and meeting the prince of darkness and all of these things about darkness, and then going into the light. The 8th Symphony is of course the apotheosis of Goethe’s idea of the ‘eternal feminine’, getting to God that way. And Das Lied von der Erde is about going off into eternity again, and finally, the 9th Symphony is about leave-taking and departure and what life means: the beauty of life and the tragedy of life. And then the 10th Symphony goes further still with these ideas, and so I think it’s just one continuance of the same point of view.

How do you personally deal with Mahler’s obsession with suffering and redemption?

Zinman: I think he was very deeply sensitive, and in a way he was a kind of martyr. He felt things very deeply and he had to express these as a part of life. I feel close to that; there are times when I’m very depressed and times when I’m very elated and I think it’s a part of life, what he’s trying to describe is a part of life. Of course he was terribly tortured – from 1907 onwards it was very hard for him, and his wife whom he loved madly was very unfaithful to him, but then he felt this tremendous love for her and it comes out strongly in the music. That has to be there. When we recorded the 6th Symphony and there is that theme [sings extract] I said, this is a portrait of Alma, but it’s not really a portrait of Alma, it’s a portrait of what he thought she was. She was actually something quite different. That whole period is a very intense story, if you look into the story of Alma and her relationships afterwards and godless marriages – it’s like a very bad soap opera actually. But he was such a perfectionist that essentially it was very hard for him to live. You see a picture of Strauss and Mahler together and Strauss is happy that he’s made lots of money and so on, and Mahler didn’t give a damn about money. But he was very keen as an opera conductor to make sure that everything was perfect and as a symphonic conductor as well, and in his own music it’s all about perfection.

Where can you see the modernism of Mahler?

Zinman: Well, you see it in Alban Berg immediately; you see how strongly he had been affected by, let’s say, Mahler’s 9th Symphony. Obviously he was writing after Mahler’s death, but the influence is tremendous because Wozzeck and Lulu could not have been written without Mahler 9. So Mahler’s modernism is a way of thinking on various levels, it’s very Freudian in the way that voices come and go, and ideas are subliminated, brought out, and layered – and this is what modern music does. It’s very close to Ives in a certain way, when Ives tried to bring all of nature into an idea, and the same kind of banality occurs in Ives as occurs in Mahler. So in a way it’s very reactionary music, but it’s also very modern and forward-looking. I think people like Schönberg and Berg and Webern really appreciated what Mahler was doing.

There is this story that Mahler took Ives’ 3rd Symphony back to Europe…

Zinman: I don’t know if that’s true, but I read that he saw a score of Ives’ 3rd Symphony at his publishers’, or maybe the 2nd Symphony, I don’t know. And maybe he brought it back because he wanted to play it with the New York Philharmonic in their next season, but he died. I don’t know if that’s true or not – I don’t think anyone can prove it.

In which direction do you think Mahler would have gone, had he lived?

Zinman: You know, it’s very hard to say. The 10th Symphony points towards modernism, but I don’t think he would have stepped over the edge as Schönberg did and abandoned tonality completely. I think tonality was very much part of his strategic plan in any symphony. But he was already using tonality in a very interesting and new way: the 9th Symphony with the submediant modulation, always going down by 3rds, is a new way of going through the circle of 5ths. There’s no longer the circle of 5ths but the submediant instead. And I think he would have discovered various other things, and maybe Schönberg would have influenced him, or Berg would have influenced him. But you can’t hypothesise, because you might as well ask, where would Mozart have gone, where would Beethoven have gone, where would all these other people have gone? For me he already went plenty far – I think the 9th Symphony is a document that we as human beings are very lucky to have.

Bernstein said that the first movement of the 9th deals with heart conditions. Would you go so far?

Zinman: No, I believe that little heartbeat is the mother’s heartbeat: the child is in with the mother, the child is born, and the child returns to the mother at the end of the first movement. But death is already in the scene: when you hear this sound when you are born, you already know that you’re going to die. So that fear is not his heartbeat maybe, but the idea of death already there at the beginning of life. To me, this is a very beautiful ending to a movement, because you have this idea again, these two motives – one is a whole step, and one is a half step – and it keeps struggling between the two; and finally at the end it just relaxes, the eyes close, and you’re home again with your mother. That’s what I think. What he had in the 8th Symphony, which is the Ewige-Weibliche, reappears at the start of the 9th Symphony.

Would you say that on a different level the 9th Symphony is a farewell symphony?

Zinman: Yes of course. Das Lied von der Erde was already that, but he didn’t want to make it his 9th Symphony. I think he realised that things weren’t working out, but he was still full of hope. When he was in New York and gave his last concerts, he was still hoping he would return and go on, and make music, and write more symphonies, so I don’t think it’s that sort of farewell. But he was always obsessed with this idea of fate, and he was afraid that his fate was this, and so he was trying to ward it off by encouraging it in a way. I don’t know – again it’s very Freudian. But I think we are lucky to have this music, we are very lucky. It gives the orchestras nowadays something wonderful to play, that challenges them a great deal and makes them work, but is also very satisfying: when you come to the end of a big Mahler Symphony, you feel that you have accomplished something.

Christian Thielemann recently said that you cannot educate an orchestra with Mahler’s 1st Symphony.

Zinman: With Mahler’s 1st?

Yes.

Zinman: Why? I mean of course you educate an orchestra with Brahms, and with Beethoven, and with Schubert, and with Mendelssohn, and with Mahler, and with Bruckner. I think for us, playing 1 through to 10 in order has been a tremendous education, and the orchestra has improved every time, and now they have a deep understanding of what they’re doing and how to do it, and they know that they understand how to do it. I don’t understand what that means at all.

So Mahler gives an orchestra the chance to improve in terms of flexibility, balance…

Zinman: Yes. It’s chamber music; they have to hear, they have to listen to what’s going on. There is so much subtlety in it. He had a desperate need for clarity, and you can see in all of his versions of the 5th Symphony that he is trying to make it work as far as balance is concerned. And you can see that even in the scores he hadn’t played yet, in the 9th Symphony for instance, there is this obsessive idea of what balance is. And of course Berg got that from Mahler – he is even more obsessive about his instructions and in his ideas about layering sound, and so on. That’s another view, but I also think it’s a conductor’s view. Some composers just leave things to the conductor and the orchestra; he couldn’t just leave it, and probably he was right in that.

Do you think that the Wagner orchestra had a strong influence on Mahler?

Zinman: Yes, absolutely, but then he went much further. I would also say that certain of Strauss’ works influenced him: he was very fond of Salome, although he maybe didn’t understand the lecture that much. I think he knew what Strauss was doing, and I think he admired it to some extent; Strauss didn’t really admire Mahler that much, but he liked him as a conductor.

Did you talk to people in New York who had heard him conduct?

Zinman: I never spoke to them personally, but I have that record of people discussing him as a conductor, and his music; people from the New York Philharmonic who I would guess are all dead now, but there is still that tradition in that orchestra of course. But when I first went to Holland there were still a lot of people in the Concertgebouw Orchestra who had played with Mahler, and they had many Mengelberg scores. Mengelberg had annotated them with what Mahler said about this, and what Mahler said about that, and what this means, and so on. They still had the parts they had used with Mahler, and you could see the changes and additions that had been made.

I think it’s very hard to talk about different versions, because, with the 9th Symphony for instance, we don’t know how perfect that is, and what he would have changed. There is one part which is just four harp notes, and in the old edition it used to be D A F sharp A, and in the new edition it’s D A D A. That change was probably there in his manuscript, but I think the F sharp is better, because the phrase rises through the octaves, but if you don’t have that the first time, then it’s not a sequence. So you have to make little judgements about that, and people fight about it, they just fight about every little note in Mahler. I think it’s a good thing because it focuses your mind on the detail – like the talk about whether the order of sequence in Mahler’s 6th Symphony is right or wrong: if you do it one way, you’re wrong, if you do it the other way, you’re wrong, if you do two hammer blows, you’re wrong, if you do three hammer blows, you’re wrong. He actually considered having four hammer blows, but nobody talks about that. A lot of musicologists are fighting with each other over these things, and maybe this gives meaning to their lives. But people say to me, why did you do that? And I say, well, I had to make a choice one way or the other, and for one person that choice is wrong, and for another person that choice is right. It’s quite hard in that way; we don’t know some things, we don’t know if Mahler always played the 6th Symphony with the Andante second, because perhaps he thought it was too powerful to have boom boom boom boom. But then again, Alma wrote a letter saying it should be the other way around – but how believable is Alma. But one always has to make the choice oneself.

Yes. You mentioned the third hammer blow in the 6th Symphony: people say that Mahler anticipated the catastrophes of the 20th century with this Symphony. Would you agree with that?

Zinman: I think it was more personal than that; I think he was talking about his own personal blows. When you think, he had left the Vienna Opera – one blow; there was the death of his child – another blow; his heart condition – another blow; Alma’s infidelity – another blow. I think he probably didn’t include the third blow, because maybe in his mind he thought that the third blow is the one you don’t hear, the one that just kills you. And at the end of this piece, there is this kind of requiem played in the trombones and horns, growing out, and then suddenly you have [claps], and maybe that’s where the fourth hammer blow was supposed to go. I don’t know, I’d have to look at the manuscripts, and I’ve never been able to see them. I have some facsimiles, but I don’t have … yes, I may have the 6th Symphony facsimile, I’ll have to see. But that’s the pure version that’s published.

Yes, that’s a very personal symphony, and it’s about his fear that all this would happen, and he’s trying to feel what it will be like. And this is what it’s going to be like, because in the last movement you’re always rushing towards a great triumph, and it just gets [claps] bashed down each time. And maybe that’s what he felt his life was like, in that he was trying to get to heaven and he was always smashed back, he never quite made it. I don’t know if you ever saw the film Carrie, but tragedies occur in it, and then finally there’s peace and quiet. The main character, Carrie, is standing there and a hand comes out of the earth and pulls her down. And I think that was one of the things that he feared the most, that there would be nothing after death, or there would just be damnation – I think this appears in that piece a lot.

How much influence did the anti-Semitism he faced all his life have on his work?

Zinman: Well of course he was very aware of it, but he didn’t consider himself a Jew in that sense. In fact he wrote to Alma about the Jews he met on the street, referring to them as ‘those street Jews’ – he was just as anti-Semitic as anybody else. But of course he felt that; it didn’t matter that he had converted to Catholicism. And of course that was a part of the intrigues of the opera as well, this element was always there. I don’t know how it comes out in the music; I don’t think that‘s a part of it. But you know he felt himself to be someone who was actually stateless: he wasn’t a Bohemian, he wasn’t a German, he wasn’t really Viennese. He wasn’t part of the mainstream and I think he always felt himself to be an outsider, but he struggled against that the whole time.

Is it true that as a young man you had a picture…

Zinman: Yes, it’s very strange. I remember that in my bedroom there was an engraving over my bed that my mother had had got from somewhere, and she had put it there and framed it. It was The Huntsman’s Funeral by Callot, this one that is referenced in the 1st Symphony. And I never knew that until I studied Mahler. She liked it because there were bunnies playing instruments, she didn’t know anything about Mahler.

What do you admire most about Mahler?

Zinman: He’s uncompromising; he doesn’t give in. He’s not geschmeidig [pliable], his is a personality that remains true to itself, always striving for purity and perfection. That’s what I admire about it.

And thinking about what Mahler wanted, what would you say is the answer to that?

Zinman: He wanted to be a great poet, and to be Beethoven in a way, to be a kind of super-Beethoven. He wanted to describe all of life; he wanted his music to be a Universe in itself.

When he said ‘My time will come’, do you think he was aware of his qualities?

Zinman: I think he knew exactly where he stood. You think of neglected geniuses: Mozart was neglected in a way, he wasn’t appreciated for what he really was; Bruckner of course was laughed at before his time came. I think it’s an awareness of how strong his own music was. It just wasn’t the right time, but now it really speaks to our age. It may not speak to the next generation, but it speaks to my generation, because of wars and all these things that human nature has going against it. But it is also simple: when you hear the end of the 3rd Symphony, for example, which is all about love; or you hear that wonderful Adagio from the 4th Symphony, well that is heaven and that is what the meaning of life is. Yes, I think he knew that it was important music, although people were telling him all the time, ‘It’s not important’, ‘This is junk’, ‘This is Kapellmeistermusik.’ I think he knew, and the friends around him who really understood him knew as well. And of course from the moment he died, a renaissance was already starting. Of course Mengelberg knew immediately; Mengelberg really couldn’t get enough Mahler.

Could we say now that the reason for this renaissance was that Mahler retains the form of the Symphony, but with modern contents?

Zinman: Yes, and I also think that we are now in a position to really understand the music, because there are so many recordings of it, and so we can hear it very readily. Before, you could only hear it in the concert hall, and every Mahler performance was a great event. For me, when I first started conducting Mahler Symphonies, every Symphony I did was a great moment in my year. It was very important to me, and I think we still have that. People come to Mahler concerts and they want to hear something, they want to learn something – what the music tells them. And I think the music penetrates deeper and deeper every year.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler
Transcript: Flora Death
25.9.2009, Zurich
© Universal Edition