Jonathan Nott on Gustav Mahler

Universal Edition Mahler Interviews – Jonathan Nott

Transcript of full interview

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

Nott: Yes. I came to Mahler through singing actually. I was eight, singing in England, in the Cathedral in Worcester, and it was Mahler’s 8th and I was in the Knabenchor. And I must have sung some of this piece three or four times in the time I was a boy. And then as far as I remember, the first part was great. I was eight years old, no problem, but the second part goes on and on … But we were still singing.

But then it left, it disappeared for a bit. And then, when I actually studied to be a singer, then it came back again through my singing of Mahler songs and then accompanying other singers. So it was actually through the song from quite an early age and then when I was in my twenties. And that was ‘way before I really had much knowledge of the symphonies. The symphonic stuff then was a quite different experience and quite a different chapter of my life. I think it’s quite good that, because – given that he was only writing either symphonies or songs, lieder – that you actually approach it from that point, that side, is actually probably an extremely good way in because there is no complexity about how this music is built, what you feel about it. You have a text, it is quite clear what it means, usually and I think it was extremely good not to be confronted with the hugh complexities of the symphonic repertoire as the first thing. But I must say because it was music I loved, the songs, there was something I felt I could relate to to find some easy ways …

Not the same with the symphonies. I don’t think there was any symphony, not even the first, where I enjoyed the first time I heard the symphony. For two reasons I think: firstly because of sheer exasperation … I had this gut feeling that I was involved in something, experiencing something that was life-changing. But totally at sea as to what the meaning should be. And I suppose that feeling of completely being lost but yet somehow drawn into something was the reason why when I actually eventually became a conductor that then the search process of actually working out what these symphonies, how they are built, what their form is, what their narrative could be and all the other myriad of problems … This enormous life thing that you get with the symphonies. That was then this driving force, trying to find – a struggle actually. I think it is always been with me, still now. Every time I open the score it’s always a struggle to find, of discovering … anything from individual tiny bits of how this music is put together, to discovering: how do I personally want to see the form of this symphony? What story am I going to say?

Then of course because you end up by discovering about life. And you discover actually about yourself as an artist. Yourself as a human being. Fantastic, this, because you have the opportunity to actually perform this if you are capable of reading a score, not just consuming the music by listening or reading. And then it becomes a drug, because there are no real answers, I don’t think. I think anything I’ve read and anything I’ve discovered by seeing in the score, there is always the opposite. There is always something else pulling it in the other direction as well. I come to the conclusion that it’s important to keep discovering and to challenge everything you think you know, or think you’ve read, or think you think Mahler said, or that Alma said, or that somebody else, like Adorno, has said about these works.

And if you keep challenging that, then you end up by discovering your own way into this story, and then the dichotomy of “no, I don’t believe this”, or “yes, I do believe this”, then it’s never-ending, I don’t think.

Was Mahler part of the repertoire when you discovered his symphonies in the UK?

Nott: I didn’t discover – apart from the 8th – I just had much more experience of the 8th than anything else – I was not really a concert-goer, I mean, I was a musician, I studied music.

I grew up in the Midlands, in Worcester, there were concerts but it is not like being in Vienna or indeed in London. So the opportunities are not huge, the opportunities of experiencing a Mahler symphony were not big, and therefore I think my first experiences actually were in mainland Europe – Frankfurt, when I ended up being in Frankfurt in the ‘80s, the late ‘80s.

Would you say that John Barbirolli played a main role in bringing Mahler to the UK?

Nott: Yes. I came cross much more recently recordings of his work and what he stands for. You know – I was terribly involved in just trying to sing, or being in Cambridge and studying music of anything. The actual focus on what really was going on, or what did someone like Barbirolli actually bring to the Mahler life in England – that was something I only discovered, when I started trying to discover about it, many years after I actually left England. But I can see now, in terms of the actual performance, what’s left, what I can hear from how he was performing his Mahler. It was an extremely individual voice, and that must have been extremely powerful in bringing that … – You see, it’s also, it’s impossible – I mean, I’m 46, I find it very difficult now to imagine what the world was like when you were having to try and persuade somebody to perform Mahler. You know, it’s not part of my life. He is a composer that everybody knows about and plays and loves. And therefore, any other composers which I’m now trying to persuade people to listen to … But I find that very difficult, and then to go back you know. Well, possibly when I was born, the world wasn’t quite like that and people were having to force … this music to being played. And I can’t imagine it.

Where do the difficulties come from, in your opinion?

Nott: The difficulties for me are … it’s the myriad of detail you’re faced with, and the questioning that comes after that. For example … Let’s take something simple, like the 4th symphony. You know, I perform the 4th, I read, I look and I don’t believe. Because I think to read everywhere and even if I buy and read all four volumes of de La Grange and try to discover anything that might be said about it, I can’t come to terms with the fact that so often you read that it’s a terribly simple, childish, sort of – the easy one.

I look at: what have I got here. First of all – I’m looking down the wrong end of a telescope, because the song, the last movement, was written first of all. So then you start at the beginning as a performer and try to work out: how do you suggest how this story might actually be decomposed, back to its original roots. That’s the problem from telling the story – a story that you decide yourself. You have to have in there … it’s also, then, I look at the text of what I’m dealing with here, I’m dealing with actually quite a lot of blood and guts, and not really the kind of heaven I’d like to be in. And then I read all right the 3rd movement is … the child is lying dead in the church or Sankt Ursula is looking down from heaven. And I go, all right, fair enough – we start with some obviously intimate, peaceful music and then I get some terribly … struggling in a soul-searching music. And then the first music comes back again in a waltz or … and then back to the soul-searching and then it goes crazy. It goes completely mad at one point. But whose world is it that’s actually gone mad? It’s not the second world, it’s not the inner struggling human-being world. It’s some sort of world that’s going crazy.

How do I relate that to being something … And then you read what Mahler himself may have said about this, or what Alma may have said, or what some other commentator may have said. It seems to me the difficulties are really looking at what’s in front of you in black and white, and trying to sieve through all of these possible interpretations that somebody else seems to have put in, and finding your own way to be trying to be truthful to what the notes are there. But yet not, obviously, completely being able to ignore the fact. Then you find something that’s maybe fantastic – like, somebody says it’s like, you are walking through a forest and it’s a sunny day, then suddenly the sun goes behind a cloud, and you’re suddenly afraid, even though the sun is still shining. Then I can find something I can deal with, that fits in.

But it seems to me the difficulty is trying to be truthful to what seems to be in front of you and to – not ignore, but not to just consume without thought processes. Now a hundred years of interpretational experience that may be pushing me into a direction which I am not sure is necessary. Because the stories of all these symphonies are so huge. It allows you to tell the same story in a thousand different ways. There is always a justification for saying: I as an interpreter am of course standing …. having my job simply to recreate, but I have now to tell this story, and it’s a very complicate story.

I need to find my way through it. So I don’t want to put myself on this music. I agree with Bernstein who says: you have to put your whole life and soul and your whole being into this music when you are performing it. Yes. But: I don’t think – my personal life history is not what’s interesting here. It’s this person’s personal life history. And therefore I have to be, at one hand completely involved, to the point where I can – as I have done several times – get to the end of the Ninth, and actually I said to myself: if I happened to die now I should die feeling fulfilled. Because I am involved in something which is so enormously bigger than I am. And I am the person sort of helping these musicians steer this for this audience. There should be this element of simple: yes, you’ve been through the struggle.

It’s always a struggle – of course it is, with these symphonies. You’ve been through this struggle, you’ve set the questions, you’ve bust yourself left and right, and you’ve come out pure, you’ve come out resolved. So, power, what’s going on, coupled with the sheer intellectual processes of how this stuff is put together. And we talk about the complexity – I mean, you can read, can’t you, about – how many different analyses are there of the last movement of the Sixth? Must be twelve, something like that. Each one deciding where they think it is. If you can’t personally find where your own structure is, you can’t have a narrative. If you can’t have a narrative, I can’t perform it. I need a narrative. I need to go from a starting-point through a curve to an end. And I can’t just experience and project emotions in little blocks that may be linked to each other but don’t actually take me from one block to the next.

That’s obviously something which I find extremely difficult because you have to chop up this music into something that makes sense to you and it’s not straightforward. Never straightforward. But therefore, because it’s not straightforward, you have this ability to discover so many things about the world … life, yourself. And that’s the power. But it’s being true to that, that I find still the most difficult thing – sifting through thoughts, spending hours and hours … now, why do I need a chorus at the end of Mahler Two? And working at – where I’m going to be in the second movement. Where I’m going to be in the third movement with the thought-process I’m going on, and sticking to that through the performance. That’s still absolutely life-consuming, I find, as a performing artist.

You mentioned Bernstein. He was blamed for overpowering, overemotionalising Mahler. What is your approach? On the one hand he brought Mahler back to the people, on the other hand he created a kind of aesthetics which now seems to be outdated. Or wouldn’t you agree?

Nott: No – well, I do agree in a way. Because again, I think probably my first experiences of listening to Mahler were Bernstein, actually. And you have to take your hat off for this type of driving force, of presenting his music, and making his music to be heard. No problem. If I’m not as intense with my own soul as he is in his performances, I am not doing the job properly. However, I sometimes feel I have too much Bernstein and not enough Mahler. My job, now, is trying to find a purity within the gut driving force. And it’s possible because – given my own personal feeling as a conductor or as a musician – it has to have, whatever music I’m doing, first of all because I was a singer it has to have a cantabile line, but that’s easy enough to find in every bit of Mahler, that’s not a problem. But it also has to have a mixture between the, sort of, gut expression and the intellectual thought processes going behind them. And because this music can be intellectualised, because it’s so challenging in terms of its intellectual skill, of how it’s put together, I find that I can always balance those two things out. So that I find myself, hopefully, being driven by the emotional content, but yet behaving within the structure that I have found out for myself – which stops me going into sheer overdrive of oblivion in structureless emotion.

I think that’s something which is possible to do, nowadays. You have to give yourself. There is no doubt about it. And when you’re in it, especially if you’re doing it without a score, which I try and do nearly all the time, then you are so involved in it that … but there is a purity involved because I feel that you are presenting struggles of whole humanity within it. And therefore you are responsible for … can I say that? – yes – you are responsible for the soul of humanity through this music. And therefore it’s like reading the Bible, isn’t it? There is a certain abstractness about  …. You yourself are of no value whatsoever. Yet the energy of the music has to take every energy you have in you.

So there’s this pull between not being there – in the same way as I actually find performing Bruckner. It’s the same way – you’re being pulled by something that is far, far greater than you are. You are, hopefully, holding the reins and making the structure – filling out structure, filling out form, but you aren’t – it’s not about me and when it really works, it’s as if something else, some other force is being … Perhaps – that’s what conducting, of course, is all about – is that you are ending up by taking energy from somewhere else and through the power of the musicians, and you are dealing with something where you yourself get out of the way.

I think that is what I’m actually … when I feel as though I’m doing a great job, a good job of performing Mahler, then I feel this slight withdrawal into another realm where the person “Jonathan Nott” isn’t terribly important. That’s the difference. That’s possibly where the people who would criticise Bernstein’s performances as being now out of date, is possibly that key that they find the most problematic. That they see somebody so involved in the music, but they see him as well, alongside the music. I feel as though I don’t really want to be there. I want to be controlling it and allowing it to happen and pushing it into the direction that I want it to go in – because I feel as though I’ve done enough homework to feel as though I – yes, I want the second movement of Mahler Two – which if you read it, saying it’s going to, say, be: now we are looking at some of the wonderful things that happened in our hero’s life. Then I question: why is it written three times pianissimo? Why is it actually so quiet until the big outbreak? Why do I see an image of a lunatic screaming behind a glass window? And I can’t hear that screaming. I’m playing my thing in front of this, but yet there is somebody behind that, screaming and screaming and screaming.

Those kind of images are the things that, once I’ve decided that’s what I want and … as I said before, you get to the … the chorus comes as a reprise of all the material – it’s the recapitulation. So, why do I need this music? I have struggled for ages – why do I … I mean, I like the text, the chorus, the music with the text makes sense – it was done before. For me then the key was actually the trumpets and the flute and piccolo, just beforehand, so that I have got birdsong, actually; I’ve got something that in the same way Messiaen, the same thing – I’ve got a God-given thing that is not human, that is live, and is, sort of, for me then, at that particular time when I was doing Mahler Two, then the key as to how I then prepared the requirement of having this finale.

To come to that point when you analyse it and put structures and all the things together, I want this music to be related to this, but I don’t want to say this there, but I do want to say this here, and I want this one hour twenty minutes to be one line, then I have to have pictures of certain scenarios that make sense to me having distilled out all the analytical, the brainwork about how I see this music. Therefore it becomes taken away the abstract element which I keep hold of as long as I possibly can in terms of structure in terms of how I am thinking about these pieces, then bring it back into something that is terribly of this world – terribly human, or then, that brings it full circle and allows me as an artist actually to be able to perform this music, and not just deliver it.

Does it help to understand the music of Mahler knowing the struggles he faced in his life?

Nott: Absolutely. I would go further than that, in that I seem to find myself happiest with what I want to say and what I feel is required to be said when I think of … or each time … it’s because I’ve seen this music as being autobiographical virtually the entire time. It’s not usually the story or the autobiographical element that is generally sort of “plakativ” – you know, is put in.

I don’t believe the Ninth Symphony is about … is hard condition. I don’t believe you need to have that. What you do need to believe, as far as I can see, is that going up to the mountains and hearing cowbells and seeing how the world is different and how the air is different, and knowing that he did that, and knowing that he found that that was his, kind of, heaven … That is extremely helpful in the Sixth. And then if you look at his relationship with Alma and try and work out what that could have been like, being such a complicated relationship, really, it seems to me from all sorts of aspects. And then I can come with that information and actually for me find that the tragic element in the Sixth is actually the slow movement. And not necessarily the last movement. I find now that most of my reasons for making musical decisions are somehow linked back to what I have read about his life and they have become autobiographical – but not always in the way that it’s been given to us, or sometimes, perhaps, the way he tried to give it to us. Or that somebody else has tried to give it to us. That’s my personal feeling about this. So I can’t ever eradicate him from the music.

I still don’t know exactly why I have such a clear quotation from the trombone part of Liszt’s first piano concerto, fourth movement, in the beginning of the Sixth. I am still looking for the absolute reason why, for me, this is there. It’s of course his life – it’s of course his everyday – when you read about what he did, the guy – it’s amazing how he managed to do that amount of stuff, I simply don’t know. We are very small in comparison … You have to know that that quotation’s there, you have to know why it annoyed all the newspaper critics at the time when it was performed. You tend to forget it nowadays. But why is this so blatantly there, this trombone melody, this trombone theme? And then you have to come to some conclusion. Is it because that’s everyday life for him? Is it because he is actually dealing with his life, his life with his wife, and his life with his work, and trying to make some sense of the whole of it? I don’t know, it’s terribly easy then to become a little bit banal about the whole thing. But I somehow feel in my bones that … and I know that it helps me make my way through these stories, thinking along those kind of lines.

Did he open the door for the Second Viennese School? How do you see his relationship to Schoenberg …?

Nott: Of course, we’re talking about a day – I happen to be performing Berg in Vienna, and Schoenberg in Vienna. So actually, the more you look at it – it’s not just the Second Viennese School I see – I see Ligeti, I see all sorts of the resonances from this person’s music. Because he has found – he has broken so many things. He has found a new way of orchestrating, of making contrapuntal lines work together, but you are not ever quite sure why they work together. The structures, the dealing with time, the fact that they are so complicated to analyse, some of these big movements, is because he was deliberately trying to get away from the norm, trying to say something more, therefore you’re playing with structure, you’re playing with story, you’re playing with time. All those things that then started to wipe away how we experienced and experience music. It seems such a small twist just to go one stage further. Or to go two stages further or even somehow to find yourself in music of the ‘60s, ‘70s … It seems to be such a far-reaching … and that of course is why, I suppose, now we do not have to have an excuse to play Mahler on a concert programme. We may have to find an excuse why we’re making another recording of this. (Laughs)

But I like to think we are making another recording. First of all I believe quite truly that the biggest gift of music is the fact that it is communication in life, in real time. First point one. Point two: that means if someone’s playing Beethoven in 2009 or whether I’m playing Mahler in 2009, there is still an absolute reason why we have to play this music, we have to experience, we give to somebody else. And the idea of making more recordings of this is simply, it seems to me …. As long as you feel as though you’ve got something that you personally want to say about this, then – and that seems to me requires an awful lot of preparation, because it is music where you can show off as an interpreter. And showing off doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve got something behind that to actually say.

But because the stories are so complicated, because it seems to me, in my researches, that it’s not black and white, it’s not all been said. You’ve only got to read any book you take up, and there are ten different interpretations, ten different meanings about even one movement of a symphony. That must mean that it is possible to find a way through ten thousand different combinations of saying these big stories. So, at the beginning I shied away from the idea of actually making recordings of this, but at the end of the day I found that it was the only way that I was able to actually for me myself re-experience the results of this constant research. To try and find out: what do I think he was trying to say? And that message is just as valid in 2009 as it was ‘69, as it was in 09.

For you as a conductor, is there a conflict between polyphony and monumentality? And conducting Mahler?

Nott: I suppose – no, because well, the polyphony side is no more complicated than most of the contemporary music scores that I am required to perform, and I enjoy performing. That means that, because I possibly came to Mahler’s music after having performed music quite a lot later, then sorting out ten different lines in one go is sort of everyday business, really. Whether or not you can actually feel that and transmit that to a public, that’s a different thing. But the complexity is therefore challenging and it’s inspiring, and the problem is simply balance within the apparatus. How do you bring these … if you have one melody that keeps changing from instrument to instrument and changing colour, then how do you make sure that that’s to be heard? So the polyphony I have no problem with.

The block element, that is what we’ve been talking about. To make sense of what’s being written there. I mean, even little things like – if there is not a ritardando or an accelerando marked and there is a change of tempo – is it unmusical to do one or is it exactly what he wants? And these kinds of decisions of what you can get out from the paper and deciding: no, I think he meant this exactly like it says here that we drive this to a brick wall, and change … Once you’ve made that kind of decision, then some of the blocks that come in, then they take care more of themselves. I find it much more difficult to see with the first upbeat, making sure that I do know where everything is on the arch to the end – which is more a question of time because they are still very, very long arches. They’re still very long concentration points for the performer, for the listener. And therefore, you’re right, that if one of the structural blocks gets pushed out of position in terms of what’s happened before, what you’re expecting, then of course you have broken your narrative, you have broken your story, and you can’t repair that. In the performance, you’re stuck with that.

The third movement of the Second has to be at the exactly the right point and the right speed, otherwise the last movement doesn’t work. And that goes for the whole thing. Or I think … you’re faced with the first movement of the First Symphony and you have a heap of tempo markings which you either ignore or you do. And if you do, then it starts off really quite slowly and it gets faster quite slowly. But the pull that this then has is the kind of bow and arrow that shoots you through the second and the third movements to the finale. If you don’t do what is written there, and decide that he was wrong, or you can’t do it like that, then you’re stuck. And so I find the balance actually in his music of those two elements so strong. But so long as you’re capable of relating to the music on all these strata at the same time, then you’re all right.

He writes about tempi in the diary. He attended a performance and he writes: “There was a lack of flexibility in the tempi and so the whole performance was a mess …” – something like that.

Nott: Yes. Then of course we are faced again with … you know, we take Mengelberg, and we look at … is this really how it went? You’re never quite sure, are you, because that’s several decades after it was first heard, and he is a very strong interpreter. Sure, it requires you, or it encourages you to be as strong as possible as an interpreter of these symphonies. So you are then faced with … no …either this is or it isn’t. But at least the flexibility … Of course, that’s something that you have to be … that’s a description of yourself as a musician. I personally cannot think of any music that isn’t always on the move. I don’t like that, I mean: marches are marches. But even within a march – the march itself you can say: “Is this a Wunderhorn march? Are we talking about the soldier or is it World War I and we are going over the trenches, and we are going to get killed?”. There are two elements of the same speed, the same march, but there are two completely different ideas about what you are trying to say. So even tempo itself is not exactly … you can’t just get it with the tempo, either. But I must say, I personally always try to make music simply flow. Because I feel that the pull – perhaps it is with the singing but the pull of line is something … and the tension in melody between a line work is part of this thing that makes my music-making what I enjoy about music-making.

You mentioned the World War. Did he anticipate the catastrophes of the 20th century?

Nott: Yes, of course. The question is if we are going to believe that these catastrophes that are in the music are somehow in him – they’re his own personal catastrophes – then he saw away beyond his own life. And I quite like to believe that. I somehow feel that he was such a special guy. The music that has come out, that is still, a hundred years later, is still so frightening – has so much power, must mean that there was something special about this. And I like to believe this. In the same way, as I say, we have to think about life and death and we have to experience life and death as artists and as music-lovers. And that is of course, I suppose, the absolute reason of making music – that you can, through music, give answers to the sort of eternal questions that humankind is going to ask itself at some point in its life. And that music can give some hope and some answer to these unanswerable questions. So if you believe that, anyway, if it is great music, you are dealing anyway with something that is taking you away. That is somehow moving in a sphere that is not actually on this plane in which we happen to be living. The catastrophes in the music are so strong that it seems to me … I would hate it if that were simply just him feeling like that … just the whole time …I like to believe that this kind of great art – that we are in the big circle of everything. That it’s part of it and therefore it’s got to be saying something more than it looks like on the paper.

But wouldn’t it be fascinating if we go back and live in that time? If you look outside of the window here, we are virtually there …Where else do you find that? – But yet it’s that kind of … the sheer drive of evolution. What’s going to happen round the corner must have been in the … I don’t know. I find all I can do – the least I can do in the music is to present these catastrophes as being something … that are possibly inevitable, but – and that seems to me always the case, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t feel completely empty at the end of the Sixth. I’d feel completely empty at the end of the Sixth, but I don’t feel as though there isn’t any point in going out of the door and doing anything else again. In other words, I don’t feel as though the catastrophes that are there are not also coupled with solutions. And therefore it seems to me we are not stuck in just … It’s not so dark that we disappear into a hole and will never get out again.

You already answered my last questions in all of these interviews: If there is a symphony you feel more close. We are talking about the Ninth but maybe it’s another one.

Nott: I think it depends. I have to say that, as we speak, I have not done hours and hours, weeks and weeks, and months and months of research on the Third and the Seventh, or indeed the Eighth. I haven’t actually conducted the Third, the Seventh or the Eighth. I’ve conducted all the others and spent all the time … So therefore it is very difficult to then … That’s something to be discovered. Hearing the symphony’s quite another thing, actually – really working out what you think what the Symphonies are about. Therefore I can’t even pick out of a complete choice of nine. I happen to have done the Ninth more recently rather a lot – much more than the Fifth or the First, which are the first two symphonies I did. The Fourth, I have always felt, has been an incredible challenge to make that one work. But only because I was determined that right from bar 1 nobody should be thinking about sleighbells. And from bar 4, when there are two tempi going on at the same time, that nobody should be feeling secure in any of this symphony. There is nothing secure about the symphony. So once I’d worked at that, really what I felt was what I was required to do. Then that package was sealed, and I became very close to that symphony.

But I think I would have to say there are certain elements of truth about the Ninth – has slightly less room for manœuvre as an interpreter. It doesn’t play itself – of course it doesn’t play itself – but it seems to me he is so strong with his ideas, about how it’s going, that I didn’t feel as though I was thrown into despair with doubt whether I would ever find a way to perform this music. I had to work out that I wanted the second movement to disappear into catastrophe. To drive it to the point of both dance worlds to go. And the third obviously how you try and link this, this “grupetto” that comes at the beginning. How do I make sure that you really know that was important enough so that the Fourth, the last movement, has something to say? How do I find this feeling of kind of putting on a coat of death – trying it on in the last movement, seeing what it’s like … Yes, the music is sort of frozen in these thirds that keep moving around. It seems to me as if you’ve got life that’s in individual cells. Life is still happening. But the whole thing’s frozen for eternity in death, if you see what I mean. So that element of course is there, but I didn’t have to struggle with a way through in the same way that I had to do with the Sixth and I had to do with the Second, and that I had to do with the Fourth. But on the other way I still come back … it’s the Ninth that I find is in my head more often when I am wandering around.

But you are starting the new season with the Third, in the new renovated concert hall. Maybe you should go to Steinbach, because when he composed the Third he was walking there, and then he took Bruno Walther there one day. And Walther asked him: “How is the new symphony?”. And he said: “Ich habe alles schon wegkomponiert” – the waterfall and the rocks and everything there. Maybe you can do this tour. I am sure there are some people who know where he was walking

Nott: That would be great. It’s like … we are going to play the Ninth in Toblach, actually, this summer. But it’s good, it does help, doesn’t it?

I can’t believe you write music that isn’t actually about yourself in the end of the day. So it has to be about him. It’s just got to be about him. And therefore everything you find in such a complicated thing does help a bit.

When I heard the Sixth for the first time and I heard the cowbells, I thought: “How can somebody at Carnegie Hall, an American, understand how this music smells”.

Nott: Yes, of course! I live in Switzerland … and it’s not just the cowbells, is it? You’re absolutely right – it’s the smell of the air, it’s the way you feel up there, it’s the way that somehow you see the church down there. And your problems are slightly further away … That’s why I say that the tragic element in the third movement, because that’s the biggest bit of Kuhglocken in the whole symphony, isn’t it? And I’m sure it’s about her, I’m sure it’s about him and her. I feel this kind of longing …I mean, you want to see how he wrote, as soon as he knew that she was having an affair, he writes in a completely different way to her. I don’t know – I hope I’m not the sentimentalist who thinks just everything is about love. But I just simply … it helps – that’s so much easier – it has to be the third movement for me as well – for the key signature as well, I’m afraid – all right, that’s just me! – … but in the fourth movement – how do we deal with this? Not: Oh, my God! – and if you know there were five Hammerschläge at the beginning, and then there were three and now there are only two, it’s not as if the Hammerschläge ursprünglich waren eigentlich dann das Leben und Tod, oder? They were something else. That’s why I enjoy this self-questioning about what this information is giving you and finding out.

And yes, it does smell differently up there, doesn’t it? It’s right, you are absolutely right. Fantastic, isn’t it just fantastic music, really … That’s why it doesn’t stop. That’s why it is a lifelong thing – as a listener, I’m sure, and certainly one is somebody who is trying to … who has got the responsibility of performing it. And you feel such a big responsibility – I feel a big responsibility with this music. You feel a big responsibility for Beethoven, but you can perform Beethoven badly and it’s a still really strong piece. I think if you can be pulled into sentimentalism, you can be pulled into analytical structure in Mahler, you can be pulled into several different … not clichés, but several different Sackgassen, I think, in this music. To avoid going into a Sackgasse but still to bring all of these elements somehow together in one package … Now, tonight, right now … That’s very, very challenging. But that’s why I say – I could really have said: “I would be thankful if I died now, because I’ve done a good job of this symphony tonight. I’ve done it and we’ve been through everything, we’ve fought and we’ve struggled, and we’ve died, and we’re dying now, but it’s all right. It may be oblivion, we don’t know – but I think I’m all right.” Which is presumably exactly what he must have been trying to say. I find that it’s such an inspiring thing to be able to do as an artist. And of course being the conductor, being responsible for all these people doing all this thing at the same time, hopefully with the same energy – making decisions but not dictating every single thing. That’s a fantastic feeling of communal spirituality, actually, that’s what it is in the end.

But isn’t there a danger of being involved emotionally too much? To forget about holding things together?

Nott: Well, that’s why I say: if you let go of the reins, if you just gush your way through it – that’s not what it’s about. It has an inner pull between this intellectual and the emotional. It seems to be from a purely compositional structure and therefore you can’t completely let go. And I can’t, anyway, as a conductor, ever let go completely, because, you know, somebody might need my help in this next bar! (Laughs)

I’ve been involved in Mahler for twenty years. When I discovered Bernstein, Mahler’s Sixth with the Vienna Philharmonic, I was sitting inside, I understood nothing. But it took me, I was under stress, but … The last movement – what does it want to tell me? And since then I’ve wanted to find out. It’s such a privilege for me that it’s part of my job to talk and think about it. What’s this all about?

Nott: I absolutely sympathize and I totally agree. It happened every single time. To the point where even two weeks before I had to do Mahler Two for the first time, it was three years or two years ago now, I rang up the Intendant and I said: I just don’t understand this piece; I understand every little bit, bit by bit. But I don’t understand where I am supposed to be going here. I don’t see … a Totenfeier works by itself, and the Scherzo is fantastic, but it’s full of … And again, the last movement of the Sixth is fascinating, isn’t it? You can’t analyse it and say: it’s this. It isn’t this – that’s what’s so clever. But he pulls you. But in order to be able to communicate to every member of the audience the Spannung in the actual form itself. [He continues in German:] Jetzt spielt er natürlich eigentlich mit sich selbst. Mit Musik selbst. Wenn die Form selbst nicht erkennbar ist und wenn es irgendwie in drei, vier, fünf, sechs verschiedene Wege dann absolut klar analysierbar ist … Das heißt, der hat mit uns und unseren Erwartungen, was Form ist, gespielt. Und da ist dann eine Spannung.

Und so bekommt er uns.

Genau dasselbe sagt Boulez über den letzten Satz der Sechsten. Er sagt, der ist für ihn eigentlich der Wichtigste fast. Er sagt, er lernt, wie man Zeit strukturiert. Er hätte das nicht schreiben können ohne die Erfahrung mit Mahler. Wie man einen großen Bogen spannt und trotzdem nicht von einer Emotion in die nächste fällt, sondern wie man das strukturiert. Und als Beispiel nimmt er den letzten Satz der 6. Symphonie. Er hat das vor sechs Wochen dirigiert.

Nott: Ja, das stimmt total. Ich wußte, dass die emotionale Ebene für mich … Und der Sinn dieser Symphonie war … Ich habe versucht, alles zu sagen in diesem dritten Satz, so dass ich dann … Jetzt kann ich diesen letzten Satz, irgendwie … Und nicht: da war diese schöne Floskel, wo die Kinder spielen … diese Kinderspielelemente von dem Scherzo sind nicht nachvollziehbar meiner Meinung nach. Und die Dritte ist irgendwie eine Schöne Sache auf der Alm mit allem Drum und Dran … und jetzt sind wir im vierten Satz, und wir sterben, wir töten unseren Held. Und er geht durch den … Wenn alles nur fokussiert ist von dem inhaltlichen Element, von der Tragödie, wenn man so will, auf den letzten Satz hin, dann ist es zu überlastet und ist falsch gedacht. Aber der letzte Satz bekommt seine eigene, absolute Verrücktheit. Never ending. And each time you look at it, it’s changed. Because you’ve changed.

Last question: Is there some work where you feel your approach has changed more than in other symphonies?

Nott: Yes, the Fifth. Because the Fifth was one that I did quite early on. I fell into the trap of making the first movement too … not important, because it’s an important movement – but too bedeutungsvoll, too much in this first movement. So the second was then left by itself. The last time I did it, I tried again – because you have this expectation, when this chorale comes in what key, and what are you going to get in the last movements … when you’ve eventually made sense of that … So I had to see more movements one and two together as really one block and not indulge myself too much in the first movement. The whole symphony then had a complete lean-over to something else that it didn’t have before.

It depends when these symphonies get you in your life. I am now a different conductor than I was four years ago. I suppose I did the Fifth six years ago, and then I did it three years ago. And you change. You’re a different person. You see things differently and you’ve developed. Therefore you have to keep questioning. I write in my scores … surely this means this (July 2004). No, of course it doesn’t – it means THIS, idiot! (2006). NO, you fool!! … I write these things in because I have to know what I was thinking about these things. There’s this question: where does this come from? So these scores follow all sorts of diaries of talking to myself.

I’m a real colourer. I use a score up, throw it away and then start another score and keep going there. You know those Ligeti pictures of how he has composed – my scores look like this. I am blue red green blue purple … written in there, scribbled out there. I then find I have a structural analysis of the piece, through the colours and through the things I’ve written in. Possibly one day you can have one page of a Mahler score, coloured in by Jonanthan Nott!

Every colour has a meaning?

Nott: Some colours have a meaning. It’s only because of opera … I started conducting in opera. In those days you had no rehearsal at all. We are talking about performing Otello for the first time, with no rehearsal, Götterdämmerung with no rehearsal, for the first time … And there were 96 performances in a year. I had to go through these scores very, very quickly. I had three colours. And usually, in the opera, the trombones have – like, 40 minutes before they play again. And they’re usually either in the bar or they’re asleep. So I had orange with trombones, and pink with horns, and blue with trumpets, and that stayed with me somehow. So these colours stayed the same. Then usually the harp is in sort of dark green, and the piano is in darker blue, percussion’s always in green, light green. There are certain colours that I tend to associate with. But I will actually colour the music, so you’ll see then where the lines, where the blocks of texture are. So actually, what I’ve done then is a very short cut of analysing the structure, at least the contrapuntal structure. Which means of course I can stop a rehearsal and say: I need the fourth flute, second oboe, etc. etc …. because that’s all in the same colour as well. So that’s good.

Is there a balance problem in some symphonies?

Nott: No, I don’t think so. All right – every now and again you somehow for some reason get a rather important line in, let’s say, the violas, marked piano, a lot of people are marking fortissimo … just every now and again I find there are certain lines that I don’t understand, quite … I think they are more important than he must have thought they were. But no more than in a Verdi opera. Sometimes I might say: get rid of that mezzoforte fortissimo for three and a half beats and then … the usual sort of stuff. But that’s rare. He’s done lots of this work for you. Of course, the instruments are slightly different, that makes a difference. It makes it different actually also – I try nearly always to have divided violins, and that makes a difference in balancing. It seems to me that in Mahler it’s just a structural necessity. I need to know that the Adagietto starts with the second violins and then goes with the first violins. And there are two different things and two different sides – they’re just next to each other. I tend to put the basses on the right and the violas on the left … simply because I like horns on the left – and horns next to basses on the left is no good; they just fight each other and complain. So that sometimes makes a difference in balance, but I don’t think I’ve found, yet …

So you need the weight of the instruments?

Nott: Yes. You read that the Viennese flute at the time was weaker than it is now. And therefore you can say here often it is marked louder than it is, needs to be. But it still doesn’t explain why in the Fourth you have four flutes. And it doesn’t explain in the Fourth, why in the first movement with the beginning of the development, where it could be a nice sleigh-ride going through something, you’ve suddenly got four flutes in unison. It seems to me that’s like one of Ligeti’s great ocarinas. You’ve suddenly got this something which is over … he didn’t need to have four flutes playing the same melody, to be heard. He had four flutes playing the same melody to have something slightly uncomfortable, slightly grotesque. But then you’ve got to play the whole symphony as being something slightly grotesque, which I’d see it. So therefore that’s fine.

Is the beginning a Viennese beginning? The Fourth … this phrase [sings] – is it Viennese – like a waltz?

Nott: The best times, when I’ve felt more comfortable, I haven’t actually – I’ve thought less of being a Viennese than the times when I have thought about being Viennese. What is most important is that the sleighbells go on in the same speed. That’s quite clearly written. And once you do that, then all you’ve done is … you’ve got [sings] got out of its way … [sings] And then we’re just in a different world.

If it’s too Viennese, then it becomes slightly tricky afterwards, because you get quite brutal, quite soon … My feeling about “Viennese” would be that it is a lightness, a sort of slightly not serious, a slightly sort of “life, you know, what the hell – you know how it goes really – we’ll pretend” …. Which is great but I can’t quite get that emotion straight away. I like the colour of that. I find that a very interesting point there. I haven’t quite really decided. But if I get [sings], I’m most concerned that people don’t go home … that they should be really upset and not at all secure with the world within the first five bars. So yes, a little bit of kind of “charme” [sings] is fine.

But when you mentioned the Durchbruch in the Fourth in the third movement. Ruhevoll. And then it’s A major, or something. Where does this come from? You never expect at the end of the third movement …

Nott: If you follow my theory about that, is that the joke is that we’re going to go to this fantastic heaven. But they can’t give a shit about us. And actually, they’re up there killing all those things … And they’re the ones, they keep closing the door in the third movement, it seems to me. They’ll try all sorts of ways of … Come on, you’ll be all right, don’t worry about it ….. With the glockenspiel and the thing that goes really crazy [sings] … oh no, we didn’t say that, did we? Sorry. And then they shut the door and therefore … and then, that’s just before the trumpet, the real sort of heaven thing … I find that paces itself okay, if actually we’re really in desperate despair for most of that movement. And we’re lost. They keep trying to do something for us but they don’t care. And so we’ve got these two levels, and therefore, at the end … Well, it doesn’t end very nicely, does it, because it gets thinner and thinner and thinner. Everybody goes up, up. It’s a bit … it rots away, doesn’t it? I think the double timpani and the trumpet thing is …O course, that comes in the first movement as well? Yes. I can’t remember now, but – so long as I made sure that from the start of the symphony I had always two worlds, through two tempi, and in the third movement I had two worlds, that one was pleading, trying to get to the other one, and the other one was pretending that it was offering comfort, and actually didn’t offer anything of any resolution whatsoever – in fact, quite the opposite. I can’t help feeling that the end of the symphony, quite honestly – because she disappears and we’re all off doing our thing. I think we should almost be wishing we would be very glad if there isn’t a heaven like that. That we’re not going to that kind of heaven. That is what the church has told us is going to happen. And it’s not what we want. It’s not right.

There are so many questions, but I have no answers, you know?

Nott: But that’s my point. You can’t say: yes. You can say: no, I don’t think of … but why …why that? You have to make a decision of course, because you can’t actually, as an artist, terribly easily express ambivalence. You have to make one thing, then you have to put the two things together. Then you can show doubt. And that’s why in the first movement I push these tempi to the point, I break, and then I do the next thing. And so we’re never quite sure where we are. Then we’re not sure where we are anyway in the second movement, that’s fair enough, and then we’re not sure where we are at all in the third movement. And the fourth then explains it, but it doesn’t explain it if you read that text as being a wonderful child-like, idyllic vision of heaven. If you read that as that, what it meant, then – the whole symphony – then you have to try and go back. You have to try and make the whole symphony sound lovely. So you end up by having sleighbells, and you end up by having St Ursula saying fantastic things. But I don’t think it works.

“Als ob”-Symphonie …

Nott: Yes. And then you find these things like: “It’s going to take two generations before they’ll understand my music”. Or, isn’t there something he said: that’s a kniffliges Problem, or something like that? You know that he was playing. That there’s this certain element of almost not wishing us to understand this music. Possibly the self-destruction element in himself, I don’t know. It’s very difficult.

Every symphony has its own character …

Nott: Of course. Each one’s its own world, isn’t it? And you are dealing with worlds. You can’t compare it with Beethoven.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler, Universal Edition, Vienna
Transcript: Flora Death
© Universal Edition