“Mahler expresses life’s reality.”

Transcript of full interview:

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

Nagano: The first time I heard Gustav Mahler’s music was indirectly through the television. I was a very young boy, and it was in the early 1960s, and I heard the second movement of the 1st Symphony explained, and then conducted, by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. And it was on a very, well, what now has become a very famous television series, called The Young Persons Concerts, and for many children like myself, who lived in rural America, far away from the big cities, where we didn’t have regular access to big symphony orchestras and big opera houses, this was a tremendous outreach programme. And using high technology at the time – television – that Mr. Bernstein employed, so that he could somehow share with a very, very broad public of young people the very special qualities of music. So in this particular broadcast it was, as I said, the second movement of the 1st Symphony: maestro Bernstein explained in a very general analysis on the piano, and then we heard the second movement. I must have been 8 years old at this time.

Did you have the feeling that – when you were more experienced, and had your musical education – that the door to Mahler opened very quickly for you? Or was this a process?

Nagano: For me personally, it was both at the same time. Both an opening, which was an opening into a vast and rich profound world; but at the same time a process, which, as with all great masterpieces, all great works of art, allows one to continue to grow and evolve throughout a lifetime. So it was both.

When you started to conduct the music of Olivier Messiaen, you had a dialogue with the composer, you could ask him a lot of questions. So, if Mahler were alive, which kind of questions would you put to him?

Nagano: The fortunate aspect of Mahler’s life is that, at least during my lifetime, there is a chance to be exposed to interpreters who still knew Mahler. So it’s quite different to, say for example, trying to reach back in time to the moments of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Ludwig van Beethoven or Johann Sebastian Bach, where it’s impossible for someone to say they actually knew what the composer had in mind. It’s impossible to say with complete certainty that this is how it should be, because none can really claim to have a direct tie to these composers. In the case of Mahler, Americans were able to host Bruno Walter, who was in a sense a protégé, or a student, or at least, at the very least, an assistant of Mahler. And today many films survive, many extracts of Bruno Walter either performing Mahler, speaking about Mahler, or rehearsing Mahler. And from this we can have glimpses of, really, how Mahler thought of his own music.

Probably, if I could ask a question of Mahler it would be on a more personal level, which would be, how did he enjoy his time in the United States of America? And, in what ways might his American time have influenced his composition?

No question about the scores? They are clear?

Nagano: Mahler was a very meticulous composer. Simply looking at his manuscripts, one sees incredible detail that he includes within his manuscript. It’s different from earlier forms, when style was an assumed part of performance, and knowledge of the regulations of performance practice was simply built into the composition process itself. That’s why, in older music forms, simply writing allegro would be enough to suggest to a performer how he or she would then include aspects of flexibility, aspects of breathing. It was simply assumed that, through the prevailing stylistic performance practices, that a performer would bring these human aspects into the performance.

Today with modern composers, it’s much more likely to meet a composer who will write, in great detail, the flexibility into the score, who will write a rubato or certain freedoms into the score. And there is more of an expectation, I think it would be fair to say, that modern composers would expect a certain fidelity to the musical text, that’s written in the score, when an artist is performing his music. Excessive freedom or an imposition of flexibility upon a written flexibility would be inappropriate, and would somehow break the musical language and the musical form.

And we see in Mahler, in his writing of the music, that it is a very modern approach. There is so much virtuosity in the technique in which he writes in these flexible aspects: these ideas of simultaneous events taking place, yet at the same time carefully written out so that spontaneity can be repeated over and over again, through simply realising the score carefully. And there is a surviving recording of Bruno Walter rehearsing a Mahler Symphony and one sees how carefully he serves the written text of the music, to make sure that this flexibility or spontaneity in the end comes out. This then includes within it an inherent danger – as we spoke about just before – that putting a further emphasis on yet more flexibility upon the Mahler score can sometimes result in a performance that is really not very appropriate.

But there is an incident where Richard Strauss heard Mahler conducting, and he wrote or said afterwards, that he [Mahler] is one of the first conductors he saw who had a real sense for flexibility in the tempo. And Mahler writes about it in a letter. Do such quotes influence your approach to your interpretation?

Nagano: I think for all artists we regard tempo as a form of humanity, as a form of human expression, and humanity, by definition, is not mechanical. We breathe. If we don’t have flexibility as human beings, then that’s to say that we are dead, it’s only the dead that have no more flexibility left in them. And so tempo, going on further, is an expression of life, is an expression of living. In that sense, we can think of tempo as having not only flexibility but colour, density, weight, a sense of breath.

Probably that’s why some composers, such as Olivier Messiaen, decided not to define tempo in terms of a metronome mark. When he wrote a new score, there were no metronome marks in his music. I remember receiving the manuscripts for Saint Francois d’Assise, the great opera, and I had really a moment of great uncertainty because there were no metronome marks to set a metronome. He wrote only descriptions: ‘lively tempo’, ‘less lively tempo’, ‘a very lively tempo’; or ‘slowly’, or ‘somewhat slowly’, or ‘extremely slowly’. But what does that mean?

It’s all relative, and I think that relativity is how we as human beings feel tempo, depending on what the context is. Say, for example, if a work is being performed in a cathedral, where there’s an enormous amount of resonance, what feels very fast within that context might feel quite slow in a small, dry Schauspiel theatre. If we take the assumption that tempo is a human expression, it’s assumed that flexibility is a part of this. What Strauss refers to, I think, is usually what all artists feel, just this normal aspect of life within a musical expression.

Which was the first Mahler Symphony you conducted?

Nagano: It was the 9th Symphony, and in a sense it wasn’t by choice; an unusual set of circumstances. I was the assistant to maestro Seiji Ozawa, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and, due to a personal problem, maestro Ozawa was unable to complete the series of performances of the 9th Symphony. And after the première, or the first performance, he was called away from Boston. As the assistant, then, I was given a chance to conduct the 9th Symphony. It’s probably not the way one should conduct the 9th Symphony for the first time, but thanks to the tremendous support of the great Boston Symphony Orchestra and the commitment and professionalism and profound artistry contained within the tradition of it all, the performance was a very special one.

You mentioned Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein; some people say Leonard Bernstein made Mahler popular, but at the same time he overpowered him. Is there a danger of overpowering Mahler?

Nagano: When one hears some of these great documentary recordings of Bruno Walter, or, for example, if one has the chance to listen to this small excerpt of Walter rehearsing a passage of Mahler, one has the distinct impression that Bruno Walter was serving the music: that he’s there as a servant of the art form and not bringing in any sorts of outside impositions.

If we were thinking of a different sort of context, you could think of a minister or a priest reciting the liturgy. Reciting the liturgy, there’s a sense of service or a sense of trying to share the content of the liturgy based upon what lies within.

Of course, I studied Leonard Bernstein, because by consensus we feel that he was an extraordinary artist with an extraordinary ability to communicate far, far beyond the walls of the concert hall.

At the same time, he performed in such a way that one has a feeling that it was very different from Bruno Walter, that somehow through his performances – and again I speak as someone who later had the privilege of working and studying with Bernstein – one has the feeling that there was almost a physical struggle taking place with the musical form on stage at the time. And my memories of Bernstein’s performance are not only about the music, but I have images of him actually, physically conducting the pieces at the same time. So the performance itself took on other dimensions, both for the conductor – the interpreter, his relationship with the music – and the music itself.

Did he put too much of his inner emotions into the music?

Nagano: You pose a very interesting question: is it possible to be too emotional in the performance of music? And it’s interesting, because when you speak of the essential nature of emotion, it is impossible to be too emotional with music. It’s a part of what music is.

The complications come when, somehow, there is a feeling for the public that a performer is placing personal feelings as the most important aspect of a performance. Those personal feelings, if they are to become say the focal point, or if the purpose of a performance is egotistically orientated, are in danger of pushing the music towards the breaking point of what it normally can hold as a structure or as a form. And when that happens, then of course a great work of art can be reduced to pure sentimentality or banality, and it doesn’t serve either the art form itself or the public at all. It becomes something different. And this point of exaggeration is a question that all we artists must ask ourselves personally.

As performers we are obliged and almost provoked to reanalyse scores again and again. Because part of the definition of great masterpieces is that they stand outside of time; we can live with them, but we need to search within them for those elements that make the piece relevant for our times today. So, if we don’t ask that question of ourselves during the preparation for a performance, are we imposing our personal feelings, from the outside onto a piece, or in fact are we looking within the art form to shed light upon the humanity that lies within?

How much do you feel that the life of Mahler influenced his music?

Nagano: It’s of course nearly an impossible question to answer, because it’s such a personal one. We do know that Mahler’s generation was a particularly flowering or fruitful time for the evolution of European society, European civilisation. The second half of the 19th century was a very exciting time to be alive. Societies were expanding, it was the time of reaping the benefits of the industrial revolution. People were dreaming vast dreams, far beyond the boundaries of what was before. For example, Haussmann was redesigning Paris; there were dreams of world expositions to share technology; the Eiffel Tower was built; Antarctica was discovered. So, this feeling of reaching out and having a vast universal optic, rather than a simple regional optic, was very exciting.

And of course Mahler’s musical forms, if you think of the great symphonic forms, they took on these very large universal tableaux: very, very different from the kinds of contained forms and structures that Mahler inherited from before him. But at the same time, this same period in history was the time of Sigmund Freud. People were also discovering – at the same time as looking out, and looking for this very positive or visionary universal canvas – that the human soul, in many cases, was becoming sick, that there was a morbidity just behind the façade. There were epidemics of diseases that we could see passing through the international boundaries; psychologically, people would become very frail; and perhaps most interesting of all there was a paradox within this celebrated advancement of technological means, as technology went forward with the Nachfolge  of the industrial revolution.

It was meant of course to help mankind, to somehow bring comfort, to bring convenience to mankind; but there was also a realisation that there was a very dark side to technology, that somehow had within it a risk or a danger to mankind. And in this sense, one can feel this darker side also included within Mahler’s music. In a way you could say, looking purely through the music of Mahler, that he was like a seismograph: you could feel the earth, or the movements within the society, changing in irreversible ways, and you could feel the march of technology and the conflict that brought to the society. And in a certain way it seemed inevitable that the First World War would happen, the first mechanised, automated, high-technology war that the world had experienced.

So we can’t really say if the world in which Mahler lived, or his environment, had an influence on his music, we can’t say that for sure. Especially when I think of how Messiaen explained his music. People often asked Messiaen: You’re a Catholic, you’re a profound believer, does one have to be a believer to appreciate your music? It’s interesting to think about what Messiaen would say. He would usually mention two things.

One, that the source of his inspiration was personal, the source of inspiration – but where the inspiration came and allowed him to be creative and to create a work; once the work was created, then it was up to the performer to recreate them with his or her own inspiration, with their own sense of creativity. The second thing that Messiaen would mention was: Would you ask this question of Johann Sebastian Bach? And these two answers of Messiaen I think are not so alone with how the true creator, which is to say the composer, thinks. The source of the inspiration is mysterious; if it weren’t mysterious then we would all be composers and great ones. There is a mystery behind it, but once that mystery allows a creation to take place, and a work exists, in a sense that piece then needs to be interpreted by the people who inherit it.

You said Mahler was a kind of seismograph to his time. Did he anticipate the catastrophes of the 20th century?

Nagano: Mahler’s art, Mahler’s music, you could say that it was an expression of life’s reality. It’s different from how we normally look back at other composers, say, Beethoven, where we see through Beethoven’s music an expression of ideals, or of ideas, great ideas. With Mahler we feel this expression of life’s reality, but it comes to us in abstracted forms.

And through this abstraction it allows us to experience these great masterpieces outside of time; Mozart is experienced outside of time, so is Beethoven, so is Bach, so is Brahms. And what that means is that we listen to the music today – of Mahler, or experience any great artwork, even in the visual arts – and we as a public don’t experience it as looking back towards the past; we experience it as having something to do with our lives today, our contemporary lives.

We somehow feel that there’s a relevance in what lies within that piece, that’s relevant to us as contemporary beings living in the 21st century. Today it has a meaning for us. We don’t think at all when we listen to the music of great composers, including Mahler, that we’re just simply looking back in time. Almost contrarily, we feel we’re looking forward in time, or we’re looking into ourselves.

So when you ask, did Mahler somehow foresee the future, you could say both yes and no. What we can agree upon is that he was an exceptional, sensitive, insightful, creative creator. That allowed him to write not one, but many masterpieces that stand above time, and so we feel that his music has a constant relevance. It had relevance during his own life, through some of the successes that he had; it had relevance throughout the entire 20th century; and it had such an impact and relevance to the composers who came after Mahler; and it has relevance to us as public members, today in the 21st century.

When you speak about his influence on later generations, in this, technically speaking, where do you see his influence?

Nagano: There are so many different aspects to Mahler’s music which – while at the same time quite traditional – were very radical and forward-looking. Today, if one looks back to the beginning of the 20th century one normally thinks of Schönberg as the great inventor, as the one who broke all forms and established the new language. In a sense that’s true, but in another sense perhaps Schönberg was the most traditional of all composers: the forms in which he wrote; how close he was to Brahms’ music; the aesthetics with which he wrote his music; the stylistic constructs that Schönberg assumed would be followed when his music was played – we know this from Schönberg himself and his own lectures. It was only that he invented a different system of how we experience tones, how we experience notes. But fundamentally it could be said that the language that he used, the aesthetic language that he used, was very, very much tied to the 19th century.

With Mahler, yes, he inherited the harmonic form of the 19th century, and yes, he pushed it to the point where it was beginning to collapse, where it was beginning to break. But moreover, he took formal structures and completely redefined them, and worked far, far beyond what the normal structures of his contemporaries were. Probably that’s why Das klagende Lied, when he submitted it to the jury with Johannes Brahms, gave Brahms a terrible impression of what the young Gustav Mahler was like: he felt that he was simply a composer without discipline.

And in breaking what would be seen as constraints or structures, this certainly is something that opened up huge pathways to the composers of the 20th century. In terms of how he thought of the orchestra, with this vast orchestration, of course he shared this with the impressionists who were working in other countries at the time. But these very, very large palettes of orchestral colours that he could weave together were in themselves radical.

But perhaps what was most radical was that he would use these gigantic orchestras and he defined structure in different ways, not only through tempo relationships, but also with tutti versus kammer, or chamber ensembles from within the orchestra; with transparency; with compact density; with the linear aspects of counterpoint – of which Mahler was a master – compared with great vertical, homophonic structures – these great Chorales that Mahler could also write. And all of these contrasts of tone, and how they come out of different combinations of orchestration: the chord is exactly the same chord, but with different forms comes different Klang. This is something that composers obviously refer to, again and again, in our own times, leading eventually to the spectral ideas that we have. These were all ideas that were put forth by Mahler, that were simply new and radical. I’m not saying that he alone did them, but he was part of a generation that was asking these questions. And the influences can be found simply by reading the texts of composers living today, and seeing how they reference back to Mahler’s influence.

Did you talk with Bernstein about bringing all these aspects to life?

Nagano: I never had these sorts of conversations with Bernstein. In fact, most of the literature that we worked upon was Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms, primarily, and of course his own music. So unfortunately no, we never had a chance to really discuss the Mahler Symphonies in depth.

Does Mahler require a special technique of rehearsing?

Nagano: Younger conductors tend to be intrigued by Mahler because it’s so challenging, in a very positive and enjoyable way. Because of the very large dimensions, not only in terms of symphonic forces required, but also the very large composition conventions: it demands a certain technique or command of technique, in order to be able to help these large forms or large ensembles to efficiently perform one of these Symphonies.

Interestingly enough, the novelty of the technical challenge, once you’ve mastered the technique, that aspect becomes sharply reduced. And what is interesting is that, if the technical issues are no longer a subject, it’s like an emancipation, it’s like a freedom, because that then allows you to come much closer to the content and to the detail, and to the very small aspects that allow a window into the sensitivity of Mahler’s world, to become much closer. So I would say yes, technically, both as a performer and as a conductor, Mahler Symphonies remain challenging today. But I would also say that, in our 21st century, with most modern professional orchestras you wouldn’t say that it was technically impossible to play the music, as the music was accused of being, in its own time, technically impossible to play. Now the education, the experience, the training of our great professionals today, allows us to go, in a sense, much closer towards this freedom of being able to become closer to the score, because we’re not distracted by the technical requirements.

When I asked Pierre Boulez to which part of Mahler’s work he feels the closest, he said, when he has had enough of the bombastic Mahler, he goes back to the refined Mahler. Is there a part of Mahler’s work to which you feel particularly close?

Nagano: What maestro Boulez refers to, I think, is something that most interpreters of Mahler feel, which is that the relationship is a process. Or, like all relationships, it evolves and it changes over time. At this point I feel particularly close to the – well, all of the Symphonies remain active in my repertoire – but what lies on my desk at the moment, what lies on my piano are the 6th Symphony and the 9th Symphony, I’m coming back again to these two works. It’s interesting, because these two works both have an epilogue aspect to them, they seem to have a pessimist’s side to them. They are purely instrumental, and in that sense they’re purely symphonic forms, different from some of the other Symphonies that you might say are more theatrical: the 3rd Symphony, the 2nd Symphony.

One of Mahler’s last works, Das Lied von der Erde, is also on my desk at the moment. This does have many dramatic aspects to it of course, but the final movement is an Abschieds [farewell] movement, and this Abschieds movement is contained within the 9th Symphony and the 6th Symphony. So I’m not sure why that’s happening right now, but these are the three scores that are on my desk at the moment.

I have to come back to Bernstein. He said the first movement of the 9th deals with heart conditions. Would you go so far as to agree?

Nagano: It’s interesting that you have mentioned that. I, like many young conductors, assisted at several of the Bernstein rehearsals, and of course this famous heartbeat motif was an aspect that maestro Bernstein was trying to bring out. What’s so wonderful about great music, all great music, is that there is no simple answer. Referring back to this boyhood experience that I had through the Young Persons’ Concerts of Bernstein, I do recall, also as a young boy, hearing Strauss’ Don Quixote being performed by Bernstein.

And in this particular broadcast, Bernstein sat at the piano and said, “Let’s talk about programme music”. He said, “I’m going to offer you a programme now”, and he made up – spontaneously through ad libitum – a story, which was a very ridiculous story, and he accompanied himself with parts of the music of Don Quixote by Richard Strauss. It was a very silly story about some event that happened in the 20th century, and of course it was very humorous and we all laughed. And then he said, “Now, let’s look at another story”, and then he told the story of Don Quixote, and with the same music but this time accompanied by the New York Philharmonic.

And his point – which was, what is music? What is pure music? – is something that somehow doesn’t lie simply within the notes themselves, it’s what lies between the notes, it’s what lies behind the notes. And to discover this, we as members of the public, we as performers, have to take the time to look to see what’s behind those notes. As with all great masterpieces, when one looks again and again, there are other dimensions to be discovered, other aspects to be found and to be shared with the public.

So, I’m sure that if you asked maestro Bernstein, “What else is there in that first movement?”, he could give you a hundred different ideas of what lies in it; our responsibility as performers is not to see only one dimension. Music is not limited, that’s what makes it so incredible. Normally, in our modern contemporary lives, sitting in front of a computer screen, we think in one dimension, or maybe at best two dimensions. But we know better, we know at least there are three dimensions. But in music there are four, five, six, at least seven dimensions that you can think off, just off the top of your head, including an existential component. These aspects are obviously within all the great works of all art forms, and that would include the 9th Symphony of Mahler.

You mentioned Das klagende Lied and the competition, where Hans Richter was on the jury as well. This could have been a turning point in the career of Mahler. He said, if he had won this competition [Nagano laughs], he wouldn’t have had so many struggles in theatre life. Maybe, let’s refer first to his life as a director of an opera house. He conducted an extraordinary number of performances, what’s your opinion about that? It’s unbelievable how much he conducted in the Vienna State Opera.

Nagano: The house in which Mahler worked was a repertoire house, and through this lifestyle, if you will, or through this great institution, the lines are blurred between music and life. That’s something very, very wonderful, and you feel it within this opera house here; you feel that joy and work are the same; you feel that work and play are the same.

And you feel that music is not only part of a social dialogue, it’s also part of a professional dialogue. You can sense that music has so many components that people from different walks of life, sometimes surprisingly different walks of life, are required to come together to make a single effective musical performance. This very, very rich, all-encompassing atmosphere of working within a large repertoire opera house is, ironically, something that’s capable of giving a sense of freedom.

Because one develops a fluency of working within all aspects of music – not just pure music, not just music as a performer, or as an interpreter, or as a vocalist, or as an instrumentalist – somehow one becomes very comfortable and fluid within all aspects of music-making.

And perhaps because Mahler was such a great master musician, a master artist, who also had the capability to be a great director of an opera house and all of the complexities that a director of an opera house has to deal with, it allowed him at the same time to have a very, very rich environment in which his imagination could go much, much further. I mentioned that there are many works by Mahler where the theatrical elements, or the dramatic elements, are undeniable: we feel them both intellectually and emotionally, and sometimes even physically, when he adds off-stage components to his performers’ scores. Perhaps his imagination was somehow fertilised by the environment in which he was working.

Well, I have to come back to Das klagende Lied, because some say it’s his only work that could be staged. You conducted the world première of the three act version. Can you tell us about this project and your reaction to seeing the full piece?

Nagano: In this particular instance, as with many other composers, one can see through studying the scores that there are times when the most radical, or inventive, or imaginative explosion of expression comes with the very first version of a score.

Mahler’s not alone in this. If one goes back to the first versions of Bruckner’s Symphonies, very often one can see wildly inventive ideas that were later softened somehow: through criticism; through advisers; through friends. But the danger with that is that if it’s overrefined, then it loses its seeds of excitement as well. When this happens, at least in the United States of America, we have a label for this, we say ‘designed by committee’ [laughs], where a board of directors or some sort of consortium will all put their heads together and take an idea, and then keep working on it until there’s nothing left of the original idea. And you see terrible creations coming out.

With the final version of Das klagende Lied, I could admit that there were very, very interesting parts of the work that I was never really inspired to perform, that were in the final version. But looking over the score of the very first Urfassung [original version], I was confronted by these wild statements of bitonality, simultaneous rhythms taking place, controlled chaos, overwhelmingly dramatic statements that were upheld by an extraordinarily large orchestra.

To me, it was a thrilling and undeniable statement by the young Mahler that the future was now, that Mahler was a pioneer – not only a radical, but a pioneer. Sometimes radicals destroy more than they create, but pioneers lead discovery, and usually their discoveries leave a legacy behind to those that will follow. And this feeling of simultaneousness and conflict, because of seemingly random forces coming together, are contained within this first version of Das klagende Lied.

And that – combined with the fact that when the work is complete you can understand what the story is – the story makes absolute sense. There is a consistency, and the ears of a listener can follow why and how these themes come, and one also sees the influences of the past traditions upon the young Mahler at this time. And while one can accept the criticism, that yes there are moments that could be described as crude or not fully refined, on the other side this burst of energy, of optimism and creativities, is something which I think all people have almost a physical response towards.

Thinking years later – well not that many years later, a few decades later – of when Charles Ives was to put the basic constructs of his 4th Symphony into place one thinks also of the great joy and energy that’s released through seeming cacophony or chaos coming together. But in fact it’s something that’s carefully placed together in an art form. So this was fascinating to me, and it was a great privilege to participate in this project to bring this Urfassung into light.

Would you agree that you can discover the entire Mahler in Das klagende Lied?

Nagano: That’s a big statement. I’m not sure who would say that. Perhaps it’s a bit dangerous ever to overgeneralise. But yes, Mahler said that’s the first pure Mahler, and in that sense one has to take it seriously, because for him there is a sense of identity that was being defined with this piece.

If you were to express, what did Mahler want? Can we answer this question?

Nagano: We can’t answer this, and it’s very presumptuous of anyone who dares to answer this question. Only the person themselves can answer it. It’s sometimes even dangerous for friends to answer on behalf of other friends, or even a husband to answer on behalf of a wife, or for a sister to answer on behalf of a brother.

We can only look objectively at what’s left behind, to have maybe an idea or a glimpse of what might have been: through the music that Mahler left behind; through the writings that he left behind, fortunately there are many writings, many letters. We can see that Mahler wanted what all humans want, which was somehow a universe in which there were positive things to be felt. But we also see that Mahler’s sensitivity was, I would say, extraordinarily high, so that he was very aware – in spite of these wishes for a very, very positive universe, or a vast environment in which humanity could live – that there was inherent a constant potential of risk, and with that risk a constant potential of danger that lay behind.

And thinking of the turbulent times in which he lived – on the eve of the First World War; during a time when the tension in the conflict between the privileged class and the population who had nothing was mounting to a moment where you could feel that an explosion was going to take place; where societal mores were changing. The family structure was being broken, if you think of Mahler’s own life, and being redefined into something strange and more modern. When you think of the Gesellschaft [society] structures, or the sociological structures, from an anthropological viewpoint we’re being completely redefined: the sense of the aristocracy for example, and how it had reached a point where it was decaying and crumbling.

One had a sense, and Mahler almost certainly had the sense, that something was going to happen, within this wish to have a very positive universe. But these wishes of humanity, I would say, is something we can feel very, very much for Mahler. He had the ability, as we all do, to dream of things, and he dreams of many aspects that he probably knew would be impossible for him to experience and to achieve. And with that came this sensitivity towards the darker side as well as the very light and positive side.

That’s why I said before that I think the music of Mahler is an expression of life’s reality. And in this way it made him a very important composer, in that he was able to express this life’s reality at this time, and in a way that for we who live today – facing the complications of the world that cannot be explained and somehow cannot be resolved – he can offer us, through his artwork, through his great music, expressions of humanity that somehow offer a context or perspective. So that, probably, was not something that he particularly wanted, but through his dreams – which he wrote about – we can perhaps have a feeling of where this extraordinary sensitivity came from.

You say he had the ability to dream, to have visions; he would have fitted perfectly to the United States of America. Which aspects do you find interesting in the relation between Mahler and America?

Nagano: America at that time was much more isolated than it is today. It was a destination of immigrants. People came to America – and in this I’m not speaking about our indigenous Americans, I’m speaking about this very unusual and particular culture, the American culture – because we were historically populated by people who left their own lands because they were searching for something else.

They were searching for a kind of freedom, somehow America could offer them a different kind of hope, a place where things could potentially be realised, whereas they couldn’t be realised in other lands. This was the case with my family, and it was probably the case with most families who made their way to the United States of America. Nevertheless, in that particular time, the east coast of the United States of America was receiving an enormous number of European immigrants – not exclusively, but a lot of European immigration. So what was established there had a certain familiarity, aspects that could be recognised: architectural aspects, certain customs. But at the same time we’re already very, very American, that is to say foreign for a European who would come.

It’s in that sense that I would like to ask Mahler how it felt, then, to work within the opera house, how it felt to work within the symphonic medium, with repertoire that he knew so well, not only as a composer but through the great repertoire that he was performing regularly in Vienna. And I’d like to see through his own eyes and ears what the differences were, coming over to this new world where immigration and, therefore, in the search of a new start, a new freedom, this idea of a melting pot came to be.

The past, yes, was important, but just as important was being able to have a new beginning. And with that, what was so attractive about the United States of America in those days was that one had the feeling that what lay in the future was just as important as what lay in the past. So you could, somehow or another, gradually let the past go and really focus on a new life in America. In my own case, for example, that’s why I can’t speak Japanese – or speak Japanese very badly – because my parents were also born in the United States of America, and their Japanese skills are limited. And my grandparents, who came over in the late 1800s, 1895, left in search of a new life, but enthusiastically embraced the new world, themselves became English speakers.

So in a sense the heritage can be lost in a relatively short amount of time, focussing on this melting pot phenomenon; it was already in existence in Mahler’s New York, when he came. It would be interesting to see what his experience was like.

He writes that he loves the American people more and more, and that he feels more inner freedom than he ever had before. That’s very stunning for me.

Nagano: That is really surprising. But that’s one of the very special parts about what makes up this American culture that’s nearly impossible to define, because it’s so complicated and so new.

Alma writes, when he was brought down from the hotel to the ship to go back to Europe, that the lobby was totally empty in respect for deadly sick Mahler. And Alma writes, “holy America”: I love this passage because you can compare it with what he faced in Vienna.

Nagano: Well, I guess I’m coming to that part now; I’ve been working my way through Henry-Louis de la Grange’s new translation of the last years of Mahler, and I’m just coming up to the American years now. It’s a great book – wonderful! It’s fantastic. I was so thrilled, I had to call him up and tell him that this is really a masterpiece.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler, Universal Edition
Transcript: Flora Death
27.7.2009, Munich
© Universal Edition