“Mahler was in control of losing control.”

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

Oramo: When I heard Gustav Mahler’s music for the first time – I have to confess that I can’t remember when it would have been. I went to concerts with my Dad quite often when I was little, and especially when my Mum was playing, she is a pianist. But Mahler’s music – I suppose it could have been when Igor Markevitch was conducting in Helsinki. And I seem to remember that my mother played Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto with him, and then there was Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. It could have been that.

What was the Mahler reception in Finland like when you were growing up?

Oramo: Mahler really became a known composer in Finland only in the late 1960s or early 1970s. I was still too young to know about it, but my conducting teacher Jorma Panula did a series where he performed all the Mahler Symphonies, and most of them were then Finnish premieres. Yet I need to mention that much before, already in the 1920s and 1930s, Finnish conductors conducted Mahler, mainly in Sweden.

There was Armas Järnefelt, who, as far as I can remember, conducted the Swedish premieres of both No. 5 and No. 6. There was Georg Schnéevoigt who was a big name at that time, also of Finnish origin, conducting a lot of Mahler. But it never really came about in Finland. Finnish conductors rather did him abroad.

And you personally: Did the door to Mahler open immediately for you?

Oramo: No, I was very slow with that actually. I remember that I felt comfortable with the Symphony No. 1 and maybe some of the songs as well in the early part of my conducting career. But that’s about it, really. And it wasn’t until I had been in Birmingham already for a few years that I began to get more into the world of Mahler. Maybe then through the Symphony No. 4 and later on with the Symphony No. 5, and then the Second and Third came as well.

If you analyse the difficulties you had in your approach to Mahler, how would you describe it?

Oramo: Well, you have to bear in mind that German is a foreign language for us Finns. This is a different approach than for people of German-speaking origin, or even of central European origin. It’s not as natural. I guess this makes approaching Mahler’s music slightly different, and it takes more time for us to do it, to find this natural pulse of the music. Having grown up with the music of Sibelius and Nielsen and – and of course a lot of German and French music – Mahler represents something that is foreign, is from another world.

In what way? In the material he uses, or how he puts it together?

Oramo: Both, I think. The material he uses, which is quite often based on folk songs, on dance patterns like the Ländler, even on ancient forms of music, as you can see with the ideas of concerto grosso in some of his symphonies. Also this extremely expressionistic music, this forward-looking music. I used to think that it lacked a sense of “organicity”. The revelation, for me, was to find the organic nature of Mahler’s music, the deep inside connection of all the material he uses. The whole is more than just the sum of its parts.

That’s what Johannes Brahms thought when Mahler was in a competition as a young composer: that he simply lacked discipline. So was this possibly one of the difficulties for you?

Oramo: Indeed, absolutely. I am not a friend of discipline at all. It is more a talk about organic growth of the material rather than external manipulation of the material.

You conducted many concerts in the Mahler Cycle here in Stockholm. Can you tell us about the audience’s response and about the festival itself?

Oramo: I’ve never experienced anything like the festival before. We had a full house every night, there was a Mahler Symphony every night. A number of orchestras and conductors participated. I did two concerts with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, doing the Symphony No. 1 and then the Symphony No. 8, and two concerts with the Finnish Radio Symphony doing the Third and the Fourth.

If we talk about the audience’s response, I think that just by showing up, they showed their interest in this kind of project, which provided them with the possibility to get a complete image of the fantastic composer Mahler in such a short time. Occasions like this are very rare and I think they are really worth doing. I felt everybody who attended the festival in Stockholm knows more about Mahler now than before. They see the connections; they see the journey that he took in his music.

Would you agree that Mahler somehow expressed the condition of the modern human being and that is why he became so popular?

Oramo: Absolutely. Although he was very well known as a conductor at his time, he wasn’t so popular when he was composing actively. Yet nowadays he is, I would say, one of the top five popular composers in classical music. This has to mean that he has something very special to say about the human being, and especially about the modern human being. I think the greatest thing that he gave to humanity was his gift to open the human soul with his music. That’s why I think so many people can adapt themselves to Mahler’s music nowadays – they can feel the power of the contrasts, of the extreme simplicity and beauty on one part, and of the extreme complexity and even chaotic nature of some other parts of his music.

And to which Mahler do you personally feel closest?

Oramo: It depends a bit on which piece one is doing, but for me the Symphony No. 4 is something very special, because it is more on a chamber-like scale, and it has a fantastic range of expression, from this nightmarish ride with sleighs ringing to the devil’s violin, the vision of heaven, with all its cruelty and realism. I think that is really something very modern. In that way I feel very connected to that. But of course, I love all the pieces. Absolutely every note he has written.

Bernstein said: “Mahler became popular because he anticipated the catastrophes of the 20th century”. Would you go so far too?

Oramo: Maybe he did. But did he do it knowingly? I don’t know. It would be hard to imagine that. It would be even harder to imagine that he actually thought that his music would be so popular in nowadays’ time. For me he is more like a psychological composer, exploring the depths of human beings rather than any sort of political or war catastrophes.

As a conductor, did your Mahler approach change over the years? Did you discover something that makes you feel surer in the way you approach Mahler?

Oramo: I am constantly changing, not only with Mahler, but with my entire repertoire. I find it’s a really important way to approach music, not to be stuck on some ideas, but to let them evolve organically, through your interaction with the score, also with regards to my Mahler interpretation. And I will continue working on Mahler’s music, trying to find all the hidden depths that are there. My next big project is to take up the Deryck Cooke version of the Symphony No. 10 next season. That will be the new, new Mahler for me.

Technically speaking: What’s the biggest challenge in performing Mahler?

Oramo: It is, I think, to bring out the continuity of the music. I absolutely want all the contrasts to be as near to the listener as possible, yet without sticking out and without stopping the overall flow of the music. I also think that in terms of handling the tempo, it is so important to be flexible and to let the phrases breath rather than to be trapped in a static pulse. I think there is always either a kind of forward arch or a backward relaxation in Mahler’s music. If there is no direction, then I don’t really find the point of the music. But there is a direction almost all the time in everything he wrote.

Mahler said that lack of flexibility in the tempi is one of the worst things a conductor can do.

Oramo: That is where he anticipated the catastrophes of the 20th century, because metronomic music-making has become almost a rule. It’s something I feel we have to fight against very hard.

Is there a danger of overpowering his music?

Oramo: You mean that the interpreter overpowers the music? Yes, I suppose there is a danger. I have experienced Mahler performances where felt that people were trying to push the music too much into one direction. If one decides that some piece is, for instance, not about a certain kind of emotion and, as a consequence, excludes all other emotions kinds of texture, then one runs risk of taking the music too much into one direction. In Mahler, you always have to have all levels present at the same time. As Mahler once allegedly said when he was discussing with Sibelius, a symphony has to contain the whole world, not just one slice of it.

So the danger could be just to jump from one emotion to another?

Oramo: Yes, if it wasn’t for his transitions. One really masterful quality of Mahler was the way he treated transitions, and the way he lets music die out and at the same time start a new section. I think these moments are the key moments in any Mahler piece, and you have to join them together like there is seemingly no change – and yet everything changes. This also has to do with the flexibility of tempo again – that you are able to bring one episode to a conclusion and start another one.

Are there Mahler conductors that influenced you?

Oramo: It was mostly Klaus Tennstedt who influenced me as a Mahler conductor. I never experienced him live, I am a little too young for that, but I think he had the ability of making the music sound very free yet very organic at the same time. It sounds as if he improvised: I really find most of his recordings very exceptional, although some are not so wonderfully played. But the sense of urgency and the interpretation is just something very unique.

Mengelberg also influenced me, although less than Tennstedt. I really adore Mengelberg’s approach to the Adagietto of the Symphony No. 5. And also the surviving recording of the Symphony No. 4 is just wonderful. However, he exaggerates a lot. But we should consider that that’s something that was customary at the time. And we know that Mahler and Mengelberg had personal contact, about 20 or 25 years before these recordings were made. And we also know that Mahler didn’t agree with him on everything, which I am quite glad to know. I find the sharpness of his approach to Mahler wonderful, how he micromanaged the rubato, his wonderful sense of rhythmic wit. This is very different from what has become customary of Mahler, of this Viennese smooth way of playing. Thus Tennstedt and Mengelberg would be my key Mahler interpreters.

It is interesting that Mahler knew Bruno Walter and Klemperer as well; Klemperer was his assistant in the Symphony No. 2. And the Mahler approach of Bruno Walter and Klemperer is totally different.

Oramo: Complete opposites, absolutely. I think this smooth, slightly ironed-out playing style has partly come from Bruno Walter. I like many of his piece interpretations, but not especially those of Mahler. I find them lacking in excitement and interest. Maybe it has to do with the fact that he made many of his recordings in America. Yet there is of course the wonderful recording from Vienna of the Symphony No. 9, which is a completely different piece of cake. That’s really exciting, I think, and very, very deep.

Mahler was not so popular in Scandinavia because there was this Sibelius heritage. The two composers knew each other. In what way would you describe how they differ from each other?

Oramo: In a way Sibelius always started from one cell of music, and then let it grow, as if it was a tree. Everything belongs together, the branches grow out of the trunk, and leaves come out of the branches, and the possible flowers grow out of the leaves – they are all connected. They eat and drink the same nurture. And that’s the difference. In Sibelius’s music, you really look for a symphonic unity. You take a little piece of something and you grow it into a wonderful structure. You could compare it to a tree, really.

Whereas in Mahler’s music you have many influences which are melted together. You take this and that, and this emotion, and that bit of country heritage, and that bit of folk music and that bit of military march. And you kind of boil it all and bring it to a wonderful interesting mix. It’s really two different approaches and – I still remember when I read some Finnish newspaper reviews from the 1970s about Mahler’s music. In one of them, Erik Tawaststjerna, who was a biographer of Sibelius and a great source of inspiration for many musicians, writes about how he is not able to understand the banality of some of Mahler’s music. Although he recognised, for instance, the great mastery of the first movement and of the Abschied of the sixth movement of Das Lied von der Erde, he couldn’t grasp Mahler. He thought that the middle movements of Das Lied were all just banality. I can’t understand that, because I think it is the most subtle music. Furthermore, the union of music and text is just incredible. This still says something about the cultural gap of that time. More exposure, I think, has helped. Although I do think that Mahler’s symphonies are not played often enough, and certainly not well enough, in Helsinki.

Still?

Oramo: Still, yes.

I mean, it’s a stereotype that Scandinavian people are more introverted and Mahler’s music is outgoing, and probably sometimes consciously exaggerating so much. Could this be a reason?

Oramo: Probably it is a reason, but we’ve got to learn to exaggerate more. Because even Sibelius’s music, and certainly Nielsen’s music, sometimes profits from exaggeration. If you take care of the overall line, then slightly stronger colouring of some episodes and subjects will just help the music and take them actually closer to the spirit of Mahler. And I think it wouldn’t do any harm to take Mahler closer to the spirit of the organic growth of Sibelius.

How do you see Mahler as person?

Oramo: Very, very interesting. I’m not so aware of many details, but I have read a fair amount, and I just find him so interesting because he was always so concerned about standards of music-making. I am sure his personal life was also very complicated and very interesting. However, I just can’t understand his eagerness to rewrite other people’s music. Maybe it was something you just did in those days, but, as far as I know, he was working on an opera by Weber called Die drei Pintos for a few of months. The project, however, did not work out, and apparently Mahler wasted a lot of energy and time on such projects. My opinion on his re-orchestrating of Beethoven’s Ninth is similar. I even heard stories about Mahler rewriting pages of Debussy’s La mer, which is quite amazing, actually. You could endlessly learn from it, both ways – how to do things right, and how to absolutely not do things.

For example: what not to do … ?

Oramo: The way he treated some of his singers and musicians must have been pretty horrible. It certainly would not go down well these days. I myself like to behave in a civilised way and reach my goals with persuasion, and not with violence.

How could it be that he didn’t write an opera? He was the greatest opera conductor of his time. Can we see his symphonies as a kind of music drama?

Oramo: Yes, certainly. Consider the Symphony No. 8, especially the second part has an operatic flow to it. Also the treatment of its material is more like opera than anything else he wrote. I can see an operatic inspiration in the end movements of the Symphony No. 2 and bits of No. 3 as well, maybe even in No. 4.

However, I think he probably wanted to separate the ‘day job’ as an opera conductor and as an opera director and intendant, from his composing, which he mostly only did in the summers when he wasn’t conducting operas. So I can quite understand that kind of split – wanting to keep the two things completely apart.

A propos other composers – what I find really interesting is that when Mahler was still in Hamburg as a Generalmusikdirektor he invited Tchaikovsky to do either Eugen Onegin or Pique Dame – I’m not sure, but it was one of those big operas. And apparently Tchaikovsky couldn’t manage to conduct it properly, so Mahler had to step in. I mean – what a wonderful idea – Mahler conducting Tchaikovsky!

He conducted Rachmaninov in New York, the Third Piano Concerto, with the composer at the piano. And Rachmaninov afterwards said he was the best conductor he ever had, because he took care of every detail, was very serious with him, very serious with the music, although it’s a totally different aesthetic.

Oramo: Yes, it is, completely. I am sure that he was a great interpreter. It is a pity that there is no film or audio evidence of his music, other than the piano rolls, which are something, but not everything.

Where would Mahler have gone had he lived twenty years longer?

Oramo: That’s a really interesting question. I think he would have probably taken a lot of notice of what Schoenberg did, for example with his five piano pieces, and what Alban Berg would do later. Maybe also of what Stravinsky was going to do. As he was interested in many things, he would have picked up elements from these people. But of course, you might not have noticed this so much in his Eleventh and Twelfth Symphonies. He was still Mahler, although it is interesting to think about how he would have reacted to these elements in music. And, say, Bartók – that would have been an incredibly interesting juxtaposition. But it wasn’t going to be.

What did Mahler want?

Oramo: That is difficult to answer. I don’t know. He wanted to touch and to move people. Also, he wanted to lay out his soul to the whole world, to be examined. He had something of an exhibitionist, psychologically speaking, and also something of a priest; not a religious priest, but a priest of a modern life-style, or of a modern view of the human being.

And this modernity, what does it mean – a modern human being?

Oramo: If you imagine the Romantic ideal of the artist as someone being in complete control, then Mahler was losing control all the time. But of course he had control over losing control. He really controlled chaos.

What would you have asked Mahler?

Oramo: Why he so often wrote ‘nicht schleppen’ [don’t drag]? Did he have the tendency to drag, or did the orchestras maybe have the tendency? All these instructions, they are wonderful, but it’s almost always the same thing: ‘nicht schleppen’. Or ‘nicht eilen’ [don’t rush].

They are always negative.

Oramo: Was he instructing himself, or was he instructing a future conductor, a student, an orchestra? I guess it varies from case to case.

Are these instructions useful? Sometimes he writes ‘Von hier an drei schlagen’[from here on, beat in 3].

Oramo: In most cases they are useful – but not always. Sometimes you would, at least nowadays, and at least with my approach to the music, choose a little bit differently. But mostly this concerns technical transitions. What a conductor beats really has a big impact on the music in any given bar; it’s completely different if you beat in three or in one. And sometimes you don’t want to lose the feeling of one, just because he wrote ‘beat in three’.

Maybe he wanted to create a performing tradition, and that’s probably why he wrote what he expects in such a detailed way.

Oramo: But think about his contemporaries – Elgar wrote actually much more precisely and consistently what he wanted, although his interpretation went quite far from what he actually wrote. Yet if you listen to Elgar’s recordings – and I am really glad that they exist – you actually hear everything he wrote, all the instructions he wrote. In Mahler’s case, I rather think he wanted to instruct himself, and talk about his perceived problems as a musician, because he was highly self-critical. He was constantly trying to make himself better with these instructions. I think they are mostly written for himself.

I totally agree with you. I think he had the tendency probably to ‘eilen’ or maybe it was for himself: ‘stay cool’, ‘stay calm’.

Oramo: As he had a hot temperament, I’m sure he had to work on keeping things in the shape he wanted.

How do you see his influence on the music of the 20th century, the Second Viennese School and later?

Oramo: His influence has been bigger than anybody else’s. That’s for sure. If you talk about the Second Viennese School, of course, he was deified by Schoenberg and his friends, and his pupils. You have, for instance, Anton Webern conducting Mahler’s symphonies in Vienna in the 1920s, when the master himself had passed away. Yet you can’t imagine a composer more far away from Mahler than Anton Webern, at least regarding his later output. But I think Mahler’s music showed the way, and it gave so many possibilities to future composers to take what they liked and to discard what they didn’t like. So this kind of massive scale of the music actually belonged to the era of time that he composed, and it pretty much stayed there. Since the 1920s, and even more since the 1930s and after the War, pieces of music became shorter and shorter. More concise, more controlled. So this part didn’t really stay. But Mahler’s sense of texture and his orchestration certainly influenced everybody. And also his kind of intellectual and emotional approach, which, I think, even today influences composers.

His obsession with suffering and redemption, as well?

Oramo: Yes, a lot of music is about suffering, nowadays. A lot of our best music is still about the same things. Suffering, redemption, introspection, dealing with the obstacles one has to face in life.

But also the idea of composing music about music, that’s also from Mahler. It’s not all about external things, it’s also about pure music. That’s how, in my opinion, Mahler influenced Shostakovitch. I think there is a big connection between the two composers. Shostakovitch is always seen as a political composer, but I think his music is mostly music about music. It speaks the language of Stalinist Russia, but it is still first and foremost music and not politics.

When Shostakovitch was asked which music he would take to a desert island, he said Das Lied von der Erde, which is very interesting.

Oramo: Yes, I can understand that, certainly.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler
Transcript: Angelika Worseg
7.5.2010, Stockholm
© Universal Edition