“Mahler embraced everything that exists.”

Do you remember when you heard Mahler’s music for the first time, and what your reaction was?

Salonen: I cannot remember what the first piece was; it might have been the 5th Symphony. My conducting teacher, Jorma Panula, was the first Finnish conductor to conduct a Mahler cycle, that is all the Mahler symphonies, and this was in Finland in the 70s. I did hear every piece in the cycle during that time, but I cannot remember what the first one was. I remember the feeling though – I was a little bewildered. I was very familiar with Bruckner at the time, and I was very taken by the simplicity and clarity of the form in Bruckner. There is a kind of lack of evolution; he just presents the material – a bit like Japanese cuisine in a way, here is the raw material. Whereas with Mahler, especially later Mahler, the material is in a state of constant flux; there is constant variation going on, and there is sometimes cyclical variation, so you have variations upon variations in a way. So the first impression was a little bewildering, and I find that some of the symphonies are still difficult to get a grasp of, formally speaking. Like No. 7: I have conducted it many, many times, and I have also heard it many times, but I still find that it takes quite a bit of energy for me to know where I am exactly within that form.

And when did you start to conduct Mahler?

Salonen: The first Mahler symphony I ever conducted was No. 3, and that was in 1983. I was 25 at the time, and I stepped in for Michael Tilson Thomas with the Philharmonia in London at very short notice, and I had to learn the symphony very quickly, and so I went and did it. And that basically launched my conducting career, so it was one of those events. That was the first Mahler symphony I conducted, and since then I’ve conducted all of them, except No. 5 – I don’t know why I’ve never conducted No. 5, it’s just an accident really, because I’ve done every other Mahler symphony.

So you started with the longest Mahler Symphony?

Salonen: (Laughs) Yes, everything else felt easy after that.

And you really have to organise it, because the first movement is so breathtakingly long. What was your strategy for organising it?

Salonen: I can’t remember what I thought really, because I think it was a very instinctive process at the time. The problem, the challenge, and of course the fascination of the first movement of Mahler 3 lies in the vast scope. You have this sonata form that is really straining at all its seams; stuffing is leaking out of this sonata form and it’s barely there at all. And I would say that the only element of sonata form that is there is the recapitulation. Everything else is already practically forgotten. And there is a double exposition as well, which complicates matters somewhat. So the problem is that if you stop for too long to smell the flowers along the road then you lose sight of the goal, and you lose the flow of the music – but it’s very tempting. There are lots of beautiful corners there, I know that. But I think that when I conduct Mahler 3 now, I really try to make the first movement as cohesive as possible, rather than kind of letting everything grow freely.

You did it here at the Salzburg Festival last year with the Vienna Philharmonic. There are more than 20 years between when you started conducting Mahler and now; in that time did you find a new way to approach symphonies in general?

Salonen: I think that the more I conduct Mahler and the older I get, the simpler things become: I do less, basically. I don’t invent very much rubato in this music anymore. I try to make it sound organic, which is sometimes a problem in Mahler because it is not always organically put together. But when it sounds simple, natural, and organic, and not twisted or artificial, then I think it works for me.

I’m fascinated by the richness of that music, and I’m fascinated by the wide scope of material, and I’m fascinated by the sudden twists and turns of the mood and the expression and all that; but I’m not particularly looking for the neurotic quality in the music. It is there – absolutely – but I don’t think that’s the point. I think this is music that works on so many different levels, and it’s also very uneven: the worst moments in Mahler’s symphonies are truly terrible, I think, and the best moments are unbelievable. And somehow all this is coexisting and it’s like the world: we have the good guys and the bad guys; we have the geniuses and we have the idiots; and we have the holy men and we have the prostitutes. That kind of richness of material is pretty unique in all music, including rock and pop music. I don’t think anybody else got anywhere near this kind of world-encompassing attitude, embracing everything that exists.

Could you give an example of one of Mahler’s worst moments?

Salonen: Well, in the first movement of the 3rd Symphony for instance, there’s this sort of C major phrase in the middle of the march that sounds like the American navy arriving at one of their naval bases. There are some unbelievably banal, painfully banal moments. Some of the first Nachtmusik movement in No. 7 is also like that; sometimes it’s hard to believe that he put that in – not the whole movement, but some phrases.

And with later Mahler, of course the actual pool of material is very small. I would say from the 6th Symphony onwards his music is made up of very few building blocks, so there is some kind of cohesion underneath this sometimes seemingly chaotic form. If you think of the Finale of the 6th Symphony for instance, it goes in every direction and sort of grows wildly; it’s like a garden that hasn’t been looked after for 20 years. And you would think that this music would fall apart in terms of cohesion, but somehow it doesn’t, because of the very limited material. And it’s interesting that he creates this unbelievable richness out of very few notes. From the 6th Symphony onwards this is his process. In Symphony No. 9, I think that the basic intervallic matrix that he uses is very limited, and yet out comes this amazing music.

Some conductors have told me that in the last movement of the 6th, Mahler had somehow anticipated the catastrophes of the 20th century. Would you go so far as to say that Mahler was a kind of prophet on the eve of the First World War?

Salonen: I don’t think so – I think for Mahler the struggle was personal. I think he always felt displaced wherever he was, and kind of homeless in a way. Of course the irony of the 6th Symphony is that it was composed during the happiest time of his life. He had started at the Staatsoper and it was all going very well, he was very successful and he had the most prominent conducting position in all of Europe, or the world; he was married to this young, beautiful, smart woman; and he had two loving children. And you would think that this is the moment to write the apotheosis of love and such things, but no – he decides to dig into the very dark realms of the human mind. But I think it’s always personal; I don’t think that he is particularly commenting on political events. The catastrophe is but a personal catastrophe, rather than a global one.

Speaking of premonitions – this is slightly off-topic – Strindberg’s last play, The Great Highway, actually completely literally and precisely predicts the first atom bomb in Hiroshima. The Wanderer in The Great Highway meets a blind Japanese man, who explains that he saw a light which was brighter than the sun, and it blinded him, and he has been blind ever since. The Wanderer asks him where he comes from, and he says “I come from Hiroshima.” This was Strindberg’s last play. That is clairvoyance, but in Mahler’s case I think it was more personal.

How would you identify the neurotic aspect in his music that you mentioned before?

Salonen: I think it’s in the sudden shifts and jumps between different moods and expressions. I think that is a sort of typically neurotic behaviour. And also, from the 6th Symphony onwards, the thematic material is quite often very elusive: the themes are complicated. If you think of the march theme in the Finale of the 6th Symphony, it’s really complicated, and kind of jumpy and nervous. But I think it’s more to do with the way it moves from one expression to another, sometimes without transition, just flipping over, and I think that’s typically neurotic.

So do you see a direct influence of his personal life on his music?

Salonen: I cannot imagine anybody who writes music not being influenced by the events of his or her personal life. In Mahler’s case, as I said, he was an alien wherever he went: In Vienna he was a Jew from the provinces and converted into Christianity, and he had a home but somehow he didn’t have a spiritual home, or a cultural home you could say. And I think that much of the crisis in his music comes from that fact.

What did the composer Salonen learn from Mahler?

Salonen: Well, one obvious thing is the orchestration. If you look at Mahler’s techniques of orchestration and how he develops over the span of the nine symphonies, it’s really interesting, because again less is more. It really becomes quite like chamber music at times, and the 7th Symphony, for example, contains moments which are like this. And somehow you can tell that the entirety of his orchestral music was trying to move towards maximum clarity and simplicity. Of course conductors do have problems to solve in the late Mahler pieces, which he didn’t conduct himself: No. 9 has balance issues that need to be sorted out because he obviously never heard it; Das Lied von der Erde obviously needs rewriting here and there, in terms of the balance between the tenor and the orchestra, especially in the first song; and of course with No. 10 even the Adagio is not a finished score.

Yes, I’ve learnt lots of things about orchestration, but also the idea of the material being in a constant state of flux and the principle of continuous variation. Also the kind of harmonic thinking that is so characteristic; it’s the harmony that makes the Mahler identity in a way, in the same way that the lack of harmony in Berlioz creates the Berlioz identity. If you play the chords of a Berlioz piece on the piano, you think, “God, this is really clumsy and bad and amateurish, like a child has written this music”, but when you hear it in context played by an orchestra, you realise that this is an original genius. But Mahler is quite the opposite – the chords themselves are unbelievably expressive and his sense of harmony is so highly developed. And it’s really fascinating because in his later output it really hovers very close to the last frontier of tonality, and then crosses firmly to the other side, and then comes back again, and it’s this sort of no man’s land where he operates. It’s really fascinating. And you know it doesn’t take a huge push to move from that kind of harmony to organised atonal harmony, so the distance between that and Berg is very short. And then of course moving from early Berg to mature Berg, we then have the principle of organising the atonal material into twelve-tone systems, and you know that distance really is very short too.

This is very speculative, but if Mahler had lived 30 years longer, what would his influence on the Second Viennese School have been?

Salonen: That’s an interesting question because Mahler was on his way out of tonality, but I don’t think he ever even considered abandoning tonality altogether – there was always the tonal reference. So the moments where he leaves tonality become incredibly exciting and expressive, because of the fact that the reference is still there, and I don’t think that he would ever have left that tonal thinking completely. If you think of somebody who had a very long career and experienced all these changes in thinking, like Stravinsky, okay he went into twelve-tone composition in the late 50s, but if you actually listen to those pieces carefully it’s not atonal music, it’s pure Stravinskian music. His harmonic principles are still there; he uses twelve-tone technique but it’s still him, the reference to tonality has not completely disappeared. So that is a big difference from, say, late Schönberg, where the tonal reference is no more. Berg never left the tonal reference. Even in his most atonal pieces – like some of the movements of the Lyric Suite and some moments in the Kammerkonzert – you can tell that the tonal reference is always there, whereas late Webern is completely free from any tonal principle, and then the same thing with Schönberg.

When we look to Mahler’s scores everything is so clear and detailed, with the dynamics and with everything else: in this sense, did he open the door to modern music?

Salonen: I think that he was one of the pioneers of this idea of trying to write foolproof music; of trying to notate everything so precisely and clearly that not even an idiot can destroy it. I mean even if you compare him to people like Brahms and Bruckner, if you look at a Brahms score there’s not a lot of information there; he uses all these markings very sparingly, and then if he writes something it really stands out and you know it’s important. But Brahms was still able or willing to trust the instinct of the musicians of his time. But I think Mahler’s experience was that people just didn’t get it, that people made lots of wrong decisions and treated his music in a way that he had not intended, so he ended up notating everything incredibly clearly.

And there of course you have the start of this process which then becomes inflated in later works: if you look at some scores by Berg – for instance the Drei Orchesterstücke – there is so much information for every note that it in fact loses its impact, because every note has some kind of story to tell. So from the musicians’ point of view, you then have to make a reduction when you perform this music – you have to reduce it to something that you can actually process, and at the same time physically manage. And it was not only the Viennese of course: Debussy did this as well, and there is a rumour that on the day of his death he still spent the morning at the Durand offices adding some articulation markings into La mer. I don’t know whether this story is true or not. And of course this process then leads to the kind of hyper-notation in Brian Ferneyhough and James Dillon, and the composers of the super-complex school, where it is unthinkable to write one note without a least three, or four or five different markings. And I think that in this respect Mahler was the predecessor of this kind of school of composing.

We spoke earlier about the fact that you plan to conduct Das klagende Lied in the first version. Can you tell me what fascinates you about the piece?

Salonen: Das klagende Lied is an amazing piece and I’m very pleased that the original version is finally available. I’ve conducted it a couple of times, and the whole piece is a miracle because all of Mahler is there. His basic pool of material is already there, and the modes are there, and the whole of his subject matter, like the use of voice, and everything else – it’s all there as a prototype. And of course the piece has some dramaturgical problems: it goes on a bit here and there, and it doesn’t form a proper dramatic shape because there is no new combination, and also the phrases are very short. It really is like a child’s piece in the sense that he does one thing, and then the next thing, and then this other thing, and then let’s go back to that, but nothing is ever allowed to develop into anything. It’s very moving, very touching, but sometimes it is also annoying because it’s as though you can tell that this was a teenager with a short attention span. The sound is amazing too – from the first bar you can tell that it’s Mahler. When you look at the score, it’s very simple and there’s nothing remarkable, apart from the identity which is so apparent.

Moving from Das klagende Lied to the 9th Symphony, you once told me that this is probably the symphony to which you feel closest. Can you explain what is so special to you about this symphony?

Salonen: There is a sort of feeling of summary in that piece; everything becomes like an archetype of an aspect of Mahler. The first movement is an archetype of Mahler’s extended sonata form; and the scherzo is like an archetype of the Mahler scherzo – everything he has done is reflected in that music to some extent. The Burleske is a completely manic exercise in counterpoint – relentless, like a homage to Bach I suppose, and the great masters of counterpoint; and then the Adagio contains all Adagios. There is this kind of summary that feels like the end of life. It’s funny to think that late Mahler is when he was my age, and I don’t feel particularly late at this point, so it’s strange to think in those terms. I’ve always just been very moved by Mahler 9, but I also discovered lots of new things in Mahler 6 recently, when I conducted it a few times. So it’s music that you never get tired of because there is so much there.

How do you personally deal with his obsession with suffering and redemption? You once told me that when he goes “crazy” you feel a little bit taken aback.

Salonen: When I perform that music I don’t think that I’m Mahler; I don’t have to identify with the composer because that’s not my position. I’m trying to perform at the highest possible level, with maximum intensity and power, but I don’t think I’m Mahler; I don’t have this kind of identification. So when there is this narrative, it’s his narrative not mine, and that’s fine – I’m just the conductor.

Is there a danger of overpowering Mahler?

Salonen: By making it too powerful?

A danger of bringing too much emotion to it.

Salonen: There is so much emotion in the music already, and to tell your story as well as Mahler’s story in this music is … well it’s Mahler’s story – it’s his story not mine. Often the Mahler performances by my colleagues that I have really truly enjoyed have been sort of simple, including some very masterful performances, like those of Haitink, Pierre Boulez, and so on and so forth. And then the Mahler performances that I’ve really hated have been ones where I got the feeling that there are two stories being told at the same time: there is Mahler’s story and then there is the story of this guy who is conducting this music, who is also wallowing in it. And I don’t think it’s right, but that’s just a matter of personal taste.

We already spoke about the worst moments in his symphonies; could you give me an example of one of the best moments, that you think really demonstrates the symphony at its peak.

Salonen: Well, for instance the end of No. 3 is really amazing, and all of the first movement of No. 9 – it is unbelievably beautiful, unfolding music. The slow movement of No. 6 is also just perfect. And then of course there are shorter moments, just a few bars here and there where some kind of miracle happens and it’s very rich.

Lastly, why, as director of the most famous, prestigious opera house, did Mahler not write an opera? And can you talk about the idea of staging the second part of the 8th Symphony.

Salonen: Well I don’t think anybody knows why he didn’t write an opera. He might have had a Wagner complex somewhere; it might have been that as he knew Wagner operas intimately and he conducted most of them, it set the bar too high for him. I’m not sure but that’s the only explanation I can imagine, because he was a very literary person and of course the leading opera conductor of his time, and so why not indeed. And the closest to opera he ever came was at the end and at the beginning of his career. Das klagende Lied, of course, is a story being told, but one doesn’t make it operatic in the same way because the singers don’t represent one character – they jump in and out of character; and then sometimes they are the voice of a person; sometimes they are singing outside, describing what’s happening – so this makes it very difficult to see this work as a sort of proto-opera. The second part of the 8th Symphony is of course the closest he ever came to opera, in the sense that every singer represents a person and a part in the play. And it’s a very tempting idea to stage Mahler 8, and you could have the holy boys flying across the stage and Doctor Marianus would be bathing in this golden light, and the Mystic Chorus would finally rise to the heavens at the end (Laughs). And I’ve been thinking about Goethe-Mahler event, where one could first do the Faust Part One as a theatrical performance, the then first four scenes of Faust Two, and then play Mahler 8 in a staged version. So you would have full Faust day, or maybe two days – a Faust weekend. I would love to do that but I’m not sure where I can do it

What did Mahler want?

Salonen: What does a great person want? I think the ultimate need for creation is the need to reach out to people, and with music you can say things that you can’t with words or with any other means of communication. It’s a particular way of communicating something to other people. I can’t think of any other reason. I mean of course one is always fascinated by music in itself as a phenomenon, and I think in many cases the creative process, in the long-term, is also seeking to understand the mysteries of creation and the mysteries of music: Where does it come from? What makes it work? Why does music affect us so much? But I think the simple answer is that he wanted to share something with other people, and in this respect he was very powerful.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler
Transcript: Flora Death
8.8.2009; Salzburg
© Universal Edition