“What Mahler wrote is so clear that it is nearly impossible to move away from it.”

Maestro, do you remember when you heard the music of Gustav Mahler for the first time?

Gergiev: I remember it very vaguely. It was the 1^st Symphony. Obviously, I was a very, very young man, but I remember this final movement when the horn section suddenly stands up and continues to play while standing. It’s a very powerful statement of lust in this symphony. That was very memorable. I don’t think that it is now my favorite memory of all the symphonies that Mahler composed, but it was my first one. That was a long time ago and of course it was also a long time before I started to look at Mahler’s symphonies – although when I was preparing to participate in the Herbert von Karajan Competition for young conductors, I saw that Mahler’s 1^st Symphony was proposed for young conductors to prepare. This means that if you prepare it, you could be asked to conduct the second movement, part of the finale, part of the first movement or just a couple of tempo transitions at the end – they don’t give you the entire symphony to conduct. So you have to know it and I knowingly started to study the symphony and played it for myself, if not to get to the heart of it, then to be able to conduct it, should I be given the chance to conduct it in the second round of the competition. This symphony was not for the first round, the beginning of the competition was very classical. I remember conducting maybe Beethoven’s 2^nd Symphony – the repertoire was very classical. Somehow I got into the second round and then into the third and then I got to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic which was a dream come true for a young man like me.

Mahler was not very regularly played at the time in Leningrad where I grew up. Occasionally, a great conductor would conduct Mahler – Kondrashin conducted Mahler’s symphonies, but Mravinsky did not conduct Mahler. But there were of course guest conductors – I remember very well Leinsdorf with the New York Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta, who is now a good colleague of mine, again with the New York Philharmonic, conducting the 9^th Symphony. It was long ago and we looked at this repertoire as being relatively unknown, although the 2^nd Symphony was performed, maybe because of this huge choir and voice – it was somehow considered to be very grand and successful.

Only later, when I was developing through Shostakovich, could I travel back and start to think about what it is that links Shostakovich’s works to this great cycle of Mahler symphonies and why Mahler’s symphonies can be better understood or better heard if you already have this experience of Shostakovich’s symphonies, especially the 4^th Symphony. In my case, it helped me.

When I started to record Mahler symphonies, the very thought of recording the 7^th Symphony was most daunting and difficult for me. I had conducted this symphony maybe six or seven times with the Rotterdam Philharmonic and with the Mariinsky Orchestra, and I was never happy with myself. What was even more frightening was that I listened to two or three recordings by very famous conductors and I didn’t want to confess, even to myself, that I didn’t feel very impressed. There was some problem with this symphony for me when I conducted it, always at some point in the final movement. We went with the Rotterdam Philharmonic to perform in several cities and I remember very well a concert in Prague, in the Rudolphinum. It’s a good hall with a good acoustic, even if it may be slightly small for Mahler. And the Rotterdam Orchestra is a pretty good orchestra and I was already a pretty experienced conductor, including performances of Mahler’s symphonies, and yet, even after this concert which was good acoustically and I couldn’t possibly complain about anything, the public was there, there was a feeling of a big occasion, but again I felt that I still didn’t have a key to understanding this certainly problematic symphony. So, to be honest, I spent a sleepless night in London before the recording and I made some very radical decisions because I felt I had to stop trying to present this symphony like a gigantic work. I wanted the finale to sound, in a very simple way, like something you could call a Rondo-finale – although it is orchestrated much more powerfully than famous finales of Haydn trios or symphonies, it is after all a Rondo-finale. And I felt that I had to find a combination of power and intensity with a strange feeling of lightness, not extremely thoughtful, not with an extremely important statement. Because sometimes a final movement can be going away from an important statement, like going back to normal from a dramatic moment in your life – looking forward to something else. That’s how I saw it myself. If you start with this famous solo – it is of course very intense and psychologically dark, the beginning of the 7^th Symphony. In many ways you can compare it with the final movement of the 5^th Symphony, except that the 5^th Symphony is shaped in such a way that you don’t want to add anything and you don’t want to take anything away from it because it’s just perfect. With the 7^th Symphony you have to spend some time on it and maybe be the nastiest critic of yourself. So that’s what happened to me, this was my experience of this symphony. Finally, when this recording in London took place, I felt for the first time that I was close to it starting to work. This was maybe one and a half years ago or nearly two years ago. That was quite a story with this symphony.

I have not only a big sense of curiosity, but I also have a strong desire to play these symphonies in different halls. Acoustics matter a lot. You can create a miraculous feeling of being one with nature or an even more miraculous feeling of one genius musician being able to portray an entire universe – this is a phenomenal quality in Mahler’s symphonies. Sometimes, there are moments when you think that you can see all the planets and all this space that is somehow given to us – we do not own this space, but we can describe it, we can think about it, we can maybe explore it with our minds, with our imagination, with our hopes, with our dreams and also with our fears. Because Mahler wrote these symphonies in Austria in the summertime and he was what I call ‘one with nature’ or a part of nature – there were all these cowbells and this fantastic feeling of being on top of the world, in a sense. Mountains give you this feeling. I personally find it hard to decide which I like best – mountains or oceans that you can spend hours looking at, thinking how incredible our universe is, how incredible this nature is that we are constantly trying to destroy.

Another thing that you feel when you are inside practically any of Mahler’s symphonies is the noise of the city, the chaos; they are very urban. And even before World War I there was this increasingly strong feeling of an imminent catastrophe. If Mahler had lived for another five years, he could have given us something shockingly different even to the last Adagio of the 10^th Symphony. But he already heard this painful, catastrophic, chaotic, crazy, abnormal and screaming intensity of those cities in Europe where the political protests and tensions were mounting and mounting. I think that composers have this incredible ability.

Also, Shostakovich’s 4^th Symphony doesn’t describe 1931, but possibly 1937. Shostakovich anticipated what happened after he composed this symphony. You can already hear Shostakovich being full of fear. Not the fear of being afraid of somebody, but the fear of an entire country, of millions of people. There is something coming, you can just feel it. It’s incredibly big and incredibly frightening, it is catastrophic, with terrible consequences, but it’s coming.

The same is true for Mahler. They both lived before World War I and Mahler composed some of his most tense symphonies then. And Shostakovich composed his ‘War Symphonies’ which are basically the strongest statement about World War II made by any musician in the world, I think.

It is both easy and difficult to talk about Mahler symphonies because now everybody knows these symphonies. There are wonderful performances and one has to try to make Mahler’s music more easily accessible to a generation of people who are now maybe 15 or even 20 years old. They should now be ready to move forward and to discover what is so incredible about Mahler and his symphonies. For my generation, there were not that many recordings or books or different great conductors who made all these statements about all these symphonies. It was largely unknown what people thought about the cycle of Mahler symphonies. Of course, there were great people like Leonard Bernstein, Tennstedt, Solti or Kubelik, but it took many decades before the cycle of Mahler symphonies became what you can call the property of many great orchestras and audiences here and there. It took time. Even in Vienna it took time and it was not that easy for Mahler in Vienna, as we all know. But I suspect that there will be room for new interpretations which will be quite different from even the most famous ones. I think it will come in the next ten, 15 or 20 years.

Mahler was a great conductor, so he made it nearly impossible for conductors to bring their own personality into the performances, to take like a white sheet of paper and start to improvise. It is so structured and clear that it is next to impossible to distance yourself from it. But still there is room and, again, it is very important in which hall any given symphony is performed because the acoustical sensation is needed. It has to be a miraculous feeling when you listen to those adagios, for example. It has to be ultra, ultra special in terms of the kind of sonority one can achieve. And this is where we have to know in what direction it should go and how it can be even more incredible and successful.

The Musikverein is a great hall. Maybe it’s slightly dangerous for a Mahler symphony because if you play the 6^th Symphony here, which I actually did once, it is almost impossible to play, with all this huge brass in the final movement. The Musikverein is more suited to the 4^th Symphony. You need the acoustics of the Musikverein for the quiet moments, for these wonderful silences, which are almost non-existent, these silences which become music, and at the same time you need room for these big, dramatic statements. It’s very difficult to combine.

Mahler went to Saint Petersburg. Can you compare the Mahler tradition in Saint Petersburg with the Mahler tradition in Amsterdam where he also performed?

Gergiev: Well, he went to Saint Petersburg twice. He conducted music by other composers, especially Beethoven, but he also conducted his own 5^th Symphony. It seems that he was extremely impressed with the orchestra and his words are known; he had a good response and he was given a very good reception. When he went to Saint Petersburg, he was a happy man. It was not an unhappy period of his life.

On the other hand, in Amsterdam, he had Willem Mengelberg. Mengelberg was not only one of the most loyal and one of the most gifted conductors, but also one of the most powerful because he already had a huge following. He was in a position to do what he found most interesting and most important. Also, Saint Petersburg was already heading towards disaster. Things were already looking slightly dangerous in 1905. There had already been a famous bloody event which was followed by maybe smaller but equally dangerous incidents. The system was already shaken. The Mariinsky Theatre, of which I have been artistic director for 22 years, was one of the strongest, if not the strongest, theatres in the world. All these composers were there – Schönberg, Debussy, Richard Strauss, Mahler, Bartok or Hindemith and of course all the big Russian composers. Stravinsky was there all the time because his father played leading bass at the Mariinsky Theatre, so he came to the rehearsals as a boy and heard many great performances. Prokofiev heard many great performances at the Mariinsky, including ‘Kitezh’ and some Wagner operas. So they were all practically children of this tradition. At the same time, Czarist Russia was reaching perhaps its most dangerous period for centuries. The last years were the most difficult for the Romanovs. The Imperial Theatre was becoming increasingly popular and after the death of Tchaikovsky, when Rimsky-Korsakov was still alive, Saint Petersburg was practically flooded with the great musical names, everyone was coming – Nikisch, Bülow, Hans Richter, not just for single concerts, but they were performing entire festivals. Hans Richter twice conducted the Festival for Wagner Operas, as it was then called. And of course there were also others, like Karl Muck, Felix Mottl, Weingartner – to name them all would make for a long list. But it was a fantastic time in Saint Petersburg – Petrograd, as it was called – before the Revolution. It still continued, even when the Bolsheviks were there, until the late 1920s, early 1930s. Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Alexander von Zemlinsky, they all came. Unfortunately, Mahler had already been dead for a long time, but Zemlinsky continued to come; Erich Kleiber came several times and had a lot of work there. And some of those conductors would perform Mahler symphonies. They were big scholars, especially Sollertinsky who was one of the first influences on Shostakovich, making him open his eyes and ears to the cycle of Mahler symphonies. That was very important.

I am sorry that I talk about Russians or the history of Saint Petersburg, but your question was directly linked to the history of the Mariinsky Theatre and Orchestra which now plays all these symphonies. And we have young players now who learn very quickly how to play Mahler symphonies and how to find the right sound, but it is terribly important that the best American, Austrian or German orchestras, the best London orchestras or the best Russian orchestras play Mahler’s symphonies; this is the way it should go, the way it happened with Brahms’s or Beethoven’s symphonies. Because you cannot claim that the only one way to play a Brahms symphony is this way; there is no Berlin Philharmonic way – there is a Berlin Philharmonic way with Karajan or with Furtwängler or with Abbado and so on. So there is not only one way. And it seems that the same can now be said about the Vienna Philharmonic tradition, they have a fantastic sonority, the golden sound, but it can be quite different from what it was like 30 years ago or 15 years ago, or what it will be like in ten years time.

I myself find it very interesting and important to work with young musicians in Russia and to find a way to make these symphonies tell us more than we think we know. We have a fantastic hall now in Saint Petersburg; it’s a new hall, only three years old. And Mahler’s symphonies, even great powerful ones like the 8^th Symphony, can sound incredibly good there. I have experience with this, which is also documented on records. I recorded the 8^th Symphony in St Paul’s Cathedral in London. On the one hand, the acoustics in one of the biggest cathedrals in the world was of course a big problem as there was a huge echo, but, on the other hand, it also offered something that you cannot find in any concert hall. There was this space and in some passages it sounded so magical. The atmosphere makes you treat the symphony, the sound and the tempi in a different way. That was my experience. And I think it’s not only the 8^th Symphony, in some way you could also do it with the 2^nd Symphony, as it has this magical choir of human voices. It was very important and very risky. But it was a very important experience for me and instead of refusing, I would maybe sometime request that the 8^th Symphony should again be performed in a huge space, maybe in one of the biggest cathedrals in the US or in Europe. I don’t think it’s only problematic, because towards the end of this symphony there are certain passages with the orchestra, with children in the choir, with the human voice and of course this soprano – in some ways you shouldn’t really understand where the voice comes from. This sensation or feeling actually works very well in a cathedral.

Technically speaking, when you teach, what is the biggest challenge when conducting Mahler?

Gergiev: I don’t teach – I try to help some conductors and give them opportunities to conduct. I myself never forget that I was a winner of the Herbert von Karajan Competition; I was 24 years old at the time. But it took me another ten, maybe even eleven years before I was standing in front of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra – the orchestra which in my eyes and for my ear was the orchestra that brought me to this high society of great performers, great conductors and great orchestras. Because it was a sensational orchestra – it is a great orchestra now, but then it was a sensational combination of conductor and orchestra. I am speaking about Mravinsky. But I still cannot explain why I was never able to conduct them when I was 25 or 27. For some strange reason, which had nothing to do with music, I couldn’t do it. Now I don’t regret this, I think I needed to grow and do a lot of other things before I was able to deservedly stand in front of the best orchestra in my country.

You are speaking generally, not only about Mahler?

Gergiev: No, it has nothing to do with Mahler. You create an environment for young conductors to help them grow. They have to grow. How do they grow? Sitting at home is good, but learning the scores is even better. Listening to somebody’s recordings may also be informative, but unless you conduct yourself you will not be growing very rapidly, even if you are very gifted. I experienced this myself in my own life, I don’t have to hear these stories, I can tell this story myself. It took me eleven years before I conducted this orchestra and it was with a very unusual program. However, I was already the music director of the Kirov Orchestra which is another very good orchestra in Saint Petersburg, they are competitors. And I was standing in front of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra which was the orchestra of my youth and of my student years and the orchestra of our biggest idol, for all of us conductors, Yevgeny Mravinsky – an unbelievable conductor. In many ways one can easily compare him to Furtwängler or Mengelberg because in his own way he was as important as any other conductor of the century. And we shouldn’t forget that he was close to Shostakovich and gave many first readings of his symphonies. He also knew Prokofiev and performed many great symphonies by him and he was also a great ballet conductor. He never gave up his love for ballets such as ‘The Nutcracker’ or ‘Sleeping Beauty’, or ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by Prokofiev. It was not only well known that he loved the ballet, but he also continued to conduct ballets. And how he did this, you cannot imagine! Mravinsky’s performance of excerpts of ‘The Nutcracker’ could be a life changing experience. And one thinks that ‘The Nutcracker’ is music for children, but with a big maestro it becomes even more than a symphony.

You told me once that you admired Kubelik and Solti and their Mahler interpretations …

Gergiev: I cannot say that I admire only them. I think you can learn from many conductors, so today I wouldn’t say that it’s only Kubelik and Solti. Actually, I listened a long, long time ago to Kubelik’s performance of Mahler’s 7^th Symphony and it did not support my desire to conduct this symphony. I thought that if it didn’t immediately impress me even with Kubelik, then I was even more skeptical of my own ability to do it well. But that was long ago, really long ago.

Which was the first Mahler symphony that you conducted?

Gergiev: It was probably the final movement of the 1^st Symphony. I was probably given the final movement to conduct, but it was long ago and you forget these things. But then I found that it was the 2^nd Symphony that I most wanted to conduct. It was strange that it was not the 5^th Symphony, but rather the 2^nd. Then I immediately wanted to conduct the 6^th Symphony. For a young conductor, it is clear that the 6^th Symphony has so much power. I don’t know how tragic the symphony is, but it is clearly so emotionally charged. I remember trying it maybe 17 or 18 years ago. And I conducted it in Sweden with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra; it was not even in Saint Petersburg.

Which Mahler symphony do you feel closest to?

Gergiev: That is very difficult to say now. I somehow do not feel that there is one symphony that I can call my favorite. Recording the cycle was something that I not only took very seriously, but you try to be as close as possible to each symphony that you conduct, and since I conducted all of them, I like them equally. I recently conducted the 10^th Symphony and I spent a lot of time trying to make it sound like a piece of music composed by a composer who was mysteriously approaching his last months; his death was imminent. But when I am performing this music, I still make a big effort to incorporate the composer’s smile, if not his laughter. Because even if it is not completely hopeful, it is still somewhat hopeful music. You see the difference between complete hopelessness and some sense of hope. I also always do this with Shostakovich’s music – I refuse to think that Shostakovich had anything to do with propaganda or dictators, Stalin or Hitler, and that’s why he composed his symphonies. Shostakovich composed his symphonies because he wanted to compose music. And I always try to find the music in his music. Sometimes I am asked to participate in discussions and answer questions and sometimes there are two to three hundred people in a hall and you talk about certain composers or certain music and Shostakovich faces this problem. Stravinsky, in contrast, said that his music should not be interpreted or tied to any historical events. Obviously, you can say that if Stravinsky insisted that not even World War II had any influence on his music, then this is not quite true, since the ‘Symphony in Three Movements’ is in a way a war symphony. It remains a theatrical symphony; there are three movements and you don’t think of them in terms of tempo. Maybe not only Balanchine felt that it is strongly linked to the theatre, to dance and the movement and language of the human body. But I think it’s also linked to the tensions during the middle of the century and World War II. But he didn’t want to talk about it and he was right.

If Mahler had written his autobiography, if he had lived another ten or 15 years, maybe he would have given us explanations and would have made it easier for us to understand why he composed this, in many ways, strange Adagio. Strange to us, but then the music of Berg or Webern or Schönberg and many others makes it sound like perhaps a first statement of the New Viennese School, instead of waiting for Schönberg to theoretically explain what the New Viennese School is, what the compositional technique of atonal music is. So we are still not entirely clear on this and I think this Adagio should sound like yet another statement about human life, about nature and this huge musical world in which you constantly want to progress, even we small people. You go from yesterday’s concert to today’s concert and you think how you can progress, how you can improve upon something and make it more interesting or quieter. So that’s the nature of music and musicians. It’s a process of living elements; we’re all living creatures, living, changing. And Mahler, of course, couldn’t possibly repeat in his 10^th Symphony what he had done in the 7^th Symphony or even in the 9^th Symphony. Although there is of course a feeling that the Adagio in the last movement recreates the atmosphere of the Adagio in the 9^th Symphony, when he was still thinking that he was not out of this world – the atmosphere of this Adagio somehow reminds you of that of the 10^th Symphony.

One week ago, I conducted the 10^th Symphony, in our new hall, and it never sounded so human and so elegant in my hands, in a way. It never felt more natural. It had been very painful for me before and it is always very difficult, even for very good orchestras, to capture the nature of this Adagio, I think.

What would you have asked Mahler?

Gergiev: Well, I would certainly have asked him to conduct at least one of his symphonies for us. And I certainly wouldn’t have missed it, if he had been in a position to agree.

Are there any questions that you would have liked to ask him about the scores?

Gergiev: When I see the score of a Mahler symphony, I just have to continue to ask myself why he said, for instance, ‘kräftig’ – OK, it’s clear; he wanted it to be powerful. Then he will warn you not to go too fast or not to drag, ‘nicht schleppen’, so that you don’t make the audience feel like they’ve just taken a sleeping pill. These are very famous remarks made by Mahler and everyone knows about them. But to name certain movements of certain symphonies, to give them an indication, like the Rondo-finale, is something we don’t think about very much in case of a finale. But a Rondo-finale is something else, there has never been a rondo which is tragic – it somehow proposes that it will be repetitive, that it will mostly be funny, like with Mozart or Beethoven, but it will be relatively short. If you don’t find the key, these repetitions in the 7^th Symphony can be really torturous – it’s not really about how fast you play it, but it’s a lot to do with how pushy and how aggressive the statements are and how frequently you make these statements about your power. Otherwise it’s like someone incessantly shouting something into your ear that you have already understood. If they continue to tell you the same thing, then you will start to lose interest or become irritated. And this can also happen with performances of Mahler’s symphonies, so the conductor has to find a way to let the music breathe and make these statements most powerful – very often it even screams. One has to sometimes control one’s own energy and be reserved, rather than to sweat and make people suffer. Because very often conductors don’t even realize how painful it can be for the audience to listen to a concert where the percussion or the brass are forced to scream. It’s like with singers who are not polished and then you see them in a Wagner opera and in order to just be heard over the orchestra, they have to scream rather than continue to sing.

That’s one of the most intriguing moments and I would love to see this happen, even if it’s just in a dream, that Gustav Mahler is suddenly there and conducts at least one of the movements of his symphonies. I am sure that the orchestra would sound very powerful, but he doesn’t try to be the busiest composer – busy in the sense that there are so many things going on at the same time in his symphonies that you can’t figure out what is actually important, what the composer wants to achieve. It’s just so much, it’s like people talking and screaming and it just goes on and on for 20 minutes. And that’s just one final movement. That’s one of the difficulties about reading Mahler, so you need a certain amount of experience and to have conducted big compositions like ‘Götterdämmerung’, for instance, which lasts for five or six hours with intermissions. You have to know how to shape this last opera in the ‘Ring’ cycle. Even ‘Siegfried’ can be torturous, just to figure out how to shape it. Maybe it’s not Wagner’s fault and it’s certainly not Mahler’s fault, but due to their repetitive nature, certain compositions can have quite uncomfortable lengths. But with a good artist on the podium it’s possible, and I am sure Mahler knew better than anyone how to shape it.

He wrote about the flexibility of tempi which is so important for him…

Gergiev: Look, there is never only one decision for any composition with regards to the tempo. I will conduct ‘Tristan’ in one theatre and then in another and the total time difference can be five minutes. The distances also matter, if the theatre is very big. To keep the energy in the slow tempo and to feel the space, so that it feels like the whole space is filled with the music, like with the beginning of ‘Lohengrin’. You need a great orchestra, but you also need a space which responds to you so that you feel that everybody should be happy now because it sounds so gorgeous. But sometimes it sounds dry and small and then you cannot say that you know the tempi. You just have to do what you can so that the sound becomes a little more alive. Sometimes you just raise your voice or you have to move forward a little. But it’s a secret which is normally God-given. It’s very difficult to explain these things because they’re natural. But the most attentive listener to the orchestra is normally the conductor. Of course the audience listens, but people forget that the conductor also listens. He does not sing. Of course he moves his hands, although Mravinsky’s gestures were very small. He looked all the time, everything was in the eyes.

What did Mahler want?

Gergiev: Look, he was a famous director of the Staatsoper, but he never composed operas. Maybe this was because of the greatness of the operas that he conducted. His 8^th Symphony is maybe his only opera, in a way. I sometimes feel this way. I was talking about this to one very famous artist, who happens to be my friend, and I was thinking about how to bring this composition, the 8^th Symphony, to the stage. Of course without a ridiculous staging, but still to make it a very powerful performance, what we call a ‘mystery’. It can be an opera or some sort of movement on stage, not exactly a ballet, but some ‘mystery’ – ‘Mysteria’ we call it in Russia. We have compositions, which are sometimes very successful, that you can move to the theatre stage, away from the concert hall. Because even if you are in a cathedral, it’s already like a theatre – what you see is already far from the concert hall. I don’t know if Mahler ever wanted to compose operas, but he conducted Mozart or Beethoven or Wagner or Tchaikovsky’s ‘Onegin’, ‘Pikovaya Dama’ and ‘Iolanta’. Mahler conducted ‘Iolanta’. I conducted ‘Iolanta’ in Vienna in 1992; it was one of my very first performances here. And Marcel Prawy came to this concert and he told me ‘You are the second conductor to conduct ‘Iolanta’ in Vienna. You know who the first was?’ And he didn’t even give me time to think and said ‘It was Gustav Mahler’.

That’s interesting… What did Mahler want philosophically speaking?

Gergiev: Well, maybe it’s my turn now to ask you what you would have asked Gustav Mahler if you were given the chance to talk to him. Maybe you should ask him this question. It’s very difficult for me to talk about music and especially to talk about Gustav Mahler and his deepest thoughts. I am quite sure that he wanted to be a happy man and a happy musician. He was a man who sometimes went so far beyond what you routinely hear that, famously, some of the musicians, especially in New York, simply didn’t understand him. Being a gigantic musician, it was the highest caliber of music making. And if anyone could, then it was he who could explain things and demand from any orchestra in the world certain things in order to constantly raise the quality. There is no doubt that he knew everything about any instrument, about orchestration and so on. But the truth is that even very experienced musicians found it difficult to understand him – I just conducted the New York Philharmonic, which is now of course totally changed, but they are a wonderful orchestra, they can play anything. But Mahler had trouble just making himself understood. Sometimes, they made this known in an uncomfortable way, maybe even in a rude way. But they just didn’t know what the conductor was talking about. A lot of them didn’t care whether he was a composer or not because his symphonies were not performed. But sometimes a conductor is what I call so far ahead of the average level of his colleagues. Maybe this was his little tragedy. Maybe it was not that often that he had a hundred musicians who would share everything with him, who would put some love and some warmth and their whole heart into the symphonies.

I think that this was most probably a very painful experience for him. Because it is enough even if you conduct a Beethoven symphony and you see that your colleagues on stage do not understand your intentions, but for this to happen with your own music, for it not to be understood, not to be supported… It could in the best case be ironic, but in the worst case it could be interpreted as aggression against his compositions and against him. So this might have strongly influenced his early death.

He was of course very emotional and, famously, his relationships with orchestras, with musicians, with his colleagues were not always very easy. Your nerves either give you a balance or make you feel completely out of balance.

One last question: Do you think that Mahler is now completely understood and accepted in Russia?

Gergiev: I think Mahler is respected in Russia and I think I and my orchestra contribute to this more than any other conductor or orchestra in Russia. We played maybe in ten cities. This is a big number because we talk about cities with maybe a million and a half or two million people living there. The Mariinsky Orchestra is one of the better known Russian orchestras worldwide; it is quite well known. We played for instance in Kazan, performing the 8^th Symphony. We used not only our choir, but also a local choir. It was a massive event and it was great to see how many young musicians were there, practically hanging from the chandeliers. It was more than full and there were a lot of young people sitting and standing. In Yekaterinburg it was the same story and also in my native city of Vladikavkaz where we played Mahler’s 5^th Symphony. That was also very special. We gave a massive performance in Nizhny Novgorod, in Moscow and in Saint Petersburg… So it started to look like a tradition or even a movement. Every two to three months we performed and now our concerts are relatively widely watched and heard. Normally they take place in the center of Russian musical life, in Moscow or Saint Petersburg. Anything I do with the Mariinsky Orchestra is right in the center of public attention. We don’t have any peripheral corners. It’s exactly what I remember Kondrashin or Mravinsky doing; every concert with Mravinsky was an event.

Would you say that the audiences understand Mahler because of their Shostakovich experience?

Gergiev: I think I am helped myself; maybe some other people are as well. I certainly feel much more protected when I approach Mahler’s score with all my experience of Shostakovich. I hear certain things which maybe people do not find immediately. And it’s not about which interval or what tonality, it’s to do with the musical intensity – the way the music tries to express what is in your heart or on your mind. There is a way, musically, to speak out. This is where Shostakovich and Mahler are in some ways similar. Of course, Shostakovich was someone who followed, someone who heard his, if not mentors, then certainly his big predecessors. Brahms famously composed his 1^st Symphony and it turned out as Beethoven’s 10^th Symphony, correct? Maybe Shostakovich’s 4^th Symphony is closest to Mahler. He didn’t really borrow the musical material; it is really quite different, much more dissonant. It is a fantastic symphony and we actually performed it in Vienna not so long ago. It’s a fantastic symphony, but I strongly believe that Shostakovich, although he was a very Russian composer, couldn’t avoid, or maybe didn’t want to avoid, the most fundamental emotional power he was given by Mahler and his cycle. Maybe Shostakovich did not want to distance himself from it; he knew that it was a great musical statement, that this was the pinnacle, so to speak. Similarly to the Beethoven cycle or the Tchaikovsky cycle – Tchaikovsky was a great symphonic composer. His opera ‘The Queen of Spades’ is one of the most symphonic operas ever written, and also one of the best operas.

So Shostakovich was helped by his own tradition, the Russian tradition, as well as by Mahler and this enabled him to become one of the most powerful symphonists of all time, like Mahler.

And he said that if he could take only one record to a desert island that he would choose ‘Das Lied von der Erde’…

Gergiev: Sure, sure. It was absolutely clear that they spent a lot of time in the late 1920s analyzing Mahler. They probably also had a chance to look at some of his scores when visitors were coming. I am sure they talked about Mahler, not only with Klemperer, but also with many others coming from Germany or Czechoslovakia or Austria. This was clearly the case.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler
Transcript: Agnes Vukovich
29.5.2010, Vienna
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