“Bruno Walter said to me: don’t be shy, play Mahler in a vulgar way.”

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

Mehta: That was in Bombay. It was a recording of the Symphony No. 4 conducted by Bruno Walter, and the singer was Desi Halban. As a young person, perhaps this was a good start, because the Symphony No. 4 looks at the world through the eyes of a child. I was not a child, I was a teenager, but the music was immediately accessible. Of course my father had already been to New York for four or five years and had heard, not so much Mahler, but a little of it: Mitropoulos with the New York Philharmonic; Lenny [Bernstein] had not quite started as yet. So my father’s connection with Mahler was not as great as with other classical composers. Also, my father was a man who was a great chamber musician, and there was no Mahler chamber music in that sense. So what we had was a recording of Bruno Walter, and then of course the first live performance in Vienna. In my early life, everything was in Vienna, everything [laughs]: my first opera, my first symphony, the first orchestra that I heard live was the Vienna Philharmonic, which is not bad. I didn’t hear a second-class orchestra in a province and then come to Vienna later, I didn’t have that transition. The Vienna Philharmonic was the first orchestra I heard in my life, and it is still the first orchestra in my life; this tradition, this sound, this conglomeration of chamber musicians. I have tried to imitate it in other countries where I have been a music director, but here is where I learnt it all, that’s my point.

Do you think this tradition of the orchestra somehow influenced Mahler?

Mehta: I think so, yes, for sure. Maybe not the youngest Mahler, when he composed the Symphony No. 1 in Budapest. Growing up in Vienna, this is the sound he heard, but then we must not forget that Mahler was also instrumental in developing this Viennese sound. It was not the way he heard it in his youth; his few years at the opera house were so instrumental, not only in terms of the future of interpretation of Mozart and Wagner operas, but also in the evolution of the sound of the Vienna Philharmonic as we know it now. There was Hans Richter before him, and also Brahms, but we don’t know how much Brahms worked on the sound of the orchestra. Maybe his Symphonies were played in a way that he personally appreciated, and of course that also developed the sound, the starting of the tradition.

But the love story between Mahler and the Vienna Philharmonic started much later. The few years during which Mahler was chief conductor were not free of tension.

Mehta: No, but those were also political tensions. And then of course his relative was a concertmaster, and it’s wonderful that today the violin of Arnold Rosé, who married Mahler’s sister, is again played by the concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic. Recently I did a tour of Japan, and this violin was played by the soloist in Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben, so it’s a cyclic process, it all comes back. And that’s a wonderful thing about the Vienna Philharmonic, that Rosé’s violin is again singing with Volkhard Steude, who is the concertmaster, or one of the concertmasters.

Fantastic story, I didn’t know that. What was the first Mahler Symphony you heard performed in a concert?

Mehta: I can’t remember, it was possibly No. 2. I heard it conducted by Josef Krips. I was at the rehearsals, I didn’t know the Symphony, and of course I always went to the rehearsals with the score; that’s how I started learning these Symphonies. It could have been the Vienna Symphony with Krips.

The first time I conducted a Mahler Symphony here in Vienna it was No. 1, with the Vienna Philharmonic with Willi Boskovsky as concertmaster. And my professor, Otto Ruhm, with whom I studied bass, was first bass and he was very nervous about playing the solo under my direction. I had to really sit down with him and say, “Professor, please, I am a conductor, just treat me like anybody else”. And he said, “No, no, but I know you so well and my colleagues are all listening to me”, et cetera. So it was quite an occasion.

There is one person who is the link between you and Gustav Mahler, you already mentioned him – it’s Bruno Walter. Can you tell me about your relationship to Walter and how you talked with him about Mahler?

Mehta: Yes, I visited him in his home in Beverley Hills a few times, and I didn’t visit him more than that because he passed away. This was the great loss of my early life in Los Angeles, that Bruno Walter passed away. I had such a good communication with him because he knew I was from Vienna and he liked the way I spoke German, in a Viennese way, and he always smiled when I spoke. I asked him once, “Why are you smiling?” He said, “Well, because you are bringing Vienna back to me”. Because in those days I couldn’t speak High German, I only spoke Viennese.

But I went through the whole Symphony No. 1 with him, and he was the one who told me about Callot’s lithograph that Mahler saw and was so affected by that he composed this Funeral March in the third movement. But the Funeral March goes right into a very vulgar, Jewish dance, and he said don’t be shy, don’t try to make this dance sympathetic, play it in a vulgar way. And that was Mahler as a youth hearing Jewish music. I don’t do it in a vulgar way, but it is very Jewish in this accented … [sings extract], and that is a depiction of the animals in the lithograph who kill the hunter and are carrying the hunter in procession. So it starts with this Frère Jacques, or Bruder Martin, canon, but then it goes into this dance because the animals are rejoicing that they have killed the hunter: so it all makes sense. I didn’t know this before, but he brought it all to life for me.

He [Walter] went to the piano and played the start of the second movement [sings extract] the way you have to play it, because Mahler has not written this [sings], Mahler has written this [sings], you know two eighth notes, and he said that that comes from the song: ‘Ringel, ringel’. These are some of the things that I can’t forget, my whole life, having heard them from an old sage at the beginning. Because I was doing Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in Los Angeles in those days, and in the afternoon I would go with the musicians to his recording session for Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. And this is a story I always repeat, because that is the first time I ever heard Mahler’s No. 9. Nobody played it in Vienna in my youth. In fact, the first time I heard No. 5 was at Mahler’s anniversary – 1960 – when a foreign orchestra played it here; and then Bernstein came and did it for the first time with the Vienna Philharmonic, and that generation also played it for the first time. In fact, it was so unknown to the Vienna Philharmonic that the first horn did not know that there was an obbligato part in the third movement; it’s a separate part and he had not looked at it. But today the Vienna Philharmonic plays all nine Symphonies as standard repertoire and they know them so well, but it had an evolution here. I did the Adagio from Mahler’s Symphony No. 10 for the first time with them, and I remember when Claudio Abbado rehearsed the Symphony No. 2 in 1965 or 66, it was also new for them. What was not new for them was the style. The style was not something you taught them – they knew it, they just had to learn the notes. The sound, the style, had never left them.

Bruno Walter premiered the Symphony No. 9 here on 24 June 1912. I think he spoke to Mahler about this Symphony …

Mehta: Yes.

Did he tell you about this?

Mehta: No. I didn’t know Mahler’s No. 9 at all, so I wouldn’t have known what to discuss with him. But I was at all the recording sessions, and I had no score so I just listened. But the tragedy was that he wanted so much to record this Symphony that he accepted all of Columbia Records’ conditions – I don’t know what financial conditions, maybe he did it for nothing, I don’t know – and they had twelve first violins and four basses. In other words, Columbia Records said, “We will do it, but of course it will never sell. So if you want to do it we will do it for you but we cannot provide more musicians.” Not only that, but these musicians were all from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and they also didn’t know the Symphony No. 9! So they were sight-reading and recording at the same time. They were good musicians and he was very patient with them, but you know, when you read the reviews of this recording they say, this is the definitive recording and nobody can play it like that: they were sight-reading. They did the best they could because they loved him. Now the Bruckner 9th, which Walter also recorded with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he played in a concert first. So the recording of the Bruckner 9th is really a document that everybody should have.

Did Walter’s style of conducting influence you when you conducted Mahler?

Mehta: Of course. I met Bruno Walter for the first time here in Vienna, in 1960, the Mahler year. He came and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sang Mahler Lieder, and then, after the interval, the Symphony No. 4 was performed. And I was at the rehearsals, and I didn’t dare to go and speak to him, so I just met him a little bit backstage in the conductors’ room. I told him I was an ambitious young person and he wished me the best, that’s all. When he met me in Los Angeles later he didn’t remember me from Vienna, but when I told him my name and that I was guest-conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he said “Yes, you are the one who just conducted Brahms’ 3rd in Vienna a few months ago.” I said “How do you know that?” He said “Because I read Die Furche – it’s a newspaper – and I read your review. The review said that you conducted it much more convincingly than Herbert von Karajan.” This amused him – I didn’t even know about this review. So immediately there was a communication, because I had conducted the Brahms 3rd with the Tonkünstler-Orchester, and it happened to be the same day as Karajan did it with the Vienna Philharmonic in the evening. Believe me, Karajan’s was a great performance; I went to that, it was a great performance. But you know, sometimes the critics want to praise the underdog, the little student there for the first time. Believe me, I was not very proud of my Brahms 3rd.

And so then I asked Walter if I could come and ask him a few questions, and he said please come, so I took Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and we spoke for hours about it. He was wonderful, he was wonderful. And he said, “You know, when you speak German with me I am back in Vienna, but something else brings me back to Vienna continuously, and that is the records of Willi Boskovsky.” He loved Boskovsky’s Strauss records, and he said that took him back. He loved Vienna so much.

What was his main advice about conducting Mahler?

Mehta: There was no main advice, he just analysed the score for me. We talked about the fact that the Symphony No. 1, composed by a young man, almost caused a revolution when he first conducted it. Because he didn’t present it as a Symphony, it was a Tondichtung, a tone poem. Then of course he worked on it for almost ten years; he had already composed No. 2 and No. 3 while he was still revising the Symphony No. 1. It has this beginning, like a Haydn Symphony, with an introduction and then the main Allegro. The introduction is his youth, his countryside around him, listening to the birds, listening to little military fanfares in the distance, et cetera: all this was different, nobody had done that before. And so Walter’s explanation was that Mahler had controversy from the first note he wrote until the last. This controversy never left him in his life, but he was so convinced of what he was doing that he never stopped, because it came out of him, sincerely.

Did he tell you something about Mahler’s person, his personality?

Mehta: Not too much, no. I went to him with a score, when we finished I left: he spoke about the music.

Alma Mahler used to live almost as his neighbour, but by that time she had moved to New York. I met Alma once much later, I visited her a few years later, and she told me a lot in this one visit. She told me how he used to sit in the hut and compose and she would advise him, and she would fill in the orchestrations as he instructed her. And then of course she showed me Kokoschka’s fans and Gropius’ plans. She lived with all this genius around her. It was like a Viennese apartment: lace, curtains, dark inside. But she was very informative, she wouldn’t stop speaking about all of them.

What did she tell you about Mahler’s personality?

Mehta: That he was a difficult person to live with; that he would come from the Opera for lunch, and he wanted his soup on the table at a certain temperature, and if he didn’t get it he would be furious. It was not easy living with him. Of course there were many details she didn’t tell me about. She didn’t talk about her other boyfriends, of course not. But Mrs. Schönberg, with whom I was very friendly in Los Angeles, told me that people only talk about her with her lovers and you don’t know how she influenced all those men. She was the fountain they borrowed from: Mahler, Gropius, Werfel, et cetera. And she suffered with all of them because they were all neurotic – this is what Mrs. Schönberg said – and it was not easy to live with them. She did not think, therefore it is understandable that Alma had lovers, she didn’t say that. But she said, believe me, she paid with each one emotionally, and spiritually she was a great help to them all.

I will tell you a story. When Alma moved to Los Angeles, Werfel died a few years later and Bruno Walter was almost her neighbour, and somebody asked her, “Now that you have Bruno Walter here, do you think you will get very friendly with him?”. She says, “Bruno Walter? No, he’s a recreator, I’ve always been with creators.” [Laughs] This was her reply, but actually she didn’t like it very much. I didn’t hear it from him, but it was quite common knowledge that she didn’t like him too much. I don’t know what happened there – they were not too close.

Did she show you Mahler scores?

Mehta: Some autographs, some pages which she had. I can’t remember which Symphonies they were, but she had these pages and she had some of Gropius’ plans, and Kokoschka’s fans were framed on her walls. And I knew her daughter, Anna, who was a sculptress in Los Angeles, and she used to have epileptic fits. So one day we were in the theatre together, and in the interval we went out to get a coffee and she had this fit, and she fell and I was quite alone and I was quite afraid because I didn’t know what to do with her. And suddenly somebody else came to help me to lift her: it was Charlton Heston. He said “Don’t worry, I’ll fix her”, and he massaged the back of her neck, and he brought her back. They knew each other, obviously. And I knew Anna’s daughter Marina as well – she was very pretty, she lives in Italy now.

When I said to Alma, I know Anna and Marina, and Marina is so beautiful, she said, “No, her popo [bottom] is too big and she should be careful!” It was almost as though this 80 year-old lady was jealous that I was praising her granddaughter.

Did Alma have a Viennese accent?

Mehta: Fine Viennese, yes, fine.

How did you find Alma as a person? Was she neurotic too?

Mehta: No. No, no. I only met her this one time, and she took a liking to me and she wouldn’t let me go. I had planned this visit to her and my taxi was waiting. I didn’t know how much time she would give me, I was on my way to the airport because I had to go to Paris, and she said “No, you sit and I want to talk to you”, so I missed my plane. Thank God I didn’t need to be at a rehearsal in Paris immediately, so I took the next plane. But I stayed voluntarily. I thought I would meet her for ten or fifteen minutes and then go, but I stayed there for about two hours.

Was she lonely?

Mehta: I don’t know – she just liked to talk. She didn’t know anything about me really; she knew I was a conductor and that I had grown up in Vienna.

Did you feel what the famous artists could have admired?

Mehta: No, I don’t know. I just know that later on, when I told Mrs. Schönberg that I had met her, she was very sympathetic towards Alma. She said, “You don’t know how she suffered with those geniuses.”

You succeeded Leonard Bernstein in New York; could you feel some kind of Mahler tradition that he had brought to the orchestra?

Mehta: Well, he approached Mahler as a composer and he was really convinced, through all the research that he did and all the performances he did – you probably know that he did all the Symphonies with the New York Philharmonic – that he knew Mahler personally, and I understand that completely. When we read about Mahler through Alma, when we read his letters, and when we know his music, we also have this illusion that we know the man personally. And I think I also do that with Bruckner, and with Mozart – less with Beethoven, because there’s not that much to read from him. With Mozart, with his letters, you get to know the person. When Mozart’s mother dies, he writes to his father and it breaks your heart; you don’t have this kind of documents from Beethoven, so you only have his music. So you know Beethoven trough chamber music, also through the Lieder, but mostly through chamber music.

With Bernstein?

Mehta: With Bernstein? I invited him twice to my performances, so that I could talk to him. So he came to the Symphony No. 5 and didn’t like it too much, so we sat and we talked. And he said, what you are doing is trying to make it more beautiful than it is. If Mahler becomes vulgar, in other words when he brings the street music in, don’t be afraid, play it as street music. Don’t try to cover it and make it more beautiful. And then he came to the Symphony No. 3 and he liked that much more. He told me that he would take the finale much slower. But he criticised No. 5 a lot, but constructively because we were friends, and I learnt a lot. And for me, as a conductor of the New York Philharmonic and the Israel Philharmonic, both Mahler specialists, to have Lenny as a guest conductor each season … He would do one Symphony here, one Symphony there, one with New York, and so on. So with both my orchestras Lenny and I did so much Mahler together, and that was a great boon. When Lenny left us, I missed him and my orchestras missed him immensely, because he was a real Mensch when he rehearsed.

I went to his rehearsals here, when he taught the Vienna Philharmonic the Symphony No. 7 – today they could play it, but in those days they didn’t know it. It was in the Mozartsaal and I would go with a score, and he was very happy that I came to his rehearsals, and we would talk afterwards. I didn’t know the Symphony No. 7 in those days. But I have had the good fortune in my life to have the older generation accept me as a friend and as a conversation partner. It was the same thing with Karajan: I went to him with a few opera scores and he opened his knowledge to me – something for which I am very grateful.

Why did Karajan only conduct Mahler in his later years?

Mehta: I never talked to him about Mahler. I once heard him do the Symphony No. 5 in Salzburg, I don’t know who with, and here at the Vienna State Opera I heard him do Das Lied von der Erde. Yes, with Hilde Rössl-Madjan and Häfliger. I can’t tell you how it was, I can’t remember that.

Bruno Walter conducted at the reopening of the Vienna State Opera in 1955 – I didn’t know him at all – and he did Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 and the Te Deum: it was beautiful. And of course, Karajan conducted Bruckner’s No. 8 as his first symphony when he came back after not conducting for so many years. The Vienna Philharmonic invited him to conduct and he did Bruckner 8, and I remember afterwards he hugged Boskovsky, and I never saw him hug anybody before or after that. But that was his re-entry into the world of the Philharmonic and the Vienna Opera.

Back to Bernstein. He is sometimes now criticised for overpowering Mahler.

Mehta: But that’s what his Mahler was, and, for instance, when he found out that I didn’t do this, he was very critical. Yes, he was criticised a lot in New York for everything, when he was Music Director. When he came as a guest conductor he could do no wrong, then everything was written in the Bible. You know, perception is very important. The perception that this critic from the New York Times had of Bernstein when he was Music Director was so negative that whatever he did he was crucified. It was unfair, and Lenny took it very personally. But later on, the staff of the New York Times changed, he came as a guest conductor and it was a coronation every time.

But do you think there is a danger of over-emotionalising Mahler’s Symphonies?

Mehta: I don’t think so, because Mahler put his whole soul down on the page, he was not shy in showing it. He didn’t hold back anything, from the very first Symphony. It starts in this very pastoral way, with those As and those harmonics for almost the whole introduction, and then comes the big D major: you have to play that as a victory! Because for Mahler it was always the power of evil defeated by the power of good – always. At the end of the Symphony it’s a victory. Beethoven was a victory composer, and Mahler was a victory composer. Strauss was not, Strauss never ended with glory: Ein Heldenleben ends with a big E flat, but his first version ended pianissimo. Beethoven was always victorious at the end, and Mahler too, except for the Symphony No. 9, which is an adieu. That is his farewell, and Das Lied von der Erde too.

There’s a story about Klemperer, that he visited one of Bruno Walter’s rehearsals …

Mehta: Yes, I was there. I was there in the box, and Bruno Walter started the third movement with the bell-like pizzicatos in the cellos and basses, and Klemperer said quite loudly in German, “Are the pizzicatos not together, or is it my hearing?” You know, they were also neighbours in Los Angeles. I don’t think they were very friendly. And then I was at his rehearsals of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, but then he was so physically impaired that he couldn’t control it. The Vienna Philharmonic also didn’t know the No. 9 that well in 1960, but they managed. The string leaders were geniuses, the way they brought it all together. He knew what he wanted, and what he told them gave an unbelievable insight into the music, but he couldn’t physically control it. They controlled it, the string leaders. You know the section [sings extract] – if you don’t give a good beat you’re not going to get it, but it was okay in the end.

Would you say that Klemperer’s approach was different to Walter’s?

Mehta: Probably. Yes, probably. But it’s these Jewish conductors who carried on the tradition, because the German conductors didn’t conduct Mahler: not Berg, not Furtwängler, and in that sense also not Karajan, not Knappertsbusch, not Keilberth – nobody conducted Mahler. But Steinberg, Klemperer and Bruno Walter did, and then in the next generation, Bernstein. That’s why it was not known in Vienna, because the Viennese conductors did not have this Mahler tradition after the war. I remember, the first time I heard Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 it was Fritz Zaun, with an East German orchestra who came here.

Was this a kind of late anti-Semitism?

Mehta: It was a tradition that was carried on. This has nothing to do with Mahler, but when Swarovski, my teacher, wanted us to practise accompanying violin concertos – this was in 1955, or 56 – he asked the violin professors to send a good pupil to play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, and nobody knew it. It was not taught. It might sound scandalous today and people might not believe this, but it is a fact; nobody was teaching Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto at the Vienna Akademie until 1955 or 56. The finale is very difficult to accompany, that’s why he said send a pupil and we will practise – nobody played it.

To me, it’s obvious there.

Mehta: I don’t want to analyse the reason for it, but it was not taught and Swarovski made such a scandal with Sittner, who was the President – it was not his policy, maybe – that it changed. Maybe the teachers themselves didn’t know the Concerto, but this was a fact.

My theory is that this was just a tradition of anti-Semitism. Anyhow …

Mehta: I have to tell you this, though. I studied with all these professors of the Vienna Philharmonic, and personally I never heard any anti-Semitic remarks from them to me, because I was a young Indian. I had no communication with this philosophy in India. I heard it from my landlord, I was renting one room from him, and I experienced anti-Semitism for the first time from that family, but never from my teachers. When I first heard it I was so shocked, because growing up in India of course we knew about the war and the holocaust and everything, but we never heard it, because the German-speaking people in Bombay were refugees, they were Jews. So we didn’t hear it from them, we heard about what they had suffered, but we never heard anti-Semitism. So the first time I heard it was here, but never from a musician. I sang in the Singverein, I spoke to so many people, and I never heard it from them. It was already dissipating, it was evaporating.

Would you say that the anti-Semitism which Mahler faced all his life influenced his work?

Mehta: Well, the Jewishness in Mahler’s music is sometimes not recognised. Lenny told me that even when the Israel Philharmonic sight-reads a Mahler Symphony, it sounds Jewish. Maybe this is an exaggeration, maybe it is the way they vibrate or something, but it’s true. There are Jewish influences hidden, and of course there are also Christian influences, no doubt about it: the end of the Symphony No. 2 is more Christian than Jewish, no doubt, considering the whole spirit of the resurrection. But Swarovski told me that when Mahler entered the Vienna State Opera as a Christian – you know, he converted – he had his letter of resignation already written in his drawer, so that any time something happened he could present this letter of resignation. This is what he told me, I don’t know whether it’s true or not. He said the letter was always ready!

But he knew the Viennese society.

Mehta: Yes, and the stories of Alma being in the Musikverein when Mahler conducted, and the two personalities being so evident – no doubt, it was a golden age for Vienna! It reminds me of the story, that when Mahler departed and went to New York, there was a group standing at the station and Klimt was in this group. And when the train departed, Klimt said “Es ist vorbei”, meaning that the good times were over. This is very touching, that this small group came to say goodbye to Mahler. It must have been the Südbahnhof, because they probably went to Trieste for the boat.

Yes. How do you see the influence of Mahler on the Second Viennese School?

Mehta: Oh, it was tremendous. Schönberg and Webern were great Mahler lovers. Webern conducted Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 here with the Arbeiter-Orchester, with the Workers’ Symphony, before the war, and Mahler went to this famous concert. This was also helped by Alma, as Alma’s teacher was Zemlinsky. Mahler was there at the famous concert where Schönberg’s Chamber Symphony was performed and a riot started, and he recognised the future. You know, Mahler died very young. Who knows in which direction he would have gone? Who knows whether he would have stayed in his expressionistic period, or maybe have been influenced by Schönberg?

As far as I know, Webern is very close to you. How do you see the relationship between Webern and Mahler? Are there roots that you can compare?

Mehta: Well, more between Weber and Brahms. You can see the strict discipline of Brahms already in the Passacaglia; it’s very similar to the fourth movement of Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 in its construction. And Webern’s organisation, as with the Concerto for nine instruments, where all the rows are either a minor 2nd or a major 6th – his whole way of composing is so disciplined. Webern does not bring folk elements into his music too much, as Mahler did, but Berg has that. I don’t think Berg conducted Mahler. Schönberg was a great admirer. I don’t know if Mahler heard the Gurrelieder, because it was performed much later and Mahler had already died, but they were close. This Alma-Zemlinsky connection was very important for all of them, so Alma is a focal point there.

Would you say that Mahler opened the door to these new aesthetics with his Symphony No. 9, especially the last movement?

Mehta: Well, as I said before, everything came from the innermost depths of his soul, whether in the first movement or in the finale, where you have this great storm breaking, and then it comes to this very lyrical part of the Symphony No. 1 and it goes into D flat major. Sometimes, when the orchestra is playing very convincingly, I don’t even know that I am standing there; I am floating, and it is Mahler who is doing that to me, and that continues until the end of the Symphony No. 9. You don’t know where these last viola notes disappear to, where they end. When I am rehearsing it, I talk with the orchestra as little as I can about it. Of course, I tell them this is his farewell, you are playing the farewell, and then I let them dissipate, evaporate, phrase by phrase, and amazingly they do it by themselves. I’ve done it with a few orchestras. The music talks to them in other words, you cannot give them so many explanations because the music speaks for itself.

In the Symphony No. 9, the first movement is so intensely polyphonic – sometimes there are four polyphonic lines going together, which of course he knew from Brahms, too. Brahms has no accompaniment, Brahms has only voices, one against the other. But Mahler has four voices, and when they are playing it, you know that, for example, a viola playing on the third stand cannot hear these voices, the player is not conscious, he is so busy playing his own notes. So we rehearse by showing them all the voices separately, and then when they realise what an incredible cohesion this is, with the four voices coming together, they realise the genius of Mahler. And of course that helps the interpretation, that kind of analytical rehearsal.

Would you say that your technique of rehearsing Mahler has changed over the years?

Mehta: Yes, of course. Experience is everything, and that’s why I did not approach Symphonies like No. 9 or No. 7 too early in my life. I listened to performances, I looked at the scores, I put them aside, and I did the Symphony No. 9 much later. In fact, I once did all the Mahler Symphonies in Los Angeles except the 9th. I invited Giulini and said “You know, I’m breaking my cycle because I want to come to your rehearsals”, and he knew the 9th, so he did it beautifully. I would go to the rehearsals and we would talk about it. Of course, thematically I had remembered what I heard at Bruno Walter’s recording sessions, but I didn’t know the Symphony then, I didn’t even have a score.

In those days, the Los Angeles Philharmonic had a great tradition, on the one hand because of Klemperer, on the other because Steinberg was always a guest conductor. After the war, the Los Angeles Philharmonic was not a world-class orchestra like it is today, but they had the tradition of Klemperer, of Bruno Walter, and of Stravinsky. So when I first came as a young conductor, I had an orchestra that knew these pieces so well.

So you took advantage of this knowledge?

Mehta: Of course, of Klemperer’s repertoire, which was my repertoire too, from Vienna. And occasionally Monteux would come and do some French music, but French music was not as well known in Los Angeles as the Viennese classics. People thought it’s a Hollywood orchestra, but that is not true.

When you did the Symphony No. 3 for the first time, with that tremendous first movement, what was your approach to organising time?

Mehta: This I owe to Swarovski. I studied it with him, he loved this piece and I invited him to Los Angeles to conduct it first, and then I took it over a few years later. I studied it very, very carefully, and I must tell you that Henri Louis de la Grange’s book, and his description of Mahler’s experience with the Symphony No. 3, helped me a lot. He was in Hamburg as a conductor, and he was being vilified by an Intendant there, whose name was Pollini. He did everything in his power to get rid of Mahler as a conductor, and Mahler stood his ground and wouldn’t go. And he would give him pieces to conduct that he’d never heard of, he conducted operas by composers who are not known today, but Mahler never left. He did the job, and then of course in the summer he would compose his Symphonies.

He went with just one movement of the Symphony No. 3 and played it for Nikisch – he didn’t even dream that Nikisch would do the whole Symphony – and Nikisch did do one movement in a concert. So, the birth of this Symphony No. 3 was painful. I could never speak about it with Bruno Walter because I didn’t know the piece, and then after a few of our meetings I went to Scandinavia as a guest conductor and I heard that Bruno Walter had passed away. It was a great loss. I don’t really know what he was suffering from, I don’t know what he died of. But he had a peaceful life at the end, in Los Angeles, because there was a great German-speaking community: Thomas Mann, Brecht, the Hindemith brothers. The great Russian soloists also lived there: Heifetz, Piatigorsky, Rubinstein. So he had good surroundings. Many movie composers, all from Eastern Europe, were also living in Los Angeles: Dimitri Tiomkin, Bronislau Kaper. They were music fanatics! They wrote for the movies to earn money, but they were very fine musicians. Bronislau Kaper, who composed ‘Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo’, could play any Schubert Lied for you by heart, he could play Mozart concertos. So there was this great influx of Eastern European musicians living in Los Angeles and composing. And of course, from Vienna we had the Viennese Wunderkind. What is his name?

Korngold.

Mehta: Korngold! So of course there was Korngold; Erich Korngold made the most fantastic movie scores, which are even played in concerts. So, these were the surroundings in the late 40s and early 50s, so people like Bruno Walter didn’t feel so far removed from their cultural ambience.

It seems that acceptance of Mahler happened in the States before it happened in Europe. Would you agree?

Mehta: Yes, because of the European conductors who conducted Mahler. Steinberg conducted a lot of Mahler, Koussevitzky did not, but Frits Reiner did a little – it was mostly Steinberg. Bruno Walter conducted the New York Philharmonic a lot.

Mitropoulos?

Mehta: Mitropoulos – a great Mahler conductor.

Did you conduct musicians who had played under Mahler’s baton?

Mehta: No. I met older musicians in Vienna, who played under the second generation. By the time I came in 1954, there was nobody in the Vienna Philharmonic who had played under Mahler. But they were the pupils of the people who had played under Mahler – it was the second generation. So I sometimes used to hear anti-Mahler stories from my professors that they had heard from their teachers. Mahler didn’t compose original music, he only copied from others, for example. One story was that when Mahler’s secretary went to the library and brought him scores of other composers’ works, they would say “Ah, Mahler is composing again.” You know, these are musicians’ stories that made no sense. That was one of the first things I heard, that Mahler never composed an original note, he only borrowed from others. And when Swarovski used to hear that, he would say, “Okay, maybe he borrowed a little theme or motive, but what did he do with that motive? How did he develop it? This is what you have to recognise as Mahler’s genius, even though he maybe took three notes from an opera.” And because Mahler was an opera conductor, whether in Budapest or Hamburg, sometimes you feel the music he conducted coming into his music.

That is the next question. What influence did his experience as a Wagner conductor have on his chorus?

Mehta: Oh, I would say a lot, I would say a lot. When you do The Ring after you have done Mahler, as I have done, you sometimes hear things in The Ring and think that you have heard them before. Just little harmonic progressions – it’s not copying or anything – or tonalities in certain important places, where Mahler uses D flat major and G flat major, which Wagner also uses to portray certain emotions: this is important. Götterdämmerung starts with E flat minor – it’s a chord that’s difficult to tune. If you just come in and play it, it’s not going to be in tune, you have to work at that. Siegfried’s death starts with E minor, and the beginning of Götterdämmerung is E flat minor; these are all tonalities which are important for composers, and of course Mahler imbibes this. But sometimes, in the third movement of the Symphony No. 6, I hear a little harmonic progression which is pure Rachmaninov, and we know that Rachmaninov played with Mahler in New York. It’s not copying, but a little progression comes into it. Now, I don’t know if Rachmaninov heard him conduct the Symphony No. 6 and put it in his concerto. But there is a similarity, some little Carmen motives. You know, in the Third Act [sings extract], Carmen, the smugglers. It appears in the Symphony No. 3 all the time. Maybe he was conducting Carmen in Hamburg in those days, I don’t know – it’s worth checking things like that. When I am rehearsing, I tell the oboes, just think you are playing Carmen, because they ask whether they should play on the beat or before the beat. One could write a whole anthology of this. It’s not too important, but it’s what he does with it, how he develops it, and that is pure Mahler. You can recognise it immediately, something which happens with no other composer.

Would you say that this is the thing you admire most about the scores?

Mehta: Well, I admire that he was a walking encyclopaedia of the music he was conducting, and that he would compose every summer, his nine and a half Symphonies. That was his output, apart from the Lieder.

Simple questions are sometimes difficult to answer, but I would like to ask you “What did Mahler want?”

Mehta: Inner peace, which he never had. Even as a child he didn’t know inner peace. From his first conducting appearances he was always fighting with everybody, not because he was a fighter, but because he had to put himself through as a conductor, as an interpreter, as a composer. And the end of his marriage was very painful to him; for his wife to tell him that she loved another man, half an hour before he went on stage to conduct the world premiere of his 8th Symphony, you can image with what anxiety he went onto this stage. Of course, I did not ask Alma about this, because we do not know what she went through.

Would you say, in philosophical terms, that he anticipated the catastrophes of the 20th century?

Mehta: Well, Lenny told me, that the marching at the beginning of the Symphony No. 6 is the marching of the German boots. The Symphony starts as a death march, and this is Mahler anticipating what’s going to come. This is a theory.

Would you agree?

Mehta: If I knew this certain period when Mahler composed the Symphony, I might agree or not agree, but I do not know that period in Vienna, so I can’t tell. Certainly, it is the future march of the German boots.

But the interesting thing is that the 6th was written at a time when Mahler’s life was perfect. He was chief conductor in Vienna, he had the most charming wife, and two children alive at the time, and he wrote a catastrophe Symphony.

Mehta: Well, because inside he was never peaceful. Maybe he had anxiety attacks, which can happen to everybody. Who knows what he had to fight in the everyday life of the Vienna Opera? Who knows?

How do you see Mahler as a person? Would you want to be his friend?

Mehta: Yes, I would love to know him. I would love to ask him a thousand questions, and I would love him to criticise my work. I would love it.

What are the main questions you would want to ask him?

Mehta: Whether I do a Mozart Symphony or a Mahler Symphony, I would like to know if my Übergänge [transitions] are logical, going from the development to the recapitulation. These musical bridges are very important. The logic with which a conductor, pianist, or quartet, interprets a bridge, either from the exposition to the development, or from the development – I’m talking simply, now – to the recapitulation. These bridges are really what make us logical musicians. These are the questions I would ask him. The same thing in a Mozart Symphony – bridges are very important.

And Mahler loved Mozart.

Mehta: Yes.

What would be your main advice to a young conductor starting to conduct Mahler?

Mehta: To know about Mahler as a person as much as possible, and to try to study the analysis of his scores, not by yourself, because you can come to the wrong conclusions. They should go to somebody and really study the analysis of Mahler Symphonies. In the Symphony No. 7, the introduction has three themes, and then the exposition has three or four themes, then the development has one section with eight parts. You need somebody to show this to you, also because when you rehearse you must tell the orchestra what they are doing construction-wise, because otherwise they are just going to play one note after the other. They will perhaps interpret each motive very well, but they will not know which part of the Symphony they are in. You have to remind them of certain things. The Symphony No. 7 is the most complicated; regarding the ten-part rondo in the finale, you have to rehearse each part of the rondo separately, otherwise you’re just playing it through – and just directing notes doesn’t make any sense. You have to rehearse analytically.

Interview: Wolfgang Schaufler
Transcript: Flora Death
5.10.2009, Vienna
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