STRAIGHT to the HEART

Gay marriage: oh dear, oh lor’, how did this become the issue of the hour? The world appears to have divided itself into two camps and I find myself in neither. Nor do I truly understand either. One strikes me as vindictive, proscriptive, oppressive and presumptuous, the other wrong-headed, unrealistic, provocative and equally presumptuous. Leave me out, please.

Here’s what I bring to the table. I was raised an only child in a household that paid unexamined lip service to the Church of England but never set foot in a church except on high days and holidays. For a brief time ahead of adolescence, I became fervently religious, joined the Bible Reading Fellowship and read a passage of scripture every day before going to sleep. Within a very few weeks of my confirmation, it dawned on me that the whole of religion was supernatural superstition and a dangerous and wicked confidence trick, eagerly taken up by the ruling class as a means of keeping the masses in their place on the promise of jam tomorrow. My take on it has not fundamentally altered since then, though I hope I now express it in more sophisticated terms.

Long before my five minutes of mystical romanticism, I knew that I looked at boys in a significantly different way from how I looked at girls. But there was no roadmap for finding one’s way across this treacherous terrain. To be “queer” – then strictly a term of abuse – was to be an outlaw and an outcast. Those public figures who were widely understood to be “queers” – Godfrey Winn, Beverley Nichols, Somerset Maugham, John Gielgud – shared a certain demeanour that was apt to repel a small boy who wanted to be accepted and approved.

Nichols, Winn, Maugham, Gielgud

Like most of my gay contemporaries, I tried to be straight because I didn’t want to go to jail or be spurned by my family and friends or be unable to get a job or be obliged to live in a twilight world (whatever one of those was). I certainly didn’t want to make my mark on the culture by being interviewed in silhouette on television, sounding defeated and desperate.

I was twenty years old before the law was changed and sexual acts between men were permitted in certain relatively limited situations. By then I was well used to being and feeling an outlaw and this context for my sexuality doubtless coloured my attitudes to everything else in my life.

A change in law does not immediately change society and it took time for me fully to reconcile myself to what and who I was and to feel confident and self-possessed enough to reveal that to others. Relationships with men who embraced their freedom more instinctively than I could, along with the gradual dawning of the gay liberation movement, swept me along. Within seven or eight years of the law changing, I was beginning to feel able to present myself as “a gay man” – still a relatively new phrase – though the instinct to cling to a safety net of being “really” bisexual still lingered.

Once I was “out” – another new and bracing notion – as a journalist addressing a public readership, there was no going back. And perhaps the sensation of burning bridges was the most liberating ingredient of all. In the heady days of the Gay Liberation Front and the first Gay Pride marches – I can still picture the face of the skinhead denouncing us from the pavement and my chum Richard demanding “did you see what just called me ‘scum’?” – we began to discuss every aspect of what it meant to be a gay man; we knew from the outset that we didn’t dare speak for lesbians, especially the ferocious sisters who designated themselves “lesbian separatists”.

And on one thing we were very clear. We didn’t want marriage. It was an article of faith that we had no intention of aping the straight world, its requirements and conventions, its rituals and charades. We were forging new ways of conducting relationships, so we were never going to model ourselves on how our parents negotiated their respective territory. Our relationships – if indeed we even tolerated anything remotely resembling “a relationship” – were going to be open and permissive and equal and progressive. And we certainly weren’t about to pay any attention to what we were told to do by notionally monogamous vicars and their Catholic equivalents who were expected to be virgins.

The original GLF badge

The painfully slow embrace of each other by the gay community and the larger society has evidently required and has indeed achieved adjustments on both sides. David Cameron’s famous line at conference last year – “I don’t support gay marriage in spite of being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a Conservative” – was widely seen as an impeccably liberal, enlightened stance.

I’m not so sure. I think the key word for Cameron in that sentence is not “gay” but “marriage”. And it revives my own instincts of forty years ago to maintain a healthy mistrust of straight society’s wish to bring us into the fold, draw our teeth and turn us into well-behaved little conservatives, big C and small. With Groucho Marx, “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member”.

In the present dispensation, the Cameron Tories are in advance of the thinking of the church hierarchies, but perhaps only because they live more in the real world. After all, the Tory Party, the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church would all grind to a halt if their gay members left en masse, whatever the official line might be.

All three institutions have their share of unreconstructed reactionaries who think that they make an unanswerable case by loudly proclaiming that marriage between a man and a woman is “natural” and any other kind of union is not. Of course, marriage is merely an ancient social convention, with no equivalent among any other natural orders of living creatures. Some fauna mate for life, most don’t, and some – whisper it – go in for same-sex action.

A GLF publication

Nature is hardly a reliable guide for anything much at all. The “natural” brigade do not stop to think that it is wholly unnatural for humans to fly, yet most of them do it routinely and have done so for a century. And what is natural about playing golf, watching the telly, getting drunk, riding to hounds, sending emails, counting one’s money, learning the cello, mounting a picket line or indeed getting down on one’s knees and parroting responses when a man in a dog collar asks his flock to do so? What to you is not “natural” –- by which you mean acceptable – is second nature to me.

Those who hold the institution of marriage in something approaching reverence conveniently ignore how it may be used as a weapon of oppression against those weakened by it – battered wives, for instance, or abused children – or how it may provide a smokescreen behind which all manner of shenanigans may obtain, not least the sham or convenience marriage. Moreover, marriage is not in itself any guarantee of a lasting union, even when entered into in good faith. Monarchists prate self-importantly about the example and stability of the royal family as if it were not rather more dysfunctional than the general run of commoner families, three of Her Majesty’s four children having been through divorce.

But then those of us who spurn marriage might think it, with Hamlet, “a custom/More honoured in the breach than the observance”. Herein lies my suspicion of those lesbians and gay men who demand the right to marriage. I no more want to join a club that until very recently didn’t want me as a member than I do a club that now says I am welcome.

If it’s the supposed security of being formally recognised as half of a couple that is desired, well, I find that civil partnership fulfils such a function admirably. It gives the partner pretty much the same legal, social and financial rights that a spouse enjoys. My own partner and I could see the advantages of signing up for this piece of societal recognition and did so in the first months of its availability. But we won’t be getting married.

Scotland's first civil partnership ceremony

Why indeed do any LGBT people wish to have a wedding, whether civil or religious? Maybe for some it is the excuse for a party or, more specifically, a celebration, but you could have that without any formal proceedings. Pace David Furnish and Elton John, our civil partnership ceremony was the quietest and most private we were permitted: just two statutory witnesses and no “wedding breakfast”. We told no one else until afterwards. Of course the downside was that there were hardly any presents, but old crocks like us are hard to buy for at the best of times.

For those who indulge in mumbo-jumbo, trying to get organised orders of superstition to throw away the preferred readings of age-old texts is bound to cause trouble, if not schism. The Church of England has been tottering for years now, poised to split on the issue of gay rights. The appointment of Rowan Williams’ successor as Archbishop of Canterbury will be more minutely examined for what it tells us about the church’s future attitude to gay marriage than for any other signs.

Not my problem, but I think my fellow gays should favour society’s recognition of their sexuality over any concessions grudgingly clawed from Synod. After all, it makes little sense to subscribe voluntarily to an enterprise that has plenty of ancient regulations set down and widely known, and then decide that you can’t “be yourself” if you don’t get the regulations changed. For that walking contradiction “the gay Christian”, it is the Christianity, not the being gay, that is the problem.

So I cannot find in my heart any empathy for those who want to eat their cake and have it too, who want to be accepted and free in their sexuality in a community that is fundamentally homophobic, right down to its written constitution.

Of course, same-sex relationships are no easier than any other kind

But if those who yearn to be embraced by their enemy are the uneatable (in Wilde’s formulation), those who hound them are the unspeakable. I feel a particular enmity towards one of the ringleaders of the backbench backwoodsmen whose notion of a debating point is characteristically to direct such ad hominem observations as “claptrap” against those who advocate and support marriage for gay people. He is an ugly piece of work called Peter Bone. Heterosexual men like to affect that their deepest fear is that gay men will try to molest them, but I can reassure Mr Bone that he raises no boner in the gay community.

Since 2005, Mr Bonehead – oh tsk, tsk, I must guard against joining him in the gutter of personal abuse – has been the MP for Wellingborough, the Northamptonshire town in which I grew up. I also enjoyed my inaugural sexual experiences in the constituency that Mr Bone now represents so diligently. If you wonder whether those experiences were homosexual or heterosexual, I give you Gore Vidal’s answer: “I was too polite to ask”.

P Bone telling the Commons that the coalition's determination to allow same-sex marriage is "completely nuts"

Wellingborough is not quite the first place to which I would direct anyone seeking enlightenment, especially in the sphere of sexuality. It is not a community comparable to Amsterdam or San Francisco, Berlin or even Brighton. On a sign announcing the town’s imminence on one’s route, a local wag has obliterated five of the middle letters of its name so that it reads “Well ….. rough”. It’s not a wholly unearned notion.

When I was no’but a lad (as people are more apt to say well to the north of Northants), Wellingborough was a quiet, modest town of some 25,000 souls, supporting a cattle market, five cinemas, a tiny zoo, a range of individual enterprises and a thriving boot and shoe industry. All that has changed. In the 1960s, the place was chosen as a major overspill town to accommodate people transferred from London and, in the coming decades, a further expansion will push the population well over 60,000. Perhaps the newcomers will prove more liberal in their attitudes than Peter Bone can imagine. For aught I know, there may even be actual queers living in the constituency right now.

GUN CRAZY

It tells you everything you need to know about Sarah Palin when you learn that it was only after the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tucson, Arizona on Saturday that one of Palin’s websites took down its graphic wherein the states of a number of progressive American politicians (including Giffords) were portrayed in the crosshairs of the sights of a rifle. Any mention of this by Democrats (and others justifiably outraged) is being urgently dismissed by Republicans and Tea Partiers as “political point-scoring”. Well, there’s nothing dishonourable about making a political point. It’s certainly not worse than implying that your opponents would benefit from being shot in the head.

Gabrielle Giffords being sworn in last week by the new House Speaker, John Boehner

Assassination is a political weapon much more characteristic of reactionary than of progressive forces and therefore its victims are more apt to be progressives. Whether Lincoln or Kennedy, Gandhi or Mboya, Sadat or Rabin, Popieluszko or Palme, the politicians and activists thus removed have tended to be striving to make the world a better place for all of their fellow citizens. These are not the kind of people that the world can easily spare.

Only last week, the Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer was murdered by one of those hired to protect him. Taseer made himself a target by speaking out against the sentencing to death of a woman under the country’s absurd laws against blasphemy. In the upside-down world of Islam, anyone can be summarily executed if some malcontent alleges that they have made a remark that may be construed as disobliging to the Qur'an, the prophet or the arbitrary tenets of Sharia law. Proof is not required. Yet the so-called guard who killed Taseer is hailed on all sides as a hero.

The website targeting Tea Party enemies

So according to fundamentalist Islam, expressing your opinion or being accused of expressing an opinion that some malevolent mullah considers incorrect deserves death, as does disobeying your husband (however brutish or deranged he may be), declining to marry the dickhead that your parents have picked out for you, being homosexual, having sex outside marriage or not covering yourself from head to foot when you can be seen by others (if you are a woman). But ending the life of someone else on the basis of some unproved claim raises you to heroic status.

Palin gunning for liberals

Do not imagine, however, that this account of Islam is essentially different from the value system of fundamentalist Christians in the south and west of the United States. There will be plenty of people who applaud the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, even if they carefully deplore the “collateral damage” fatally inflicted on six others including a girl of nine who was born, with astonishing resonance, on the very day that the Twin Towers fell. We live in an age when pure hatred is the motivating force behind how millions view the world and their fellows within it. I happened to pass through Fox News during its coverage of the Democratic Party convention that chose Senator John Kerry to run against the incumbent George W Bush in 2004. Interviewing some Republican commentator, the Fox anchor observed: “I’m hearing a lot of hatred at this convention”. This was so a) not true and b) nakedly partisan as to be laughable if it were not so malicious. Well, the followers of Fox are sure doing all the hating now.

Salmaan Taseer

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The weekly arts column in The Guardian’s G2 supplement has a regular on-line poll inviting readers to choose between two simple positions on a topic of arts interest. The only time I ever troubled to register a vote was when we were charged to arbitrate as to whether it might be acceptable to top-slice the BBC licence fee in order to hive off funds for Channel 4. I am glad to report that an overwhelming majority deplored this proposition.

The current vote poses the question “Was Pete Postlethwaite the best actor of his generation?” I find this an appalling notion to survey. It would never have been asked in the present tense and only arises now because of the actor’s death at 64. Postlethwaite’s family must have ruefully regretted that the man was not alive to see the quite remarkable outpouring of admiration and affection that his death engendered. Did he always get such notices? I doubt it.

Of course, if you want a warm send-off, it always helps to die in harness. On hearing of the sudden passing of Truman Capote, Gore Vidal famously quipped: “good career move”. And your legend is apt to be sealed by leaving plenty of work undone. I do not for a moment demur at the extent of the tributes to Postlethwaite, a doughty player, brave and strong and always true to his material. But the best actor of his generation?

The young Pete Postlethwaite (billed as Peter in those days)

Judgments about performance, be it acting or singing or playing an instrument or indeed writing plays or music or novels, are a curious mix of the subjective and the objective. Objectively, of course, there is a chasm between the practised pro and the stumbling amateur and hence there are degrees of rational assessment along that continuum. The notion of a critical consensus around a work or a performance or a career is not without merit. It seems to me to be perfectly acceptable to argue that Keats is a “better” poet than the anonymous providers of doggerel in greetings cards and death announcements in local newspapers; that Jane Austen is a more significant novelist than Barbara Cartland; that Johnny Depp is a more accomplished and prodigious actor than Graham Seed, who has just been killed off in The Archers.

But whimsical taste and the accidents of what you might have seen come into it too. Many of those who vote on Postlethwaite will not have seen his television roles in The Paradise Run, The Muscle Market, Doris and Doreen and Afternoon Off as I have done (did you know he had so much Alan Bennett in his cv?); nor his stage performances in such plays as Magnificence (38 years ago!), Breezeblock Park, Having a Ball, Cromwell, The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, Flying Blind and a great deal of Shakespeare at the RSC. I honour, as who doesn’t, the work he did in later life as a leading player and I am pleased to report that even after all the years of watching him he could still surprise me, especially in Brassed Off and In the Name of the Father.

But the best actor of his generation? If it were refined to “the best screen actor” or “the best stage actor” or “the best British actor”, some of the curse might have been taken off it. And, given The Guardian’s house style commitment to eschewing the term “actress”, perhaps “the best male actor” might also have clarified the matter.

And then how big is a generation? Consider just some of those born the same year as Postlethwaite: Alan Rickman, David Calder, Brian Cox, Tim Curry, Stephen Rea, David Suchet, Tony Robinson, Nicholas Jones, Timothy Dalton, Struan Rodger, Stuart Wilson, Peter Egan, Tim Pigott-Smith, Alun Armstrong, Barrie Rutter, Mike Grady, Richard Heffer, Duncan Preston, Gavin Richards, Roger Sloman, Clive Francis, Roy Holder … not a bad list. The following year brought Jonathan Pryce, Frank Grimes, Miles Anderson, Patrick Barlow, Warren Clarke, Richard Griffiths, Dermot Crowley, George Costigan, David Yelland, Nicholas Le Prevost … you see the competition is fierce. The roll call born in 1948 includes Tom Wilkinson, Niall Buggy, David Hayman, Karl Johnson, Philip Jackson, Jim Carter, Joseph Marcell and Ron Cook.

This is still just the British men. If we look to the women and to other nations, the list starts to burgeon: Cher joins us, as do Liza Minnelli and Mary Beth Hurt and Tyne Daly, Tommy Lee Jones and Bruce Davison, Danny Glover and Ben Vereen, Eugene Levy and Hector Babenco and Joe Spano, Diana Quick and Brenda Blethyn and Alison Steadman, Judy Loe and Stephanie Beacham, Glenn Close, Joe Mantegna, Richard Jenkins. Kevin Kline, John Ratzenberger, Colin Stinton, Sinéad Cusack and Frances Tomelty, Lindsay Crouse, Mercedes Ruehl, Billy Crystal and Samuel L Jackson, Jean Reno and Gérard Depardieu. Oh, and Meryl Streep. If we spread back to 1943 to define this generation, who can deny Robert De Niro? If on to 1950, what about Daniel Auteuil?

Go back seventy years and there’s no difficulty reducing the “best actor of his generation” list to just two, certainly from a London and Stratford perspective, probably in New York’s assessment too. It was either Laurence Oliver or John Gielgud, the one a force of nature, a man who took the stage by storm and presence, the other the greatest speaker of classical language of this or any age, the vessel for the music of the spheres. Around them played a golden generation of actresses and actors but, though they both fell into and out of fashion over their long careers, Gielgud and Olivier were clearly the top dogs.

Harriet Walter, dame to be

What’s striking about the players in my lists above – at least the British ones – is the absence of knights and dames. Olivier was knighted at 40, Gielgud at 49, both were raised to the Order of Merit and Olivier gazetted in the House of Lords. Ralph Richardson was knighted at 45, Michael Redgrave at 51, Alec Guinness and Donald Wolfit at 55, Basil Rathbone at 57, John Clements at 58. Peggy Ashcroft and Sybil Thorndike were made dames at 49, Edith Evans and Flora Robson at 58. Postlethwaite’s generation – in their early 60s – have so far achieved only one knighthood, that of Antony Sher (born three years after Postlethwaite) and two damehoods, for Helen Mirren and, bestowed in this year’s New Year honours list, for Harriet Walter (born four years after Postlethwaite). Walter’s gong is certainly deserved although perhaps surprising. Though six years younger than Walter, Juliet Stevenson might have been expected to precede her in the honours. Postlethwaite’s contemporary Penelope Wilton – my choice for the best actor of this generation – should also be in the running.

But really what does it matter? Why reduce everything to “best of” lists? Just glory in the career that Postlethwaite enjoyed and the work that he got to do. Hug yourself if, like me, you were able to catch a lot of his stage performances. I’m smug that I’m so old that I got to see so much stage work by all the players mentioned in this posting, including even Wolfit and Thorndike. As Chairman Mao said so wisely (though he hardly lived by it): “let a hundred flowers blossom”.

But if you do wish to vote in The Guardian’s poll, you may do so at this address:
www.guardian.co.uk/culture/poll/2011/jan/06/pete-postlethwaite

HERE COMES EVERYBODY

Tony, my best friend at school and my earliest writing partner, left a year before I did to study English and drama at Birmingham University, a good move as it transpired. I stayed on an extra year to do scholarship entrance to Cambridge, in vain as it turned out, but that’s a tale for another day.

One weekend, Tony rolled up in his battered old jalopy, flourishing two tickets for a concert. Granted parental permission, I jumped into the passenger seat and we motored off to London down the M1, still something of a novelty in 1966 for country bumpkins like us.

My musical education had been somewhat piecemeal up to this point. My recent forebears had all been musical in their various ways. One grandfather was a silver bandmaster for forty years, the other a village choirmaster for forty years. My parents met in the local amateur operatic society, she in the dancing chorus, he a decent light tenor, well suited to playing the hero’s friend but not actor enough to lead a cast. He had a local triumph as Detlef in Romberg’s The Student Prince. My mother had studied piano to a pretty good standard – her plaster bust of Wagner I still have – and she obliged me to take lessons in my turn.

But we did not own a gramophone until I held out for a Dansette-type record player for my 13th birthday, putting pressure on my Dad by starting to buy singles in anticipation, even without the wherewithal yet to play them. As I grew more serious in the Vth and VIth forms, I started to read reviews of new classical releases and to supplement my pop stuff, soundtracks and show albums with haphazardly chosen grown-up music, everything from Bach to Pfitzner, from Mendelssohn to Mimaroglu.


Gustav Mahler

There was also a school record library, a motley of purchases, donations and swag. This collection exactly reflected the serendipitous nature of my own growing collection of LPs, save that some of them were so old that they were 10-inchers and even 78s. I borrowed indiscriminately and, having set up my reel-to-reel tape recorder to copy from my record player, I soon had half the school’s haul on audio tape.

The composer whose work we were to hear in London was not represented in the school collection. He was Gustav Mahler. Both Tony and I had liked what we had read about this late romantic but had still not heard a note of his work. Mahler had become fashionable over recent years, rediscovered thanks as much as anyone to the American conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein, whose own music was greatly under Mahler’s influence. Bernstein had recorded several of Mahler’s massive symphonies in the States and Europe and now he was coming to London to record the 8th symphony after giving it in concert at the Albert Hall.

Lenny Bernstein was also a persuasive advocate. He was a gifted teacher and talker and, in an era when “mass communication” was the only way to go, he made for terrific television, whether talking or conducting. I had a recording by him of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony that had a bonus EP of a talk on the work by Lenny. Not many people could get away with a phrase like “Beethoven the gigantic one” and still not seem a fraud. In a Sunday Times review that I vividly recall of another Mahler concert, Desmond Shawe-Taylor remarked that “Bernstein concluded with a left and a right that had Mahler sprawling against the ropes”. That sounded just the kind of conducting that got me going.


Otto Böhler's famous silhouettes of Mahler in action

The 8th, a grand choral work, was known as “the Symphony of a Thousand” because of the massive forces involved. The Albert Hall gig was to be populated by the London Symphony Orchestra at full stretch, the London Symphony Chorus, the Leeds Festival Chorus, the Orpington Junior Singers, the Highgate School Boys’ Choir and eight soloists. We knew we were in for a show but we couldn’t guess quite what a show. From the electrifying crash of the opening, a thunderous octave leap on the giant Albert Hall organ, immediately followed by the roaring invocation of the massed voices – “Veni, veni, creator spiritus!” [“Come, creator, holy spirit!”] – we were, as comparably impressed teenagers would say now, blown away.

The whole first section of the work, lasting around 25 minutes, is a switchback ride of emotion, power, retreat and renewal, packed with exquisite melody and daring orchestration. The second part, a realisation of the climactic scene of Goethe’s play Faust, is more than twice as long and rather more measured and discursive before returning at the end to the tumult of the earliest bars. By that end, we were mentally, physically and psychologically shredded. It was the most enthralling experience, not least because of the dynamism of Bernstein’s conducting.


Lenny gives it his all

Afterwards, we slept in Tony’s car parked in the Kensington side-street where, the previous year, Winston Churchill’s life had drawn to its close. Next morning, we breakfasted in the café of a nearby hotel. We were served by a very chirpy waitress with whom, by curious coincidence, I enjoyed an affair a decade later (oh yes, I cruised both sides of the street in those days. I always cherish Gore Vidal’s famous answer to the question “was your first sexual experience homosexual or heterosexual?” – “I was too polite to ask”).

Naturally, when the double album of Bernstein’s version of Mahler’s 8th was released the following year, I rushed out to buy it. I still have it but it is so worn down by constant playing as to be unbearable. My CD replacement is a rather embarrassing item from a series called ‘The Royal Edition’, all works conducted by Lenny but decked out with watercolours by the Prince of Wales who, you can bet, has not listened to the Mahler as often as I have. But the piece has had an important function in my life. If ever I felt sad or defeated or confused or in any other way negative, all I needed to do was to lie on the floor and play Part I of the 8th, very loudly and preferably in darkness. After that, everything seemed possible.

Over the years I got to know and love all of Mahler’s music. Though the individual pieces are all large-scale, it’s as assimilable a body of work as Jane Austen’s, as opposed to the sprawling canon, across several genres of, say, Haydn or Bernard Shaw. Mahler was, after all, only ever a part-time composer, making his living as a conductor, primarily of opera. He was born in July 1860 so, next month, we mark his 150th anniversary. Next May will be the centenary of his death; he lived only four years longer than Schumann whom we think of conventionally as having “died young”.


The musical prodigy at 5 or 6

It is evident that Mahler was, with Keats, “half in love with easeful death”. Mortal terror stalks his music. Seven of his eleven siblings died in childhood, including his closest brother. One of his two beloved daughters also died in childhood, giving a retrospective poignancy to his most agonised song cycle, Kindertotenlieder (I am listening to it as I write in the rapturous rendition by Kathleen Ferrier with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Bruno Walter). Soon after Maria’s death, Mahler learned that his own heart was defective and that his prospects were not good. He was working on the 8th symphony at this time. Always superstitious, Mahler deferred writing a further symphony because of the notion that nine was the most a composer could complete – Beethoven, Spohr, Schubert, Dvorak and Bruckner had all died without completing a tenth. Instead he wrote Das Lied von der Erde, which has an unmistakeably symphonic structure. After that, he dared to write a huge and magnificent 9th symphony before, inevitably, leaving an unfinished 10th (it has been superbly realised in performable form by Deryck Cooke and, subsequently, in several other versions).


Mahler in his late 20s

That Mahler was driven and a mass of contradictions is both clear and not to be wondered at. A Bohemian Jew, he converted to Catholicism in order to carve himself a highly influential role in the life of a city devoted to music, Vienna. The extent of anti-Semitism in late 19th century Vienna can only be imagined. Like the cliché of an opera conductor – perhaps he inspired the cliché – Mahler was autocratic, perfectionist and relentless. He made many enemies. His tenure at the Vienna Opera, like all his conducting posts, was wracked by quarrels, resentments, resignations and outrageous ferocities both suffered and inflicted. He would flee to a succession of summer retreats to compose, but his symphonies and song cycles received mixed responses. His greatest triumph, the last of his lifetime, was the world premiere of the 8th in Munich on September 12th 1910. The composer was denied the savour of its reception, however, for he discovered on the eve of its performance that his adored wife Alma was faithless with the architect Walter Gropius. Despite this blow, Mahler dedicated the symphony to Alma.


Alma Mahler

Mahler’s music resounds with the sounds and flavours of the world around him. The quality of gemütlichkeit, so beloved of the indulgent Viennese, thrives alongside the doom and despair. Band music of all kinds – from military marches through town band tunefulness and funeral dirges to oompah corniness – passes through the sound picture. The music of the Viennese café and salon, of street players and folk singers, of the church choir and the klezmorim rub shoulders with the particular writing for projected voice that Mahler studied so closely for his work in the opera house. Forerunning geniuses – Bruckner (his teacher), Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner – inform his taste and his decisions, as do his extensive readings in philosophy and theosophy. Had he lived, I have no doubt that jazz and the new forms pioneered within a very few years of his death by the likes of Stravinsky and, in Vienna itself, Schönberg would have contributed to his joyous eclecticism and perhaps indeed he would have made the obvious move into writing for the opera house, though it is hard to see any librettist surviving such a collaboration. More than any other ingredient, the summer sounds of nature that surrounded him while he wrote in the Austrian countryside fed into his aesthetic.


Contemporary caricature of Mahler's aesthetic

It’s a rich and dense fabric that he weaves. Mahler isn’t for everyone and certainly not for those who take a more ascetic view of art. At the time of the ‘60s revival, I remember Kingsley Amis remarking that he couldn’t bear Mahler’s stuff. Given Amis’s own politics, character and world view, I felt comfortably in the correct camp (and anyway, isn’t Lucky Jim one of the most overrated of novels?). Mahler appealed to me at that time because I had a young man’s passion for artists who created teeming worlds. I remember a Sunday newspaper headline over a piece about James Joyce’s writing: “Here comes everybody”. That was what I loved in Joyce and Günter Grass and Lawrence Sterne and Dickens and later in Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Lawrence Norfolk; and what Mahler’s crowded canvases also seemed to offer.

In the fifty years before that Bernstein-led revival, Mahler’s reputation had dwindled while the Baroque was rediscovered and the classical composers took their place at the centre of the repertoire. A few conductors kept his name known on the continent – Willem Mengelberg, Hermann Scherchen, Karel Ancerl, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Jascha Horenstein – and in Britain – Adrian Boult and John Barbirolli, than whom no two conductors could be more different in style and approach. But none did more to fan the flame than Bruno Walter who worked as Mahler’s assistant at the Vienna Opera and who was perhaps unique in refusing to hear a word said against the maestro. After Mahler’s death, Walter conducted the world premieres of both Das Lied von der Erde and the 9th symphony at Alma’s invitation and, a quarter of a century later, made the first recordings of both works. A later recording of Das Lied with Kathleen Ferrier and Julius Patzak is among the finest recordings of great music ever made. Walter, whose long life ended in 1962, once said that the two greatest musicians he had ever known were Mahler and Ferrier and that perhaps Ferrier – that hugely loved English contralto who died so tragically young – was the greatest of all.


Bruno Walter

In recent years, Mahler recording has become a vital industry. No conductor worth his or her salt foregoes the opportunity to record not just a favourite from among these symphonies that were once thought too demanding and exhausting to attempt, but the whole canon. Since Luchino Visconti drew on it so extensively for the soundtrack of his movie Death in Venice of 1971, the Adagietto of the 5th symphony has turned into Mahler’s “lollipop”, an extractable sweetmeat for busy people to swoon at momentarily. But the movement has from the get-go been teased out as a crowd pleaser. Sir Henry Wood introduced it into a Prom concert as long ago as 1909 and Lenny Bernstein extracted it for the memorial mass given in New York for Senator Robert Kennedy.

What Mahler himself and the scornful Viennese haute bourgeoisie would have made of it all is anyone’s guess. Secure in the Pantheon, his last laugh would at least have been heard by the famously scandalous Alma, who married and divorced Gropius and who outlived even Bruno Walter by two years. For his part, the erudite composer would have read his Hippocrates and so would have known that ars longa, vita brevis.


The maestro on the podium