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
