I much enjoyed Richard Morrison's article in The Times this morning and
expect many others will too.

   Come on, Mahler, make me a kid again

   Once again - thanks to an extraordinary coincidence that I shall come
   to in about 800 words' time - I find myself thinking about Mahler.
   And very irritating it is too.  Mahler, after all, is a teenagers'
   composer.  His music is best savoured when you are 18, at which point
   it exactly fits your world-view:  that life, love and death are heroic
   adventures, worthy to be celebrated in music of heaven-storming
   grandeur.

   At that age a symphony such as the Resurrection, which sweeps you
   down to hell and then blazes out the promise of immortality, hits
   you between the eyes.  The Adagietto of the Fifth - that shimmering
   love-song-without-words - leaves you in a trance.  You don't walk
   out of the hall; you float.

   Hear the same pieces when you are 37 or 47, and it is liable to be
   a case of emotion recollected in sterility.  By then, most of us have
   found life to be neither heroic nor tragic:  rather, it's paying the
   mortgage and muddling through.  The rollercoaster ride hasn't happened.
   We can still thrill to Mahler's huge emotional odysseys, but the
   thrill is rooted in escapism or nostalgia.

   And yet old habits die hard.  I still check my diary each time I see
   a Mahler concert advertised.  No other composer has that effect on
   me.  Why? Well, one clue may lie in a fascinating book, Charisma in
   Politics, Religion and the Media, by David Aberbach.  He studied the
   lives of people who, for good or evil, exercised charismatic power
   over mass populations.  Ranging from Hitler to Marilyn Monroe, he
   argued that a traumatic failure or tragedy, often in childhood, leads
   such figures to seek compensatory control of the public domain.  "I
   belong to the public and to the world," Monroe declared, "because I
   have never belonged to anyone else." Or as Diana, Princess of Wales,
   put it:  "I want to be the princess of people's hearts."

   Aberbach didn't study composers, but Mahler would surely have been
   his prime example.  His symphonies are wrenched from the turmoil of
   his life - particularly his grisly childhood, scarred by the deaths
   of his siblings - and then laid bare in public.  Nearly a century
   later, their hold on audiences remains extraordinary.  In his hands
   we are all teenagers, it seems.

   But Mahler's symphonies, especially the massive choral ones, are also
   grand celebrations of music as a truly communal art.  Mahler was
   himself a great conductor, and the music he wrote for orchestral
   musicians is expertly conceived to stretch them to the technical
   limit.  But the glory of these gigantic works is that their virtuoso
   demands operate in tandem with choral writing that demands nothing
   more than a good ear, a tuneful voice and prodigious lungs.  To cap
   it all, Mahler also used children's voices brilliantly.  So his
   symphonies really do span the gamut of music-making, from skilled
   pros to beginners.  That is why every Mahler concert is an event.

   And the Eighth Symphony is the greatest event of them all.  It's
   called the Symphony of a Thousand because at its 1910 premiere a
   thousand people (1,002 actually) took part.  These days, most
   performances get by with about 600.  But even in these straitened
   circumstances, Part One of the Eighth Symphony - that hurtling dash
   through the ancient Catholic hymn Veni Creator Spiritus - is one of
   the most ear-splitting, mind-blowing half-hours in all music.
   (Unfortunately, it's then followed by Part Two - but nothing is
   perfect.)

   Imagine my astonishment, then, to discover that next week London will
   enjoy not one but two unconnected performances of this gargantuan
   masterpiece.  Much laborious prose has been churned out - not least
   by me - on the subject of London's decline as a world-class musical
   capital.  But I cannot think of any other city on the globe that
   could possibly find the musicians, or the audience, to sustain two
   performances of the Symphony of a Thousand, 48 hours apart, by entirely
   different organisations.

   What a contrast they will make, too.  The Albert Hall show next
   Thursday is in what you might call the European Cup of Mahler Eights,
   with the Royal Philharmonic, three famous choral societies and some
   starry soloists.  Two days later, the Festival Hall hosts the Mahler
   equivalent of the Nationwide League, including such intriguing
   ensembles as the Crouch End Festival Chorus.  But I don't doubt for
   a moment that their commitment will be every bit the equal of the
   luminaries across the river.

   Leonard Bernstein said Mahler was "the last great composer".  That's
   a bit gloomy, but one knows what he meant.  Mahler lived at the
   optimum time in history for personal traumas to be expressed on
   massive musical canvases.  Shortly after he died the advent of cheap
   mass entertainment destroyed the economic basis for music-making on
   such a scale.  And the rise of a foul generation of political dictators
   gave charisma and rhetoric a bad name.  The power to inspire millions
   suddenly seemed, to sensitive composers at least, unhealthy and
   potentially evil.

   Many retreated into writing complex little pieces for complex little
   audiences.  By contrast, pop composers had no scruples about wooing
   millions with their music, but rarely developed the techniques to
   extend their art beyond the span of the four-minute song.

   So in one sense Mahler really was the last of the greats.  And 90
   years on, the Eighth Symphony continues to enthrall and deafen us,
   just as it did the Edwardians.  But can I take it twice in three
   days? You bet.  When it comes to Mahler, as Mr Bryan Adams so memorably
   wrote, I'm 18 till I die.

John G. Deacon   http://www.ctv.es/USERS/j.deacon