Gustav Mahler

* Mahler: Symphony No. 9
* Hartmann: (Adagio) Symphony No. 2

Cleveland Orchestra/Christoph von Dohnanyi
Decca 289 458 902-2 Total time: 58:55 + 41:11

Summary for the Busy Executive:  Glorious.  And then there's the Hartmann.

Perhaps I've met with extraordinarily good luck, but I have never heard
anything less than a very good recording of this symphony.  I've not heard
all the recordings out there, by any means, but the ones I have include
Abravanel, Bernstein's first with the New York Philharmonic, Szell,
Kubelik, Haitink, Walter (1961), Horenstein (1966 - I thank Deryk Barker
for putting me on to this one), Gielen, Bernstein with the Berlin, Abbado,
and Boulez.  Of these, the Szell, Haitink, and Horenstein (not necessarily
in that order) are for me benchmarks of interpretation.

However, I'm probably also not a Perfect Mahlerite.  That is, for me, the
symphonies are not primarily quasi-religious testaments.  I flatter myself
that I listen to them mainly as music, rather than as spiritual texts.
After all, there are a lot of God-hungry artists, but only one Mahler, and
Mahler wrote music of such individuality that we go to the trouble to
invent eponymous adjectives for it.  To some extent, this is undoubtedly
"anti-Mahler" himself, and I probably suffer from an adverse reaction to
most of the stuff I read.  As most critics don't seem to get beyond the
surface of Richard Strauss, most sink immediately into the "subtext" of
Mahler.  All this is just to say that Strauss wasn't a Philistine and
Mahler had immense craft, and for a change perhaps we should try to talk
about these things.

I find most important in accounts of Mahler's works a convincing
"narrative" line.  "Narrative" here has little to do with a literal story,
but more with how the music unfolds.  Over the years, it's become apparent
to me that this kind of forward impulse - the intensity behind phrases and
notes - is heightened by great ensemble playing, which means that both
rhythmic sharpness and textural clarity assume great importance.  However,
the two are not ends in themselves, but the means to the coherence of the
movement.  There can be beautiful Mahler with no impulse behind it which
interests me less than something rougher (the nits I pick in Abbado and
Boulez).  On the other side of the scale, as in the Bernstein-Berlin
recording, one can encounter a "go-for-emotional-broke" with every phrase
so that the shape of the whole dissolves into goo fit only for wallowing
in.  Given the choice between a great performance in less-than-great sound
and a great performance in decent stereo, I'll probably take the latter,
although, for my money, no recorded performance of Kindertotenlieder
surpasses Horenstein's 1928 Berlin Philharmonic recording with Rehkemper.
On the whole, however, part of Mahler's glory to me lies in the sounds he
invents.

Just for the hell of it, I decided to follow the Dover edition of the
score as I listened to the Dohnanyi CD under review.  Dohnanyi apparently
uses a different edition of the text (although I can't tell you which one).
Still, I wanted to see how much I could glean of the relationship between
print and realization:  How much of the spirit resides in the letter?

Mahler's scores are thick with detail - not only are phrases shaped and
filigreed with every known notational mark (although there's less of that
in the Ninth) - but the composer provides detailed instructions in German
at the very passages referred to as to what the effect should be, how to
achieve it, and so on.  Mahler addresses not only the conductor with these
remarks, but the players as well, which I think significant.  In a really
great Mahler performance, players and conductors collaborate - everybody
works to maximum capacity.  I've read of a British orchestral
instrumentalist feeling "naked" when he played Mahler.  The orchestras may
be, if not necessarily "enormous," then pretty big, and yet Mahler seldom
plays up volume.  Mahler asks for the numbers mainly to change colors and
to generate a dazzling, clear counterpoint-on-counterpoint.  He resorts a
lot to momentary chamber groups within the large ensemble.  Unlike the
frequent case with Strauss, the orchestra player can't often hide behind a
wall of sound.  With a great orchestra, the conductor seldom has to clarify
texture, as long as the players follow the markings in the score.  Instead,
he must make clear the narrative thrust, and given the length of many of
Mahler's movements, this becomes a difficult necessity.

Although Mahler found his voice early and indeed re-used themes and ideas,
I've never felt that he repeated himself.  For me, each symphony differs
from its fellows.  The composer keeps extending his range and finding new
uses for familiar things.  The Ninth, however, is the only one of his works
where I feel him lingering in the past - in this case, the immediate past
of Das Lied von der Erde.  The musical language, particularly the reliance
on "oriental" pentatonicism and much of the orchestral sound, seems to
comment on the earlier work.  Already by the Tenth, we get something
different again.  In Das Lied we get symphonic songs.  The musical tension
in that work culminates one of Mahler's earliest symphonic concerns - how
to base the open, "becoming" form of the symphony on the closed form of
songs.  In Das Lied, Mahler opens up the song up to, but not crossing, the
line into symphony with vocal commentary.  The songs, despite their scale,
retain their individual arcs - really the extension of a song like
Schubert's "Ganymed." In the Ninth, Mahler uses much the same language to
create a genuine symphony.

Many commentators, at least since Berg and Redlich, have found the work
"death-obsessed," strongly related to Mahler's perception of his illness.
Certainly, the musical connections with Das Lied - particularly with "Der
Einsame im Herbst" and "Der Abschied" - reinforce this view.  I've nothing
against it, and three cheers if it helps people penetrate this wonderful
work.  I know too little of Mahler's life to have a definite opinion.
However, the Tenth Symphony - an entity really only available since Cooke's
first realization in the 1960s - sows doubt in my mind.  The triumph in
that symphony makes me wonder whether the fatalism of Das Lied and by
extension the Ninth stems from the poetry Mahler set or from Mahler
himself.

In general, the emotional arc of the symphony has the family look of
Tchaikovsky's Sixth (a work which, by the way, Mahler detested) - a
"struggle" first movement, a "relaxed" second, a frenetic third, and a
slow finale.  I don't really hear "death obsession" in the first movement
- in other words, what Alban Berg heard.  To me, the movement is as much
"about" the intense contemplation of the natural world as anything else.
We hear Mahler's musical symbols of nature - the "shivering" strings, the
slow procession of single notes from the principal harp, the fanfares of
nature awake (going all the way back to the First Symphony).  We also have
that intense pentatonic counterpoint from Das Lied.  This symphony is, if
anything, contrapuntal, and the first movement a stunning exemplar.  On the
one hand, pentatonic counterpoint is pretty simple to write.  After all,
if you just press down the black keys of a piano (which make up the usual
pentatonic scales), you already have something that sounds pretty good.
But with Mahler, it's just never that simple.  We certainly have music
pentatonically-based, for the most part, but which possesses the magical
ability to modulate anywhere, through the chromatic alteration of a single
note or even enharmonically.  Pentatonic music usually doesn't modulate.
It stays where it is harmonically - like one of those drinking-cups that
don't tip over - and for that reason, it can't all by itself hold interest
for the nearly half-an-hour the movement runs.  Pentatonic music is, in a
sense, anti-symphonic.  Unless the composer gives it a kick, it doesn't "go
anywhere." However, Mahler also includes a chromatic strain to the work
which provides both contrast and movement.  Chromatic music goes far and
fast.  Its danger is that one never the gets the feeling of "arriving"
anywhere.  Extreme chromaticism tends to undermine a listener's sense of
coherence.  Conductor and orchestra must find a way to reconcile these two
elements, for that becomes the main musical issue of the movement.
Mahler's contemplation of nature is never completely untroubled.  Nature
soothes and quiets the restless heart.

The sheer playing of the Cleveland runs at such a high level, it creates
its own difficulty:  one may not be able to get past the surface beauty
to the emotional subtext.  Furthermore, Dohnanyi portrays emotion like
a patrician.  Intensity is always accompanied by analytical distance.
Dohnanyi doesn't try to become the composer as much as he tries to comment
on or criticize (in its non-pejorative sense) the composer's work.  This
results in an individual point of view, one which tries to embrace both the
psychology of a work and its position within a culture.  Plenty of
listeners don't like this kind of distance, and sometimes I find Dohnanyi's
readings way off the mark - like the critic in love more with his
commentary than with the work itself.  On the other hand, I've never been
indifferent to Dohnanyi's readings - love 'em or hate 'em.  I happen to
love this.  Dohnanyi's distance and the beautiful, unearthly playing of the
Cleveland Orchestra give a noble, life-affirming quality to this movement
very rare in my experience with the work.  I usually hear something more
desperate and, at the end, more exhausted.  That's certainly one way to
read the work, but I like Dohnanyi's way as well.

The second movement apparently confuses some critics.  As late as 1970, for
example, well into the Mahler revival, Philip Barford wrote in the BBC
Music Guide to Mahler's symphonies:

   The next movement, a tedious and far too expansive Laendler, does
   not rivet the listener's attention like the first.  Its main thematic
   substance is a trivial commonplace of the Viennese idiom, and it is
   not redeemed by the burden of development it has to bear.  The massive
   extension of the movement, through derivative and subsidiary material,
   seems an artistic miscalculation.

God only knows what Barford was listening to.  For me, this counts as
one of the most bizarre movements in all of Mahler, and that's saying
something.  The composer marks the movement with the direction "Somewhat
clumsy and very coarse." The first idea is so obviously trivial, considered
all by itself, it would take a very thick head indeed to think that Mahler
hadn't a clue.  Very quickly the composer puts this slightly annoying idea
to serve not merely satire, but the depiction of a dream world.  Many
conductors emphasize the "clumsy" and "coarse," Dohnanyi the "somewhat." I
especially enjoy Mahler's use of extreme, side-slipping modulations - of
the kind Prokofiev later built a career on.  The basic technique stems from
Wagner, and Strauss extended it.  But Strauss often goes for the harmonic
reach only to return quickly to the original key - a kind of musical yo-yo
that always finds its way back to the hand which cast it.  Mahler, to the
contrary, uses the technique as a symphonist - to transform the given into
something new, to fly to a new place.  At times, the music seems like it's
been through a taffy pull or looking at its own reflection in a fun-house
mirror.  Because the Cleveland Orchestra plays so incredibly in tune, the
freshness of these modulations hits the listener more forcibly, without
inflating the emotional content.  The movement ends with a brilliantly
poetic feat of orchestration, what has always struck me as surrealism
before the fact - a desolate landscape riddled with ghosts.  I'm sure some
critics might object to Dohnanyi's restraint.  I, however, like the
elegance of it.  For me, he arrives at the right place with less strain and
hysteria than most.

The third movement, "Rondo.  Burleske," is almost the same kind of
movement as the second, but on amphetamines.  That is, it takes essentially
very simple, extremely brief ideas and betrays that simplicity, this time
through a virtuosic contrapuntal display and a breakneck tempo.  It takes
the character of a very quick march - a kind of commentary on the more
grotesque Wunderhorn songs like "Revelge," but the brilliance of the
orchestration also suggests the first and fourth parts of Das Lied.  One
also finds a transformation of a march idea in the Third Symphony, here
weirdly distorted almost to a polka, which again shows Mahler's ability
to build on and extend his earlier work and the unity this gives to his
symphonic cycle.

Early commentators had trouble with this movement as well.  It's not that
they couldn't figure out what Mahler was doing so much as why he wanted to
do it.  Some had criticized Mahler as a "homophonic" composer (Mahler's
main musical criticism of Tchaikovsky, incidentally).  But they weren't
really listening.  In this movement, Mahler rubs their noses in very
complex counterpoint indeed.  In fact, if you consider the lines
separately, their contrapuntal fit probably wouldn't occur to you.  He
dedicated the movement to "my brothers in Apollo," and the main character
direction is "sehr trotzig" (very stubbornly or defiantly).  Obviously,
Mahler writes it in part as satire, but the satire surpasses the thing
satirized - as if one were to write a great string quartet on themes by
Kenny G.  As if that weren't enough, Mahler inserts a slow, yearning
passage not entirely free of grotesqueries, and, enveloped by music racing
like demons, becomes even more enigmatic.  Dohnanyi again reads the passage
more at a distance than other interpretations I've heard.  What comes to
stand out are the strange little slides and out-of-tunes that frame the
passage and serve as transitions from the quick to the slow and back again.
They give the music an unease that standard Romantic yearning doesn't cover
- almost primeval, like a forest out of Grimm.  The whole movement reminds
me a bit of a grinning skull, an anticipation of Expressionism.  One might
expect a pristine performance from the Cleveland, but Dohnanyi counters
expectations.  Not that it's sloppy, mind you, but it's not presented as a
mere contrapuntal exercise either.  "Defiance," I think, provides the
emotional key.  The account is manically defiant - Cagney in Public Enemy
- without losing control.

The adagio finale is textually simple and emotionally complicated.  It
assumes the character of a funeral song - tears and farewells, including
the "Farewell" ("Lebe wohl") motif from Beethoven's Piano Sonata No.  26.
Of all the four movements, I think this the most death-obsessed, but not
necessarily Mahler's death.  Musically, it's unusual, even for Mahler.
Despite magnificent interludes - one for winds, one for brass, one for full
orchestra - strings dominate, and one doesn't normally associate Mahler
with the sound of strings.  At least, I don't, remembering mostly woodwind
passages.  For all that, the string writing is magnificent, and then one
realizes that it really doesn't differ all that much from the string parts
in Mahler's other works.  Here, Mahler lets it take center stage.

The movement's main idea comes from Kindertotenlieder, the song "Oft denk'
ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen" ("I often think they have only gone out"),
at the lines "Wir holen sie ein auf jenen Hoh'n / Im Sonnenschein!  / Der
Tag ist schon auf jenen Hoh'n!" ("We go to meet them on those heights in
the sunshine.  The day is beautiful on those heights!").  The poet imagines
that his children have not died but are merely playing outside.  This
movement laments Mahler's own children as much as anyone.  Dohnanyi and the
Cleveland give a heart-breaking account, all the more heart-breaking for
its beauty and the apparent simplicity of delivery.  One never feels that
someone shoves an Interpretation with a capital "I" down one's throat.  It
seems to break into spontaneous singing - a gorgeous end to a great work.

Someone will surely ask whether Dohnanyi's is an "essential" performance,
rather than merely interesting.  I can't answer except to say that it's
essential to me.  I say this having thought his account of the Symphony No.
4 nothing special, so I don't believe I qualify as a rabid fan.  However,
along with (in no particular order) the Horenstein, Walter, Szell, and
Haitink, I think he provides a penetrating, individual take on the Ninth -
elegant, but passionate as well in its way.  It's also a performance
incredibly well-played and recorded.

Following the Ninth's adagio with the Hartmann Symphony No.  2 may
constitute unusual cruelty to Hartmann.  He is an heir to Mahler, but how
many composers come up with music as incisive and as individual as Mahler?
Compared to the Ninth's finale, Hartmann's brief one-movement symphony
comes over as just so much noodling around.  I can easily appreciate the
considerable craft and the seriousness of it, but I eventually begin to
wonder whether it will ever "break into blossom." It always promises
something, then steps back or breaks off, without ever catching fire.
Needless to say (I'll say it anyway), it receives as good and committed
a performance as it's likely to get.  I wish I liked it more.  Hartmann
is a genuine hero of our times, worthy of admiration, and a composer who
obviously knows his stuff.  I just don't connect to the music.

Steve Schwartz