Mahler

PERFORMERS:
The Mariinsky Orchestra
Conductor: Cristoph Eschenbach

PROGRAMME:
Gustav Mahler
Symphony No 9

Christoph Eschenbach’s half-century-long career as a pianist and conductor has developed according to the typical scenario – if, indeed, it could be called typical to have two musical professions. A prize-winner at piano competitions, he gradually won the right to perform at the best venues and with the greatest orchestras and conductors, subsequently learning to perform and conduct classical concerti at the same time. A pupil of George Szell, he has travelled the path from one-off appearances with provincial orchestras and opera houses to directing the Tonhalle (Switzerland), the Orchestre de Paris, the Houston and Philadelphia Symphony Orchestras and, currently, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington. Today Eschenbach accompanies Renée Fleming and Matthias Goerne when they sing Schubert and he performs concerti by Mozart and conducts: the focus of his repertoire is the Austrian and German classics, with a particular fondness for Mahler.
It was in order to revive the classical symphony repertoire that Eschenbach was invited to Washington. Both in Paris and in Philadelphia his concerts in recent years have led to fervent discussions and separate his fellow musicians into two camps. Some who have held subscriptions for years have given up their familiar haunts while others have become fans and follow the maestro from one city to another. Several years ago Eschenbach’s performances brought a forgotten genre back to life – duels between critics published over several months that directly conflicted each other in their reviews of his concerts. He is condemned and applauded for roughly one and the same thing. For his exaggerated contrasts of the piano and the forte, for the too-quick and the too-slow tempi, for the fervency of his Romantic interpretations and for his cool severity with classical works, for the non- traditional qualities of his gestures as a conductor. For the fact that he drives the orchestra to the very edge and suddenly “steps on the brakes and burns the rubber.” For the fancifulness and the untraditional nature of his interpretations – “perversity”, “originality” or “insight” according to tastes. His ambivalent art, always betwixt and between the aesthetics of Good and Evil, is deeply connected in the music of Mahler – which, apropos, at one time was also reviled and lauded for the same qualities. For the megalomaniac scale, the vulgarity of the fits of passion, the style of low genres that invaded symphony music, for the magnificence and grandiose nature of the compositions, the wittiness of the drama and the wave of emotions, the impossible expansion of stylistic vocabulary. Eschenbach speaks of Mahler as the principal symphonist of the 20^th century. For him Mahler’s compositions are the loftiest expression of compositional skill, precision in writing and clarity of composition. When performing Mahler he literally examines the limits of the orchestra and the sensations of the audience, but all of his caprices and tricks are invariably subject to the general idea of the symphony and, having “taken a breath” in the first movement, the audience can only relax in the finale. What are the main dangers in interpreting Mahler? “It’s dangerous to approach the verge of tastelessness,” says Eschenbach, “That happens when the conductor omits the inverted commas of what is ‘trivial’ with Mahler.”
Kira Nemirovskaya

“It seems that the Ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away... Those who have written a Ninth stood too close to the hereafter. It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth which we ought not yet to know.”
Arnold Schoenberg
Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner... None of them wrote a Tenth Symphony. All-powerful death stopped them in their paths! Neither did Dvořák compose a Tenth, although he did live a further ten years following the American premiere of his New World Ninth Symphony. With his paradoxical Ninth Symphony Shostakovich “laughed it off”, in part due to completely understandable superstition, but principally because he desired no new Ode to Joy which was expected from him following the war or to participate in the glorification of a tyrant. Mahler tried to deceive Fate. When, in January 1907, the family doctor discovered he had heart disease and recommended that he lead a healthy lifestyle and avoid overstraining himself, it sounded like the first, not-yet-so-worrying alarm bell.
In June that same year the composer met with a bitter shock – his four-year-old daughter fell ill with diphtheria and suffered an agonising death before her parents’ eyes. What he had witnessed made Mahler’s heart disease worse, and the doctors did not conceal from him the fact that the situation was serious. One year earlier, in the summer of 1906, in just eight weeks Mahler had composed his grandiose Eighth Symphony (although its premiere had to wait until 1910 in Munich).
By then the composer who had written eight symphonies was enduring incredible suffering with the creation of his Ninth. Joining his family in a resort in the Austrian Tyrolean, the composer sought familiar comfort in walking and reading... His attention was drawn to a recently published book of poetry translated by Hans Bethge. This provided the impetus for the new symphony, with Mahler himself defining the genre as a “symphony in songs”. The conductor Bruno Walter subsequently wrote of Das Lied von der Erde that “It was supposed to be his Ninth. But then he changed his intentions: recalling Beethoven and Bruckner, for whom the Ninth proved to be the extreme of art and life, he did not wish to tempt Fate.”
The last movement of Das Lied von der Erde was named Der Abschied (The Farewell). “If illness initially game him a gloomy outlook on life,” recalled Bruno Walter, “now the world appeared before him in a soft light of farewell – as in nature, twilight dissolves in the glow of sunset...” Mahler composed his Ninth in the summer of 1908 and 1909; because of his work as a conductor he was only able to compose while on holiday. And yet the composer never heard wither the Ninth nor Das Lied von der Erde: they were performed only after the composer’s death.
“... Somehow I came to perform Mahler’s Ninth again: the first movement is the finest thing Mahler composed. It is an expression of unheard-of love for the world, a passionate desire to live on it in peace, enjoying it again and again as much as possible before death comes. Because it approaches relentlessly.” It is hard better to convey in a few words the content of this music. In this case it is purely instrumental music, continuing the composer’s farewell to the world. In the measured cold tones of the harp with which the symphony begins there is a heart beating slowly but barely, measuring the hours of human life. The intermittent and changeable pulsation and the uneven tempo of the music are a reflection of final passionate wishes to hang on to the unravelling thread of life.
“Imbued with tremendous spiritual emotion, the music no longer speaks of the powerful tension of struggle; the strong surges, rising up, powerlessly fade away, the ecstatic flights cede to interminable weariness bordering on prostration,” writes Inna Barsova, a researcher of Mahler’s symphonies.
In the middle fast movements of the symphony the composer rejected the lofty and noble feelings that possessed him so that for a moment he can look back at the chaotic world he was leaving. The “rough and ready” peasant ländler that Mahler loved so much suddenly turns into a grotesque and somewhat caricature waltz. And the Rondo-burlesque has openly stated grotesque features, “in its capricious melodic lines, in the broken and excited rhythms there is the feverish pulsation of a modern metropolis... It’s a whirlwind that drags you along, wicked, a merciless perpetuum mobile” (Inna Barsova).
The final Adagio is adorned in pre-sunset tones, imbued with a deep peace and reconciliation. It is a majestic hymn to eternal life: the human soul has come to heavenly rest, it leaves the world but attains immortality, dissolving into nature and becoming part of it.
Iosif Raiskin