Author Kangas, Ryan R. Share Facebook. Metadata Show full item record. Chapter 1 lays the theoretical foundation for these analyses, which draws on cultural memory, nostalgia studies, and the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. After proposing several ways in which music processes might resonate with forgetting in the form of repression, in Chapters 4 and 5, the Second and Fourth Symphonies are discussed in terms of mourning and nostalgia respectively, defined as two specfic types of remembrance.

I remember many concerts that made me dislike it even more, because I found, in the Mahler concerts I had heard, two extremes of realisation. One was exaggeratedly emotional, in the sense that the text was used as an excuse for self-expression on the part of the conductor, even if it was sometimes done at a very high level. Others withdrew from any kind of emotional content, making it rather dry. And I think this is terrible. In other words, the biography of the composer, and the musical diary which he writes — and the oeuvres of all great composers are musical diaries — are not really related.

Beethoven wrote some of the most positive music at a time of complete distress, and vice versa. Mahler was probably the first composer who consciously, and permanently, wrote individual dynamics for the instrument. Most composers write a dynamic vertically in a score: piano , forte , crescendo.

Now, the job of the conductor, of course, is to make this audible. If you have a whole orchestra making a crescendo from A to D,and already at A, the trombones, horns, trumpets, and timpani are making a crescendo , you will never hear the second flute, or the violas, or any other instruments. Therefore, part of the job of the conductor is to create a balance, and to make the crescendo audible, according to the importance of the instruments that are playing the music.

I must make sure that the heavyweights — the brass, and timpani, the percussion — start their crescendo later, when the weaker instruments have already made the crescendo. When you see the second bar of the famous Prelude to Tristan and Isolde with the famous Tristan chord, if all the instruments make the diminuendo at the same time, you lose the line.

Therefore the oboe, which is the instrument that continues, has to make a diminuendo later. All these aspects fascinated me with Mahler. Mahler very often wrote the same music, the same notes, in different groups of instruments, with opposite dynamics. Barenboim: Absolutely. You have the same notes, but you have, for instance, the clarinets starting fortissimo and making a diminuendo, and at the same time in unison, the violas starting pianissimo and making a crescendo to fortissimo.

So you have the line more or less sustained on one level of volume, but with a complete change of colour. This aspect, I realised then, was in fact indicative of his complexity, while I had thought before that this was artificiality. And this is what drew me more and more to his music. I must say, my occupation with Wagner also drew me to Mahler, because the Wagner influence on Mahler is very often ignored.

He wrote with a historical modernism, which is almost, I would say, unique, in the development of music, because it was tied to a very old-fashioned sense of form. The symphony with Mahler is a very old-fashioned form of the symphony, the same that started with Haydn and Mozart, then went through all the developments, through Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner.

And you find yourself with this strange combination of almost an enlarged 18 th century structure with a 20 th century content and a 19 th century musical idiom. So, in effect, the complexity of Mahler and its greatest appeal to me is that it is, in a way, the affirmation of three centuries of musical thinking. But the real Mahler renaissance started in the late 60s, more than 40 years later. Why so late? Barbirolli was less famous than Bernstein, and had less appeal to the general public, but Barbirolli was the conductor who brought Mahler to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra at a time when Mahler was not only unknown but was never played.

It was only after he created a furor with a recording of the 9th Symphony that Karajan himself became interested and conducted, I think, the 4 th , the 5 th , the 6 th and the 9 th Symphonies. He had always conducted Das Lied von der Erde. Also, it was more organised if you worked with Bernstein than with Barbirolli. But Mahler was one of those composers who inspired — and in a way still does — a sort of specialisation.

And I remember I heard most of the Mahler Symphonies — most, not all, certainly not the 8th and not the 1 st —with Klemperer in London, and it was a completely different world from Bruno Walter.

And then of course came Bernstein with his unique exuberance and personal involvement, which was the antipode. You mentioned Klemperer and Bruno Walter, and both knew Mahler. Did you talk with them about the experience?

Barenboim: I never met Bruno Walter, but I knew Klemperer — I played quite a lot with him, and also recorded all the Beethoven concertos with him in the 60s — and he repeated to me what he said on the television. What is the difference between the two of you? With older composers, you see that there is a different Zeitgeist that led to performances of works, and some composers inspire, if you will, a certain way of dealing with their music very quickly, and others more slowly.

On the other hand, even today the interest in Schubert, who died only one year after Beethoven, has not yet brought different schools of thought, not to speak of composers who came later, like Debussy. In the piano world there were Michelangeli, Gieseking. And in terms of the style of conducting Mahler, are you closer to Bernstein or to Klemperer? Barenboim: I think you should answer that. But the development of how his music is seen is one thing, and another is the development of its popularity.

Because, if you think for a moment about all that you have heard and read about Mahler, it mostly uses non-musical terms. Some people are more articulate than others. Christoph Schlingensief, who is a fantastically talented stage director, creator, artist, who does so many different things, and who suffered terribly in the last couple of years from an absolutely devastating cancer of the lung, has written a whole book about this.

But does it make me understand Schlingensief the artist better? It is a completely separate entity. Can it be conducted too emotionally?

And the difficulty in talking about music is that music definitely has a very strong content, but that content can only be expressed in sound. If you try to express it in words, you only reduce it. The greatness of music is precisely that it can laugh and cry at the same time, that it can be mathematical and sensual at the same time, that it can be all extremes and opposites put together. And therefore whatever you say about it is not a description of the thing itself, but a description of your perception of it at that moment.

The effect was shattering, and Mahler poured out his insecurities and grief in the new symphony, veering from almost suicidal depression, writhing on the floor of his composition hut, to heights of ecstasy in the fleeting moments when he imagined he had won Alma back. There are shocking inscriptions and poems written onto the score: "O God! Why have you forsaken me?

To die for you! Mahler also wrote the sounds he heard in the Alps into his symphonies, and the popular music that he remembered from childhood: those sixpenny dances, military fanfares, and cowbells. In , Mahler met Jean Sibelius, whose symphonies are the polar opposite of Mahler's: compressed, distilled, self-referential. The composers discussed the meaning of the symphony.

Sibelius admired its "profound logic and inner connection". Mahler completely disagreed: "A symphony must be like the world," he said. Mahler's embracing of musical and cultural difference marks him out not as the last gasp of Romanticism, but rather as a composer of the 20th and 21st centuries.

He didn't just prefigure musical moderns like Schoenberg and Stravinsky; he was thinking and composing like an avant-garde composer. Four of his symphonies have parts for choirs and vocal soloists, and his sound-world includes everything from the quietest, most intimate instrumental lines an offstage posthorn solo in the Third Symphony to the loudest noises that had ever been heard in a concert hall: in a passage at the end of the Seventh Symphony, a carillon of cowbells overwhelms the orchestral instruments, an inversion no other composer could have conceived of.

His symphonies live in the present tense, progressing on their nerves, each fearlessly unconventional and unpredictable. The piece that made a Mahlerian of me was the Ninth Symphony, thanks to the way Leonard Bernstein talked about it in his televised Norton Lectures first broadcast in , and the way Otto Klemperer conducted it on the recording I bought. However well you think you know the piece, there is always more to hear in it.

And in discovering more about the music and Mahler, you learn more about yourself. The end of the Ninth is one of the scariest, most confronting places you can be as a listener or a performer — a few halting phrases that carry this huge, minute symphony over the threshold of audibility into silence. For Bernstein, this passage is "terrifying, and paralysing, as the strands of sound disintegrate. And that's how Bernstein, Mahler's greatest apologist on and off the podium in the 20th century, conducted this music.

But it's not how Klemperer, or more recently, Bernard Haitink at last year's Proms, thought of it. In Haitink and the London Symphony Orchestra's performance especially, this music was a consolation, a holding on to life and love rather than a letting go. For one page of music to be able to communicate such completely different experiences is the special quality of Mahler's work — and testament to how much of ourselves we continue to read into him.

There are thousands of such moments in each of his symphonies or song cycles. A Mahler symphony is an experience that should be as disturbing as it is life-affirming.