In the spirit of full disclosure, I must confess that I have always had a hard time with Mahler. He tends to take his time saying whatever it is he is going to say, and woe to the listener who can’t maintain a sufficiently long attention span.  At least that was my conclusion the first time I heard a piece played by Mahler by a live symphony orchestra.  That was in Salem, Oregon.  I was about fourteen.  So maybe it’s understandable.  My next exposure to Mahler was a performance of a piece I believe was called something like “In den Himmelreich” or something to that effect.  This time the location was a small but lovely symphonic hall in Kortrijk, Belgium.  I was twenty.  I enjoyed the performance, but still didn’t feel like I was really grasping what Mahler was about.

So, it was with some sense of nervous anticipation that I accepted a complimentary pair of tickets for a performance this last Saturday (12 June) for the Redwood Symphony’s performance of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony at the Main Theater at Cañada College in Redwood City.

Alma Mahler, who started it all.

One cannot help but admire a local, volunteer symphony taking on such an ambitious work.  The task becomes more impressive when one learns that Mahler never finished his tenth symphony.  Only the first movement and about thirty measures of the third movement were complete when he died.  There were also some sketches, some of which did not come to light until many years after Mahler’s death.

Then there are the circumstances surrounding this storied work.  Mahler and his beloved wife, Alma, were on the outs.  In 1910 she had an affair with architect Walter Gropius (whom she married after Mahler’s death).  Mahler had sowed some of the seeds of estrangement earlier by demanding that Alma, herself a composer of some talent, give up composing on the rationale that there could be only one composer in the family.

Then there was the “cursed” nature of composing more than nine symphonies; Beethoven and Bruckner had both expired between symphonies nine and ten.  It is said that after composing his ninth symphony Mahler wrote his symphony “Das Lied von der Erde” without numeration in order to dodge the deadly double digit.  As one of Mahler’s contemporaries, Arnold Schoenberg famously remarked in 1912:

“It seems that the Ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if that something might be imparted to us in the Tenth, which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not yet ready. Those who have written a Ninth have stood too near to the hereafter. Perhaps the riddle of the world would be solved if one of those who knew them were to write the Tenth, and that is probably not to take place.”

As a side note, Schoenberg’s comment is interesting in light of the 41 symphonies of Mozart or Haydn’s 104.  Perhaps it is because even among the musical titans of the day, these two composers had long since passed into legend, seemingly immune from the boundaries that constrained later artistic minds.

But if this numerological peril meant anything to Mahler, there is little evidence of hesitation on his part. He plunged into the task of composition shortly after completing his ninth symphony, but died in May of 1911 before the work was completed.  The incomplete manuscript was kept secret by Alma for years. When it was finally released it was found to contain tortured notes and exclamations by Mahler, most of them to his beloved and increasingly distant Alma.  Several famous composers were approached about completing the symphony, and they wisely refused.  Others, such as Alma’s son-in-law Ernst Krenek, reconstructed parts of the symphony but were never quite comfortable with the daunting task of reconstructing the artistic mind of Mahler.  Over the years several versions have been published, each one providing ingenious solutions to this massive musical puzzle.

The version performed by the Redwood Symphony was reconstructed and orchestrated by Rudolf Barshai in 2000.  Barshai is both a musicologist and a conductor, which is the most appropriate perspective from which to undertake this intimidating exercise in musical necromancy.  I was told that this version was selected because it is one of the livelier and more vibrant of the versions, and the performance brought this out.

The first movement (Adagio) started with some disagreement among the violas as to the pitch in the opening bars.  But the group quickly found its voice and what followed was well played with an excellent sense of ensemble and dynamics.  Several quiet sections were played with skill and sensitivity.  This movement closed with a blaze of dissonance, resolving to a quiet, sublime finish.

The Scherzo was for me (and quite a few others) the highlight of the performance.  This movement starts out with a kind of meandering melodic voice, slowly building as it progressed.  I found myself thinking of a river, growing as it was fed by its tributaries, to a bold and striking conclusion, which elicited a smattering of well-deserved applause.

The third movement (Purgetorio: Allegretto moderato) theme at times reminded me distantly of a sort of danse macabre.  The movement seemed to alternate between playful and stern, even intimidating.

The fourth movement is designated “Allegro pesante. With greatest vehemence”, and in this performance it sounded vehement.  This did not, however, overpower some very poetic, lithe, even whimsical interludes as the piece built its way forward.  The movement found its anger in time to make its point before a nearly seamless transition into the Finale (“Slow, but not dragging”).  This transition is marked by the punctuation of a single drum beat, inspired by a funeral procession that passed the hotel where the Mahlers where staying in New York in 1908.  The Finale started slow, but grew to a beautiful, lyrical texture, eventually soaring to a climax before fading like a warm sunset.

Without the tortured marginalia found in the fragmentary manuscript of this work, it is hard to imagine that such beauty could have come from a mind as tormented as Mahler’s was at this time of this life.  But we have seen this before; Beethoven could not have been happy at not hearing a single note of his “Ode to Joy”, but it did not stop him from producing a benchmark for symphonic rapture.  The Redwood Symphony and Conductor/Director Eric Kujawsky are to be congratulated for taking on such a challenging and remarkable work and delivering a polished, moving performance.

The question remains open whether I can now say that I truly “get” Mahler.  I will not recklessly say that the aesthetic scales fell from my eyes due to this one performance.  But I have far more insight into this musical giant than I did before, and I look forward to other opportunities to explore his life and work. In the meantime, I encourage you to the Redwood Symphony and other examples of local artistic excellence.

References:

In preparing for this review, I consulted several items which I am pleased to recommend to the reader seeking further information:

Michael Steinberg, “Symphony No. 10 by Gustav Mahler”. A downloadable version of this article is available at: http://www.mahlerarchives.net/archives/steinberg.pdf

Teng-Leong Chew. “Performing Versions of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. Naturlaut vol. 1, no. 2, 2002, pp. 7-10.   A downloadable .pdf version of this article is available at: http://mahlerarchives.net/archives/chewM10.pdf