But long is relative. Most people think nothing of sitting through a two-hour movie. And Mahler’s symphonies are long in the way that movies are long, in the way that books are long, in the way that Charles Dickens and James Joyce are long — and poised aesthetically between these two, Victorian on the one hand, experimental modernism on the other.
Forget the idea that symphonic music is high art. Mahler crams his pieces full of folk tunes and dances and marches and birdcalls. There are moments of Hallmark-saccharine sentiment (the soprano solo at the end of the Fourth Symphony can evoke a Hummel figurine), and there are moments when you feel like the top of your head is lifting off (as when Ivan Fischer brought the chorus to its feet amid the trumpets of Judgment Day at the end of the Second Symphony with the National Symphony Orchestra in 2008).
Mahler told Sigmund Freud, during their single consultation, of a childhood memory of his parents fighting while a hurdy-gurdy played outside; this anecdote is invoked to explain his jarring musical juxtapositions of the sublime and the banal.
And there are special effects, including cowbells, sleigh bells, offstage trumpets and a giant mallet that delivers three crashing blows of fate at the end of the Sixth Symphony (the “Tragic”). You don’t have to know much about symphonic conventions to appreciate all this stuff.
The symphonies — 9, or 10, or 11 of them, depending on how you count — are a kind of soundtrack to the 20th century. Listening to them in order, as I did last week, is a reminder of how our understanding of them has changed with the times. In the early 20th century, they were seldom-played exercises in modernity. Willem Mengelberg was a friend of Mahler’s who kept his performance tradition alive at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw; in his lyrically restrained reading of the Fourth, from 1939, the emotion, rather than being wildly underlined, is allowed simply to speak for itself.
In the 1960s and 1970s, however, the symphonies were embraced precisely for their in-your-face emotional excess and general trippiness. Leonard Bernstein, perhaps the quintessential Mahler conductor, helped put him back on the map, wallowing in the music’s throbbing angst and producing some searing performances in the process. Bernstein’s over-the-top gesticulations on the podium were not unlike the ones Mahler was caricatured for when he headed the Vienna Court Opera, the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic (not, of course, at the same time).
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