Mahler

Becoming Gustav Mahler: The Formation of a Musical Genius
by Thomas May

The great Mahler renaissance began about fifty years ago, roughly a half-century after the composer’s death in 1911. Like one of his signature marches, the momentum of interest in Mahler has been tinged by irony. Mahler, once considered mannered, eccentric, and the archetypal “outsider,” has not merely joined the familiarrepertory but taken up a position at its center.

Mahler now plays an indisputably key role in the very identity of leading orchestras—including the San Francisco Symphony. “Mahler wanted his orchestra to sing, but he also wanted it to speak, whisper, and bellow,” Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas observes. Mahler’s symphonies have become the touchstone for orchestral excellence both in theconcert hall and on recordings; the act of interpreting them from the podium is a defining artistic moment for conductors. Commercial recordings of individual Mahler symphonies (somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200 by some estimates) run neck-to-neck with the number of recordings of Beethoven symphonies.

The San Francisco Symphony’s recent release of the Eighth Symphony (recorded live lastNovember in Davies Symphony Hall), completes the SFS Mahler symphonic cycle. The Eighth comes full circle, in a curious way, with Mahler’s legacy over the century since his death. It was the last work of his own that he lived to conduct (in September 1910), and its premiere marked the most resounding triumph Mahler was ever to experience with his music. That success foreshadowed what would ultimatelybe, in the postwar decades, vindication for his entire career as a composer. In striking contrast, the Sixth Symphony—the work that launched the San Francisco Symphony’s Grammy award-winning, self-produced Mahler cycle in 2001—was met by the more typical pattern of condemnation and bafflement when it was first introduced in Mahler’s time.

Even more, the Sixth—the most relentlessly tragic ofMahler’s symphonies—became a treasured talisman for modernists (it was especially prized by Arnold Schoenberg and his circle). Like the resigned farewells of his late works, the Sixth Symphony seemed to represent Mahler the Prophet—the guise under which he gained a newfound relevance in the 1960s. Leonard Bernstein famously emphasized that oracular role, whereby Mahler’s darkest music was heard toforetell not just his own premature death but the nightmares of war and the Holocaust—even the threat of humanity’s annihilation.

Hand in hand with the Mahler who prophesied the Age of Anxiety—characterized above all, for Bernstein, by Mahler’s shattering “crisis of faith”—was an understanding of his music as “progressive,” a beacon of inspiration for later artists. There is no question thataspects of his music look ahead to a new century of innovation, influencing a wide, international array of composers. A young Benjamin Britten was thunderstruck by what he chanced to hear of Mahler on the radio. Those sudden juxtapositions of contrasting mood and tempo that are quintessentially Mahlerian, exploiting a frantic and even bitter sarcasm, would prove a goldmine to such composers asShostakovich.

Yet for decades, there was an overemphasis on refashioning Mahler in the image of contemporary audiences (or at least interpreters), corresponding to the uncertainties of the Cold War era. The great musicologist Deryck Cooke—one of the most insightful of those who spearheaded the Mahler renaissance—realized early on that thinking of him “as a mere predecessor” is like “the mistake ofthe Romantics who saw Mozart purely as the ‘precursor of Romanticism’ and that “Mahler is an outstanding composer in his own right: the foreshadowings in his music are only fascinating by-products of its own original genius, which often enough foreshadows very little.” 

Mahler’s greatness—and relevance—has by now become so established with audiences that there’s room for a fuller, more...