Mahler's Second Symphony



There are few other pieces of music which move me as much as Mahler's Second Symphony does. I imagine I first heard it at the end of 1983 after Tom Field introduced me to Mahler in preparation for a recital given by Maureen Forrester at our college. But I don't remember really falling in love with the piece until the following year when I was in Europe. I had bought a tape of Bruno Walter's recording with the N.Y. Philharmonic and listened to it hundreds of times throughout 1984-85.
The first time I heard it live was in summer 1986. My Austrian girlfriend was visiting me that summer, while I was living at a friend's apartment near DC and working with my college roommate in his record stores in Northern Virginia. I somehow found out that Maureen Forrester would be singing the alto solo part with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at the Riverbend Music Center on the Ohio River, a good 10 hours from DC. My old VW Rabbit was on its last legs, so if I was going to make it out there, I'd have to find someone as crazy as me to drive us out there.
Janet Kirkly, a fellow DJ from our college radio station WCWM, was up for a road trip, so she drove Johanna and me out there. We broke up the trip on the way out by spending the night in a motel somewhere in PA.
A friend of the family, Charles Bell, played French horn in the orchestra, so I contacted him beforehand and had him order us tickets. We stopped by and visited him and his wife and child before the concert. I'll never forget walking into the practice room in his house, which was lined with records of virtually all the existing recordings of Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler and other heavily brass-laden composers. Quite a beautiful site for a lover of the classical repertoire!

Well, you drive two days to hear a large-statured, aging Canadian contralto sing a four-minute solo in an outdoor performance of a piece you've never before heard live, and you expect to be disappointed. Janet, who was heavily into punk at the time, quietly left somewhere in the long first movement (longer than Beethoven's entire Fifth Symphony!), realizing that the music wasn't to her taste.
I had fallen hard for Maureen after hearing her give a recital at William and Mary in October 1983, primarily because of the charm and intensity she projected from the stage. That charm, the intense performance (I believe Michael Gielen was conducting), the warm evening, my Austrian girlfriend soaking up my enthusiasm - it all made for an unforgettable First Time. I went up and spoke with Maureen on the stage afterward where Johanna took a picture of us together.
Then we were off. Janet wasn't particularly disappointed. A road trip is a road trip, but she and I both had to be back in DC the next day for work, so we drove through the night. When she and I were too tired to drive, Johanna tried but Janet was so scared she wouldn't get us there safely that she ended up driving the rest of the way herself.

Maureen sang Mahler II (and Berlioz' "Nuit d'ete") in Raleigh a year later, which was also a very moving experience for my new girlfriend and me. At that time I was teaching high school English and German in Richmond and couldn't help talking about Mahler and his morbid premonitions of his own death. When reading early American literature (Poe, Hawthorne, etc.), it is easy to broach the topic of death. Some of the 17-year-old indestructible boys in my classes started calling me Mr. Death, though. And yet it was the resurrection part of Mahler's Second Symphony that so attracted me.
According to the composer's program, the Titan, whose life is explored musically in his First Symphony, looks back at his life once again in the first movement of the Second Symphony. Then he falls, the bird of fate twitters and a chorus of hundreds resurrect him from his grave.
I hadn't fully grasped the reason why this music was so able to move me when I met my next girlfriend. Early on, I gave her Leonard Slatkin's recording of Mahler II and said, "Listen to this and you'll understand me better. You have to like it."
She didn't and she said so. Perhaps a recording can't do what a live performance can. We drove together through a snowstorm to Charleston, WV, to hear Maureen sing "Das Lied von der Erde". I had booked the tickets long in advance (by telephone; this was in the days before Internet) and said I wanted the best available seats. When we arrived, we realized we were in the next-to-last row in the balcony. I went down to the box office, told the woman we had driven all that way and had expected better seats. She remained stubborn but luckily another woman there sympathized with us and upgraded our seats to the fifth row center at no extra cost.
The Mahler followed Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's "Scottish" Symphony. The tenor was excellent and Maureen was exquisite! What the early Mahler Symphony exudes in hope, "Der Abschied" takes us down to the netherworld of our thoughts, helping us realize we are all just mortals.

After that relationship ended and I still hadn't found anyone to love Mahler with me, I had a revelation. Curiously, it was a professor from the University of West Virginia who helped me jump across the chasm. Leading me and a classroom full of teachers through a journaling exercise, during which we were transported into a twilight state, he told us to freewrite whatever was on our mind when we woke back up. I wrote, "Sterben musst du um zu leben." For me, that is the main message in Mahler's Second Symphony. I took that as a sign to quit my teaching job, move to Germany and start studying musicology. "Now or never," I thought. You have to die (give something up) in order to live (get on to the next stage in your life).
Needless to say, I've never regretted the decision. Over here in Germany I've been able to study music, go to lots of concerts and learn a great deal about the arts in general. I've never heard a bad performance of Mahler II. The Stuttgart Philharmonic's performance one Sunday morning brought me to tears. Listening to a performance by the RSO Stuttgart from the fourth row made me realize what a prominent role the solo trumpet plays (in this case by the wonderful Thomas Hammes).

I guess I've learned this much about the piece: It is not the piece by Mahler that the casual listener should start with. Listen to his First and Fourth Symphonies first. Then listen to his songs. If you like them, then you're ready for the Second. And if you're ready for the Second, you're ready for anything!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

Image
Recently a friend asked me which music piece IS ME. This is it. This song by Gustav Mahler is one I've long felt an affinity for. If I said I loved it, that would smack of self-love, wouldn't it? It has been close to me since I first heard it, probably around 1983. That is also when I discovered the incredible voice and personality of Maureen Forrester , who gave a song recital at our college in October 1983.  Maureen and I hit it off after her recital in 1983 After that fateful and wonderful meeting, I listened to all the recordings she had made which were readily available (and even ordered rare import copies of Canadian pressings). As so often happened with me, a person helped me discover a certain area of music. Having worked with Bruno Walter as a young woman, she became a renowned expert in the music of Gustav Mahler. But her repertoire spanned four centuries of music and dozens of languages. The afternoon before her recital, I had hosted the "Classical Hour" on
Read more

Alberto Ginastera's Variaciones Concertantes

Image
  If you look closely at the CD cover above, you'll see Ginastera down at the bottom in third place. Although the other two pieces are lovely and world premiere recordings to boot, my love goes out to the concert variations this time. I was thrilled when my mother sent me this recording right after I moved to Germany in 1990. George Manahan and I had a friendly relationship while I lived in Richmond. We had dinner together and I went to very many of his orchestra rehearsals. We often talked about music together and I would lend him books about Mahler that he hadn't read yet. In one case, while he was rehearsing Mahler 5, he stopped during the Adagietto, turned around and asked ME what I thought about the balance between the harps and the orchestra, even though his assistant conductor was sitting up in the balcony. I was sitting down below with two of my best friends, my girlfriend and her parents. I felt like a king.  I never got to hear him conduct Ginastera, though. I believ
Read more

Schumann's Piano Concerto

Image
  Martha Argerich plays the Schumann Piano Concerto in Amsterdam Most of Robert Schumann's music puzzles me. Perhaps because he was insane; or maybe I'm crazy. Or perhaps it is because he composed his music to go straight to the heart and my head often gets in the way of this kind of listening. Whatever it is, I am often at a loss as to what the music is trying to say. His Kinderszenen are easy enough to appreciate, but I've read few critics who have praised either his concerto for violin or the cello concerto. The Piano Concerto in a-minor , on the other hand, is one of the most frequently played and most lovely piano concerti in the concert repertoire. It is often called a woman's concerto, perhaps because the half-hour long work is not as strenuous to play as some of the other piano concerti in the repertoire.  My first introduction to the piece came at William & Mary when the first movement was to be played by a student pianist, Steven Budd, who had won that yea
Read more