Mahler

[Serial_Apologist]

Do people actually disagree with this?

If one can hear the music from reading the score one possibly has an advantage over one who has to hear the piece live or on record. A midway position would be to be able to perform the work oneself. Until the work's broadcast a couple of days ago I had never heard another perform the Berg Piano Sonata to my satisfaction, having (albeit with my very mediocre technique) managed to reproduce the work myself to a standard that, to me, represented its nuances most faithfully to the composer's intentions. Others I had always found to rush the music too much. There again, for me it all depends on the composer. If s/he had indicated nuances in a highly detailed way, with score-reading abilities one should be able to reproduce in ones head. But what of the composer, eg Satie, who sometimes left few or no markings, leaving the question as to how his music should sound open? Can one make a judgement on one's own, just by reading the score? I have heard numerous Debussy performances which differ to a degree that would alienate me from the work if they were its introduction. Fortunately this has not often happened. And while I certainly agree that the meaning of a work changes with each generation's interpretation, we are still talking "interpretation" here, and of its reception (the work's realisation) as a conjoint public experience - mindful that not all music is thus intended, of course.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

But I'm not in any way running down recordings relative to live performances! I'm just remarking that very often one recording or another (or that unforgettable evening in Norwich Town Hall) might be a distraction.

In the sense that it becomes a "benchmark" against which all other performances/recordings are weighed in the balance and found wanting, you mean?

[ahinton]

Quoting myself, since this doesn't appear to have generated a response:



Do people actually disagree with this?

I realise that Mahler's popularity dates more or less from the advent of LP and then stereo recording, but I sometimes have the impression that "Mahler" for some consists of a selection of petrified performances (themselves receding into the past) rather than a living body of work which, as people say of Shakespeare, evolves in its relevance to different times and is to a greater or lesser extent renewed in each performance. I've heard more live Mahler in the last couple of years than in the previous 20, not always in stellar presentations, but this has deepened my appreciation of the music in quite a different way from what I get out of listening to a recording. This is a whole dimension which often seems to be undervalued.

Well, I certainly don't disagree with it - very much the reverse, in fact - but then I've long felt that even listening to the finest quality recording of a fine performance is rather like experiencing an aural photocopy of the real thing. I suspect that Mahler himself, whose pitifully short life took in a good many performance of other composers' work and occasionally also his own in his capacity as conductor, might have harboured similar reservations about how much could be gleaned from a recording had he lived into the LP era and still been active as a conductor. In thinking about this I'm reminded of Erwartung, written at the time Mahler was completing his Ninth Symphony, of which I'd heard quite a few recordings before attending a live performance conducted by Boulez during which I felt increasingly and uncomfortably embarrassed by the realisation of just how very much detail in that vibrant, powerful and disturbing score of which I'd previously been unaware because it had only been on the turntable and then the CD player.

[Richard Barrett]

In the sense that it becomes a "benchmark" against which all other performances/recordings are weighed in the balance and found wanting, you mean?

That was one thing that I meant, yes - getting too attached to one view of the music, positively or negatively. The music is a lot bigger than that, so to speak.

In answer to S_A, I wouldn't say the whole answer is to be found in the score. A work of music is more than what the composer wrote, it also evolves through its performance and reception history, which, crucially, is both open-ended and independent of the composer's intentions in so far as those are known in detail. In the case of Mahler, there are recordings by conductors who had first-hand experience of the composer's own performances and I wouldn't say this in itself makes Walter or Klemperer (very different musical personalities of course!) more authoritative or authentic than Boulez or Jonathan Nott. Mahler's scores, unlike those of Satie, are quite detailed, but this doesn't shrink the space of possibilities latent in them (principally because of their sonic and expressive complexity and polyvalence), it just gives it a different shape as it were. As you might imagine I have much experience in reading such scores and "hearing" the music from reading, but that's a very different experience from actually hearing the music, and certainly no substitute for it, especially since as a non-conductor I have limited grasp of the techniques needed to bring a "vision" from the score to a sounding reality (though I know it when I hear it, I think).

[Oakapple]

Does anyone know whether there are two mandolins in Mahler's 8th?

I read an article this morning in the Spectator that said there were and the Wikipedia entry says so too, and this surprised me, but looking at the orchestral parts only one is specified.

[Once Was 4]

By 'eck we're bringing out the Mahler refuseniks. I tend to like 1-5 so much that it's taking me an age to move on to 6-9 and the bit of 10. It's probably irrational I always feel there's something intangible about other people's tinkering so and completions - Mahler 10, Bruckner 9, Payne's 3 based loosely on Elgar - but it's irrational also that I really like orchestrations of piano works and piano versions of orchestral works.

Well I was brought up by my mother to avoid Mahler; her wartime boyfriend (a member of the LPO) couldn't stand his music and she just carried on the dislike without bothering to listen for herself. It all changed when I played the 4th symphony with the Edinburgh Rehearsal Orchestra and this led me to explore further. However I did not 'get' no 9 and found No 8 a colossal bore. My feelings on No 8 have not changed I am afraid even though I have played it a couple of times (there is a photograph in a certain book of a performance in one of the big cathedrals by one of the regional orchestras and yours truly is an extra in the horn section). But I do get number 9 now having got to know it from the inside (i.e., the horn section).

Sorry, nothing more profound to offer - only an old git's memories.

[Pulcinella]

Does anyone know whether there are two mandolins in Mahler's 8th?

I read an article this morning in the Spectator that said there were and the Wikipedia entry says so too, and this surprised me, but looking at the orchestral parts only one is specified.

The study score I have (Universal, UE3000) has in the orchestra list (singular) Mandolino.

However, there is this general comment at the bottom of the list.

Per un grande coro e molti strumenti a corda bisogne radioppiare i primi strumenti a fiato.

I don't think that a mandolin comes in that category (wind), though.

[Bryn]

The study score I have (Universal, UE3000) has in the orchestra list (singular) Mandolino.

However, there is this general comment at the bottom of the list.

Per un grande coro e molti strumenti a corda bisogne radioppiare i primi strumenti a fiato.

I don't think that a mandolin comes in that category (wind), though.

O.k., it a Wikipedia entry but:

Strings
2 mandolins
2 harps (preferably doubled)
1st violins
2nd violins
violas
cellos

I will check my Dover score, too.
double basses

[Pulcinella]

A couple of entries for the mandolin are marked Solo, which might just imply that elsewhere there should be more than one, but I think that it is more likely simply drawing attention to the fact that it is a solo line that needs to be heard through the rest of the orchestra.

[cloughie]

O.k., it a Wikipedia entry but:

Interesting that there was a 'Pointless' question on what instruments there are in Mahler 8.

[Oakapple]

From as much as I can gather, it seems Mahler wrote for one mandolin but one edition of the score says another one would be preferable. The article I read said that Mahler demanded two, and I don't think he went that far. It's a review of a new book out called The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910, by Stephen Johnson.

I'm surprised there hasn't been a thread on the 8th; maybe I should have started one with my question. I remember when it was performed at the Proms some years ago and there was an oft repeated (aren't they all?) trailer in which one of Promenaders said Mahler was "out of his skull when he wrote it". That used to irritate me. (Maybe it was someone who posts on this forum.)

[Bryn]

. . . I remember when it was performed at the Proms some years ago and there was an oft repeated (aren't they all?) trailer in which one of Promenaders said Mahler was "out of his skull when he wrote it". That used to irritate me. (Maybe it was someone who posts on this forum.)

I thought that was Beethoven re his late string quartets (and, of course, the final movement of his 9th Symphony).

[Oakapple]

That would make more sense, Bryn, as I think those compositions were more daring and innovative than what Mahler wrote.

And yet I cannot get this image out my head of a young man with a young woman beside him saying those words on television and sounding slightly mad himself, which I always associate with a performance of the 8th due on the first night of the Proms.

[cloughie]

and, of course, the final movement of his 9th Symphony).

Nah that was in one of his Joyful moments!

[Bryn]

That would make more sense, Bryn, as I think those compositions were more daring and innovative than what Mahler wrote.

And yet I cannot get this image out my head of a young man with a young woman beside him saying those words on television and sounding slightly mad himself, which I always associate with a performance of the 8th due on the first night of the Proms.

Only fair to mention that in my youth I got to know and love the late quartets long before the Serioso and its precursors. It was not planned that way, it's just the lates were what I came across in W H Smith sales, etc. Also, my introduction to the 9th, some years earlier, was via my father's only Beethoven LP, that of the 5th and just the final movement of the 9th conducted by Schuricht. It was thus quite a revelation when I heard what I had taken to be its very own themes prefigured in the first three movements when I eventually got to hear them.