I am reposting the Mahler 9th Symphony conducted by Bruno Walter because this is a famous recording, and I seem to be lost in conductors at the moment.
I am posting a very famous live recording from 1938 of Bruno Walter conducting Mahler’s 9th symphony. If you haven’t listened to Mahler before, he may take some getting used to. But once you do get used to the harmonies, I think that you will find that there is nothing at all like Mahler. Bruno Walter knew Mahler, and he was considered to be one of the best conductors of Mahler, if not the absolute best. This is a long piece, but I hope that you will take the time to listen to it.
Gustav Mahler
July 7, 1860 – May 18, 1911
Mahler was an Austrian Jewish composer and conductor, noted for his 10 symphonies and various songs with orchestra, which drew together many different strands of Romanticism. Although his music was largely ignored for 50 years after his death, Mahler was later regarded as an important forerunner of 20th-century techniques of composition and an acknowledged influence on such composers as Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitry Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten.
Mahler was the son of an Austrian Jewish distiller and tavern keeper living in the Bohemian village of Kaliště (German: Kalischt), in the southwestern corner of what is now the Czech Republic. Within months of his birth, the family moved to the nearby town of Jihlava (German: Iglau), where Mahler spent his childhood and youth. These simple facts provide a first clue to his tormented personality: he was afflicted by racial tensions from the beginning of his life. As part of a German-speaking Austrian minority, he was an outsider among the indigenous Czech population and, as a Jew, an outsider among that Austrian minority; later, in Germany, he was an outsider as both an Austrian from Bohemia and a Jew.
His musical talent revealed itself early and significantly. Around the age of four, fascinated by the military music at a nearby barracks and the folk music sung by the Czech working people, he reproduced both on the accordion and on the piano and began composing pieces of his own. The military and popular styles, together with the sounds of nature, became main sources of his mature inspiration. At 10 he made his debut as a pianist in Jihlava and at 15 was so proficient musically that he was accepted as a pupil at the Vienna Conservatory. After winning piano and composition prizes and leaving with a diploma, he supported himself by sporadic teaching while trying to win recognition as a composer. When he failed to win the Conservatory’s Beethoven Prize for composition with his first significant work, the cantata Das klagende Lied (completed 1880; The Song of Complaint), he turned to conducting for a more secure livelihood, reserving composition for the lengthy summer vacations.
The next 17 years saw his ascent to the very top of his chosen profession. From conducting musical farces in Austria, he rose through various provincial opera houses, including important engagements at Budapest and Hamburg, to become artistic director of the Vienna Court Opera in 1897, at age 37. As a conductor he had won general acclaim, but as a composer, during this first creative period, he immediately encountered the public’s lack of comprehension that was to confront him for most of his career.
Musical works: first period
Each of Mahler’s three creative periods produced a symphonic trilogy. The three symphonies of his first period were conceived on a programmatic basis (i.e., founded on a nonmusical story or idea), the actual programs (later discarded) being concerned with establishing some ultimate ground for existence in a world dominated by pain, death, doubt, and despair. To this end, he followed the example of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major (Pastoral) and Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique in building symphonies with more than the then traditional four movements; that of Wagner’s music-dramas in expanding the time span, enlarging the orchestral resources, and indulging in uninhibited emotional expression; that of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor (Choral) in introducing texts sung by soloists and chorus; and that of certain chamber works by Franz Schubert in introducing music from his own songs (settings of poems from the German folk anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn [The Youth’s Magic Horn] or of poems by himself in a folk style).
Mahler’s disturbing early background, coupled with his lack of an inherited Jewish faith (his father was a freethinker), resulted in a state of metaphysical torment, which he resolved temporarily by identifying himself with Christianity. That this was a genuine impulse there can be no doubt, even if there was an element of expediency in his becoming baptized, early in 1897, because it made it easier for him to be appointed to the Vienna Opera post. The 10 years there represent his more balanced middle period. His newfound faith and his new high office brought a full and confident maturity, which was further stabilized by his marriage in 1902 to Alma Maria Schindler, who bore him two daughters, in 1902 and 1904.
Musical works: middle period
Most of the works of this middle period reflect the fierce dynamism of Mahler’s full maturity. An exception is Symphony No. 4 (1900; popularly called Ode to Heavenly Joy), which is more of a pendant to the first period: conceived in six movements (two of which were eventually discarded), it has a Wunderhorn song finale for soprano, which was originally intended as a movement for Symphony No. 3 and which evokes a naive peasant conception of the Christian heaven. At the same time, in dispensing with an explicit program and a chorus and coming near to the normal orchestral symphony, it does foreshadow the middle-period trilogy, Nos. 5, 6, and 7. These are all purely orchestral, with a new, hardedged, contrapuntal clarity of instrumentation, and devoid of programs altogether, yet each clearly embodies a spiritual conflict that reaches a conclusive resolution. No. 5 (1902; popularly called Giant) and No. 7 (1905; popularly called Song of the Night) move from darkness to light, though the light seems not the illumination of any afterlife but the sheer exhilaration of life on Earth. Both symphonies have five movements. Between them stands the work Mahler regarded as his Tragic Symphony—the four-movement No. 6 in A Minor (1904), which moves out of darkness only with difficulty, and then back into total night. From these three symphonies onward, he ceased to adapt his songs as whole sections or movements, but in each he introduced subtle allusions, either to his Wunderhorn songs or to his settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert, including the cycle Kindertotenlieder (1901–04; Songs on the Deaths of Children).
At the end of this period he composed his monumental Symphony No. 8 in E Flat Major (1907) for eight soloists, double choir, and orchestra—a work known as the Symphony of a Thousand, owing to the large forces it requires, though Mahler gave it no such title. This stands apart, as a later reversion to the expansive metaphysical tendencies of the first period, and represents a consummation of them: the first continuously choral and orchestral symphony ever composed. It could be called at once a massive statement of human aspirations and a cry for illumination, from both the religious and the humanistic points of view. The first of its two parts, equivalent to a symphonic first movement, is a setting of the medieval Roman Catholic Pentecost hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus”; part two, amalgamating the three movement-types of the traditional symphony, has for its text the mystical closing scene of J.W. von Goethe’s Faust drama (the scene of Faust’s redemption). The work marked the climax of Mahler’s confident maturity, since what followed was disaster—of which, he believed, he had had a premonition in composing his Tragic Symphony, No. 6. This work had revealed for the first time a superstitious element in his personality. The finale originally contained three climactic blows with a large hammer, representing “the three blows of fate which fall on a hero, the last one felling him as a tree is felled” (he subsequently removed the final blow from the score). Afterward he identified these as presaging the three blows that fell on himself in 1907, the last of which portended his own death: his resignation was demanded at the Vienna Opera, his three-year-old daughter, Maria, died, and a doctor diagnosed his fatal heart disease.
Musical works: last period
Thus began Mahler’s last period, in which, at age 47, he became a wanderer again. He was obliged to make a new reputation for himself, as a conductor in the United States, directing performances at the Metropolitan Opera and becoming conductor of the Philharmonic Society of New York; yet he went back each summer to the Austrian countryside to compose his last works. He returned finally to Vienna, to die there, in 1911.
This last-period trilogy marked an even more decisive break with the past than had the middle-period trilogy. It represents a threefold attempt to come to terms with the modern individual’s fundamental problem—the reality of death, which in his case had effectively destroyed the religious faith he had opposed to death as an imagined event. Das Lied von der Erde—a six-movement “song-cycle symphony” as opposed to the two-part “oratorio symphony,” No. 8—views the evanescence of all things human in veiled poetic terms—sardonic, wistful, and grief-stricken by turns—until it finds a sad consolation in the beauty of the Earth that endures after the individual is no longer alive to see it.
In the four-movement No. 9, purely orchestral, the confrontation with death becomes an anguished personal one, evoking horror and bitterness in Mahler’s most modern and prophetic movement, the “Rondo-Burleske,” and culminating in a finale of heartbroken resignation. The finales of both these works end with an extraordinary, long-drawn disintegration of the musical texture, suggesting dissolution, and the more extreme case in No. 9 was for long thought to be Mahler’s final comment on human existence. Growing familiarity with the sketch of No. 10, however, has suggested that he broke through to a more positive attitude: its five movements deal with the same conflict as the two preceding works, but the resignation attained at the end of the finale is entirely serene and affirmative.
Legacy
Modern critical opinion recognizes Mahler’s powerful influence during a period of musical transition. In his works may be found pervasive elements foreshadowing the radical methods employed in the 20th century: these elements include “progressive tonality” (ending a work in a different key from the initial one); dissolution of tonality (obscuring the perception of key through the constant use of chromaticism or harmonies not belonging to that key); a breakaway from harmony produced by the entire orchestra in favour of a contrapuntal texture (based on interwoven melodies) for groups of solo instruments within the full orchestra; the principle of continually varying themes rather than merely restating them; ironic quotation of popular styles and of sounds from everyday life (bird calls, bugle signals, etc.); and, on the other hand, a new way of formally unifying the symphony through the adoption of techniques subtly derived from Liszt’s “cyclic” method (the carrying over of themes from one movement of a work to others).
In terms of the personal content of his art, it can be said of Mahler, more than of any other composer, that he lived out the spiritual torment of disinherited modern man in his art, and that the man is the music.
Bruno Walter
September 15, 1876 – February 17, 1962,
Walter was a German conductor known primarily for his interpretations of the Viennese school. Though out of step with 20th-century trends, he was such a fine musician that he became a major figure—filling the wide gulf between the extremes of his day, Arturo Toscanini and Wilhelm Furtwängler.
He began his career as a pianist but made his debut as a conductor in 1894 at the Cologne Opera. By 1900 he was at the State Opera in Berlin, and in the following year he became Gustav Mahler’s associate in Vienna—the beginning of what was to be a lifetime spent in promotion of the master’s music. He conducted the premieres of Das Lied von der Erde (1911) and the Ninth Symphony (1912). Walter moved to the Munich Opera (1914–22) and from 1922 conducted at Salzburg, where his interest in Mozart developed. Other appointments followed: at the Berlin Municipal Opera (1925–29) and as Furtwängler’s successor in Leipzig with the Gewandhaus Orchestra (1929–33). The advent of the Nazi regime in Germany forced him to leave Leipzig and his Berlin concerts; he moved first to Vienna (1936–38), then to Paris, and finally to the United States (1939). He conducted frequently at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic (musical adviser, 1947–49).