Why Mahler, Why Now?

Readers of a recent companion to the music of Gustav Mahler are confronted at the very outset by an editor in querulous mood. 'Does Mahler matter?' demands Jeremy Barham.

A history in which eighty years of screen culture and emotion commerce have interrogated, reprocessed and cashed in vast areas of Mahlerian idiolect as patois, narcotizing a society his music was to have transformed and mobilized, presents a curious problem.¹

The tone of this sentence, at least as I read it, is as much affronted as puzzled. Presumably the question doesn't need answering for Barham. It isn't 'does Mahler matter?' but 'how does Mahler matter?', or more precisely 'how can Mahler be made to matter again today?' The unwelcome guests at the spectacle of Mahler's imaginative challenge to society are held up at disdainful fingers' length — 'emotion commerce', 'cashed in', 'narcotizing'. There's something sleazily self-serving and mercantile about this 'false' Mahler, Barham seems to suggest, echoing Mahler on the war he waged as a composer and conductor against Schlamperei (sloppiness).

Barham uses a version of Mahler — the Mahler with the 'capacity to offend historical consciences and aesthetic sensibilities' — to sound a warning about another version of Mahler, one less sharply defined but (in his mind) all the more dangerous for being so widely circulated and effete. This is why scholars encourage us to remember Mahler's edgy relationship with nineteenth-century music and bourgeois culture: his use, abuse and transformation of it, his modernism, his postmodernism. 'My time will come!' Mahler famously declared, and that time did come, above all from the 1960s. Imagine the consternation of musicologists, then, when their work played relatively little part in the dizzying upwards trajectory of Mahler's popularity. Many people enjoyed (and enjoy) Mahler without considering his place in musical history or having ideas about postmodern viewpoints in the symphonies. Yes: Mahler's time has come: it's just that most of us don't enjoy Mahler in quite the way musicologists think we should.

The question remains, though. Why did a 'difficult' composer of such lengthy works like Mahler, whose music was routinely mocked by contemporaries, experience such a dramatic reversal of fortunes around the time of his centenary in 1960?² And if one is in any doubt about the vertiginous scale of this reversal, the example of the Second Symphony (the Resurrection) may prove instructive. At the Berlin premiere in 1895, subsequently reported in negative terms by the local press, Mahler had to give out tickets to music students to swell numbers in an empty hall. Yet Barham's Cambridge Companion to Mahler has a discography detailing fifty-one recordings of the Resurrection Symphony.³ Given that this is a selective discography (I can also think of at least nine recordings issued since publication of the book in 2007), the conclusion must be that we're hardly ill-served for recordings of the symphony — indeed, quite the reverse: we're glutted. These days, when the classical record industry finds itself in a tight spot, barely able to keep afloat, that speaks volumes — supply would have to follow demand.⁴

Two of the recordings of the Resurrection Symphony in this discography are conducted by Gilbert Kaplan, the millionaire American businessman who became so obsessed with the work from a seminal encounter in 1965 ('by the final moments', he recalled in 1987, 'I found myself sobbing, absolutely hysterical') that he has spent huge sums attending performances worldwide, buying Mahler's manuscript score and taking conducting lessons to be able to perform the piece with some of the world's leading orchestras. Which other composer would drive an otherwise level-headed man to such extraordinary lengths, or, perhaps more tellingly, would make so many concert-goers and CD-collectors (Kaplan's first recording of the Resurrection Symphony sold 180,000 copies) eager to hear the 'inspired' efforts of a man who had to learn to read music before he could fulfil...