RECORDINGS IN REVIEW

1 7 0 Y R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W D E W E Y F A U L K N E R Fifty years ago the world noticed Gustav Mahler. He had been born a century earlier, in 1860, and was still remembered as a great conductor, especially in New York. He was also known as a composer of large, sprawling, eccentric symphonies and a host of more acceptable, if depressing, songs. The world had passed him by, although some conductors enthusiastically championed his compositions. There were articles in magazines, most coming back to Mahler’s insistent statement that ‘‘My time will come.’’ Three conductors performed some of his works with his final orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, in a Mahler Festival: his protégé Bruno Walter and younger converts Dimitri Mitropoulos and Leonard Bernstein. Two recordings were then made with the Philharmonic by Columbia Records, which had pioneered in recording Mahler in New York: Walter conducted Das Lied von der Erde, though not with the singers who performed it at Carnegie Hall, and Bernstein recorded the Fourth Symphony. Both pieces had been recorded before; the novelty was the new medium of stereophonic sound, which gave greater body and definition to Mahler’s scoring. Later in 1960, Mitropoulos died in Germany after a performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony, which he was to 1 7 1 R have played in 1961 as an afterpiece to the festivities. Bernstein took it up as a memorial for Mitropoulos, his former mentor, and both performed and recorded it in 1961. Of this seed would grow the Mahlerzeit, the time that Mahler had prophesied. Fifty years on, every conductor of repute (and a great many not yet so) has given or is giving us his or her Mahler cycle, in concert, on recordings , in videos. Nor is there any sign of abatement: now we’re getting several Mahler cycles in Super Audio / 5.1 channel surround sound. In the fifty years since 1960, Mahler’s time has more than come. Fortunately for conductors, Mahler cycles are limited a√airs. There are nine completed symphonies, and a tenth was in preparation at the time of Mahler’s death in 1911. There are song cycles and individual songs for both voice and orchestra and voice and piano, many setting poems in the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn , assembled between 1805 and 1808 by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. Supposedly folk poems, these were sophisticated by their poet-editors to suit emerging Romantic tastes, much on the model of Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Mahler set these to tunes that are like folk songs but aren’t, any more than the poems are folk poems. There is also the astonishing early cantata Das Klagende Lied. And there is the equally astonishing late song cycle Das Lied von der Erde, which is also a symphony. The symphonies fall conveniently into three groups: numbers 1–4 are known as Wunderhorn symphonies, much rooted in the idiom of Mahler’s songs; 5–8 are more abstract experiments in accommodating Mahler’s idiom to that of the traditional German symphonic tradition; 9–10 and Das Lied are movements into the unknown, into loss and loneliness and death, and ultimately into an attempt to counteract all these with love. The first eight are in many ways typical German symphonies, with an implicit movement ad astra per aspera: from a titanic struggle in the opening movement to a titanic triumph at the end. The central movements are largely genre pieces. There are few fully realized traditional slow movements or scherzi among them except in the Fourth Symphony, with its long Ruhevoll slow movement , and the Sixth Symphony, which has the most orthodox structure of the group but an ironic action ad disastra per as- 1 7 2 F A U L K N E R Y perissima and is named the Tragic. Mahler played with his structures , especially in the later symphonies, and none of them is like any of the others, which is another part of their appeal to conductors doing complete sets. The variety...