Mahler im Gesprach: Die zehn Sinfonien (review)

There is a long history of books and essays analyzing the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, beginning in the composer's lifetime. My task in this review is to place the above book in historical context and show what it has to offer that none of its predecessors does.

This book, which was published in Germany, is not widely available in this country; it is more likely to be found in libraries than in book stores where anyone can pick it up. Analyses of the Mahler symphonies have usually been published in German (including studies by Paul Bekker, Egon Wellesz, Otto Nodnagel and Curt Rudolf Mengelberg) and English (including Deryck Cooke, Donald Mitchell, Neville Cardus, Kaikhosru Sorabji and Colin Matthews), with a few holdouts in other languages including Simon Vestdijk (Dutch) and Inna Barsova (Russian). By the standards of the "New Musicology"—primarily devoted to analysis in philosophical or sexual terms—study of Mahler's works qua music is passé. And yet such analysis is more useful in the long run than any speculation about the "idea" behind the music, because it is based on facts which Gustav Mahler himself set down. This book, in which the joint participants are a conductor (Michael Gielen) and a musicologist (Paul Fiebig), takes its place among those by musicologists and composers: an analysis which, if old-fashioned, is badly needed as a counterbalance to useless speculation.

The conversations between Gielen and Fiebig took place between 1987 and 2002, as broadcasts on the Southwest German Radio, and were transcribed and published in the wake of an honorary doctorate awarded to Gielen in Berlin. Most conductors prefer to use the podium rather than the pen or the tongue. The list of conductors who have written or lectured about Mahler is scant: Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer (who were more concerned with their knowledge of Mahler personally than analysis of his works), Hans Zender, Norman del Mar, and Fritz Stiedry, who did indeed analyze individual works of Mahler but were not well-known enough to challenge the research of musicologists with new ideas.

This book shows Michael Gielen's knowledge of all works of Mahler that he has conducted, and that knowledge—which this writer has observed on several occasions while watching him on the podium—is extensive and should be ranked highly. While Gielen considers the practical aspects of conducting Mahler's music, he makes no attempt to teach conducting or lay out a "road map" for other conductors; rather, he shares his opinions about influences affecting the way a conductor puts together the music—whether those aspects include form, orchestration, or the historical background of the music.

It is interesting to observe that the exchanges between Gielen and Fiebig involve questions and answers on both sides; this is no mere series of interviews, and—while Gielen speaks at greater length than Fiebig—the difference between their contributions is not so extreme as I would have expected, considering that Gielen is a world-famous conductor whereas Fiebig is unknown outside the German-speaking countries. Indeed, exchange of opinions between conductor and musicologist is so rare that this stands as a model of cooperation between the two professions.

The organization of the book is not revolutionary; it is divided into eleven chapters, each devoted to a conversation about one symphony plus Das Lied von der Erde, and an Anhang [appendix] devoted to one of Mahler's song cycles, the Kindertotenlieder. The introduction of Das Lied (which was composed between the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies) is not unusual in collective analyses of the symphonic works of Mahler, since Mahler specialists still debate whether it is a symphony or a group of songs; but I was pleasantly surprised to find the extra chapter about the Kindertotenlieder, about which there is no controversy: this is a song cycle, forming a strong contrast to the symphonic works in its intimacy. Yet, because this song cycle is performed less frequently than most...