MUSIC
Giant strides
MICHAEL NYMAN
The tail of the Viennese symphonic tradi- tion was shaken good and hard at the Proms last week, when Bernard Haitink conducted Bruckner's Ninth and Mahler's Second Symphonies. The two works are exact contemporaries (both were written over the period 1887-94), and these were performances which (with a few lapses) uniquely matched the stature of the music and minimised that disconcerting dicho- tomy commonly found between a score and its realisation. Haitink's immersion in this music—deeper in Mahler's than in Bruck- ner's—worked on two levels. By burying his hands deep inside the fabric of the orchestral sound, he managed to conquer the deadness of the Albert Hall acoustic; the LPO'S brass playing especially was of a tremendous weight and vividness, but the whole orchestra seemed to be playing from inside the notes, which made for a depth of tone richer, more glowing and more musical than we have come to expect from lazy 'surface' playing.
Any Mahler symphony—like, for better or worse. some Stockhausen pieces—is so vast in scope and impact as to drown most other musical organisms which happen to swim around in its wash. Bruckner's Ninth, however, can stand it: this is the work in which he succeeded, metaphorically speak- ing, in divesting himself of beer-stained lederho.sen to write the best scherzo since Beethoven, and in which his personal idio- syncrasies—the 'favourite things' common to all his works—are conceived at the very
highest level of invention and subtlety.
Both Bruckner and Mahler can be, in- deed still are, criticised less for their music itself than for its externals, for the bad musical company they keep. Today's 'col- lecting mania' amongst composers is. in fact, nothing new: Bruckner and more especially Mahler did the same, except that. as inheritors of the Viennese tradition, they filched from their own property.
But, if the basic materiais for each com- poser are constant chorales, unison themes, marches, popular music or what have you-- the renewal and rearrangement ot all these factors is unexpected. And their mitebods are very different: it is obvious that Itackner, with his lesser personal and technical sophistication, could only 'do what he could do'; Mahler, on the other hand---neurotic, restless, voracious in vision and experience, emotional and technical need- -seems to have made far more deliberate and conscious choke of how his music should express the breadth of his vision. Indeed, as creative types, in the manipulation of their material they could scarcely be more contrasted. Mahler is always on the move, even when seemingly atxast, in a constant process of making and achieving—a kind of verb-music. Bruck- ner's npun-music is concerned with stating and offering; the perpetual succession of peaks to which his music rises certainly leaves the listener high and dry, whereas Mahler directs a combat course which is often completely uncharted.
After a performance of the Second Symphony, the feeling that you have been on a musical battlefield is very strong. The battle has been waged with the idea of the Symphony and with Life as Mahler saw it: 'the great questions why did you live? —why did you suffer? --is it all nothing but a huge, frightful joke?' During the coursg of the five movements the listener is fiiid and sniped at on all sides, and though a temporary cease-lire is reached at the end---'What thou hast fought for Shall lead thee to God*-- much blood has been shed during the hostilities.
This is felt nowhere more powerfully than in the first movement, itself a battle- ground where Mahler fought his war with sonata form. Gone are the four-square phrases of Bruckner. the laying of material side by side, ruggedly but predictably. In- stead there is a constant flux of apparently insignificant fragments. as though even themes had been reduced to living at their nerve ends. No longer can you rely on your tonal memory to find your way, no longer are you permitted the comfort of contrast- ing whjects. What relief there is soon has its support withdrawn from under it. and the music again falls through the trap- door, to continue perpetual mutation till some terrifying new climax is reached to wrench the listener's orientation on to a different course.
Ttie dRtraordinary paradox about Mahler is that while conception and execution are overwhelmingly grandiloquent though. to be truthful, one refuses to be overwhelmed by the Mahler ego at times- no composer before him, and not so many since. showed such sr meticulous sensitivity, not only to instrumental timbre but to the levels of dynamic shading, employed as positive forces in the contrapuntal texture. This was one of the most revealing aspects of Haitink's performance. I have rarely heard an orchestra play so soft, or so loud or control so sensitively all the dynamic subtleties between these extremes.
Previous page
