Austria Salzburg Festival [5] – Mahler, Symphony No.9: Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra / Andris Nelsons (conductor). Broadcast live (directed by Leopold Knötzl) from the Grosses Festspielhaus, Salzburg, 11.8.2024 and available on STAGE+. (JPr)
I have always regarded Mahler’s Ninth Symphony as more than its crochets and quavers and its biographical nature is sometimes overlooked. So many composers led insular lives, distilling something of this inner world into their compositions and this must always be considered.
In the summer of 1910 Alban Berg studied Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and wrote about it to his future wife, Helene: ‘Once again I have played through the score … the first movement is the most heavenly thing Mahler ever wrote. It is the expression of an exceptional fondness for this earth, the longing to live in peace on it, to enjoy nature to its depths – before death comes … The whole movement is permeated by premonitions of death. Again and again it crops up, all the elements of terrestrial dreaming culminate in it … most potently of course in the colossal passage where this premonition becomes certainty, where in the midst of the höchste Kraft [highest spirit] of almost painful joy in life, Death itself is announced mit höchster Gewalt [with maximum force] …’.
The entire first movement is a series of subtle transformations of the three-note figure introduced at the outset by harp and horns, a primal motif apparently based on the opening of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Les Adieux (Op.81a), which Beethoven associated with ‘Leb’ wohl’ (‘Farewell’). This permeates the start of the symphony and recurs towards its end as the clear evocation of an unsteady – subsequently failing – heartbeat.
Mahler himself had simply considered his Ninth as ‘a very welcome increase in my little family’. He made this comment to Bruno Walter and it probably hides his real thoughts on the work which he never survived long enough to hear a proper note of in performance. Mahler’s Ninth is, like those of Beethoven, Schubert, Dvořák and Bruckner, his last completed one and it might have been as though this own music was, in a certain way, yet another prognosis of his illness as terminal.
The second movement is a night out in Mahler’s Vienna; this dance movement juxtaposes a Ländler against two ill-tempered waltzes: the first a pastiche of a theme from The Merry Widow waltz by Franz Lehár whilst the second is ‘danced’ by the trombones accompanied by oompah-pah tubas. This is almost a reticent minuet based on the theme of the Andante and leads to a hint of resignation at how death is inevitable. At one point the Ländler seemingly tries to push the waltz group off the dance floor but loses out.
The Rondo-Burleske of the third movement exhibits Mahler’s use of counterpoint with yet more Lehár (here we get the ‘Wie die Weiber’ chorus from Merry Widow) against a wistful, idealistic trumpet melody (now the Merry Widow waltz theme again) which is promptly opposed by the cynical, squally, mocking A and E-flat clarinets in music riddled with sarcasm. There has been some effort to strive towards the light from the darkness but (again?) deep resignation is the emotion most experienced here and the feeling that nothing is ever good enough.
A trumpet melody reasserts itself in the Adagio finale, where the chorale-like main theme recalls ‘Abide with Me’ – though less in this performance than I recall before – and is haunted by a quiet melody from the low bassoon. Interestingly, Oxford University Press’s The Mahler Companion (2002, editors Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson, both of whom I knew well) has as a footnote to the analysis of the Ninth’s final movement the proof for Mahler’s awareness of that famous ‘Abide with Me’ tune which should come to mind – however fleetingly as here – every time anyone listens to this plaintive hymn-like passage. The last moments can be considered almost an Adagissimo with its final important – and extendable – 27 bars. Here there is a quotation from the fourth song – ‘Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen’ (‘Often I think that they have only stepped out’) — from Mahler’s song cycle Kindertotenlieder, where the singer expresses his belief that his (dead) children might still be alive.
Mahler had of course lost his four-year-old daughter Maria to diphtheria and scarlet fever in 1907 and had been put – that same year – under a death sentence from his doctor, later dying from bacteriological endocarditis in 1911. So, it is not a great leap of imagination to see why musicologist Paul Bekker subtitled the Ninth Symphony ‘What Death Tells Me’! Mahler actually wrote across the pages of the Andante he composed, ‘O youth! Vanished! O love! Blown away!’ He knew that his days were numbered, even though this movement – and indeed the entire symphony – is as much about the nostalgia (or death) of love (for Alma) as his own impending demise. In conclusion I must agree with Leonard Bernstein’s statement about how ‘In his Ninth Symphony he [Mahler] succeeds in writing perhaps the greatest farewell symphony ever written by anybody.’
The sound of the Viennese musicians was as eloquent, rich and sumptuous as ever and individual instrumental timbres had all the clarity and definition you would expect from ‘Mahler’s orchestra’ who have this music in their DNA. Do they need a conductor I wonder? Certainly very few of those the close-up camerawork focussed on looked at Nelsons who anyway rarely lifted his head from the score high-up in front of him. (Has anyone seen Nelsons conduct anything without peering at the music?) Virtuosic contributions throughout the symphony from so very many in the orchestra including Josef Reif’s horn, Andrea Goetsch’s clarinet, Sebastian Breit’s oboe, Anton Mittermayr on timpani and concertmaster Rainer Honeck.
I suspect Nelsons has a tendency to micro-manage what we hear and there are limited opportunities for any spontaneity. His account was languorous and, as always, the huge outer movements were the biggest challenges. The first movement was rather episodic with its succession of juddering crises and Nelsons just about managed not to lose momentum in the post-climactic – or possibly post-coital – sections, where the music seems to be piecing itself back together.
In the concluding Adagio the violins slowly wound down and the final pages fragmented as Nelsons had the textures thinning and the music stuttering to a halt as Mahler wearily gives up on life. At last, the strings whisper the final transcendent phrase … and then nothing. Nelsons kept his arms raised and the members of the excellent Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra held their instruments in place. I realised I had forgotten to breathe and then, quite deliberately, Nelsons lowered his hands; the musicians put down their instruments and there was an ovation for this matinee concert. A very fine Mahler Nine – how could it not be – though not the best I have heard.
Jim Pritchard