Switzerland Lucerne Summer Festival 2024 – Mahler’s Seventh Symphony: Lucerne Festival Orchestra / Riccardo Chailly (conductor). Broadcast live (directed by Ute Feudel) from the Konzertsaal des KKL Luzern, 16.8.2024 and available on ARTE Concert until 19.8.2025. (JPr)
Years ago – well, most everything is ‘years ago’ for me now! – Andrew Huth in his BBC Proms notes about Mahler’s Seventh Symphony declared how ‘Many people have found the Seventh to be the most problematic of Mahler’s symphonies’ and ‘problematic’ is the adjective often applied to it. Whilst for me, what was mindboggling – from anyone who should hear music and not just read it – is when Huth wrote before this, ‘Passing references, perhaps not intentional [my italics], can be heard to music by Schubert, Schumann and Wagner, to Bizet’s Carmen and even Léhar’s The Merry Widow.’ I can only repeat what I have written before: one thing most musicologists should agree on is that Mahler rarely did anything unintentionally!
Because Mahler conducted at the Vienna Court Opera it meant that although he wrote the two middle Nachtmusik (‘night music’ or serenade) movements first in the summer of 1904 he then set them aside for a year uncertain as to what to put around them. There followed the oft-quoted revelatory moment when he stepped into a boat to be rowed over an alpine lake and got ‘the rhythm and the style of the introduction to the first movement’. So, the composer bookended those two serenades with an Adagio and a Rondo-Finale putting an eerie Scherzo between them.
Do not underestimate how in thrall Mahler was to Wagner, though this, I believe, is something the musical world is very keen to suppress. Mahler would know that in Mein Leben Wagner claims a precompositional ‘vision’ for his introduction to Das Rheingold while staying in La Spezia, Italy, where there were also boats and water. In the last years of his life there is also evidence that Mahler was very anxious about seeming to be the elderly Hans Sachs (from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger) to Alma’s youthful Eva and there is much that frivolously alludes to Alma in the Seventh. The use of the guitar and mandolin in the second serenade ironically mimics the unsuccessful wooing of Eva by Beckmesser with his lute playing. The Mahler expert, Professor Steven Bruns has written: ‘The interval of the perfect fourth has special significance throughout Wagner’s opera, and the fourth is motivic in Mahler’s Seventh as well. Finally, Mahler was surely referring to the sunny C major of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger in his strategic use of that tonality in the Seventh, especially during the closing measures.’ So – as I have always claimed – it only needs a few conceptual leaps and QED we have Mahler’s unacknowledged ‘Wagner Symphony’ … and so it is far from ‘problematic’!
Don’t of course forget themes permeating a number of the movements (notably the first) which were appropriated for the soundtrack to Star Trek, though that is another story entirely but something which helps make this a truly fascinating symphony.
The best Mahler 7 I heard live was from Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony at the BBC Proms in 2007. Was it better than that I heard from the Lucerne Festival Orchestra conducted by its music director Riccardo Chailly I cannot be sure, because now I was listening to this second half of the opening concert of the Summer Festival through loudspeakers. Truthfully, I believe I have never heard such a convincing, coherent – at times visceral – account of Mahler’s score and one which banished all thoughts of the Seventh being ‘problematic’; therefore securing its ranking as my absolute favourite symphony. For a symphony which can be too episodic Chailly showed how – like MTT – it can be approached with shining lyricism and if it is supposed to – and probably does – veer from darkness to light then any darkness for Chailly (often smiling beatifically) is never more than a dusky hue because wit and optimism shone through the whole work.
The first movement was both robust and rhapsodic. If Reinhold Friedrich’s trumpet and Ivo Gass’s horn fought to establish a melancholy tone the jauntiness of the rowing rhythms worked against this in the positive forward momentum Chailly established. The lilting tempo was an undercurrent of the second movement, the first ‘Night music’ marked Allegro moderato. Basically, it is another march – something apparent in the first movement too – but one swaying dreamily with nothing foreboding here despite haunting cowbells and the doom-laden timpani strokes of Raymond Curfs. At one-point Chailly appeared to be bouncing with joy on the podium.
To get to the second serenade we must go through the graveyard of the Scherzo which the composer marks ‘Shadowy’. It is a brilliant Dance Macabre and with concertmaster Gregory Ahss to the fore, if you haven’t heard much Wagner till now, you will be reminded here of the ‘Dance of the Apprentices’ from Die Meistersinger. Any ‘bump in the night’ ghostliness was lightened by a far from eerie trio.
The following gentle Andante amoroso ‘Night music’ was a joy with its Viennese schmalz from Ahss’s violin mixing enchantingly with the mandolin and guitar. Indeed all the musicians played particularly beautifully here, notably the woodwind section.
Joy was unconfined in the exuberant Rondo-Finale: Shostakovian, before Shostakovich, it argues back and forth between the serious declamatory moments of some triumphant brass and the inconsequential trills and slides in the woodwind – the oboes of Lucas Macías Navarro and Dina Heidinger featuring here – and strings. (Probably just me but isn’t there something of ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ to the start of the movement?) It almost poses the question – whither the symphony? – as music is on the cusp between nineteenth-century Wagnerian Romanticism and Schoenberg at the start of the twentieth? It is the brass, aided and abetted by more rampant timpani which wins out in the end and the conclusion is most definitely – ‘always look on the bright side of life’.
It had been truly wonderful to watch a genuine maestro at work: in fact, the notes seemed to come off the score in front of him, enter Riccardo Chailly’s expressive eyes and then emerge in the clear and precise gestures of his hands and baton. This all helped to shape each and every phrase and line of Mahler’s music emanating from the excellent Lucerne Festival Orchestra. The performance deservedly brought the Lucerne audience to their feet.
Jim Pritchard