SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mahler Symphony No 3: Katarina Karneus (mezzo), Women of the BBC National Chorus of Wales, Boys of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester Cathedral Choirs, BBC National Orchestra of Wales / Tadaaki Otaka (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 1.10.2010 (GPu)


When Ludwig Schiedermair – not yet the famous musicologist he was to become – wrote to Mahler proposing that he write and publish a study of Mahler’s music, the composer was evidently not impressed by what Schiedermair had said about one of his works, since he wrote to him as follows: “The third (symphony)has nothing to do with the struggles of an individual. It would be more accurate to say: it is nature’s path of development (from stiff materiality to the greatest articulation! but above all the life of nature!)”.

Schiedermair wasn’t, of course, alone in what seems to have been his reading of the symphony. After the first Vienna performance 1904 a young Arnold Schoenberg wrote to Mahler, saying “I think I have experienced your symphony. I felt the struggle for illusions; I felt the pain of one disillusioned; I saw the forces of evil and good contending; I saw a man in a torment of emotion exerting himself to gain inner harmony. I sensed a human being, a drama, truth, the most ruthless truth”.

In his response to such understandings of the work – as expressed in his letter to Schiedermair – Mahler was surely either deceiving himself or being wilfully disingenuous. He makes an impossibly simple distinction, assuming that a work can be simply expressive of the “life of nature” without at the same time articulating something about the ‘life’ of the man who created it. To pretend otherwise is to ignore almost the entire history of Romanticism. A Turner landscape is necessarily as much (or more) ‘about’ Turner as it is a representation of what was ‘objectively’ there to be seen; Wordsworth’s poem ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ concerns the development of Wordsworth’s own consciousness at least as much as it has anything to say about some beautiful ruins in the Wye Valley. How else, after all, can man have ideas about the ‘life of nature’ other than through what his own consciousness tells him? One might, indeed, goes so far as to say that one of the things Mahler’s Third ‘means’ is precisely that Man provides a consciousness, a self-awareness that Nature itself cannot possess.

Oddly, it seems to have been in terms of a richly poetic – but seriously outdated – model of the ‘life of nature’ that Mahler was thinking when he planned and wrote the symphony. In letters written to friends in August of 1895, Mahler spoke of some of the second to sixth movements (of what was then planned as a seven-movement symphony) thus:

II What the meadow flowers tell me

III What the creatures of the forest tell me

IV What night tells me (mankind)

V What the morning bells tell me (the angels)

VI What love tells me.

At this stage the first movement was described as ‘Summer marches in’ and the last (which later found a home in the Fourth Symphony) as ‘The heavenly life (what the child tells me)'. The sequence of movements II-VI corresponds almost precisely to the lineaments of a scheme usually referred to as the Great Chain of Being, which seems to have been formulated in the Middle Ages, and which sees all ‘being’ (nature) as rungs on a ladder or links in a chain which ascends / descends to and from God. One of the most common versions of the idea sees that ladder as consisting (in ascending order) of rocks and minerals-plants-animals-Man-Angels-God – the last four of these corresponding to Mahler’s flowers-creatures-mankind-angels-love.

In the finished symphony Mahler prefaces this sequence of movements with a huge first movement which (while it has a certain primitive obduracy to it) is far more than merely rock-like. Rather its repeated and violent struggles seem to involve, yes, the succession of Winter by Summer, but more than that, the very emergence of the Spirit of Life from the inanimate or – and we come back to the inseparability of Man and Nature in romantic art – the artist’s struggle towards the creation of order out of the incohate.

Tadaaki Otaka has always been a fine conductor of Mahler and he always seems to get the best out of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. So it was not surprising that this performance should have been as exhilarating as it turned out to be. From the unison horn statement at the beginning of the first movement onwards the audience were held gripped by the music and its development. The lower strings were commanding and authoritative as the movement progressed, the upper strings precise and poetic in what felt like the first stirrings of life, the moment at which the inanimate became animate, and the woodwind's ‘bird’ motifs sounded, fittingly, more like one imagines pterodactyls might have sounded than the homely birds of the forest! The tension between the demands of untrammelled energy on the one hand, and discipline on the other, gave a compelling tautness to the whole movement, the illusion of frenzied abandonment always just a well-made illusion.

The ensuing second movement always comes a shock – its delicacy weirdly reminiscent of Berlioz or Schumann; in this performance its sweetness was never allowed to become saccharine (it was perhaps the determination to avoid the saccharine that led Otaaka to set tempi which were perhaps a fraction fast in places?). In the third movement the bird noises were no longer prehistoric memories, the horn melody against iridescent high strings evocative of settled summer, before a fierce E flat minor chord shattered the idyll, a recognition of “nature red in tooth and claw” and, perhaps, of what we mean when we call men animalistic or recognise such elements in ourselves.

That recognition comes before the fourth movement – the movement of Mankind. The Chain of Being recognised Man as a midpoint between the beast and the angels – which is why Hamlet muses “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals” [italics mine]. Mahler’s sense of Man is close kindred to this – for the first time in the symphony words are needed, since it with man that both self-consciousness and morality enter into Nature’s chain.

Katarina Karneus (on the stage where she was crowned Cardiff Singer of the World in 1995) sang gloriously the Nietzschean warning to Man to “take heed”, the words of Joy and Grief, of Death and Eternity sounding with their full weight in Karneus’ expressive dignity, beautifully (and movingly) supported by – in particular – trombones, oboe and piccolo – in a movement whose illusion of stillness reminded one of Man’s centrality in Nature’s chain, how Mankind is, as it were, the pivotal point in such a scheme.

Poised between animal energy and angelic purity Man, in the fifth movement, finds himself in dialogue with the angels, a dialogue about sin and mercy. The relative simplicity of this movement – in part because the words are given such primacy – has its function in the Mahlerian scheme of things, and the choral forces at this performance sang with tender force and joy, especially in the closing affirmations.

The Love with which the final movement concerns itself is, by its very nature, beyond the reach of mere human words. Music reclaims its primacy. Mahler told Anna von Mildenburg “I could almost call the movement ‘What God tells me’”. Not surprisingly Mahler’s God is no conventional Catholic figure; nor is it surprising to discover that the Love Mahler yearns for, and to a degree affirms, in this movement is not entirely free of conflict and complexity.

The long hymn-like theme in the strings, beautifully played and exquisitely paced in this performance, comes close to unalloyed spiritual calm, to the spiritually rhapsodic – at least briefly; but the more dissonant passages of the central section suggest the difficulties Mahler had in giving himself even to Heavenly Love. Whatever Mahler said, this is – amongst other things – music which registers a personal struggle. Otaka and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales rose to the demands (more than merely technical) of this subtle adagio with commitment and passion and the closing pages sound more like poetry and less like wilful rhetoric than they sometimes do, as simple untroubled affirmation was problematised.

This was a passionate and intelligent reading of what is surely one of the most remarkable symphonies ever written. Yes, there were a few momentary lapses of intonation, particularly in brass and woodwind, but these were no more than are more or less inevitable in a work of such length and complexity; they never came close to distracting attention from the power and troubled beauty of the music. The intensity of the playing never flagged – and there was never any risk of audience attention flagging or wandering.

Tadaaki Otaka has always struck me as one of the least self-serving, least attention-seeking of conductors; but he has the power (for all his obvious modesty) to be an inspiring figure who, in the service of the music, can persuade and carry musicians with him in the full-blooded articulation of a coherent vision. That was certainly the case on this occasion, and it made for an exhilarating and (fittingly) ‘exhausting’ evening.

Glyn Pursglove