A Bang and a Whimper

Editor’s Note: Be patient with me. I know this is staid (Ridiculous) material, but give me three paragraphs to seduce you.

In the weeks ahead of its performance at the New York Philharmonic, I listened to two recordings of Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. One was by the New York Philharmonic in 2005 during the reign of Lorin Maazel, its prior conductor and septuagenarian music director.

To dismiss it quickly, the Maazel reading was what I expected. Maazel being of the Old World (capital Os & Ws), he did the Mahler with trademark consistency, like a sturdy, veteran point guard (late John Stockton) who makes up for his lack of volatility by shooting free throws well. I saw Maazel a few times during his run in New York and I enjoyed his eminent stature as I was a new observer of classical music being shown the ropes. But I’m not sure I ever felt Moved. This recording was no different.

The other recording of the Sixth was by San Francisco Philharmonic. I found it because, in the way these things happen to winnow their way into lore, it was from a performance held on September 12, 2001. The weird mystique behind a piece like the Sixth stems from descriptions of it as one of the “very few symphonies that end in complete hopelessness” (Herbert von Karajan), the label Mahler characteristically retrofitted the symphony with (and ultimately deleted) was “The Tragic.” (A note: anything called “tragic” by Mahler himself must be taken seriously, it registers [for better or worse] in the same way that the “Double Down” sandwich is hailed as “extreme, even for Kentucky Fried Chicken” or John Grisham’s “most obnoxiously lawyerly” book.)

A digression. One question you may be pondering: Who buys tickets to hopelessness? Chicago Cubs fans, 2012 DNC Convention-goers, etc, and classical music listeners. While the Sixth is one of Mahler’s least performed symphonies, it has its adherents. And like anything well-crafted, nothing can be one-sidedly good or bad. A monolithically evil character is boring and too cartoonish to be human; the grey spill of nuances is where the resonances lay (I can’t believe I just wrote that either). The same goes for classical music: you fight through doubt to arrive at despair, you endure crest, plateau, and peak before you tumble irrevocably in the abyss. That’s where the art is. Otherwise, it’s just Taps.

The thing about the Sixth is that there are two rifts surrounding its performance. There are four parts: An allegro (moderate, energetic) opening movement and an allegro final movement (moderate, energetic). Both contain marches that are pleasant, sonorous, booming, doubting, furious.

Then the middle two parts are a scherzo (heavy, slow, weighty, sombre) and the andante (nice and uplifting). The traditional way the Sixth is performed, for a long time, was allegro, followed by the macabre scherzo, the palliative andante, and the drowning end. Down, down, up, down. The Maazel version does this.

A new order has emerged and become more accepted, which goes allegro, andante, scherzo, end. Down, up, down, down. (These directionals are reductive, but in terms of discussing a journey, also necessary).

The first order (thematically) is a losing proposition from the start with an (ultimately quelled) upsurge of hope. The second order pits two forces against each other from the start and has one prevail despite fits of resistance. So here was the tragic, baleful, bereft-of-hope Sixth. On September 12, 2001. Down, up, down, down. The new order.

The other rift has to do with an instrument that Mahler wrote into the composition: the sound of a hammer which is meant to sound like an ax that fells the Hero in the final movement. In the composition, Mahler wrote three hammer strikes to represent the blows of Fate, but being superstitious, he deleted the last of the hammer blows as to not seal his own fate. Composers have cherry-picked whether or not to include two or three; the September 12th recording (quite wisely) seems to have only two.

Where the world has gone, it felt like the Sixth came onto the schedule with choice timing. Sure, Mahler was born 150 years ago and died 100 years ago (after serving his final post: musical director of the NY Phil.) and tributes/traditions are a music organization’s bread and butter, but there is more here. Alan Gilbert, the young new director of the NY Philharmonic, had a list of long list of Mahler’s work to choose from. His first pick as director was Mahler’s Third, his longest and most complex, which the NY Phil. performed last September. The Third represents Mahler’s rumination on the nature of the universe, very dark, also leaden, but in the end, stunningly optimistic and gratifying.

Gilbert’s rendition of the Sixth was what I’d hoped for. What Maazel couldn’t quite do. It also evoked a feeling I couldn’t self-discern from the lo-fi quality or from the context of the SFO’s recording. Technically, Gilbert’s was a little uneven at times (while I’m not a trained ear, I know what pornography sounds like), but it felt convincing. Maybe because it was live and the lows tug at you funny when all the sounds register but I was Moved. But I’ve been Moved by recordings before.

As past is prologue goes, I found this performance had its fitting place: the opening march which recurs throughout the piece slowly grows into its own echo like a universe folding into itself. Was it sloppy or intentional? The cowbells that Mahler wrote into the piece -- to be sounded offstage, meaning to evoke nostalgia -- were barely audible and instead evoked the traces of something faint and lost. (A performance I saw of Mahler’s 7th I saw at Carnegie Hall this spring [judge away] had offstage cowbells that did the nostalgia trick right so it’s possible I may know something about cowbells). Misstep or Interpretation? And lastly, while the violins hummed “the Alma theme” (for Mahler’s wife) in the third movement, I thought about the abyss into which an outed violinist landed with a teenage splash after throwing himself off the George Washington Bridge.

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I once started a draft of graduate paper on Mahler’s Third Symphony with this introduction:

I am a stranger to classical music; it is unknown to me. By Donald Rumsfeld’s Potemkin Village of Knowledge model, classical music would constitute a “known unknown;” my lack of knowledge about classical music suffers in the gelid cold beyond the path ushering one toward Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. Moreover, I don’t even know classical music biblically (I’ve yet to find a girl who will make love to it either, but if you know someone...).

Like Mahler, I deleted this out of superstition, that I might resign myself to unknowing (or getting kicked out of class). I was also not sober when I wrote it. That said, it’s true I am aware that I am not fluent in the language and theory of classical music and have a while to go before I even venture into understanding. But what I do know is that when the Third hammer sounded at the end of Mahler’s Sixth on Thursday night, I felt that the import of a musical tradition being sounded; like we’ve been here before, the world on a brink, it’s always felt like the end at various points, but we’ve managed past it. Notwithstanding, that sound, of the mallet hitting the plank, also did kind of scare the shit out of me.