Being away, staying in hotel rooms or, nowadays, Airbnbs, is part of the freelance musician’s life. In terms of distraction, it’s a lot easier than it used to be—though that can, of course, be a problem if you’re trying to write. Radio 4 almost makes you feel as though you’re at home, and movies not only fill the downtime but can profitably interact with the work at hand. So what have I been watching?
“Wouldn’t you just die without Mahler?” So asks the self-improving Rita (Julie Walters) in the movie version of Willy Russell’s play Educating Rita, a phrase she has comedically stolen from her new (and ultimately suicidal) flatmate, Trish. “Well, frankly, no,” replies Frank (Michael Caine) her cynical Open University English tutor. The film, with this ironic take on Mahlerian pretension—as well as a deft nod towards its more tragic currents—came out in 1983, 12 years after Visconti’s cult version of Death in Venice, which reimagined Thomas Mann’s writer protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, as a Mahlerian composer, pushing the slow movement from the Fifth Symphony into the classical hit parade.
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In his own lifetime, Mahler was more famous as a conductor than a composer. Although he was the music director of the court opera in Vienna, and hugely influential on the way performances of opera developed in the 20th century (innovative productions and an obsessive insistence on high standards of musical execution), he never composed an opera and remained, as a composer, very much in the shadow of his contemporary, Richard Strauss. After his death, his works were largely ignored, with some exceptions (the conductors Willem Mengelberg and Bruno Walter were great advocates of the symphonies), and this neglect was compounded in the Austro-German world by the Nazi condemnation of Mahler as a degenerate Jewish artist.
After 1945, conductors such as Leonard Bernstein started to champion his work; and Benjamin Britten he became a crucial figure. By the time of his centenary in 1960, Mahler was entering the canon. Visconti’s use of the “Adagietto” confirmed and intensified his status, so that by the 1980s and Willy Russell’s play he was a cultural icon.
We tend to think of Mahler as cosmic, metaphysical, serious: the apogee of the late Romantic. This is the composer of the “Symphony of a Thousand” (his eighth). “A symphony must be like the world,” he told Sibelius, “it must embrace everything.”
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Mahler’s gigantism might seem a world away from the sort of music I spend most of my life engaged with—the rhetorical tapestry of the Baroque, the miniaturism of a Schubert song. There’s an apocryphal story of Mahler visiting Niagara Falls, standing as close as possible to the cascading waters and shouting to his wife, Alma, “At last, a true fortissimo!” But, in fact, Mahler has been a crucial part of my repertoire from the beginning and not just because of the pervading aroma of Weltschmerz. Mahlerian excess is just one part of his story.
With Mahler, you never quite know where he stands, when he’s being serious, when he’s making an affectionate parody, when he’s taking the mickey. The sheer banality of some of his gestures, in song and in symphony, is quite intentional and reflects an ironic engagement with the world that undercuts straightforward Romantic musical heroism. For Mahler, the heroic and the tragic can only exist in a field of irony—very Viennese, very pre-First World War (Mahler died in 1911, aged only 50).
I came to Mahler through his songs. Alongside Schubert, Schumann and Hugo Wolf (Mahler’s one-time flat mate in Vienna), he is one of the great song composers in the Austro-German tradition. The first piece of Mahler’s I took on was his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), a brilliant homage to Schubert’s song cycles, complete with a quotation from Schubert’s Winterreise and a travelling apprentice who ends his journey under a linden tree. Mahler wrote the poems himself. It’s a quasi-pastiche but it is, at the same time, deeply felt. I’ve performed these songs with piano and with small orchestra.
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In recent years, I’ve taken on something much bigger, the collection of settings of folk poetry called Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn). Bigger because the songs have such a wide range: a drummer boy marches off to be hanged for cowardice; a ghostly regiment of skeletons routs the enemy; a lonesome love casts his ring into the sea for a fish to swallow so that it can end up on the king’s table, and his girlfriend can find it and bring it back to him. Bigger because the orchestra involved is an enormous one.
But the size of the orchestra is not an exercise in gigantism, and I never have to struggle with the noise it makes. It’s a matter of colour, of finding a whole palette of instrumental colours to paint words, emotions and the story. It’s always an exciting encounter. And next week it’ll be in Bologna—the home of song—that I’m singing these complex, little-big masterpieces.
