A personal relationship with Mahler’s second symphony
Originally written ca. November 2013
It is the first Friday night in November. I am at home, alone. My cat died two weeks ago and has yet to be replaced; my wife is slaving away at her office; my live-in father-in-law has gone off to do whatever it is that 65-something widowered gentlemen do with their free time.
Though many years have since passed, I am spending the evening in a way not too different from many similar nights when I was in my twenties: on my sofa, a book and a drink at hand, and listening to a masterwork of western music. The differences, and they are not insignificant, are that the room I am in is only one of several in a house, rather than being the sum total of a meager studio apartment; that I have advanced from grocery-store jug wine to whisky cocktails; and instead of a notebook to scribble in I have this laptop computer upon which to type.
My musical selection for the evening is Mahler’s second symphony. I have a long relationship with this symphony, having come to know it rather out of sequence for my relative musical maturity. I clearly recall hearing it for the first time, by chance, at a home-town friend’s house. At the time I was a know-nothing college student, a fledgling music major who, aside from some long-term exposure to Bach and a good deal of applied school music experience, really knew staggeringly little about orchestral repertoire. Nevertheless there it was, the opening of the first movement of Mahler 2, emanating from my friend’s family stereo. I was awestruck. Soon thereafter I availed myself of the local library. This was still the heyday of cassette tapes, so I eagerly transferred the library’s LPs of Leonard Bernstein’s recording onto a 90-minute cassette (anal-retentively typing–on a typewriter–a label for the box) and listened to it repeatedly. I also taped the third symphony, but I never really got into it. The Second was my first love and I was faithful.
Fast-forward a few years to that studio apartment, and I am in graduate school, having successfully earned a B.A. in music and then gone on under delusions of competence to pursue a master’s degree in music history. I was essentially living on credit–my graduate assistantship stipend paid my rent and maybe a few groceries–so when I gave in to the temptations of luxury I still meted out my pennies carefully. And thus it was that I found myself at the local CD store one night considering a copy of Mahler 2 to help subdue my misery. That familiar Bernstein recording, re-issued on CD with it’s vaguely Secessionist cover lettering and artwork, was a two-disc set, meaning that by music-company calculus was twice as expensive. Due to the symphony’s length, most available recordings span two discs. But as I flipped sadly through the bins, trying to imagine spending upwards of twenty-five dollars I didn’t really have, I happened upon what appeared to be a single-disc, and therefore singly-priced, recording: Otto Klemperer conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, with Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, soprano; and on the EMI label. Hmm. Well–and here I reveal again my ignorance at the time–I’d heard of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, I think she was a pretty big name, and EMI is a reputable label. I didn’t know anything about this Philharmonia orchestra but I recognized Otto Klemperer as having had a direct association with Mahler, and I was pretty sure I knew that most orchestras in England were really all freelance players anyway, so there was every possibility that this would be good. And the price was right, so what could I do? To the cashier, then home to sofa, wine, and CD player.
I know what you’re thinking right now. You’re waiting for me to be piteously disappointed: the tempos will be wrong, the recording quality will be like a tin horn. Or perhaps you are waiting for it to be transcendent, to take my infatuation with the symphony to some new level, where the divine is at last revealed to me as Mahler had so fervently sought. I am sorry, or relieved, to disappoint you, but the recording and performance were…fine. Good, in fact, and very satisfying. I was happy to have it on CD instead of tape. The tempos are perhaps relatively brisk: the entire symphony clocks in at just over 79 minutes, compared to Lenny’s 93-minute opus. Claudio Abbado takes about 87 to make it through. Oh and yes, I am able to report those timings because, in the years that have passed since that happy single-disc find, I have acquired not only the CD re-release of the Bernstein performance I taped from LP, but even a third recording.
OK then, you say, so you were satisfied with it at the time. But now you’ve purchased not one but two other recordings, by bigger-name conductors and recognizable orchestras (New York for Bernstein, of course, and Vienna for Abbado). What makes you talk about this Klemperer recording? Why have you kept it anyway? It can’t be so wonderful that it stacks up well against newer recording technologies (1987 and 1992, versus 1962). Having two recordings sounds opulent enough, why do you have three?
I can tell you. It’s sure to be partly sentimentality, and partly inertia, and musically it actually does hold up in comparison; but there is another very specific reason: by the time the end of the fifth movement rolls around, nearing the ultimate conclusion of the work, the orchestra is noticeably out of tune. They sound like this symphony has worn them down, that they have been grappling with this giant for over an hour and it has taken its toll on them. Like the symphony itself, they finish triumphantly; but it comes at a cost. Unlike yet another perfect, “shiny” recording made in the studio by von Karajan (as Bernstein himself once said, derisively, in a 1990 interview with Rolling Stone magazine), you hear the labor of the Philharmonia musicians. What would ordinarily surely be considered a flaw is, to me, an importantly humanizing moment.
This flaw is the key, and why this recording is special to me. It’s easy to love something that is perfect; in perfection, what is there ever not to love? But perhaps in fact the perfect is not easy to love, but harder–easy instead to take it for granted. A flawed thing that you can love, you value it more. You know that you love it even though–or because–you know it is not perfect.
Mahler was noted for his severity and discipline as conductor of the the Vienna Opera. But as a man we know he was constantly torn by emotion, aware of his own flaws, painfully aware of the vagaries of human life itself, but still always yearning, laboring for that musical ideal. I think he might have nodded knowingly with Klemperer and his fatigued band. A little manifest struggle in a labor of love is, I think he would say, a good thing.
This material © 2013 Jeffrey A. Ohlmann. All rights reserved.