Why this page

After the pages devoted to the Wagner listening evenings of my youth and to my later encounter with Bruckner’s symphonies conducted by Sergiu Celibidache, Gustav Mahler’s absence from this site began to seem unfair. I could not leave Wagner and Bruckner alone in my musical pantheon when Mahler is, for me, another of the “greats” — different from both, but no less important.

I am not a musicologist, and here too I am not attempting a study of a composer’s work. I write about Mahler from the perspective of a listener who approached his music gradually and discovered in it a world unlike any other. Wagner marked my youth and, in the Conservatory hall, opened the gate to musical drama. Bruckner, heard much later in Celibidache’s performances, taught me the patience of a structure rising through time. Mahler brought something else: the restlessness, contradictions, and fragility of a world trying to contain everything, from the simplest song to the ultimate questions.

There are links among the three, but also essential differences. Mahler admired Wagner and came after Bruckner, yet he did not simply continue either one’s path. In his symphonies, the monumental meets the intimate, the sublime the grotesque, the solemn chorale the street march, and the voice of nature the premonition of death. This very heterogeneity, which Celibidache may have regarded as a weakness or even a violation of musical unity, is for me one of Mahler’s great strengths.

This page therefore seeks neither to assign him a rank nor to decide whether he is closer to Wagner or to Bruckner. It tries to explain why he could not be absent from among the musicians who shaped and accompanied my way of listening.

The conductor who composed in summer

During his lifetime, Gustav Mahler was known first as a conductor. Born in Bohemia in 1860 into a German-speaking Jewish family, he climbed the stages of a European career through Ljubljana, Olomouc, Kassel, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, and Hamburg. In 1897 he became director of the Vienna Court Opera, one of the most prestigious musical institutions of the age.

There he did not merely conduct the established repertory. He imposed severe discipline, banished routine, and demanded genuine unity among orchestra, singers, acting, lighting, and scenery. His collaboration with the painter and stage designer Alfred Roller changed the way opera was conceived. The whole had to express a single vision, and no detail was unimportant.

This intense activity left him little time to compose. Mahler conducted during the season and composed in summer, secluded in small huts near his holiday homes. In the solitude of Attersee, Maiernigg, or Toblach, the conductor’s public world gave way to the composer’s inner one. There the vast symphonies were born which professional life gave him no time to write during the rest of the year.

After ten years in Vienna, attacks from the antisemitic press, internal conflicts, and exhaustion drove him to resign. His final years took him to the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. He died in 1911, aged fifty, famous as a conductor but never knowing the true reach his music would one day attain.

The dissonances of a restless world

What I recognise almost at once in Mahler is dissonance. I mean not only the violently dissonant chords that appear at moments of greatest tension, but also the dissonances between the worlds he places side by side. A limpid melody is disturbed by a fanfare; a solemn chorale is interrupted by a street march; after a moment of contemplation, the grotesque may suddenly erupt.

At first such ruptures can seem strange, even disturbing. They do not allow the listener to settle comfortably into a single state. Mahler erects a broad structure and, just when we think we understand its direction, introduces an element that seems to come from somewhere else. Yet this instability is precisely what makes him so recognisable to me. This is not music of easily attained reconciliation.

Sometimes the dissonance is harmonic and sounds like an open wound. At other times it is a dissonance of meaning: beauty and vulgarity, ecstasy and irony, a children’s song and a funeral march coexist without cancelling one another. Mahler does not conceal the world’s cracks; he introduces them into the very form of the symphony. If Bruckner raises a sonic cathedral, Mahler allows the noise of the street, human anxiety, and the premonition of collapse to enter it.

Alma, love, and grief

I cannot separate Mahler’s music from Alma. When they met, he was director of the Vienna Opera and nineteen years her senior. Alma was young, beautiful, cultured, and herself a composer. Their relationship was no peaceful idyll. Mahler had asked her to abandon her own ambitions as a composer and subordinate her life to his work. Later he would understand, perhaps too late, how unjust that demand had been.

And yet Alma meant love, support, conflict, and fear of loss to him. According to Willem Mengelberg’s testimony, the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony was a declaration of love addressed to her: a letter without words entrusted to strings and harp. When we hear it only as funeral music, we forget that love may have stood at its origin.

The heaviest blow came in 1907. Their elder daughter Maria, nicknamed Putzi, died aged only four, of scarlet fever and diphtheria. The grief was all the more haunting because Mahler had already composed Kindertotenlieder, to poems Friedrich Rückert wrote after the deaths of his own children. From the beginning Alma had regarded these songs with dread; composing them while their daughters were healthy seemed to her like tempting fate.

After Maria’s death, Mahler said that when writing the cycle he had imagined himself in the position of a father who had lost his child; once the loss became real, he could no longer have composed those songs. This tragic coincidence should not be turned into a legend of premonition, but neither can it be forgotten when we listen to his music of love, separation, and death.

In 1910 the marriage entered another crisis after Alma’s relationship with the young architect Walter Gropius, the future founder of the Bauhaus School in Weimar. Exclamations addressed to her remain on the manuscript pages of the Tenth Symphony, direct traces of Mahler’s terror of losing her. The dissonances of this final music are not only a step towards modernity; they also belong to a life that had lost its balance.

Silence and rediscovery

There was no absolute silence after Mahler’s death. Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, and Willem Mengelberg, conductors who had known him or stood close to his circle, continued to perform his music. Yet the scale and difficulty of the works, together with changing musical taste, prevented the symphonies from quickly entering the standard repertory.

Then came the brutal rupture of Nazism. Mahler’s music was banned as the work of a Jewish composer and removed from programmes across much of Europe. After 1945 the tradition had to be rebuilt. Concerts, the long-playing record, and a new generation of conductors enabled the return of music requiring large orchestras, extensive rehearsal, and an audience willing to travel through its immense spans.

A symbolic moment came in 1960, the centenary of Mahler’s birth. On 7 February Leonard Bernstein presented an American television concert for young people simply entitled Who Is Gustav Mahler? The question shows how little known Mahler still was to the wider public. Bernstein would devote an essential part of his life to him, conducting and recording the symphonies and turning them into confessions addressed directly to the twentieth century.

Bernstein did not single-handedly return Mahler to the centre of musical life. But his was the most visible and passionate voice. After him, or beside him, complete recordings and major performances by Rafael Kubelík, Bernard Haitink, Georg Solti, and others made the once difficult and marginal composer one of the most frequently performed and recorded symphonists.

The great Mahler conductors

Mahler’s modern history cannot be separated from the conductors who transmitted it. Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, and Willem Mengelberg still preserved a direct link with the composer’s person and age. Walter conducted the premieres of Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony, neither of which Mahler lived to hear.

Leonard Bernstein made Mahler a personal cause. Rafael Kubelík restored his naturalness and Central European roots; Bernard Haitink, balance and continuity; Georg Solti, energy and orchestral brilliance; Klaus Tennstedt, dramatic tension. Later, Pierre Boulez illuminated the score’s modernity, while Simon Rattle and Riccardo Chailly continued to explore a universe that seems to change with every generation.

I am not trying to establish a ranking. With Mahler, the differences among conductors are part of experiencing the work. The same symphony can appear as testimony, construction, landscape, tragedy, or anticipation of modernity. Comparing interpretations is therefore not an external game, but a way into the music.

Why Celibidache kept his distance from Mahler

Sergiu Celibidache, so close to Bruckner, remained almost entirely outside the world of Mahler’s symphonies. Had he still been alive and had I been able to meet him, this is what I would have wanted to ask: why did he keep such a distance from a composer who, for me, stands so near Bruckner in the pantheon of symphonic music?

I do not think the distance can be explained merely by a lack of emotional affinity. His objection seems to have gone deeper, to the very construction of the music. For Celibidache, a work was not a succession of expressive moments, however powerful. It had to be born of an inner necessity. Each element had to prepare what followed; the ending had to be contained in the beginning, while the beginning disclosed its full meaning only at the end.

Mahler may have appeared to him as the opposite of this conception. His symphonies gather the most heterogeneous materials: folk songs, military marches, fanfares, waltzes, chorales, cries of nature, grotesque episodes, and vast metaphysical developments. The sublime borders on the trivial, contemplation is interrupted by irony, and a melody of almost otherworldly purity may be followed by a fanfare’s noise or the caricature of a march.

This very heterogeneity, which today’s listener recognises as one of Mahler’s great originalities, may have seemed to Celibidache a violation of organic unity: a juxtaposition of effects, deliberate instability, and at times even the composer’s desire to startle or show off.

I do not present this explanation as a documented statement by Celibidache; I have found no reliable source for one. It is how I understand his distance, starting from what I remember of his objections and his conception of form. The known exception is Kindertotenlieder, the five-song cycle to poems by Friedrich Rückert, which he conducted in 1983 with Brigitte Fassbaender and the Munich Philharmonic. There we encounter not the symphonies’ immense diversity, but concentrated, restrained, and unified grief.

Yet what Celibidache may have reproached Mahler for is precisely what fascinates us today. Mahler does not build a cathedral. He tries to contain a world, and the world is neither homogeneous nor orderly.

Claudio Abbado – Mahler made transparent

If Leonard Bernstein played a decisive role in Mahler’s rediscovery and turned the symphonies into a vast confession addressed to the twentieth century, Claudio Abbado belonged to the generation that placed them permanently at the centre of the European repertory. He did not initiate the revival, but continued and deepened it.

Abbado discovered Mahler during his years as a student in Vienna, between 1956 and 1958, when, by his own account, the music was almost unknown in Italy. The encounter became one of the great loyalties of his life. From his early performances and recordings in Vienna and Chicago through the Berlin Philharmonic years and the late Lucerne concerts, Abbado returned to Mahler again and again.

Abbado’s Mahler is not Bernstein’s. With Bernstein the music often becomes confession, suffering lived in public, outburst, and an embrace of the world. Abbado retains a certain distance. He does not diminish emotion, but allows it to arise from the transparency of the orchestral texture, the relationship among voices, and the clarity of the structure. Even at the great climaxes, we continue to hear the lines, colours, and inner movements of the music.

In his final years with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, this transparency acquired a special intensity. The performances no longer seem demonstrations of a conducting concept, but meditations on fragility, suffering, and disappearance. Abbado, himself marked by serious illness, did not dramatise farewell. He made it audible.

His homage was not limited to concerts and recordings. In 1986–87 he founded the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, initially bringing together young Austrian musicians and colleagues from Czechoslovakia and Hungary, across the still rigid borders of a divided Europe. Mahler’s name thus became not only that of a recovered composer, but also a symbol of a shared European culture.

Celibidache asked that music’s ending be contained in its beginning. Mahler seems to tell us that between beginning and end the world can shatter. Abbado knew how to make us hear the hidden unity of those fragments.

Mahler in three images

On the page about the Wagner listening evenings, the stained-glass images attempted to recreate something of the visual atmosphere in the Conservatory hall. I would not repeat that image for Mahler. Instead I see several complementary images: the severe portrait of the Vienna Opera director, the small room where he composed in summer, the almost feverish manuscript page of the Tenth Symphony, and, from another age, the unsettling elegance Visconti created in Death in Venice.

The first belongs to the public world: the demanding, feared man at the centre of European musical life. The second preserves the silence he needed to compose: an isolated hut, a piano, and the surrounding countryside. The third shows neither the public man nor the refuge, but the direct trace of an inner struggle — unfinished music, corrections, and words written in the margins of the score.

The gallery will be added once the local images have been selected and prepared. For the film image, source and reproduction permission must be checked; a production still does not become free merely because it can be found online.

Mahler in Death in Venice

For many people, the encounter with Mahler occurred without their having sought out his music. It happened in 1971 through Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s novella. Visconti changed the writer Gustav von Aschenbach into a composer and made Mahler’s music the film’s true commentator.

The decisive choice was the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony. It accompanies Aschenbach’s arrival in Venice and returns at the end, as he dies on the beach looking towards Tadzio. After the film, the music became almost inseparable from images of water, inaccessible beauty, and decay concealed beneath elegance.

But Visconti did not choose only the Adagietto. The film also uses the Fourth Movement of the Third Symphony, Sehr langsam. Misterioso, built on the “Midnight Song” from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The grave voice beginning “O Mensch!” brings to the film not only beauty, but also the question of the world’s depth, suffering, and the joy that desires eternity.

The film has its own unforgettable apparitions. The very young Björn Andrésen gives Tadzio the almost unreal beauty that fascinates Aschenbach. Silvana Mangano, as his mother, moves along the beach with distant elegance beneath the extraordinary hats created for the film by Piero Tosi. A photograph of her can say more about the visual world into which Visconti placed Mahler’s music than yet another concert image.

There, on the Venetian beach, beauty and death are not opposites. They look at one another. Visconti understood that Mahler, above all, could make this proximity audible.

Three listenings: awakening, love, and farewell

From so vast a body of work, choosing only three excerpts is inevitably unfair. I have not tried to name the best symphonies or to summarise Mahler’s output. I chose three moments that together form an arc: the awakening of a world, love, and the approach of silence.

The beginning of the First Symphony lets us witness music being born from almost nothing. The Adagietto from the Fifth brings the intimacy of a declaration of love that later became one of the best-known pages in the repertory. The Adagio of the Tenth takes us to the end of Mahler’s creative journey, where music seems suspended before its own disappearance.

Symphony No. 1 – the awakening of the Titan

The First Symphony begins not with a statement, but with expectation. The strings sustain an almost motionless sound spread across several octaves. From afar come signals, birdcalls, and fragments not yet resolved to become themes. The orchestra seems to listen with us as the world awakens.

Mahler initially called this movement “Spring Without End” and spoke of nature awakening after its long winter sleep. The title Titan, used for an early version of the symphony, was later withdrawn. I retain it here not as a programme imposed upon the final form, but for the force of the image: we seem to hear a sleeping giant begin to breathe and recognise the world around him.

In Leonard Bernstein’s interpretation, this awakening is more than a description of nature. It already contains the impatience and energy of Mahler’s entire journey. Song gradually emerges from scattered sounds, and landscape becomes forward motion.

Symphony No. 5 – an Adagietto turned “hit”

The Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony has almost become a “hit” of symphonic music. Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice linked its beauty to death and to a Venice in decay. Popularity detached this page from the symphony and often turned it into a self-contained funeral elegy. Yet I cannot hear the Adagietto without seeing again the steamer, the beach, Tadzio’s face, and the aristocratic silhouette of his mother.

Its origin seems to have been quite different. Willem Mengelberg, close to the composer, recorded that the Adagietto was a message of love to Alma. Mahler needed no words: strings and harp were to say what he had not written in an ordinary letter.

Its duration varies greatly from one interpretation to another. Sometimes the music is slowed until it becomes a ceremony of farewell; elsewhere it retains the character of a song without words and breathes more naturally. Claudio Abbado does not deny its intensity, but neither does he burden it with external tragedy. He allows it to flow clearly, as though emotion should be discovered within the fabric of the music, not added by the conductor.

Symphony No. 10 – music on the threshold of silence

The Tenth Symphony remained unfinished. Mahler left sketches for the entire work, but only the first movement, the Adagio, reached an orchestral state complete enough to be performed without substantial reconstruction by another hand. When we hear this movement alone, therefore, we are not listening to an excerpt chosen from a finished whole, but to the last great symphonic page Mahler himself brought close to final form.

The beginning is suspended and uncertain. A line in the violas advances alone, like a question that has not yet found its harmony. The music gathers, brightens for a moment, then enters an increasingly troubled region. At the climax comes an immense dissonance, almost an orchestral scream, after which nothing can truly return to its initial state.

Here the ending no longer rests quietly within the beginning, as Celibidache would have required. A rupture has occurred between them. And yet, in Abbado’s interpretation, the movement does not dissolve into a succession of effects. Its inner connections remain audible, and the climactic dissonance seems the inevitable result of the entire journey.

Here, perhaps, the questions raised by this page meet. Mahler places beauty, fracture, and terror within the same music. Abbado discovers its unity without concealing the rupture. And we remain before a work that does not end, but stops at the edge of silence.

The place of this page in my memoirs

This page does not recount an episode in my life. It has no place and date comparable to the evenings at the Conservatory. It belongs to a cultural memory formed over time through repeated listenings, comparisons, and returns to the same musical passages.

Wagner remains tied to youth and initiation; Bruckner, to my late encounter with Celibidache’s sense of time. Mahler occupies a different place: he is the composer of a world no longer able to hide its contradictions and which, for that very reason, more closely resembles the world in which I have lived.

I could not leave Wagner and Bruckner alone in my musical pantheon. Mahler had to stand beside them, not to complete a list, but because without him something important in my own memory as a listener would have remained unsaid.

And to think that I have not yet written anything about another passion of mine: opera…

Links

• Wagner Listening Evenings at the Conservatory
• Sergiu Celibidache and Bruckner
• Back to Maturity
• Back to Memoirs