Mahler’s Final Symphonic Thoughts

Vladimir Ashkenazy continues a survey of the Mahler symphonies with his Orchestra. David Garrett asks the Sydney Symphony’s Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor about this Russian take.

When a conductor and an orchestra perform all the Mahler symphonies within two years they offer a rare opportunity to follow Mahler in his symphonic odyssey. This is what Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Sydney Symphony are doing a cycle that will culminate in performances of Symphony no 9 and the unfinished Tenth in May and Symphony no 2 in November. Choices had to be made – should the order of performance follow the order of composition? Ashkenazy’s decision to begin with the most accessible symphonies, nos 1, 8 and 4, before progressing early in 2011 to the more complex nos 6 and 7 prepares height of season audiences for the sense of completion that comes with no 9. Ashkenazy tells of a conversation he had with a viola player in London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. In the slow movement that Mahler so daringly ends this symphony with, the violas have the last long note, and Ashkenazy’s colleague and friend said, ‘It feels like the last strain of matter is disappearing in the universe’. When Ashkenazy told the Sydney Symphony viola players about this comment, they said, as one, ‘correct’. Orchestra and conductor alike are anticipating the end.

Yet it isn’t the end. Mahler had been superstitious about a ‘ninth’ symphony, and avoided numbering what was effectively the ninth symphony he composed, The Song of the Earth, before proceeding to compose a numerical ninth and even to work on a tenth symphony. He was never to hear either The Song of the Earth or his Ninth Symphony, nor was he destined to finish the Tenth. Schoenberg, relating Mahler to Beethoven and Bruckner, observed ‘It seems that the ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away’. Ashkenazy is reluctant to find in Mahler’s Ninth a farewell. Other conductors, among them Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein, have pointed to clues to changes in his life – his irregular heartbeat, his limping walk – but Ashkenazy finds this of interest rather than convincing: at most, he thinks, Mahler sensed that his remaining time may be short. ‘He discovered his health problem and of course it affected his everyday life and mentality.’ Asked whether a darker world prevails in Mahler’s Ninth and Sixth Symphonies, Ashkenazy demurs: ‘I don’t think the Ninth is dark … It is beyond being light or dark. It’s just another world … on another level of feeling and existence.’ (Alban Berg found in it ‘an exceptional love for this earth, a desire to live in peace in it, to enjoy nature fully before being surprised by death’.)

A further choice or dilemma arises – should any part of the Tenth Symphony be performed at all? Was the Ninth Mahler’s farewell to composition? For Ashkenazy there was little hesitation in deciding that the Tenth Symphony should be performed – the major question for him was, ‘in what form?’

Any conductor who decides to perform the Tenth Symphony obviously believes that Mahler had more to say after the Ninth, and would have wanted it to be heard. Although Mahler regarded the Tenth Symphony as fully prepared in sketch form, it has been claimed that he had wanted it destroyed. The orchestral draft of the first movement needs only a few lines filled in (an ‘easy’ task, Ashkenazy says). Mahler’s widow Alma had asked her son-in-law, composer Ernst Krenek, to see attempt to complete and orchestrate the symphony, and he made a fair copy of the first movement, and a performing version of the short third movement, Purgatorio. The Adagio was hailed as one of Mahler’s finest creations and often performed in its own right. But for a long time it was deemed neither possible nor respectful to go further with Mahler’s draft, and although Alma Mahler changed her mind several times about this, inviting first Shostakovich then Schoenberg to attempt a completion, both declined. But on hearing, in 1960, the partial reconstruction by English musicologist Deryck Cooke, Alma agreed to the 1964 performance of Cooke’s first version of the whole symphony.

It was this version that Vladimir Ashkenazy initially expected to use in the Sydney Symphony’s Mahler Odyssey. But, studying several the other completions of the work, he found them all, even the Cooke version, too ‘shy’, too respectful to ‘interfere’ with Mahler. He was tempted by American Clinton Carpenter’s version, which seemed to dare to do what Mahler might have done. ‘It’s much richer,’ says Ashkenazy. ‘He wasn’t afraid to add things, and I thought he had a definite understanding of what Mahler wanted to say.’ Despite a niggling doubt (‘maybe he overdid it in the brass’) Ashkenazy confirmed in May 2010 that he would perform the Carpenter version, mentioning only in passing that there was a version for him yet to hear ‘which I didn’t know existed until someone told me a few weeks ago’.

It was an intriguing find – a version written by Ashkenazy’s old friend and musical collaborator, the Russian viola player and conductor Rudolf Barshai. ‘We’d been good friends. I had played with him conducting.’ (Barshai will no doubt be especially remembered for the orchestral Chamber Symphonies he arranged from Shostakovich string quartets). Ashkenazy found in it a happy medium between Cooke’s occasional reticence and Carpenter’s overuse of the brass. Barshai seemed more faithful to Mahler’s spirit, particularly in orchestration ...

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Mahler 10
12 May 1.30pm, 13 May 8pm
Mahler 9
18, 20, 21 May 8pm (These performances commemorate the 100th anniversary of Mahler's death on 18 May 1911)
Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House
Tickets: from $35
Bookings: 8215 4600
www.sydneysymphony.com