75 Years After Death, Mahler Upstages Experts By Gaining Concert

Public`s Ear

May 18, 1986|By John von Rhein, Music critic.

If you had told any musician, critic or musicologist 40 years ago that Gustav Mahler would be the symphonic hero of the mid-1980s, so widely lionized as to displace Tchaikovsky from the pantheon of the Top Favorite Composers, you probably would have been met with a skeptical stare.

For the consensus among professionals of the immediate postwar era was that, although Mahler had been one of the great conductors of all time, he was a second-rate composer whose symphonies were overlong, turgid, banal, too excessively neurotic for general enjoyment. In this musicians were merely echoing an opinion that had been expressed by Mahler`s contemporaries. As late as 1950, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote that ``intimate acquaintance with the executive side of music . . . made even Mahler into a very tolerable imitation of a composer.``

But it was Vaughan Williams` countryman, Frederick Delius, who predicted that once the concert public had had its fill of Sibelius it would ``boost up Mahler and Bruckner.`` That was in 1930; by the early `60s, his prophesy had come true. (Well, half-true: Bruckner has yet to inspire the general audience frenzy that Mahler has).

Mahler has grown from a cult figure to an everyday composer, almost as standard a fixture of orchestral programs as Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart. Consumers may choose from some 175 recordings of Mahler`s music, with new ones added to the catalog every month. The Grove Dictionary of Music, whose 1954 edition devoted only six pages to Mahler, now allots him a densely packed 27. What is the Mahler symphony every conductor performs when he wants to create a big splash? The First or the Fifth. What score is invariably chosen to summon a grand choral noise for a grand public occasion? The Eighth, a.k.a. ``Symphony of a Thousand.`` What symphony does a great maestro, or would-be great maestro, produce to display his profound depths as an interpreter? The Ninth, of course. Mahler`s music, with its restless, neurotic vacillation between ecstasy and despair, triumph and tragedy, sublimity and banality, allows performers and audiences a satisfying wallow in rich, striving sound. Even when the musical result is mediocre, the sonorous satisfaction remains constant.

Sunday marks the 75th anniversary of Mahler`s death, a milestone that has given rise to a mini-flurry of publishing activity. Two mammoth biographies of the composer, by Henry-Louis de la Grange and Donald Mitchell, are in various stages of completion. The third and final volume of De la Grange`s impressive study has been published in French, and an English translation of Volume II is due shortly. The Kaplan Foundation and Faber Music Ltd. have just issued the Mahler ``Resurrection`` Symphony in facsimile score--the first facsimile of a complete Mahler symphony ever published, and a fascinating document for scholars or anyone wishing to gain insights into the fastidious manner in which Mahler applied his creative genius to score paper.

A lot of theories have been advanced to explain the nature of Mahler`s peculiar fascination for modern audiences. Surely it is more than coincidence that the advent of the so-called New Romanticism in composition comes at a time when Mahler`s music is enjoying widespread attention from performers. Mahler appears as a restorative to an age that seems to have grown weary of dry, discordant, overly cerebral music. The philosophical subtext of his 10 symphonies and ``Das Lied von der Erde``--the heroic and futile struggle to make sense of life--fills a need to anchor emotional excess in intellectual restraint, even if the existential questions that Mahler poses are banal.

In an essay written in connection with a New York Philharmonic Mahler cycle nearly a decade ago, Pierre Boulez, then the orchestra`s music director, cited the ``exuberance`` and ``lushness`` of the composer`s music as lures for the listener--qualities that ``call back to memory the luxuriance which for many years had been forgotten or damned as superfluous and lascivious.``

But Boulez later made it clear, in prose as well as performance, that there was scant room in his Mahler-view for exuberance or lushness. His was, and is, a structuralist interpretation of Mahler, an approach favored by many of today`s younger Mahler conductors. They project the gleaming skeleton of the score, but not enough of its glowing essence. This kind of interpretation strikes some listeners--those who made their initial acquaintance with Mahler`s music via Bruno Walter`s wondrous New York recording of the Fourth Symphony, for example, or his classic 1938 performance of the Ninth--as clinical, unfeeling, unspacious, and thus rather beside the Mahlerian point.