Titanic

Got the day off to a rousing start by listening to Mahler’s 1st Symphony, as performed live back in 1987 by Leonard Bernstein with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. I played it back in June here and found that, after several years of on and off exposure, I was beginning to get the architecture of the piece. Similarly this morning I felt I knew where the first three movements were going, but I must say I struggled with the final movement. I love it, in bits, and I recognise a good many of the themes repeated from earlier, but it overwhelms me in terms of sheer busyness, a problem I find with a good deal of Mahler.

What I did find myself responding to this morning was the manner in which the composer infuses the symphony with various kinds of musics from the world that surrounded him – the oompah-oompah bands so loved in Germany then and now, the languorous melodies of the piano playing in the parlour, the sentimental yearning of Jewish folksong. I found myself trying, sometimes succeeding, to put myself in that sound-world feeding the symphony. Melodies were more long-breathed then, more sinuous in nature. I suppose people listened better, or at least with greater patience.

I’m thinking of working through a kind of Mahler cycle. Over the years I’ve listened fairly regularly to Mahler’s 1, 2, 5 and 9, the ones I own. But it’s time to dig into my pockets for the rest. Actually I’ve heard them all, except 8, in the concert hall and always intended to listen further knowing there were riches to drown in, but I suppose it has been that sense of the work that the listener needs to do that has somewhat put me off. After all, I’ve owned Mahler 1 since 1989 and am only now genuinely beginning to appreciate it.

This also put me in mind of the first time I really listened to it, or at least a bit of it. This was back in England, sometime in the mid-eighties, and I’d gone round to David Kerr’s house (the HOD of the department I was then working in.) He had an amazingly good stereo system and a quiet room for listening in and proceeded to play the opening of the symphony as a kind of demo. Those faint wisps of melody coming together over the magical sustained strings struck me as some of the most gorgeously refreshing sounds I’d ever heard. And some twenty-five years later I’m hearing them again.