By Music Hound: Mahler The Conductor

Mahler was one of the first internationally famous conductors and he put his stamp, for better and worse, on the classical music repertoire.

Mahler felt that he was pretty unschooled in counterpoint, so he studied Bach's scores to improve himself (they were the only scores he kept among his books in his various "composing huts"). He also championed Bach in the concert hall, which for him meant scaling-up his works for BIG orchestras. This approach has--thankfully in my view--gone out of fashion, and the playing of the English Baroque Soloists on our first DVD is about as far away from Mahler's bombastic Bach as one can get. 

For a reconstruction of Bach's face click here 

Mahler's impact on the position of Mozart in the canon was more positive. Before Mahler's tenure at the Vienna Opera, Mozart's operas were considered rather too trite for a "serious" opera house. Mahler changed that, and it is largely thanks to him that Mozart's operas gained their position at the center of the repertoire and remain there to this day. Our nod to Mozart is presented in the form of a DVD of John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists performing the Requiem Mass in Spain in 1991. Mahler is said to have, in his death delirium, conducted Mozart with his fingers on the bed spread. This is one of music's greatest meditations on Death--a subject Mahler himself was totally obsessed with.

Next up comes Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony in the form of the BBC film of the same name. It's an historical re-enactment of the first rehearsal of the piece at the Esterhazy estate in Austria-Hungary in 1803 with the Gardiner gang again providing the performance and some of the extra actors. Mahler loved Beethoven, and performed his opera Fidelio with great aplomb. He also fiddled with the 9th symphony--doubling up orchestration and adjusting arrangements--in ways that had the critics in Vienna and later New York howling "heresy!" Of course it is not heresy, just artistically ill-advised; but Mahler thought the public were so stupidly insensitive they needed to be bludgeoned over the head in the increasingly large concert halls where the relatively small ensembles of Mozart and Beethoven's day (in his view) could not produce the intensity he believed that performances of this music ought to have.

Our last lead-in to Mahler is a Blu-ray of Robert Schumann's music featuring Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra performing the fourth symphony and the piano concerto with Riccardo Chailly and Martha Argerich. Mahler's OCD with early Romantic scores did Schumann perhaps the greatest disservice of all, for it was Mahler and his generation of conductors that gave rise to the notion that Schumann was a gifted composer of leider who did not understand orchestration. Mahler, as with some of his Beethoven performances, doubled things up with Schumann--especially the horns--and in the process imparted an inappropriately Malerian heavy-handedness to Schumann's symphonies that has only been recently corrected.

Mahler conducting a rehearsal in 1910

So, Mahler's legacy as a conductor is a mixed bag, but in the long run, he probably did much more good than harm to the repertoire. As his own idiosyncrasies have dropped away from performance practice, we are left with a classical music canon that he shaped more than any other single individual.

Now on to Mahler's own music!