My Mahler Moment
[I’m writing posts this semester alongside those of my students in the course MUS 130B: Introduction to Music Literature, at the University of Arizona. To find their posts, look for the #mus130b tag.]
It was the spring of 2000, toward the close of my freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania, and Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony appeared in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s program just as my year-long course on the History of Western Music crossed the twentieth-century mark. After I took only a tepid liking to the course’s two assigned Mahler compositions, Norman Smith, my music history professor, suggested I give the composer another chance by attending this live performance.
Perched in the upper tier of the Academy of Music, I noticed as a growing intellectual respect yielded to impulsive emotion with the entrance of cowbells near the piece’s conclusion. Instead of discounting my visceral reaction, I decided to learn more and to feel more. Hazily returning to my dorm room after the concert — it was already 10 at night — I pulled from the shelf my already-worn CD of Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler’s Seventh, along with the accompanying score I’d borrowed from the library, to prepare myself for another hour-and-a-half bout of Mahler.
There’s one moment in particular, in the triumphant conclusion of that symphony, that always gets me, and I seem to remember it well from that first experience at the Academy of Music. It takes place about 30 seconds into this clip of the finale—a sudden and magical switch from C major to E major that’s akin to the big modulations frequently heard in pop songs, and that I especially appreciate the ’70s-’80s British band XTC for (check out the dizzying series of key changes that start here).
Powerful moments like these mean that it’s always surprised me that Mahler’s Seventh has been so heavily criticized over the years. Examples of this kind of criticism abound, but it still stuns me, for example, that in 1923, Richard Aldrich of the New York Times went so far as to write that a performance by the New York Philharmonic “should lead to the hope that the times and labor and funds of the Philharmonic shall not further be expended upon this sort of music, Dead Sea fruit that turns to ashes in the hands of him who would grasp it.”
How did we get from Aldrich’s review — one that essentially shut down any sense of artistic worth in this work — to my own unearthly experience? Hundreds of Mahler concerts after my introduction to Mahler’s Seventh, and countless hours of academic study of Mahler’s symphonies and their reception, I have some ideas (some of which I’ve explored in my book), and they have a lot to do how musical value is shaped in public and private spheres, in part by influential individuals both in public and behind the scenes.
However we got here, though, not a day goes by that I don’t consider the still-powerful impact of that formative Mahler experience. As a scholar and educator, it continues to inspire me.
