Earlier today, I took a deep breath and committed myself to listening through all of Pierre Boulez's recording of Mahler's Fifth Symphony -- maybe the first time that I've really tried to concentrate over the whole span of its 75-or-so minutes. What follows are impressions only -- I'm not close to competent to make musical judgments. I can only report on what the music seems to me to express, and a more musically literate person than I would probably have a much more confident sense of what exactly is going on in this 5-movement structure that seems to me to be both compelling and deeply weird. Mahler's orchestration is so distinctive and transparent and his motifs are so engaging that I'm never bored when listening to his music, but it's work -- especially when one gets outside the more accessible, often folk-song saturated worlds of the "Wunderhorn" symphonies, especially the First and the Fourth (although they too have their weirdnesses).
The first thing that struck me, on reflection, was that the Fifth Symphony's first two movements might be thought of as "alternative" first movements. The first movement -- a funeral march, at least to begin with -- seems "public," a public engagement with grief and loss, such as one might associate with a ceremony like a procession to a graveyard. In Boulez's recording, it's close to 16 minutes, and hypnotically powerful in its opening measures, but long before the end of the movement, the sense of order falls apart and something much more desperate and painful erupts -- a reminder, perhaps, of what kinds of private sorrow the public ceremony fails to do justice to. There's an effort to get things back in order, but the final five or six minutes are roiled by the outburst and never quite recover their balance. The second movement seems broadly the private counterpart to the first movement -- "sturmisch bewegt" [stormily moving] -- much more unpredictable in its movement, with howls of pain interspersed with reminiscences of something more like the first movement's steadiness but also with quieter yearning moments. Musically, it doesn't seem chaotic -- no more does the first movement -- for the motivic development is quite transparent, even though one might not know just how the motives and their moods are going to be sequenced. But when the transitions come, we realize that we're hearing something recognizable and that a shape is emerging, though I, at least, have no way of naming it. In Mahler's designation, the first two movements make up "Part 1" of the symphony, so maybe it makes sense to see these two movements (about 28 minutes of music) as constituting a single movement of some kind.
"Part 2" is a 20-minute-long Scherzo (so designated by Mahler), and marked "Strong. Not too fast." It seems to me to represent or express an effort to lift the spirits, but you know that when you give 20 minutes to that effort, it's not working too well. The music here often adopts a"laendler" character reminiscent of the Wunderhorn symphonies, but the mood of freshness isn't sustained, and reminiscences of the first two movements impose themselves too. It strikes me as an unstable movement -- or, at least, heightening the sense of instability that haunts the first two movements too. What's expressed is a failure to settle, a failure to know what to do about the mind's unpredictable movements. The music isn't confused -- it's gripping, as in a soliloquy in a play in which a character reveals a chaos of feeling and thought -- expressing confusion without being confusing. The idea of the symphony's being dramatic as a whole is one that makes sense to me -- like those Romantic poems of inner turmoil in which the drama is the inner drama of the effort to effect a change in mind and mood.
"Part 3" is made up of the final two movements -- a ten minute Adagietto and a 15-minute Rondo marked "Allegro -- Allegro giocoso. Frisch [Fresh]." The Rondo succeeds in being lighter-hearted than the third-movement Scherzo, but for all that there seems to me throughout an undercurrent of uneasiness (buzzing basses), and the sense of instability isn't wholly expunged. The "fresh" music isn't assertive or triumphalistic (compare the end of the First Symphony), and it's often quite quiet, as if infected by a carry-over from the Adagietto. Still, it seems the right kind of conclusion for this particular drama.
I've left the fourth movement to discuss last, partly because it's one of Mahler's best-known and is often programmed as a separate piece. "Sublime" is a word often used of it, but when one hears it in context, that characterization seems wrong -- at least as referring to what's expressed. It might be a marvelous piece of musical construction, but to me it expresses the featureless flattening of affect that I associate with depression. Thus I think that Luchino Visconti was right to use it as he did in his film Death in Venice, where it is absolutely fitting for the depression and repression and sickness that Dirk Bogarde so powerfully and restrainedly conveys as Aschenbach, the dying artist [image above]. In Aschenbach, repression is perhaps one cause of the depression, being a denial of the erotic attraction of the "classical" beauty of Tadzio, the teenager he is obsessed with watching. Mahler's music, heard in context of the symphony, doesn't, of course, "mean" all that -- but Visconti saw that in the context of the movie its "meaning" could be extended to include that. But even without Visconti and the movie, the music doesn't convey "sublimity." It's just very, very sad, with the sadness that comes from a sense of the impossibility of lifting ones own spirits by an act of will.
Mahler's Fifth is a great symphony, and I was much impressed by Boulez's account. I had been surprised at how much I enjoyed his accounts of the First and Fourth, for I had thought of Boulez as something of a cold technician of music. Far from it. The orchestra is the Vienna Philharmonic, sounding great.
Note: The image that opens this posting is the cover of the 14-disc box of Boulez's Mahler recordings for Deutsche Grammophon. In addition to the symphonies, it includes the songs, Das Lied von der Erde, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and Das Klagende Lied. All but one of the recordings are studio recordings, and the sound is excellent. I got it for just over $25.00. It's an amazing bargain.
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