Nowadays conductors and their orchestras scramble for the opportunity to perform the entire cycle of Gustav Mahler's symphonies. They are drawn to the dark and sublime beauty of his music, the emotional and formal twists and turns, the scale and unconventional instrumentation. Mahler is a challenge classical musicians gladly accept.
It wasn't always so. Before 1960, Mahler's memory was attended by a cult following, inspired by the devotion of a pair of distinguished conductors,Bruno Walter and Dimitri Metropoulos. At the turn of the decade, Leonard Bernstein began to bring Mahler to a wider audience. A towering figure of classical music (and American life), Bernstein was a fanatic for Mahler's music and was determined to be the Viennese composer's apostle to the world. As critic Tim Page writes in his booklet notes to Bernstein Mahler: The CompleteSymphonies (released by Sony Classical), "Bernstein presented Mahler as Modernist-barbed, ironical and anxiety-ridden" and proclaimed his symphonies as "nothing less than cataclysmic meditations on life and meaning." Beyond the concert hall, Mahler resonated with many concerns of the '60s counterculture.
Listening in 2009 to Bernstein's magnificent interpretations of Mahler, recorded in the 1960s and early '70s, it's possible to hear the music a little differently. Whatever ironies Mahler intended are inaudible to all but the most schooled ears. His anxiety we can still share. Mostly, Mahler's sonic grandeur can be allowed to speak for itself, free of ideological or theoretical baggage if not of the mystic chords of imagination. With their stormy finales and Judgment Day choruses, his symphonies can be appreciated as a glorious summation of the Germanic classical tradition, from Beethoven through Wagner, but taken a step beyond to the edge of a spiritual abyss.
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In an essay on Mahler reprinted in the booklet for this boxed set, Bernstein wondered whether the composer would have jumped the fence into atonality had he lived longer. We'll never know for sure. Listening to these nine and a half symphonies (Bernstein conducted only the adagio from the unfinished 10th), one can speculate that Mahler, so in love with the Romantic tradition and perhaps so troubled, would have achieved his own synthesis of the old and new.
