Introduction

It is perhaps presumptuous to write about Mahler’s Eighth Symphony at all. The composer himself, at the time he was working on it, called it “the greatest work I have yet composed . . . so different in contrast and form that I cannot even write about it.” But fools rush in where genius fears to tread, and so this fool will attempt to write about the indescribable.

To start with the obvious, there’s no ignoring that subtitle: “Symphony of a Thousand.” That was the brainchild of the publisher, and Mahler reportedly did not care for it. Actually, on July 26 it will be more like Symphony of 400-500, but that’s still a massive amalgamation of musicians; even the most extravagant opera companies, when staging the Triumphal Scene in Verdi’s Aida, don’t put that many bodies on stage at once. At Ravinia, performances of Mahler’s Eighth require a special stage extension to accommodate the full forces. And so the first thing we think of when we hear about Mahler’s Eighth Symphony is its enormous size. And that can be misleading.

In the matter of enlarged musical forces, Mahler was very much influenced by Richard Wagner, a composer whose music he admired while still in his teens. Throughout his life, Mahler was regarded first and foremost as a conductor, and he carefully cultivated his career, moving from one conducting post to another, more prestigious one—from Olomouc, Kassel, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest and Hamburg to those pinnacles of music, the Vienna Court Opera and Vienna Philharmonic, and the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic. Throughout that conducting career, many of his greatest triumphs were his productions of Wagner’s operas, including the first mounting of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen in Leipzig, another Ring cycle in Budapest sung in Hungarian, a triumphant production of Tristan und Isolde in Hamburg, and Lohengrin in Vienna.

While Wagner’s highest aspiration was the creation of the so-called “Gesaumtkunstwerk,” the unified synthesis of all the arts, he is perhaps more often thought of in connection with the great length of his operas and his expansion of the orchestra. In considering the length of his operas—as well as symphonies by Bruckner and Mahler—we need to keep in mind that life moved at a different tempo in those days. People expected enormously long concerts. We know that when Beethoven unveiled his Fifth Symphony, the program also included his Symphony No. 6, the Piano Concerto No. 4, excerpts from the Mass in C Major, a dramatic scena for soprano and orchestra and the Choral Fantasy. The legendary mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran once sang a double bill of Beethoven’s Fidelio and Bellini’s La Sonnambula. Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet originally served as the curtain-raiser for his opera Iolanthe. Even over the last few decades, concerts have grown shorter; American Ballet Theatre, for example, used to augment their full-length Giselle by following it with Offenbach’s one-act Gaité Parisienne. In 1971, when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” for the first time on its subscription series, the concert opened with Vladimir Ashkenazy performing Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto. Today, in a world defined by soundbytes and MTV-style editing, audiences have difficulty sitting through that much music. Wagner and Mahler were merely writing works that would fill out an evening’s program.

As for the orchestra, Wagner did not add instruments merely to create bigger sounds; rather he was enlarging the color palette of the orchestra. Just because a graphic artist has an unlimited range of colors at his disposal doesn’t mean he necessarily wants to use them all at once. Wagner wanted to be able to juxtapose entire blocks of homogeneous sonority. If we look back at the Renaissance, musical instruments usually came in “chests,” or complete sets covering the range from soprano down through the alto, tenor, and bass ranges. In the early-19th-century orchestra, that principal held true only for strings (violin-viola-cello-bass); Wagner was extending the same principal to other choirs of the orchestra. Similarly, Mahler uses his combined forces only at times. Certainly he lets loose with a mighty noise at the opening of the work. In this he is following the example set by Bach, who was to become for Mahler a model and ideal—Mahler cherished his copy of the collected works of Bach and in 1909 assembled a suite of movements of Bach’s orchestral pieces. Look at Bach’s two great passion settings, those of St. John and St. Matthew: both start with massive and elaborate choral movements that in terms of scope and grandeur are not equaled in the rest of the entire work that follows them. Likewise, Mahler certainly pulls out all the stops for the symphony’s opening. But after that musical explosion, he starts alternating various reduced combinations of the forces at hand, both vocal and instrumental; he dazzles us not with a blinding light, but by shifting the color of that light in a kaleidoscopic fashion. But this is only one way in which his Eighth Symphony defies our expectations. Other generalities many people believe about Mahler are also dispelled by this unique work.

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