Mahler

Summary

Dominique Pagani ranks Mahler among the three great post-Wagnerians and considers him the most popular of them: a fervent Wagnerian, a Jew from Mitteleuropa and Bruno Walter's teacher1. He places him in Freud's Vienna, which he says he adores, among the neurotic geniuses who passed through the analyst's couch. What he draws from him is the haunting return of the Volkslied and the way his Lieder treat the great orchestral machine as chamber music2. He comes back several times to the Ninth, Mahler's symphonic testament, and to the curse of the number 9 handed down from Beethoven, which pushes him to sketch a tenth3. He discusses its final slow movement, a contemplative ecstasy that he prefers under Klemperer's baton. He links the revival of Mahler, who was scorned in the 1950s, to the film Death in Venice and to the return of mass unemployment4. In 2022, speaking of the Second Symphony, he calls him a musician of decadence who reaches peaks of musicality, though not without longueurs5. Earlier, however, he had pointed out that his symphonies, thought to be long, last under an hour.

1. 1Wagner and his interpreters, approaching Clouscard, Marx = Theseus?31 Mar 2021 · 43:23
2. 2#5 Happiness versus the death drive in music11 Dec 2020 · 1:16:00
3. 3#10 The two Klemperers and Bruno Walter in Wagner18 Jan 2021 · 14:29
4. 4#8 Happiness and unhappiness in music11 Jan 2021 · 1:53:46
5. 5#9 Pictures at an Exhibition: art, seen from here or from the other side?10 Feb 2022 · 2:35:53

Summary produced automatically from 24 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.