Mahler in Boston

No. 290 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages, which can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast290

=====================================================================

This week’s Blog and Podcast is the first of four Friday and Tuesday musings in September, all of them featuring music of Gustav Mahler. Unlike our “Mahler in New-York” montage of a few years back, we are not re-creating a Mahler concert program (though he very well may have visited or performed in Boston during his years in America). The “in Boston” in this week’s title (like similar offerings on Beethoven and Mendelssohn in the past) refer to the performers – in this case a single, common orchestra, the Boston Symphony.

The two conductors featured today reined upon the orchestra for a combined almost 40 years during the latter half of the 20^th Century: Alsatian conductor Charles Munch and Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa.

Munch (who was Music Director from 1949 to 1963) is often thought of as a master of French music – which he undoubtedly was – but we must not forget that he worked his way through the ranks as a violinist; in the early 1920s he was concertmaster for Hermann Abendroth's Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne, and later as concertmaster of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Wilhelm Furtwängler and Bruno Walter (1926 to 1933). It should not be a surprise that Munch is no slouch when it comes to the German repertoire…

There is a bit of a back-story with the performance I chose today from Munch and Canadian contralto and Mahler Stallworth Maureen Forrester: she was initially supposed to record the song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen with Bruno Walter and the New-York Philharmonic (and indeed was featured in subscription concerts with him) but since Walter was a Columbia Records artist and she an RCA Victor artist, neither label was willing to allow the pair to record the work, which explains why Munch and the BSO (also RCA Victor artists) got the nod. Wakter later recorded the song cycle with Mildred Miller and the Columbia Symohony.

There are strong connections between this song cycle and our other work this week, Mahler's First Symphony. To wit, the main theme of the second song is the main theme of the 1st Movement and the final verse of the 4th song reappears in the 3rd Movement as a contemplative interruption of the funeral march.

Although in his letters Mahler almost always referred to the work as a symphony, the first two performances described it as a symphonic poem. The work was premièred in Budapest, in 1889, but was not well received. Mahler made some major revisions for the second performance, given at Hamburg in October 1893; further alterations were made in the years prior to the first publication, in late 1898. Some modern performances and recordings give the work the title Titan, despite the fact that Mahler only used this label for two early performances, and never after the work had reached its definitive four-movement form in 1896.

Maestro Ozawa, who famously served as apprentice to Leonard Bernstein in the early 1960’s , had the opportunity to work in preparing his New-York Philharmonic Mahler Symphony cycle (coinciding with Mahler’s centennial). I know of at least two commercial recordings of this symphony by Ozawa and the BSO – one with Philips later in his tenure and this DG recording from the early days of his association with the orchestra. When it was reisued,in 1984, the 1977 recordig was edited with the addition of "Blumine".

Blumine originates from some incidental music Mahler wrote for Joseph Victor von Scheffel's dramatic poem Der Trompeter von Säckingen. The trumpet serenade was used for Blumine with little changes. The movement is a short lyrical piece with a gentle trumpet solo, similar to the posthorn solos in the Third Symphony. Even though it was cut from the symphony, there are still traces of its influence in the rest of the movements.

Benjamin Britten gave the first performance of the reconstructed Hamburg version of Mahler’s First with Blumine re-inserted in 1967, after it had been lost for over seventy years. In the 1970s, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra made the first recording of the symphony by a major orchestra to include Blumine. Its use is still today a bit of a curiosity; Mahler had rejected it from his symphony, dome reason, so it should not be played as part of it. Famous Mahler conductors such as Bernstein, Georg Solti and Bernard Haitink never performed it.

Currently some 20 recordings exist that include Blumine; however, most of them combine it with the revised edition of the other movements, thus making a "blended" version of the symphony that was at no time authorised by Mahler. You decide if this was a good idea.

I think you will live this music too.