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The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

Have we reached ‘Peak Mahler’?
27th July 2022

27th July 2022

With a new cycle of the complete symphonies recently launched by Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic on Pentatone, and another – from Ádám Fischer and the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker on C-Avi – finished a few months back, the recording industry’s love affair with Mahler’s music shows no signs of diminishing. At a conservative estimate, the number of conductors who have set down the full cycle is at least 25, among whom a select few (Bernstein, Maazel) have tackled it twice on disc. Several others have duplicated many of the symphonies, and scores more have set down individual works, including some tantalisingly near-complete sets (Kondrashin, Iván Fischer). In the case of Bruckner, Eugen Jochum set down two cycles, Barenboim has managed a so-far unequalled three, while the Oehms label alone has issued surveys under three separate conductors (Skrowaczewski, Simone Young and Ivor Bolton). The number of complete Beethoven cycles doesn’t bear thinking about (Karajan alone led four, of varying critical success).

These bald figures hardly begin to suggest the scale of duplication in the classical record market, but they do raise an interesting question. Of all those Mahler cycles, how many on an artistic level have offered significant interpretative improvements on the Mahlerian pioneers (Walter, Klemperer, Mengelberg, Horenstein, Mitropoulos, Bernstein, Kubelík)? In purely sonic terms, many of the more recent surveys have undoubtedly brought benefits – but so, too, has the sensitive remastering of older recordings. Symphonies by Mahler, Bruckner and even Beethoven are by no means unique in this regard. Barely a month goes past without some new release of Bach’s ‘Goldberg’ Variations, Cello Suites or Violin Sonatas & Partitas. The number of complete Ring cycles (new and old, particularly live recordings) continues to astonish, and even Bach’s 200 or so cantatas now exist in an impressive half-dozen sets. Nor could anyone now complain that there are too few complete surveys of the symphonies of Shostakovich, Sibelius or Vaughan Williams (although sporadic availability is another matter).

Where such cycles were once musical rarities and triumphs of technology, to be savoured by eager record buyers (think of the hype surrounding Georg Solti’s studio recording of Wagner’s Ring), they now seem almost like mere rites of passage for conductors, orchestras, singers and instrumental soloists, eager to issue ‘their’ interpretation of the great musical masterpieces of the past. No orchestra with any global pretensions can afford to be without a Beethoven or Mahler cycle to act as its calling card. To some extent it is difficult to disentangle this extraordinary proliferation from the growth of the recording industry as a whole. In the early days of electrical recordings, the most an eager Wagnerian could hope for was the famous ‘potted Ring’, issued by HMV shared between a variety of eminent (or at least experienced) singers and conductors. At the time it must have seemed like manna from heaven.

The game-changer was the advent of the long-playing record in the post-war years. Unbroken playing times of 25 minutes or more per side vastly benefited works of music drawn on the larger canvas. The case of Mahler is particularly interesting because this development coincided with renewed interest in his music fostered by one of his most ardent champions, Leonard Bernstein, whose complete cycle on CBS was soon followed by Rafael Kubelík’s set on DG and then Haitink on Philips. All three sets – along with the soundtrack to Visconti’s 1971 film of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice – helped to ensure that the 1970s and 1980s were arguably the heyday of the Mahler renaissance (memorably caricatured in the line from Maureen Lipman’s character in the movie Educating Rita: ‘Wouldn’t you simply die without Mahler?’). Whether the subsequent explosion of Mahler recordings has contributed to significantly further enthusiasm for the music or simply been riding that extraordinary wave is a moot point.

In his 1967/1982 book Foundations of Music History, the late Carl Dahlhaus – one of the most perceptive writers on the subject of music history – posited the notion of kairos for the works of certain composers: the moment when their ‘time had come’. Among others, he suggests ‘various points in the nineteenth century’ for the works of Bach (which were effectively ‘discovered’ and transferred from their original functional origins to the ‘high art’ realm of the concert hall), the 1920s for the music of Bruckner (based on the number and quality of commentaries and analyses of his works – although in the English-speaking world this point was reached only 40 years or so later), and the turn of the century for Wagner, when the Bayreuth phenomenon arguably reached its peak.

With some foresight, Dahlhaus suggested that the 1970s would indeed come to represent ‘the high-water mark in the later history of Mahler’s works’. Such a concept does not automatically involve a subsequent decline, although it is easy to see how a genre such as French grand opera – epitomised by Meyerbeer and Gounod – has steadily waned popularity, replaced (one might suggest) by the operas of Richard Strauss as well as the ‘rediscoveries’ of Berlioz and, most recently, Korngold. Nor do such moments of relevance, when works seem suddenly to ‘click’ with certain times and moments of social consciousness, necessarily coincide with the musical anniversaries of the diary planners. One could argue that Beethoven’s symphonies, having reached a moment of kairos in the mid-19th century, found another in the immediate post-war years, when performances by the likes of Toscanini, Furtwängler, Klemperer and Erich Kleiber found extraordinary resonance with audiences emerging from the preceding decade of horrors. It’s a resonance that can still be felt in the best recordings from those years. By the time of the Beethoven bicentenary in 1970, those same performances already seemed to come from a ‘golden age’.

Equally distinct from the authenticist insistence that the composer’s time is the only one that matters, the counter-argument that the onward march of time inevitably brings improvements, and even the fickle favours of mere fashion, the concept of artistic kairos (what the French call a point de la perfection) is a difficult one to pin down, perhaps easier to recognise than to define. And it certainly doesn’t depend on sheer numbers of performances or recordings. The symphonies of Mahler and Bruckner have earned their place in the repertoire, at least for now, but who knows what the future may hold?

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