"Photo: Courtesy of 'Música en México' 2021"
By HRJ
On May 18, 111 years ago died Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), who took the tonal system to its ultimate consequences and left music on the threshold of ambiguity. took the tonal system to its ultimate consequences and left music on the threshold of ambiguity, from where the new forms of sound articulation that marked the course of this art during the twentieth century were possible.
"What will I find in Mahler's music?"
What is new in Mahler's repertoire is not the language, which is based on the languages coined and developed during nineteenth-century romanticism, but the approach: to make the symphonic fact an all-encompassing and all-containing world.
The measure of this totality is the heart of Mahler himself, who always advanced, intrepid, tireless, in search of the eternal answers: why daily suffering, what will we find after death?
The whole of his work is an epic narration of his mystical and sensual adventures around these two questions.
"What does Mahler's music sound like?"
Despite being expressed through a large orchestra, Mahler's music has a chamber texture:
No clear melodic references are usually found in his work; the tonal system is taken to its ultimate consequences, split, disjointed from its own rules, on the verge of ambiguity, at the service of the brilliant and moving inconsistency of a dual man who was always torn, to quote Leonard Bernstein, one of Mahler's greatest exponents, between "the composer and the conductor, sophistication and innocence, German blood and Bohemian, Christian and Jewish beliefs, Western tradition and Eastern vision, symphonic disposition and operatic nature, large orchestra and chamber music, tragic sense and childlike joy".
"To what historical context does Mahler's music belong?"
Gustav Mahler lived during the crisis of European civilization that eventually led to World War I, a time of great instability when two discoveries that transformed the spiritual life of human beings emerged: the theory of relativity and psychoanalysis.
The universe and the soul ceased to be safe places: everything that was known about them turned out to be a lie. Suddenly, the same things were no longer the same things; and men were left defenseless before the confusion and fear of inhabiting a world that revealed itself to be different, unknown, alien.
In its eagerness to express this new reality, art destroyed conventionalisms and undertook radical quests to find new expressive forms.
Musically, this revolution meant the fading of the aesthetic ideas raised by nineteenth-century romanticism and the emergence of a 12-note system (the traditional one was eight) that allowed ambiguous sound constructions whose coherence evaded the melody to serve more complex formulas.
Despite its violence, this transformation was not entirely a rupture. Between the last melodics and the first moderns, Gustav Mahler extends like a subtle and enigmatic link, through which Robert Schumann (1810-1856) advances to Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951), finding coincidences along the way, and where Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) goes back to Franz Liszt (1811-1886), fully understanding each symbol of his journey.
Mahler took the tonal system to its ultimate consequences; he broke the rules that for 300 years had imposed its inflexible system and left music on the threshold of ambiguity, from where the new forms of sound articulation that marked the course of this art during the twentieth century were possible.
"What do you recommend I listen to by Mahler?"
Symphony no. 1, Titanby Gustav Mahler, written between 1884 and 1888, and published in 1889.
You can listen to it in this live version by the Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería under the direction of Carlos Miguel Prieto performed during the 2010-2011 season, together with his entire orchestral production, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Mahler's death.
"As a bonus, we're sharing a 'Musical Moment' in which Juan Arturo Brennan explains to us
"What inspired Mahler to finish his Symphony No. 2?"
