Mahler - Symphony nr. 7

Mahler cast a magic spell over me with his Seventh! In fact, I'm not alone. Ever since we went to that concert last Thursday at Bozar, Ann and I have had this music obsessively pounding in our heads. And if there is a momentary lull, we hum or whistle a theme to one another and we're hooked again for a few hours or days, who knows!  But it doesn't wear me out. To the contrary, the music stays fresh and alive.

Today I listened to Gielen's version in full and it is a wonderful rendering indeed. Very special. It seems as if Gielen has found a way to let this complicated and fractured musical process unfold in some sort of hyperdimensional space. Whilst most of his colleagues either get bogged down in the symphony's labyrinthine structures (Sinopoli), or happily dismiss the complexities in a rollercoaster ride (Solti; the live version we heard) or - sometimes very capably - illuminate predominantly one of this work's hidden strata (say, Scherchen, the expressionist; or Abbado, the romantic), Gielen conjures a particularly multifarious 'musicscape'.

There is no 'story' here. This is absolute music indeed, in all its glittering splendour and baffling intricacy. Gielen plays on significant variety in tempo, a very lean orchestral sound, analytic clarity in the work's rhizomatic voices and painstaking attention to minute shifts in expressive registers. His approach doesn't strike me as particularly 'modernist'. It's more-dimensional than that. Gielen weaves a rich tapestry of different layers here. There is the explicit historicism that pervades this whole symphony (the references to Strauss waltzes, the baroque figurations, the serenade character of the Nachtmusiken, the rondo template of the finale). Then Mahler doubles up this historicism in his backward glance to the Wunderhorn years, not only in the brooding references to the first movement of the Third but also in the authentically Bohemian sounding first Nachtmusik, transporting us back to the First Symphony, in the manner of Callot indeed! But then these wistful or ironic figurations are counterbalanced by a radical expressionism, expertly suggested by Gielen in a truly 'schattenhaft' scherzo that, paradoxically, in its lightness of touch prophesies the abstract, shattered but still monumental visions of expressionist painters such as Feininger or Jawlensky. Richard Strauss compartmentalised psychedelic rage and regretful nostalgia in two consecutive works, his Elektra (1908) and Rosenkavalier (1910), respectively. Mahler simply brings those two worlds together within the confines of the same work. The second Nachtmusik is a serenade, a 'Ständchen' with some genuinely warmhearted lyricism, crisscrossed with nightmarish overtones. A 'Siegfried Idyll' running amok! The finale, often so depressingly overblown and disjointed, really comes to life here. More than once I wondered what I was listening to, so disorientingly fleeting are the perspectives offered. It's kaleidoscopic and coherent at the same time: a most satisfying and genuinely symphonic end to this unsettling work.


All this is a most unsatisfactory rendering of what is in effect a most intricate musical process. I'm experiencing it as absolute music but I have to resort to hapless similes to reveal something of that experience. When I listen I am not resorting to narratives to keep track of the unfolding process, but it's an almost holographic experience that appeals to an inner eye for structure and space, and an inner sense for shifts in texture. It's like experiencing a medium of fantastically differentiated viscosities, like feeling the swoosh of a trapdoor suddenly opening under your feet, the dizzyness of constantly shifting perspectives. It involves horizontality and verticality, sequentiality and mirroring, stasis and dynamism, body and mind. That's what a Mahler Seventh in the right hands can do.