GreygirlGarden: Mahler in Manchester

The Fifth Symphony at Bridgewater Hall

This is personal and not written by someone educated in classical music etc who is an 'authority'.

I am no expert, but I am a Mahlerite. That sounds like some sort of precious stone, (I'm not one of them either).

On Friday the 12th October I ventured from the garden to the metropolis. I had forgotten how Manchester looks and feels at night. The Bridgewater Hall was a bright glassy light attracting moths from the dark. Lots of moths.

You know it's Mahler when you see the stage is full of instruments, music stands and chairs. The double bass players are having to make do with office-type ones tonight.

All available space is taken up with violins, violas, cellos, double basses, a huge gold harp, an impressive and exciting array of weird percussion and a large brass section.

Your only hope is that they have left a narrow pathway for the conductor.

a drawing of Mahler conducting

There are some extreme mood swings in the Fifth, some have called it 'schizophrenic' but 'manic-depressive' might be more appropriate, since many of Mahler's friends and colleagues saw in his behaviour the shift in mood typical of the condition.

Psychologists suggest that the over-elated manic phase is a deliberate attempt by the mind to escape from unbearable thoughts or situations. Mahler had plenty of both.

In a letter to his wife Alma while he was preparing for the Fifth Symphony's premiere Mahler revealed his doubts about how it might be received. He described the Scherzo as an 'accursed movement' and wondered what the audience would make of

"...these primeval noises, this rushing, roaring, raging sea, these dancing stars...".

The Scherzo bursts onto the scene after the second movement in a kind of frenetic, mad waltz. After this comes a massive change of mood in the Adagietto.

Alma Mahler

Ah...the Adagietto

This is the piece of Mahler's music that most people have heard. It features heavily in Visconti's film 'Death in Venice'. It was played at JFK's funeral. It was one of the most requested pieces of music to radio stations in America after 9/11.

There is something shockingly true about the Adagietto balanced between the strings and harp, violins and cellos. Between the high strings of consolation and the deep resonance of loss. It

spirals down as well as soaring and your heart goes with it, up into the ether and down to the darkest depths. As Tomas Transtromer wrote, "happiness and sadness weigh exactly the same".

We are not one thing or the other, given a happy or sad disposition at birth, more a complex layering of our own stories and memories that create a landscape unique to us.

Mahler insisted passionately that "the symphony should be like the world - it must embrace everything!".

During the Adagietto you are taken to the interior of your self and transported outside it, into a vast exterior world. Both these inner and outer spaces feel limitless.

It is a strange thing to experience in a huge half-lit hall with hundreds of people, all of them quietly listening, some with eyes closed.

Your heart melts, but it also strains and breaks.

While writing this love letter, this 'song without words' to his wife Mahler is at the same time saying 'I am lost to the world'.