Gustav Mahler | Blumine, “Adagio” from Symphony No. 10, and selections from Lieder und Gesänge and Des Knaben Wunderhorn / 2025

a trip into mahler’s mind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gustav Mahler Blumine, “Adagio” from Symphony No. 10, and selections from Lieder und Gesänge and Des Knaben Wunderhorn / Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel / 2025 | the concert Howard Fox and I attended was on February 23, 2025

 

Yesterday afternoon Howard and I were fortunate to be able attend a concert of the work of Gustav Mahler, conducted by the great maestro Gustavo Dudamel at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

     It began with a “stranded” masterwork Blumine, torn out of his First Symphony, that yet, in its absolute luminous use of strings and subtle clarinets and brass creates very much what Orin Howard describes as a “piece of shimmery poetic restraint,” centered around a romantic sense of sexual expectation and resistance that Richard Wagner might surely have appreciated. The “flower,” the substance of this work, blooms so slowly and imperceptibly that we almost lose our breath as it comes into its final orchestral existence. This is the true substance of longing and desire that cannot utterly be fulfilled.

     And the wonderful Los Angeles Philharmonic performed it a manner that almost literally took our breaths away, particularly given the vertiginous view in which Howard Fox and I sat—probably in the very seats we shared in our very first visit to the concert hall many years ago with its architectural creator Frank Gehry as a member of our party. I am sorry to report that I do suffer, very slightly, from vertigo, and to watch the performance from this height literally did make me gasp for breath: perfect for the work of such endless anticipation.

     The second performance, the “Adagio” from Mahler’s Symphony No. 10, was just as breathtaking. But in this case the anticipation was in how all the strings, the rows of violins, violas, cellos, and woodwind instrumentalists stirring up our emotional tethers which we hoped might be mitigated by the rows of trombonists, tuba players, and bassoonists. This is truly a kind of Wagner-like exploration, expressing the situation when Mahler, whose wife Alma had begun an affair with the great architect Walter Gropius, himself fell into a deep Freudian frenzy of unrequited passion, ending in a kind of mental breakdown; even his manuscript was covered over with statements such as “Madness, seize me, the accursed! Negate me, so I forget that I exist, that I may cease to be!”

     Critics of the time thought the work to be that of a deranged man, a genius suffering a total mental collapse, the territory perhaps of Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice. Yet the brass finally do arrive to save the day, resolving the sexual frustrations, even if only briefly, allowing us a final relief in the brief bombast of their voices. Even as the violins and cellos flutter to the end, the purgation of the sexual intensity of this truly sexual masterwork is resolved by a slow putter of the trombones and tuba.

      The second half of the concert was devoted to a selection of Mahler’s Lieder und Gesänge and his Des Knaben Wunderhorn, based on the poems and songs of Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, which despite the wonderful performances of singers Ekaterina Gubanova and Simon Keenlyside, just didn’t quite do it for me. They too were almost breathless evocations of boys, women, and goats that, in Mahler’s truly theatrical style, often made us wonder about the folkloric events. But lieder has never been my favorite form. Perhaps you need to be German to truly enjoy the genre; but tales of throwing a ring into the river to find the woman of one’s dreams, a dialogue about a mother and her starving child (with reminisces of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage), and a cry out to heaven to seek the celestial touches of a lost boy just don’t do it for me. 

     The last, as commentator Howard Posner explains, became the theme of Mahler’s fourth movement to his Second Symphony, which might be sublime but seems, in the context, simply overdramatic, one of my problems with many of the great composer's works, and which possibly also explains his later lack of early 20th-century musical recognition. Given the beauty of his music that wasn’t, of course, deserved.

     And Dudamel and his now renowned Los Angeles Philharmonic do simply take one musically speaking into new dimensions that make you feel utterly dizzy with pleasure.

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2025

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (February 2025).