We’re doing Mahler 7 this week, and I’m dazed and confused. I just can’t get my head and heart around this tough nut. I hadn’t even listened to the piece via recording all the way through until a couple weeks ago, as I was getting ready to do it. I’d heard a live performance in College Park, Maryland back in 1990 by the Toronto Symphony with Gunther Herbig and it didn’t make much of an impression on me then, as I remember. I don’t know why this is. I love nos. 1-6 and 9, but 7 and 8 leave me cold for some reason. Even the sprawling first movement of no. 3, almost a half an hour long, seems to hold more magic for me than the equally long corresponding movement of no. 7. It’s almost as though Mahler is trying out some new techniques which he abandons after the 8th is in the hopper. I’m reminded just a bit of Beethoven’s late quartets, with their episodic tendancies and emphasis on thematic development over overt melody. The logic seems more cogent in the Beethoven works, however, and the Mahler just seems to lose its way in almost every movement except the dark Scherzo. Ah, well – time to get a good book and relax. Only three more times for Mahler 7 and the end of my season.
UPDATE: My wife came to the concert on Monday night, and she’s a fabulous musician with one of the best ears I know, and a great lover of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. She said that she’s always seen it as a titanic battle between darkness and light, and that that is what dictates the necessarily schizoid structure. After our final performance in Salem last night, I’m leaning in the direction of her assessment, and coming to like the piece more and more.