Over the years, I had many disagreements with Tony Duggan over the value of many newer recordings. Mr. Duggan seemed to be stuck in a Barbirolli/Horenstein mode, while I was wanting to move on. These disagreements had, at times, become rather heated when I had on more than one occasion, caught Mr. Duggan having not really listened to a recording he had either reviewed, or had some strong opinion about. This is not a matter of sour grapes - I'm being both candid and truthful. However, I'm delighted to have stumbled upon this page, where Mr. Duggan and I see nearly eye to eye on the deeper meaning of Mahler's 6th symphony - a symphony that I think deserves the title 'apocalyptic' more than just "tragic". Here's Mr. Duggan . . .
"In the years that have followed, those words have stayed with me each time I have heard the work in recordings familiar from that first survey and in recordings that have appeared since. That feeling of "work in progress" with regards to both how we listeners respond to this work and how conductors interpret it never seemed more appropriate on each occasion. It has caused me in this present revision to therefore submit each recording I dealt with last time to an even fresher and even longer analysis than in the revisions that have preceded this one, along with the necessity of taking in as many of the new and newly reissued recordings that have appeared since as possible. To an extent I think I have hardened what firm conclusions I reached the first time as to how this symphony should be played. But the "work in progress" impression also remains.
In the Summer of 1904 the Sixth Symphony was emerging from Mahler’s composing hut. When life was very sweet he was mapping Downfall. Some would say his own, others that of an "Everyman", maybe it was both. Alma Mahler said: "Not one of his works came as directly from his innermost heart as this. We both wept that day. The music and what it foretold touched us deeply. ..." Yet the Sixth is formally the most classically conceived of them all; the first conventional, four movement, one key symphony he wrote. The first movement in particular sees classical form frame the drama with exposition and repeat, development, recapitulation and coda. The second subject of the exposition an abandoned, soaring theme on violins meant as a musical portrait of Alma herself but, true to the work’s nature, swept aside by the march rhythms that cross and re-cross the symphony like successive generations of armies over the same battlefields. But this is creatively deceptive because there is no work of Mahler’s which is, by the end of it, more despairing and pessimistic. Alone among his symphonies, mirroring only his first major work "Das Klagende Lied", it ends in complete disaster after a last movement where Mahler seems to be dramatising in music humanity and its very condition. Our "hero" keeps pressing forward, imbued with optimism, only to be struck down three times by blows of fate amidst the battering of those march rhythms and a particularly nasty fate motif on timpani carried over from the first movement. For these "blows of fate" Mahler uses a hammer effect, the delivery of which has tested the skill of percussionists (and recording engineers) for years. The last blow of all, meant to bring in the requiem-like coda, was in the end deleted by Mahler, whether out of superstition or dramatic sense this is not the place to discuss. (Some conductors restore it against Mahler’s wishes.) Suffice it to say Mahler originally meant the whole work to have five hammer blows rather than three and that the final tally of two therefore came out of more sound musical judgements stretching back a lot further than people realise.
You will certainly hear the explanation, taken from Alma Mahler’s own account of their life together, that in this work Mahler "foresaw" his own fate. That in the year following the first performance of the work three "blows of fate" did visit him. Unless you believe Mahler had second sight this is a story that should be examined very carefully and treated with caution for all manner of reasons. That Mahler, like all great artists, could see beneath the surface of life and, in spite of his own present situation, appear to map the complete opposite is not in doubt. So see the Sixth as one of the great "human condition" works of the twentieth century, prepare to be rocked, and you will be on the right lines.
It has always seemed to me appropriate that the work’s 1906 premiere took place in Essen, the cradle of German heavy industry. All those driving, relentless, militaristic rhythms, mechanistic percussion and harsh-edged contrasts that permeate so much of this work have always seemed, to me, to share kinship with the place where the work was first heard. Here were the foundries and factories that put the iron in The Iron Chancellor and built the guns that would spill the blood in his "blood and iron" when fired in World War One, the cultural pre-echo of whose cataclysm eight years later the work seems partly to illustrate. A case of Mahler the sensitive showing himself in tune with his times, I think. So I believe this symphony is, first and foremost, a twentieth century work Perhaps the first twentieth century symphony. It breathes as much the same air as Krupp as it does Freud, and its concerns are those of our time because so much of our time was formed in the furnaces of Essen as in the consulting rooms of Vienna. The work's classical structure also implies the same creative detachment crucially demanded by classical tragedy and I believe any performance that’s going to make us appreciate the Sixth’s Modernism has to take this into account too, strip Mahler bare of nineteenth century sonorities and folk memories, contrast the sound of the Fifth Symphony and project, as though on a bright stage, a bitter, unforgiving elegy that opens out the tragedy into something universal, held at one remove to reinforce the tragedy’s universality and confirm its contemporary relevance. I feel so strongly this is the right path the work should take that I’m prepared to court the approbation of Mahlerian comrades-in-arms and rule out versions that try to personalise this music, in the end treat it as an excuse by the conductor for romantic excess and the kind of mannered intervention it might seem to court and which many seem ready to indulge. So I’ve found the survey for this symphony the most difficult to "call" of them all and am aware I’ve cut a swathe through the list to do so. No Bernstein or Tennstedt recordings here, for example. Both men recorded the work twice (studio and "live") but both, for me, turn Tragedy into Melodrama too often by much intervention of their own personalities in mannerisms of emphasis of phrasing and colouring and tempo. Wonderful as "one-off" experiences in the concert hall, I have no doubt, but for repeated listening the creative detachment that I prefer and believe more appropriate for the work makes for a more surer guide over time. Many will disagree, of course. Many will continue to find my passing-over of Bernstein especially in this score worrying. But if you read what I have to say about this work in general you will see why I find Bernstein’s hands-on melodrama one step too far. Both of his versions are excellent in their own way and given a choice of him in the work I prefer the alert and spiky sound quality as well as the pioneering spirit of his first recording made in New York available on Sony. But I must in the end go with my beliefs about this work and remain convinced that for us to get closer to the full implications of the Sixth we must turn elsewhere and to a handful of conductors that seem to take, to a greater or lesser extent, the more circumspect, classical, symphonically-aware approach outlined above. It will mean my calling up a version or two which are hard to find, but I defend that because I believe this great masterpiece demands only the best from the recording companies."
I certainly could not have said any of this better myself. I even agree with his point on Tennstedt and Bernstein in regards to this particular symphony.
