Berliner Philharmoniker,
conducted by Simon Rattle.
Carnegie Hall, New York,
November 9–10, 2016.
On the day after America went to the ballot box, the Berlin Philharmonic played the first of its two fall concerts at Carnegie Hall. Like everybody I know, I could barely get out of bed that morning; I was so shaky I had to replace my usual breakfast coffee with cupfuls of milky, sugary tea to alleviate the symptoms of shock. Activity of any kind seemed pointless. But I had resolved, ever since first hearing them in Berlin in 2003, never to miss an available performance by this incredible orchestra, so I went ahead and used the precious tickets I’d obtained months earlier.
Not everyone made the same decision. There were empty orchestra seats right next to me, for instance, and I spotted another pair across the aisle, even though the concert had been sold out for weeks. I don’t mean to criticize those who stayed home to mourn, or sleep, or drink themselves senseless. The program—Mahler prefaced by Boulez—would not have struck most Carnegie-goers as ideal consolation; it is not, in fact, the music I would necessarily have chosen myself, if I were aiming only for comfort. But I have learned, over the years, to follow Simon Rattle wherever he takes me, trusting that his choices will always be to my ultimate benefit.
I do not like to think of music (or any art, for that matter) as therapy. Something more complicated than reassurance or cure is involved in the transaction between creator and receiver, and in any case that transaction results in a third entity—the artwork—that is finally beyond the reach of either participating psyche. Whatever Mahler’s problems were during his lifetime, and whatever ours are at this moment of history, the Seventh Symphony stands apart as something that is inalterably there. The piece itself is not inalterable, for its qualities and effects can vary enormously, depending on who is playing it. But it is always a monument, always huge; and in the hands of the Berlin Philharmonic, it was monumentally and hugely thrilling.
First, though, they gave us a ten-minute piece called “Éclat” that Pierre Boulez wrote in 1965, sixty years after Mahler completed the Seventh. This weirdly orchestrated composition (which included, among other things, a guitar, a mandolin, a glockenspiel, a vibraphone, a cimbalom, and other instruments rarely heard on a symphonic stage) was so brief that the audience didn’t have time to set up the usual coughing competition it resorts to when confronted by dissonant music. The Boulez was “an amuse-bouche,” as the friend sitting next to me put it, and, like the best of its kind, it subtly introduced the rest of the meal. We didn’t need program notes to sense that “Éclat” was Boulez’s version of a late Mahler symphony: a somewhat crazy surprise that was meant to shock his 1960s listeners as much as the Seventh, say, had disturbed its initial audiences. Rattle was reminding us—lest we be tempted to apathetically appreciate the Mahler—that great music is by its nature revolutionary in its own time.
The delights of this particular Mahler symphony are, to my ear, still a bit discomforting. It’s not just the cowbells, the loud percussion, the unusually heavy reliance on bass notes, and all the other oddities of Mahler’s instrumentation. It’s the unpredictable pacing of the thing. The Seventh is so wildly various that we never know where we are. Long stretches of near-silence and Wagnerian atmospherics are followed by violent explosions of sound that practically jolt us out of our seats. A melody that starts in one direction seems to shift mid-stream to another; a rhythm we thought we could follow disappears two measures later, only to be replaced by a completely different one. We are constantly being wrongfooted by the music, as if to prevent us from lapsing into obliviousness. Often, listening to Mahler, I find myself feeling oxygen-deprived because I have neglected to breathe regularly. The music takes one over, inhabits one’s body, until both of them—the music and the body—arrive poundingly together at the end. It is not always a pleasant sensation, but on November 9 it felt necessary and true.
By Thursday the 10th New Yorkers had apparently recovered enough to claim their seats at Carnegie Hall, and the second concert was performed to a packed house. This program was even more pointedly eccentric than the previous night’s. It began with three pieces by, respectively, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, and then moved after the intermission to Brahms’s Second. The Brahms was what drew me (no one plays him as beautifully as the Berlin Philharmonic, whose recording of the four symphonies I own and listen to all the time), and the Brahms was indeed miraculous, reminding me of why it’s always worth coming out to a live performance of a beloved work. This delicately modulated but nonetheless overpowering performance was an unmitigated, unearned joy: the best kind of balm for sore hearts.
And yet it was in the first half of the program that I gleaned the most unexpected reward. Before the first note was played, Rattle announced that the orchestra, after rehearsing these three early-twentieth-century works—Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, and Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra—had decided they sounded best played sequentially, without any kind of break in between. He enjoined us, therefore, to hold our applause until the very end, a request which nicely echoed the rules at Schoenberg’s own musical salon, where applause was always forbidden. (So, by the way, were critics.) Rattle concluded his little speech by urging us to think of this hour-long amalgamation as a fourteen-movement symphony in itself, perhaps Gustav Mahler’s unwritten Eleventh or Twelfth. He had already alluded to the fact that all three modernists tremendously admired Mahler, and it was clear he viewed this Thursday performance as a pendant to Wednesday’s rendering of the Seventh.
But it was another Mahler symphony performed under Rattle’s baton—the Sixth, which he had done with the Philadelphia Orchestra a month earlier, also at Carnegie—that I thought of in the closing moments of the trio. The Schoenberg and the Webern were excellently played, and even though I didn’t know those compositions beforehand, I could hear both the affinities and the break in style between them. But it was the Alban Berg piece, with its loving gestures toward the romantic past and its simultaneous resistance to that past, which really won my heart. My allegiance was sealed at the moment when a gigantic mallet, like a cartoonishly large version of a child’s wooden hammer, came into play at the very end. I had seen that mallet before, on October 10 in that very hall, when it was used at a key moment in Mahler’s Sixth. I remembered watching it then, waiting for it to fall, just as I was now doing in the Berg. And the feeling that came to me then was like the moment when you realize that a tiny detail planted by the writers early in the first season of The Wire has finally come to fruition toward the end of the fourth season, years and episodes later. It was an assurance that someone had planned it all out, guiding our experience, rewarding our close attention, and including us, the audience, in the process of narrative revelation. I felt as if Simon Rattle had held out his hand to me, a hand that was also Mahler’s hand, Berg’s hand; and I reached back and gratefully took it.
Wendy Lesser’s You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn is out this March from Farrar Straus and Giroux. She is the founding and current editor of The Threepenny Review.
