Bartok & Mahler

In 1907, Gustav Mahler received a death sentence. Although mortality had already permeated the composer's household (Mahler's beloved daughter died of scarlet fever a year before), his family was not destined to hang up their mourning garb quite yet. Another death was imminent. During a routine doctor's examination, Mahler was diagnosed with a fatal heart defect. Confronted with his mortality, Mahler was consoled by a new vision--immortality. His heart, his body and his memory would erode. His music, however, would not. Mahler was set to compose his legacy. His ink was his effigy; his fear of death was his muse. And the fervor that inspired him was not that of a composer, but of a missionary. In his final pieces, Mahler leads us through the landscape that is explored by a dying man--the denuded landscape of his own soul.

Although it is not easy for performers to capture Mahler's spirit in any of his compositions, his final pieces are especially challenging. Mahler's repertoire requires spiritual empathy as well as technical delicacy. A conductor must look at life and try to see what Mahler saw--a combination of fear, ennui and child-like wonder. Unsurprisingly, an exquisite performance of Mahler is moving--but rare. And so, when conductor Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (B.S.O.) performed one of Mahler's final (and arguably, most perfect) pieces, the vocal accompanied Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), they achieved two feats. Not only did the BSO lead us to Mahler's own spiritual crossroad--the dark hinterland that lingers between life and death--but it managed to affirm its reputation as one of America's greatest symphonies.

The BSO thrives under something rare in the classical music world--a long-reigning conductor. In his 26th year as music director, Seiji Ozawa is currently the world's longest serving conductor of any major orchestra. With Ozawa at its helm, the BSO attains a balance that might seem impossible for other contemporary symphonies--a balance between high sales in tickets and high quality in programming. The process of choosing a repertoire can be as political as it is musical, an inimical intersection between the vision of a governing board concerned with fund raising and a conductor concerned with musical integrity. But Ozawa's long tenure offers some relief--and a certain degree of autonomy. When the spry conductor leapt onto stage, the applause he received was as breathless as for a rock star. This applause was not of adulation. It was of respect. Ozawa does not need to choose a repertoire filled with the lite classical music that we hear in television commercials and Au Bon Pain's front foyer. His allegiance is not to music that is popular, but to music that is earth-shattering. And indeed, the BSO's last concert, featuring Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde and Bela Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin, might have been earth-shattering enough to crack fault lines into Symphony Hall.

Expanding on the theme of mortality, the concert opened with Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin, Bartok's own exploration of life and death. This one act opus was more of a pantomime than a musical suite. In fact, it was almost a miniature play. While there were no actors, no costumes, no sets, there was one staple of drama--an unmistakable storyline. Ozawa took the role of the narrator and the instruments assumed the voices of characters. The Miraculous Mandarin's format was vaguely reminiscent of the children's symphony, Peter and the Wolf. Its plot, however, was drastically different. The Miraculous Mandarin unravelled in the salacious milieu of a brothel bedroom, where a young prostitute, working in tandem with three ruffians, would lure and rob her customers. The ruffians were depicted with a chromatic viola sequence that sounded as shifty as their characters. The girl attracted her victims with the sound of a solo clarinet that was as seductive as sad. And their story climaxed when they attacked a victim who did not die easily.

Ostensibly, the opus was not uplifting. But it was rivetting. No one dared to flip a program during The Miraculous Mandarin. The tension mounted to such an unbearable degree that at the end of the piece, the audience collectively exhaled and all of Symphony Hall leaned back from the edge of their seats. It would be foolish to glean any message about death and dying from a pantomime. And yet, paradoxically, this is what the opus' power derived from. An audience could not help but be mesmerized when the tawdry relation between a prostitute and her customer explored the interface of life, death and compassion.

The highlight of the concert, however, came after intermission with the performance of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, his adaptation of Hans Bethge's collection of translated poems The Chinese Flute. At this point, Ozawa was not only conducting the BSO, but also two singers, Ben Heppner and Thomas Quastoff, who rounded out the tenor and bass-baritone voice parts. The work was divided into five parts that explored a different facet of Mahler's self-contemplation. In the first piece, known as the "drinking song," a man laments that "Dark is life, dark is death" and copes by losing himself in drink. The second piece, "The Solitary in Autumn," was hardly more sanguine; the singer moaned "I weep in my loneliness; autumn stays too long in my heart." But the piece was not all despairing. "Of Youth" extolled friendship, while "Of Beauty" explored aesthetic unity in nature. Although each song seemed discrete, each number was enmeshed under one unifying rubric--Mahler's attempt to come to terms with his incipient death.

With acute sensitivity, Ozawa used the work of these two composers to probe mortality. But the concert he put together was not as morbid and ponderous as such subject matter might suggest. Rather, with artistic mastery, Ozawa performed a concert about death that, surprisingly, left us unambiguously joyful about life.