Spotlight Mahler: The Sixth Symphony

“To perform Mahler in a kitschy way – this wave is now over. I’ve waited this long to take Mahler into my repertoire. Now I present my view of him.”

Karajan’s commitment to Mahler’s symphonies concentrated on the numbers 4,5,6 and 9 and on the years 1973 – 1982. Karajan started with the Fifth and ended with the Ninth. The Sixth was only in his repertoire for five years. Between 1977 and 1982 he conducted it 13 times, more than the other symphonies. Obviously, the Sixth was one of the pieces that exhausted Karajan emotionally more than the rest of his vast repertoire – other works with a similar effect were Strauss’ “Elektra”, Berg’s Orchestral Pieces op. 6 and Sibelius’ Fourth. Karajan pointed to another similarity between Mahler’s Sixth and Sibelius’ Fourth: “The Fourth Symphony for me is always a milestone, and very difficult. lt is one of the few symphonies – like Brahms’s Fourth and Mahler’s Sixth – that ends in complete disaster.” It is certainly no coincidence that the respective works were all written in the decade before World War I – “Elektra” (1909), Berg (1913/14), Sibelius (1911), Mahler’s Sixth (1903/04) – and Karajan had no doubt that these works share a visionary quality: “The collapse of a culture and the foresight of everything that was coming is here, certainly. But it has always been the privilege of the genius to know these things before other men.” And more specific:

“The Sixth is for me one of the greatest symphonies – and so seldom played in the past! There we have complete catastrophe.”

Karajan’s biographers have pointed out that the Sixth with its “classical” four-movement structure reminiscent of Bruckner’s symphonies may for that reason have had an additional appeal for Karajan. He told Richard Osborne why he waited so long to do Mahler and why he developed his interpretations of them exclusively worked with the Berlin Philharmonic: “I spent three years in Vienna as a student. We heard this music – Mahler, Webern, Schoenberg – a great deal; it was our daily bread. Then the war came and after the war the concert-managers offered me a chance to do all the Mahler symphonies. I asked them, ‘How much rehearsal do I get?’ ‘Two rehearsals for each concert.’ I said, ‘Gentlemen, please forget it.’ Mahler is very difficult for an orchestra. First, you must, as a painter would say, make your palette. But the difficulty is great, and the greatest danger is that if it is not well performed the music can seem banal.”
Karajan’s decision to take his time for a composer he thought to be extraordinarily complicated paid off. As Gramophone put it: “Karajan’s classic Sixth confirmed his belated arrival as a major Mahler interpreter.”

—  P.R. Jenkins