The sound of those days: Mahler’s Fourth in Bolzano

In Gustav Mahler’s works, a vision of humanity, the world around him and the transcendent weaves its way through the notes – at times barely sketched out and almost concealed, at others made explicit through the use of the voice in the symphony. A prophetic vision, which takes shape thanks to his talent as an orchestrator and a knowledge of instruments that extends to a meticulous search for the right timbre. “When I want to produce a soft, restrained note,” says the composer, “I do not entrust it to an instrument that can play it easily, but to one that does so with great effort, often pushing beyond its natural limits. For me, the basses and the bassoon must often squeak on the high notes, whilst the flute blows deeply in the low register.”

Building on this idea, the Mahler Academy Orchestra, an ensemble conducted by Philipp von Steinaecker, is continuing the Originalklang Project, which arose from a collaboration between the Busoni-Mahler Foundation in Bolzano and the Euregio Cultural Centre Foundation in Dobbiaco. In the Mahler Academy Orchestra, the 50 students from the academy perform alongside 50 professional musicians from prestigious European ensembles, such as the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Wiener Symphoniker, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Orchestre de Paris. Together they have recorded Symphony No. 9, involving musicologists and instrument makers engaged in the reconstruction of instruments used at the Vienna Court Opera around 1910, such as the Viennese oboe, wooden flutes, the Viennese tuba, timpani, gut strings and wooden mutes. This research into materials subsequently extended to musical technique: the way of holding the bow, phrasing, and pressing the finger against the strings – all to ensure a performance practice consistent with the customs of the period, as advocated by Clive Brown, one of the leading scholars of Romantic performance practice.

The project brings this year’s packed programme of the Bolzano Festival Bozen to a close with Janáček’s Mládí and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, conducted by Steinaecker himself, featuring soprano Johanna Wallroth (tonight at the Teatro Comunale in Bolzano). Reflecting on his work over recent years, von Steinaecker makes no secret of his amazement at a score rediscovered in its original sound: music never heard before, which surprises with the vivid presence of the woodwinds, the piercing ring – ‘which cuts to the bone’, as the conductor puts it – the warmth of the strings and the rediscovery of an ancient beauty, at times harsh, which modern instruments cannot reproduce. Even more interesting is the case of the Fourth: a score lightened by the absence of trombones and bass tuba, the most restrained instrumentation of the entire cycle. The style of composition is simple, even childlike – the finale is ‘Das himmlische Leben’, paradise seen through the eyes of a child – drawing on certain eighteenth-century stylistic elements, including in its four-movement structure, each of which develops a symphonic ‘topos’ in its own way: the sonata form, the scherzo, the variation and the Lied.

One is left to wonder, however, what exactly is being presented to the public. The musicologist Richard Taruskin, with his characteristic boldness, argued that philological performance did not bring anything back: it was simply the most modern style we have, disguised as the distant past. John Butt, returning to the issue years later, saw it instead as a legitimate dialogue with the past, which is valuable precisely because it is an avowedly contemporary gesture. It is difficult to determine which of the two is correct. Perhaps listening to Mahler as he was heard in 1900 simply responds to a contemporary need of our own, rather than settling a debt to him.