This will be a long article, necessitated by the number of points that need making and my desire to explore them seriously, in some detail, so I beg your indulgence in advance. Having listened carefully to four (so far) of Benjamin Zander’s recorded lectures about Mahler’s symphonies, I feel it’s time, as a public service, to discuss a phenomenon that has little precedent in the world of classical music today. Zander was, before launching himself through recordings as a Mahler specialist, best know for his work with the Boston Philharmonic, an enthusiastic semi-professional orchestra with which he has made a few noteworthy and sometimes provocative CDs (a very exciting Rite of Spring, for example), and as the music director of which he has demonstrated a very important fact: that playing standards today are so high that the best trained community orchestras can sometimes outperform even professional groups. For this he deserves much credit, as also for his educational activities in the Boston area, which have given him a loyal and well-deserved following.
An excellent public speaker (he also runs a series of personal growth seminars that provide a ready-made market for his CDs) with a charismatic personality, Zander’s reputation rests as much on what he says about music as on his conducting of it, and it is here that the problems start. Over the years he has become something of a cult figure, a fact which would not be bad (for him at least) save for the point that his lectures, as evidenced by his series of Mahler symphony recordings for Telarc, have become less and less about the real experience of the music from the listener’s perspective, and increasingly about Zander’s own importance as an interpreter of it. In other words, there are two Zanders at work: one a brilliant lecturer and advocate for classical music, the other a narcissistic self-promoter anxious to preach his own particular gospel of musical truth. As Telarc has seen fit to give him a worldwide reach, it’s time that someone asked the reasonable question: Who do these talks best serve, Zander’s audience, or himself?
Zander’s first discussion for Telarc, of Mahler’s Ninth, focused largely on technical aspects of the conductor’s role in interpreting the music. Some of it was a tad self-aggrandizing in tone (What conductor isn’t?), but aided by detailed examples taken from his personal copy of the score, he did at least encourage the listener to consider the music carefully. His analysis of the symphony’s opening bars, for example, was compelling. This was also his best Mahler performance. Later releases of the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies were less successful, even as his discussions became longer, less musically focused, and more sweeping in their grandiose celebration of the perspicacity of the conductor/lecturer. In this latest effort, he makes statements and adduces facts so at odds with a real-life experience of the music that his motives seem, shall we say, less than pure. Mind you, I am not going to discuss here the actual performance to any great degree. That will be the subject of a regular review. Rather, let us instead consider Zander’s discussion of Mahler’s Sixth (which he pronounces “sikth”) on its own merits.
In the course of his very long lecture, Zander rehashes all of the usual arguments about the order of the inner movements, the question of two vs. three hammer blows, and other such ideas as though his personal solutions represent some sort of unique path to Mahlerian enlightenment. Never mind that every single musical point that he raises has been discussed previously, ad infinitum, by innumerable writers, researchers, and performers, and with particular thoroughness by Norman Del Mar in his excellent little book on the two published versions of Mahler’s Sixth. There’s no original insight or scholarship at work here. I can accept the view that newcomers may be hearing these arguments for the first time, but then another question arises: Do they really need to, in order to understand the Sixth? Who is Zander helping by forcing the novice listener to delve into the arcane byways of Mahlerian debate? Does raising such issues make the music’s structure or meaning clearer?
Take, for example, Zander’s firm belief that the third hammer blow must be heard in the context of Mahler’s original orchestration (as opposed to adding it to the revised edition, as Bernstein, Solti, and Segerstam do). Anyone can look at the differences between the critical edition and Hans Redlich’s Eulenberg pocket score of the first published version, from which Zander gets these theoretically crucial seven bars. How curious then, that in the revised version the mezzo forte muted snare drum is more audible that the fortissimo, unmuted roll of the first version, and that the single timpanist hammering out the “fate” rhythm forte with wooden sticks (revised version) cuts through the texture more clearly than two players fortissimo (first version). Could it be that Mahler’s revisions, which typically eliminate some doublings in the winds, actually make the passage sound more powerful, and not less? Or is the problem simply Zander’s inattention to anything but the grossest, surface level “special effects” and dynamic contrasts?
Why, for instance, does he have the cellos, marked “sempre fortissimo” in the earlier score, play the same diminuendo as in the revised version? Actually, you can’t even hear Mahler’s first thoughts on the voicing of the a-minor “fate” chord with any clarity because the third hammer blow obscures its initial attack. I also defy anyone to detect the basses doubling the principal melody in the strings (after the hammer blow) in the first version. That tune gains intensity in the revision by having the cellos play in triple forte unison in their upper register rather than in octaves, and by leaving the basses out entirely. Only a single, rather silly sounding toot from the woodwinds reveals anything significantly different from what we might normally expect, so I suppose we should thank Zander for demonstrating the superiority of Mahler’s second thoughts. What’s so strange is that he doesn’t seem to want to hear these obvious, audible facts on his own recording, so much so that he has Telarc include two complete versions of the finale just because of these seven marginally different bars. A more cogent case of trying to make something out of nothing it would be difficult to imagine, and it’s even harder to believe that any sensitive listener will readily understand exactly what Zander claims he ought to be hearing, and why it matters.
If you really want to understand the folly of Zander’s obsession with hammer blows, take an analogous example from elsewhere in Mahler. At rehearsal figure 44 in the finale of Mahler’s First Symphony (the recapitulation of the second subject, just before the violas launch the coda), Mahler rescored the entire passage in his revised version, adding a cymbal crash, extra brass and winds, totally different dynamics—a much more radical treatment than in the corresponding example in the Sixth. But does anyone ever say that we need to hear two versions of the finale of the First Symphony, because one has a cymbal crash and the other doesn’t, or that the presence or absence of the “crash” (as opposed to the Sixth’s “thud”) significantly alters the meaning of the music? Or take another case in point: Does the expressive effect of the second Nachtmusik of Mahler’s Seventh undergo radical change because some performances have the mandolin player execute tremolos in different places and on different note values? All of Mahler’s symphonies underwent considerable revision, with countless details both large and small being altered and reconsidered, and none of these adjustments, considered individually, affects in any significant respect the substance of what Mahler was trying to express.
The bottom line is this: there is no musical evidence that Mahler removed the third hammer blow for any reason other than his complete overhaul of the orchestration of the Sixth Symphony. None. I can point to dozens upon dozens of pages in this work more heavily reorchestrated than the seven bars that Zander harps on. You can do it yourself by simply comparing the two published scores. The hammer blows are just noise: loud thuds. Zander himself notes that at the premiere Mahler used a regular bass drum to achieve them. Anyone who believes that the tragic “meaning” of Mahler’s Sixth is altered in any specifically musical way by the inclusion or exclusion of that last thud understands nothing about this symphony. It’s a small detail, nothing more, insignificant in the face of the whole work, and Zander’s insistence that the listener view the hammer blows as the organizing principal of the entire finale fundamentally misstates what Mahler actually achieves there. Even Bernstein, a big advocate of hammer blow No. 3, admitted with characteristic frankness that he included it as much for numerological reasons (the mystical and religious significance of the number three) as for intrinsically musical ones. So Zander includes it too, and in the appended lecture talks (and talks, and talks) about how he arrived at this epochal choice, and in magnifying its significance makes matters progressively more obscure and confusing for his audience by gradually turning away from the music altogether. Witness the following example:
Zander claims that the third hammer blow represents the final, fatal stroke directed against the hero, who has at last achieved fulfillment in the immediately preceding climax. What? (I hear all knowledgeable Mahlerians cry.) Yes indeed, Zander actually maintains that the preceding tam-tam crash and horrific shriek announcing the return of the finale’s introduction does not represent a final collapse indicative of the tragic futility of the music’s heroic striving, but rather the fulfillment of the promise represented by the preceding chorale which, he claims, “resolves” at last. Not only does this view stand in flat opposition to every opinion or sentiment that I have ever seen uttered regarding this passage, it contradicts the plain sense of the music and Zander’s own analysis of it (particularly with regard to his description of the finale’s opening, which the passage in question here reproduces exactly). In support of his view, Zander necessarily downplays consideration of the music itself, noting instead that in various literary tragedies, the fatal blow often comes after the tragic hero believes he has achieved happiness. Perhaps true, but what matters here is not what happens in Sophocles or Shakespeare, but rather what occurs in Mahler’s Sixth, and this raises the interesting issue of why Zander finds it necessary to look beyond the music for support of his erroneous interpretive theories.
The answer lies in what has become the increasingly dual purpose behind these self-serving lectures in the first place, which is not so much to illuminate the music for the novice listener, but rather to validate Benjamin Zander as the guru with all of the answers. Making reference to a wide range of subjects–literary, musical, philosophical, or artistic–unrelated to the work under discussion as well as to the listener’s normal frame of reference is one sure way to assert one’s own intellectual superiority, even if that means obfuscating rather than simplifying the matter at hand. This is exactly what Zander does. He is the classic snake-oil salesman of county fairs past, the type that always wore spiffy suites and prefaced their names with the title “Dr.” They are basically harmless, often entertaining, charming, seemingly erudite, and adept at working a crowd. Zander, like any dealer in patent medicines, knows that in order to offer a fake cure, he must first convince his audience that they suffer from a fake illness. He accomplishes this in several additional ways to those just mentioned:
- Make plenty of meaningless, but vaguely impressive sounding statements about the Meaning of Art. For example, Zander begins his lecture with the following comments, interspersed with bits of music from the Sixth: “To be great, music doesn’t have to be beautiful ALL the time;” “The word ‘pretty’ will not cross your mind once during [the symphony’s] nearly 90 minute span;” “If you come to it with open ears, and an open mind, you may indeed come to love it.” Note that in between the melodramatic delivery and cheesy production values, Zander is already setting up his next straw man: an exaggerated notion of the work’s difficulty (in other words, defining the “illness” for which he has the “cure”).
He begins by asserting that the Sixth is the least popular, least frequently performed of all the Mahler symphonies–perhaps true several decades ago, but a patent falsehood now. The popularity issue is, of course, impossible to “prove” one way or the other but in terms of frequency of performance, the Sixth receives far more attention than the Eighth, and probably the Seventh too. It was offered several times in the past couple of seasons here in New York alone. It is the single Mahler symphony that, as a performer in community orchestras, I have personally played most frequently. Why? Because it is, in fact, among the easiest to perform well (not to mention the most fun). It has few exposed, chamber music-like passages, and plenty of work for each instrumental section playing as a unit. In short, it emphasizes collective rather than individual virtuosity, and this makes it less difficult for the player than Mahler’s more economically scored works. The Sixth has also been one of the most frequently recorded of the symphonies, at least recently, counting within the past few months alone, aside from Zander, new releases of discs by Ashkenazy, Gielen, Kubelik, Leinsdorf, and Tilson Thomas. I personally own at least 45 recordings of the work, including Zander’s own first version with his Boston Philharmonic, and can readily list about a dozen more. So much for the myth of the work’s unpopularity.
- A further way to make the music out to be especially difficult to listen to is to equate length with complexity, and exaggerate both using some carefully selected examples. For instance the epic finale, Zander notes, is fully as long as Brahms’ entire Third Symphony. Oh, really? Let’s examine this claim from a few different angles. Zander obviously selects the Third because it’s the shortest of Brahms’ symphonies. The First and Second Symphonies play for 45-50 minutes each, on average, the Fourth for around 40. So the comparison is skewed to begin with: Mahler’s longest purely instrumental finale versus Brahms’ tersest symphony. What is the point of that? The first movement of Brahms’ Violin Concerto can be longer than all of Mozart’s works in the same form. Does this make the Brahms excessively or uniquely complex or taxing for the listener?
But let’s stick to Zander’s comparison. Here are a few facts: Kondrashin takes 25 minutes for the Mahler, and 34 for the Brahms (no first movement exposition repeat). Karajan requires 30 minutes for Mahler, 33 for Brahms (without the repeat), Abbado takes 31 minutes for Mahler, 37+ for Brahms (with repeat); Haitink: 29+ minutes for Mahler, 39 for Brahms (with repeat); Szell: 29 minutes for Mahler, 34 for Brahms (no repeat). There are many recordings of the finale of the Sixth that last less than 30 minutes, but none of the Brahms, even without that repeat (which Zander, given his predilections, would himself probably never omit in performance and should surely be included in any estimate of running time). So purely on its own terms, Zander’s statement is inherently untrue. He’s exaggerating for the sake of the point, the point being how problematic this movement must be for you, the uninitiated CD purchaser.
Rather than emphasize the finale’s difficulty as a result of its length, Zander could just as easily have told us the truth: that this movement lasts about half and hour, and though large, this is still shorter than, say, many of Strauss’ single movement tone poems, such as Don Quixote, An Alpine Symphony, Symphonia Domestica, or Ein Heldenleben, none of which seem to pose “special” problems for the listener. It is, in fact, about the same length as Death and Transfiguration, Also Sprach Zarathustra, the adagio of Bruckner’s Eighth, Dvorak’s The Golden Spinning Wheel, and the first movement of Liszt’s Faust Symphony, among other reasonably well known pieces. It is exactly the same length as the first movement of Mahler’s own Ninth, and shorter than the first movement of the Third. Yes, it is longer than most classical symphonies, as Zander notes, but most classical symphonies are short, so what does that prove? Classical symphonies always appear on programs with several other pieces, so length of work does not equal length of concert
The truth is that a live performance featuring Mahler’s Sixth and no other work (the usual practice) will likely contain LESS music overall than a standard program sporting, say, a symphony, a concerto, and an overture, suite, or symphonic poem. That’s one of the reasons that Mahler symphonies have become so popular for orchestras on tour: you’ve got a full evening’s concert with less fuss and bother. And why should mere length alone be a “problem,” as Zander claims? Before going to see a movie do you say to yourself, “I can’t believe that it’s two hours long. Maybe I need to listen to a lecture first to help me understand it?” Of course not. All of this carping about timings may strike you as trivial (as in a sense it is, because Zander’s basic gambit involves magnifying the significance of points that are in fact trivial), but the real issue is this: in saying what he does, is Zander making the work easier for the listener to digest, or harder? The answer is, I should think, obvious.
- A further example of Zander’s tendency to exaggerate the music’s difficulty occurs in his discussion of the first movement’s first subject group, where he maintains that there are no “tunes,” just short “motives,” and then claims that in order to understand the music the listener ideally needs to “get” 11 of them into his head. Nonsense. The only thing the listener needs to recognize is the difference between the opening march music and the lyrical contrast of the “Alma” theme. If he recognizes the development of the various tunes and motives in further detail, well and good, but this comes naturally with repeated listening and is in any case made pellucid by the progress of the music itself. There’s no need to “memorize” anything with an abnormal degree of concentration, and no justification for asking the listener to view the music in such a fashion. It’s equally legitimate to regard the entire opening march passage as a single, long tune, and not an aggregation of little motives. I want to stress again that what matters here is not which view is “right”, since both are, but rather which actually proves more helpful to a listener coming fresh to the music.
- Then there’s the old “I’m a better listener than you and I’ll bet you can’t hear what I hear” challenge. We’ve already seen Zander use this ploy with the minimally audible and expressively irrelevant (at least as he conducts them) differences in orchestration in those seven bars encompassing the third hammer blow. But Zander also plays the game in another form, openly daring the listener to conclude that Mahler quotes Strauss’ Symphonia Domestica in the trio sections of the Sixth’s scherzo. Of course, Mahler knew the Strauss well, conducting its Viennese premiere in November 1904, some seven months after Strauss himself unveiled the work at a concert in New York. The only problem is, as Mahler biographer Henri Louis de la Grange has demonstrated, the middle movements of the Sixth were composed in the summer of 1903 (the whole work was finished by August of the following year), almost exactly contemporaneously with Strauss’ completion of the Symphonia Domestica, making the likelihood of any Straussian influence vanishingly small. In any case, the episode in Strauss that Zander points to doesn’t sound especially like the trio of Mahler’s Sixth, and using it to bolster not some significant musical point, but Alma’s dubious statement about the music representing the arrhythmic games of her children, hardly directs the listener’s attention away from the facile programmatic descriptions that Mahler himself so deplored with respect to this very symphony.
- Finally, we also have to sit through the “false dichotomy” argument, which Zander describes as a conflict between Mahler “the composer” and Mahler “the performer”. In this case Zander suggests practical performance issues, or emotional stress arising from his role as interpreter of his own music, as the main excuse for Mahler’s taking out the third hammer blow, thereby damaging his visionary original conception as he first set it down on paper. Zander proudly proclaims his allegiance to “Mahler the composer.” I hope I don’t have to explain in detail how false and illogical this construct is. Let us merely observe that if true, then why is Zander hypocritically accepting without comment the thousands of other changes and improvements that Mahler “the performer” made in his scores as a result of his practical experience? Mahler had a reputation in his own lifetime as the most idealistic, uncompromising interpreter alive. He ran around Europe with his own church bells and tam-tams, and even some of the principal wind and string players from Vienna just to make sure he got the sounds he wanted in his own works. There’s no evidence at all that he ever felt a need to compromise his or anyone else’s music in his role as interpreter. All of the evidence in fact points to the exact opposite, but even if this were not true, Zander’s entire argument remains totally irrelevant in terms of its usefulness as a point of reference for a listener encountering the work for the first time.
I suppose what I find most off-putting about Zander’s approach is that it cynically exploits the vulnerabilities of those intimidated by the whole cultural and elitist afflatus surrounding classical music, the very people most in need of a confidence building corrective to the usual cant that so often makes the classics difficult to swallow. It may very well be that Zander believes that he really is helping, and heaven knows I am not questioning his sincerity as an interpreter on the podium. Still, it’s hard to shake the feeling that when all is said and done, rather than empowering his listeners, he makes them dependent, insisting that they rely less on the inherent expressive qualities of the music itself and their own valid perceptions of them, than on his verbal explanations of “what it all means”. And if true, it’s unfortunate because Zander has a real gift at communication, and he could use it to serve the cause of the music far better (or at least more effectively) than he seems willing or able to at present.
There’s a wonderful scene in “Annie Hall” when Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are standing in a ticket line at a movie theater, listening to some pseudo-intellectual “explain” Marshall McCluhan to his girlfriend. Allen walks off camera and brings on McCluhan, who tells the horrified guy that he has no idea what he’s talking about. Looking into the camera, Allen then asks the movie-going audience, “Don’t you wish you could do that in real life?” Well, here’s a case where it would be interesting (to say the least) to have Mahler listen to Zander’s discussion, and then tell the conductor exactly what he thinks about it. It isn’t going to happen, of course, but in a sense it doesn’t have to because we have Mahler’s music, eloquent testimony to how irrelevant, inaccurate, and unnecessary much of Zander’s “help” really is. Both the symphony and Zander’s performance of it speak for themselves, far more eloquently and with greater immediacy than any self-serving lecture-demonstration can.
Hopefully, most listeners will not buy into the spurious theory that the Sixth Symphony is so big, so long, and so complicated that they need any special mental equipment beyond the same willingness to listen that all great music requires and rewards. My personal experience has always been that novice concert attendees enjoy Mahler at first crack because of his expressive intensity, cinematic use of the orchestra, and grand scale; this no doubt accounts for his popularity with contemporary audiences that largely lack traditional grounding in the “rules” of form and composition as espoused in conservatories and music schools still hung up on the primacy of the “three Bs”. It’s the classically trained (and semi-trained) musicians that have always had the biggest problems, never the public, and so we once again come back to the question of just who Zander thinks his audience really is.
The fight for Mahler was, in any case, won long before Zander joined the cause. Indeed, perhaps the final irony here is that Mahler’s genuine popularity sustains Zander’s career, certainly on disc. He needs Mahler far more than Mahler needs him (a fact he surely realizes), and to this extent his lectures can also be viewed legitimately as a classic case of preaching to the converted, of espousing a cause that everyone already endorses anyway. Such exercises offer little risk to the speaker, but equally small benefit to the listener aside from the general good feeling that may come from having one’s own tastes and preferences validated by an independent authority. Still the fact remains: Unless Zander can find a way to express a love of Mahler’s works that isn’t compromised by his greater fascination with the sound of his own voice, he will likely never make a meaningful contribution towards a wider appreciation of the music itself.
David Hurwitz
