The Eighth is Back

So it’s time for Mahler’s Eighth again. When Alexander Gibson and the RSNO opened the 1965 Edinburgh Festival with the big work’s Scottish premiere, and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus was created to sing it, performances were still uncommon - though not so rare in international terms that it needed to be hailed, as it originally was, as the Symphony of a Thousand.  In fact it is a work best kept as a rarity, because it can be dulled by repetition.

Indeed Lord Harewood, in what was his final year as festival director, did his best to persuade people not to call it by its mammoth nickname.  It was, he said, a symphony like any other and not a display of musical gigantism. He was right, of course, as he was about so many musical things, though I thought he had been wrong the previous year when I asked him at a press conference why the festival was not celebrating the hundredth birthday of Richard Strauss and he replied that he didn’t see the point, especially as no other festival was celebrating it either. 

But times change and Strauss’s 150th birthday is certainly not being neglected at this year’s festival.   Even if the temptation to perform the Alpine Symphony in Princes Street Gardens has been resisted, there’s enough of his music at the Usher Hall - Don Juan, Ein Heldenleben, the exquisite Four Last Songs -  to keep Straussians reasonably happy, though it’s a pity that the operas are being cold-shouldered. Having already given us a dud Capriccio and a fine Die Frau ohne Schatten, however, Jonathan Mills perhaps felt disinclined to take further risks.   

As for Mahler’s Eighth, with which the RSNO ends its Edinburgh season on Friday and its Glasgow one on Saturday,  we should bear in mind that Mahler himself was ambivalent about the work’s nickname, pointing out that it did not require a thousand performers even if, at its Munich premiere in 1910, more than a thousand participated.

But to call it his greatest symphony, as people persist in doing, is surely a mistake, because it stands out among the other works as being not really a symphony at all but a species of oratorio, based partly on a vast opening setting of a hymn and partly on the closing scene of Goethe’s Faust, Part Two, requiring eight solo voices in addition to the chorus.  In 1965 the soloists included Heather Harper, Gwyneth Jones, Janet Baker, Vilem Pribyl and Donald Mcintyre, a line-up that will be hard to surpass, though there may be some surprises in store.   

28 May 2014