The Mahler Problem

We're playing Mahler's ginormous 9th Symphony this week with one of my favorite guest conductors, Mark Wigglesworth. Which is interesting, because it's entirely possible that you could be a regular visitor to the Minnesota Orchestra web site, could even be planning to attend this concert, and be unaware that there's any Mahler on the program.

The headline on the website for this concert is "Schubert's Unfinished Symphony," which is, to be fair, also on the program. The same description appears on the concert tickets themselves. The thing is, the Schubert, lovely though it is, is a 20-minute appetizer, while the Mahler is a 90-minute magnum opus, so it might seem a bit odd for our marketing department to be highlighting what is unquestionably the less significant work. But there's a reason that they do it, and it's one that musicians often avoid talking about: the concertgoing public just doesn't seem to like Mahler.

I should qualify that right off the bat by saying that, clearly, many people do like Mahler, and several thousand people will be joining us for the concerts this week to prove it. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if our overall ticket sales this week are among our lowest totals of the season. Past experiences with Mahler, in fact, almost guarantee it. And this isn't just a Minnesota problem - audiences across America are decidedly less enthusiastic about Mahler than we musicians are.

So what's the problem here? Mahler's symphonies have been a part of the standard orchestral repertoire for the better part of a century now, so it can hardly be a lack of familiarity that keeps audiences at bay. If anything, I get the sense that our audiences know exactly what a Mahler symphony is, and that it's that knowledge that keeps them away. A couple of years back, our piccolo player and I were talking about Mahler's 5th symphony at a Hallowe'en party (yes, we're huge dorks,) and her husband disgustedly broke into the conversation to explain, in great detail, that only musicians like Mahler, and that people who have to listen to it (rather than playing it) generally hate the experience.

And the thing is, he may not be wrong about that. There's no question that Mahler is generally a lot of fun to play, especially if you're lucky enough to play it with a really good orchestra, under a really great conductor. The music is hugely challenging for every instrument in the orchestra, contains plenty of melodic content for everyone, fits together like the world's most complex jigsaw puzzle, and is just incredibly visceral and raw in it's style. If playing Mozart is like baseball, all clean lines and perfect structure, playing Mahler is like rugby. It's brutal and draining and everyone seems to be piling onto everyone else at exactly the same time, but damn, it's exciting.

Of course, Mahler is brutal and draining for audiences as well. And on top of that, Mahler symphonies are loooooooooong. The one we're playing this week is 90 minutes, which isn't at all unusual for him. I think his shortest symphony is an hour, which is as long as Beethoven's longest. And when you consider that, in most Mahler symphonies, the drama, the pathos, the agony, and the navel-gazing start right off the top and almost never ratchet down, it's asking a lot of an audience. Most people aren't in the mood for that sort of thing very often, and a fair number of people never are. It's like asking people how they feel about Ulysses. Most will allow that it's a great work of literature, but they're not going to make an attempt to read it very often, because who has that kind of energy?

I strongly suspect that a lot of concertgoers get turned off to Mahler after wandering into a performance of one of his bigger works (the 5th, the 6th, the 9th, etc.) unaware of what they were in for. Mahler isn't a composer you want catching you off guard. If you're just looking for a nice, relaxing evening out, and you suddenly find yourself being assaulted by all the personal demons of a 150-year-old manic depressive Austrian in musical form, you're not in for a good night. It'd be like intending to spend a quiet night at the movies and wandering into Letters From Iwo Jima. Even though you recognize that it's an impressive work of art, it's not even remotely what you were looking for.

The reality is, too, that a number of Mahler's symphonies are arguably longer and more over-the-top than they needed to be. It's almost impossible to have a reasonable conversation about this, however, because the people who love Mahler really love Mahler. And in the same way that people who love, say, Lord of the Rings, are not willing to hear a single word said against it, Mahlerians are prone to fly into fits of righteousness if anyone so much as suggests that, really, the first movement of the 9th does drag on a bit. So there again, we run the risk of alienating audiences who, encountering a passionate fan of Mahler, are made to feel as if they are just too dumb or impatient to understand the attraction.

All that having been said, a lot of Mahler's music is great stuff, and we're really not going to stop playing it anytime soon, much as our marketing department might like us to. So I'm curious to hear from our readers on the subject. Do you like Mahler? Hate him? Feel confused by him? Does seeing his name on a concert program make you less likely to buy a ticket? And if so, how did that aversion get started? Enquiring musicians (and marketers) worldwide want to know...