Mahler 2nd Symphony at the Chan Centre with the UBC Symphony last evening or - what's enormously long and has scales?

"The idea of suffering and redemption, 

expressed with overblown egoistic self-assuredness, 

is as youthful as a hangover."

I cried, etc etc, it was amazing!! so powerful - exciting! emphatic!! (see Mahler's m.s., of his first symphony, featuring exclamation marks, above) and yet…

I am in what appears to be a tiny minority that thinks Mahler has Emperors’ Wardrobe Syndrome (or Philip Glass syndrome if you like) - a condition whereby not-very-good musical materials are dressed up and presented, somehow acquiring the adulation of the majority, preying on its pretentiousness, putting the 'phony' in 'symphony.

I looked around the web today to see what other curmudgeons might be daring to express the same opinion - and I found some notable critics, among them Kingsley Amis. No, I am not alone.

I do, however, love Mahler's 2nd, for all its failings; the emergence of the soprano in the Auferstehn NEVER FAILS to tear me up. It’s also a passage to my youth. I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard it: the Wilson Library, wearing small black headphones, reading the analysis of the motifs, my 19-year-old egotism resonating furiously with this shallow yet gargantuan work. (I also remember exactly where I was when JFK was shot: that obviously does not make it a good thing!)

The idea of suffering and redemption, expressed with overblown egoistic self-assuredness, is as youthful as a hangover.

What caused Mahler's symphonies? 

Several things come to my mind: the enormous orchestral resources must be a reflection of the rise of the Austro Hungarian Empire, with its leader Emperor Franz Josef happening to be a person of artistic temperament. I was rather disappointed in Vienna when I discovered that the ancient and venerable buildings in the heart of town were actually built just over 100 years ago (there may be houses in Vancouver older than the palaces of the Vienna Centrum). The militarism required to maintain an empire must have given rise to lots of organized music making, mostly among brass and percussion. The brass chorale in Sym 2-mov 5 may owe itself to that. 

The ambient music of Vienna in the 1870-s must have included, among the gala waltzes, frequent military parades, which the young Mahler would have been excited about. The military passages are not present in his work as a commentary on militarism (that’s our contemporary revisionist thinking at work), but because he liked that sort of thing!  The Arabic or Asiatic modes which provide occasional colour, and the frequent use of solo violin, speak to me of the lands to the East of the Danube, with their Gypsy influence. 

Cuckoo clocks, nursery rhymes, folk songs, military marches, bird calls (can somebody SHOOT that bird?), scales, big bangs, and incessant use of chord tones and intervals such as mordents and turns: these are its gems. The settings are opulent and impressive, but the material being set is in most cases trivial. Wagner's lietmotif structure is far more subtle, profound, and melodically inspired.

BUT I LOVE IT.  I don't love that I love it, but I do. I love it in spite of, or possibly even because of, its blustering and blundering human ego coating its shrinking human frailty.