Radio: Mahler’s Mighty 8th

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30962, 19 January 1966, Page 9

Radio: Mahler’s Mighty 8th

Mahler’s mighty but rarely heard Eighth Symphony will be broadcast from 3YC at 9 this evening.

Known as the “Symphony of a Thousand” because of the vast number of instrumentalists and vocalists required to perform it, the work is tremendous in conception and in execution.

“Imagine that the whole universe begins to sound in tone. These are not human voices any more, but planets and suns circling in their orbits,” Mahler described the work in a letter to the conductor Willem Mengelberg in 1906.

Mahler scored it for two vast adult choirs, a children’s chorus, and orchestra enlarged to 150 instrumentalists and eight vocal soloists. The first part of the symphony is the medieval hymn “Veni Creator Splritus,” celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, set as a huge symphonic movement with a double fugue. As a tone-poetic corollary for this Mahler set the final scene of Goethe’s "Faust”— describing the ascent of Faust’s soul to heaven —in three movements.

Mahler presses the close relationship of these divergent texts—creative inspiration, wisdom, power and love.

Mahler conducted the first two performances in Munich in September, 1910, in a hall specially built for the occasion. It was a tremendous success. In fact it was Mahler’s biggest popular success as a composer.

The monster orchestra came in for some criticism. Mahler, although confident that the size was justified—for the symphony more than his others had succeeded in realising what he had intended — was aware that the gigantic apparatus verged on the comic and later referred to his “Barnum and Bailey show” in Munich.

Mahler’s Eighth, like Schoenberg’s “Gurre-lieder,” which employs an even larger orchestra, marked a musical turning point, according to Professor Hans Redlich, the climax and the collapse of the tendency to increase orchestral sonorities which had started with Beethoven’s “Choral” Symphony and gathered momentum in Berlioz’s “Requiem” and “Te Deum.” Performances of the Eighth Symphony have been few. Even today when there is a Mahler vogue the cost is prohibitive. A recent British performance cost just over £3OOO for one concert—which works out at £32 a minute.

Last month Leonard Bernstein staggered the musical world by conducting the New York Philharmonic in five performances of the Eighth in one week—compare this with the fact that there have only been five performances in London in 57 years and only eight in the whole of Britain. Bernstein capped his feat—which had a good many critics in ecstasies—by announcing that he would conduct the Eighth next in London when the London Symphony got back from its Australian tour.

The recording of the Eighth to be broadcast this evening was made by the Utah Symphony Orchestra conducted by Maurice Abravanel. The number of performers is 850.