Mahler, the “Resurrection,” and the Westminster Choir

Mahler is such a popular composer in the 21st century that we forget how recently he entered the active repertory. In 1912, Arnold Schoenberg declared that “today’s young people worship Mahler like a God. His time will come in, at most, five or ten years.” This did not happen. Mahler’s symphonies were considered bizarre and chaotic (at best) or simply unplayable, though a few die-hard devotees like Bruno Walter and Maurice Abravenal struggled to keep his flame alive.

The Westminster Symphonic Choir is an indelible part of Mahler history.  The Choir performed Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony in 1942 with Walter leading the New York Philharmonic. This was Maher’s own orchestra in the first decade of the 20th century, and they have his music in their blood.  Still, it was not until Leonard Bernstein – himself a charismatic composer-conductor – that a maestro emerged with the star power to persuasively declare that Mahler’s “time has come” and to present him as the ultimate “Amen-sayer to symphonic music.” Bernstein had no problem with Mahler being “excessive,” “overblown,” the very definition of “overwrought” – all the words critics regularly trotted out to attack what they considered vulgar, and that so many used for half a century to keep Mahler out of the repertory (along with a healthy dollop of anti-semitism).

Mahler is now a central part of American musical culture, and Westminster has performed his gigantic choral symphonies -- the Second, Third, and Eighth (the “Symphony of a Thousand”) -- with leading orchestras from around the world. Mahler’s simultaneous embrace of joy and despair, lyricism and brutal dissonance, epic structures and microscopic details, ethereal melodies and coarse vernacular tunes, constitutes a largeness of vision that contemporary audiences find riveting. Unlike Mahler’s contemporaries, we see him as embodying multiplicity rather than contradiction, grandeur rather than sprawl, emotional honesty rather than crassness.

These qualities are fully on display in the “Resurrection.” I heard Bernstein conduct it in 1987 with the Westminster Symphonic Choir, one of the most thrilling musical experiences of my life. Since then I’ve caught every WCC performance of this astonishing work that I could, including engagements with the Philharmonic under Lorin Maazel, the Concertegbouw Amsterdam under Riccardo Chailly, the Cleveland Orchestra under Franz Weltzer-Most, the Staastkapelle Berlin under Pierre Boulez, and the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle.

After the Staatskapelle performance, Pierre Boulez told me backstage how greatly he admires the Westminster Choir and how little rehearsal they required after their meticulous preparation with Joe Miller. In the Stagebill program notes, Boulez commented on how Mahler walks a treacherous border between “sentimentality and irony,” “nostalgia and criticism,” “meticulousness of detail” and “grandeur of design,” demanding that we listen in a “manner more varied, more ambiguous and richer” than we ordinarily do. Audiences today seem very willing to rise to the challenge.

The Choir has never sung the Mahler Second with the Philadelphia Orchestra, making the upcoming performances in New York and Philadelphia a “Resurrection” not to be missed: the big sonority and uncannily unified ensemble of the Philadelphians are exactly what a major Mahler symphony requires.  My Westminster students tell me they love working with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the young maestro who has been largely responsible for this great orchestra’s own resurrection after sinking into Chapter 11. I remember hearing the Philadelphians do the Mahler Second some 30 years ago at Carnegie Hall; even with Zubin Mehta and without Westminster, it sounded good. This time it should sound great.

Jack Sullivan is Professor of English and the Director of Rider University's American Studies Program.