Don's Weekly Listen: Elly Ameling's Mahler

Up to now, I have devoted Don’s Weekly Listen entirely to underplayed compositions. While such works will continue to be our focus, I will also throw in an occasional week like this one, focused on notable but largely forgotten recordings of well-worn classics.

This week’s listen features one perfect (in my view) performance of a single symphonic movement: the finale of Mahler’s 4th Symphony, an orchestral lied called “Das himmlische leben” (The Heavenly Life). Originally composed for inclusion in the song cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Mahler pulled the lied from that set and used it instead to conclude the symphony.

The movement’s text is a German folk poem depicting a child’s guided tour of heaven. As a child might, the text fixates on the details—on the roles of each saint in the everyday life of the heavenly realm, the wild fruits and vegetables that grow there, the landscape. Of the religious allegory underlying what our narrator sees, she is blissfully unaware. Everything in Mahler’s heaven is entirely tactile—there is no grand plan, no philosophy, no past, and no future. Granted, there is pain; so that the citizens of heaven might eat, a lamb must still be slaughtered and blood must be shed. But our heavenly child, momentarily distraught and agitated by the slaughter, moves immediately into the next heavenly clearing and forgets all about it. It is pain without consequences and without suffering.

The year of this recording is 1979, and the performers are the Pittsburgh Symphony conducted by André Previn, accompanying the Dutch soprano Elly Ameling. Ameling’s performance perfectly embodies the paradox of the text: that heavenly life is noble and omniscient, but that living in such a place, sheltered from real human suffering, we are destined (or perhaps cursed) to remain children forever. Her mercurial tone accentuates the volatility of Mahler’s composition. She cries out at the butchery of the lamb, piously describes the watchful St. Peter at the end of the first stanza, darts with the schools of fish, and mesmerizes us into eternal rest. Listening to how she closes the movement—in a tone wise, watchful, and forever young—we close our eyes and hope that the lapping of the harp never ends, that we can stay in her world forever.

Previn takes a tempo slow enough to linger on the details, never afraid to puncture the movement’s sublime atmosphere where Mahler demands it. The stridency of the oboe that interrupts the clarinet solo at 0:16 perfectly sets up the movement’s tension between fleeting pain and heavenly peace.

Enjoy a moment of beauty this Thursday, and see you next week!

DB