Mahler Defending Schoenberg

“Mahler was in the auditorium for the first performance of Schoenberg' Schamber Symphony (Op. 9) in 1907. There were rowdy scenes after the performance, with people clapping, hissing and yelling. Mahler himself clapped, but the man next to him hissed for all he was worth. ‘How dare you hiss when I'm clapping?’ Mahler asked him imperiously. ‘I hissed your filthy symphony, too!’ came the answer. ‘You look as though you would!’ countered Mahler, and the two men would have come to blows if the police had not intervened.

“Thirty years later in Vienna I [Otto Klemperer] conducted a full orchestral setting of the work, arranged by Schoenberg him self. It was a great success.”

On Mahler's Interpretative Tradition

“There  is now a ‘Mahlerian’ interpretative tradition, but a regrettable number of conductors employ it quite incorrectly. As Mahler once remarked to me, his retouchings were meant for him alone, and he bore full responsibility for them. Today, The Universal-Edition scores of the four Schumann symphonies are sold to the world at large with his amendments incorporated. 

“The retouching of Beethoven, Schumann and others was an essential feature of Mahler's interpretation of their works. I cannot go all the way with him on this point. He retouched in the spirit of his age. I believe it was unnecessary, and that one can bring out the full content of such music without retouching. I believe, too, that if we heard a Beethoven sonata played by Franz Liszt today we should be shocked by his arbitrary treatment of it. And yet both things, Mahler's retouching and Liszt's interpretations, were entirely necessary—in their day. Mozart's retouching of Handel's Messiah should similarly be construed in the spirit of the age. He added the new-found clarinet and transcribed the harpsichord part for clarinets and bassoon.

“During the rehearsals for his Eighth Symphony, Mahler quarrelled with the leader of the Munich Philharmonic (I think that was the name of the orchestra) because he wanted an absolutely first-class violinist who was familiar with his style. He sent for Arnold Rosé, who naturally took over the leader's place. At that, the rest of the orchestra rose and quitted the platform with one accord, leaving Mahler and Rosé alone. They did not return until Mahler had agreed that their leader should play in all future rehearsals and performances. This happened in 1910, when we still had monarchies and some respect for authority still remained. What would Mahler say today?”

—Page 26-27, Minor Recollections by Otto Klemperer

Mahler's Recommendation of Otto Klemperer

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Mahler on Beethoven

Continuing the focus on Otto Klemperer, we turn to his book about his memories of Mahler, “Minor Recollections”:

“In 1910, during a discussion of Beethoven's ‘Pastoral” in Munich, Mahler expressed strong criticism of academically trained German conductors, who, he said, did not understand the work. ‘How should the second movement—the scene beside the stream—be conducted?’ he asked. ‘If you conduct in twelve-eight, it's too slow. If you conduct in twelve-eight with four beats, it's too fast. How, then?’ He supplied the answer himself: ‘With a feeling for Nature.’…” —Page 25

Ottto Klemperer's Conversion in Cologne

The impact of Cologne on Klemperer and the roots of his 1919 conversion:

“For the first time in his life he found himself living in a bastion of intellectual Catholicism. The Rhineland was the centre of the liturgical movement, which was opposed a merely personal piety, and in its emphasis on ritual advocated among much else a return to plainsong. … The growing attraction that Catholicism had begun to exercise on Klemperer became apparent during Christmas 1918. To Marianne, the holidays with her brother in Cologne seemed like a ‘weeklong conversion to Christianity’. She had, she wrote to her friend, Leni Asch-Rosenbaoum, listened with real Christian devotion to the carols Otto had played, and also to Bach arias, whose calm spirit she described (doubtless echoing his sentiments) as ‘the purest essence of the German-Christian sprit.’

Immediately after Christmas another potent influence began to make itself felt. In January 1919, Max Scheler, the most celebrated Catholic philosopher of his time, was appointed professor at the newly established university of Cologne and by the following month both Klemperer and his sister had fallen under the spell of the intellectual brilliance of his lectures on the materialist view of history. Marianne found that there was ‘something watchful (lauerndes) and sceptical about him that is hard for me to reconcile with his fervent Catholicism’. But Klemperer was fascinated by a man for whom philosophy was less an abstruse discipline than a means of reflecting on the great issues of life and death. Indeed, it was perhaps the very discusiveness of Scheler’s thinking that appealed to his own untutored mind. Scheler was no proselytiser and he played no direct part in Klemperer’s conversion. But the closeness of these two restless, searching spirits is indicated by the facts that Scheler acted as a witness to Klemperer’s marriage in June 1919 and that the Missa Sacra, which Klemperer composed immediately after his conversion, is dedicated to him.

Early in 1919 Klemperer started to receive instruction from a Jesuit priest and on 17 March he was received into the Church. In one of those self-questioning moods to which he was prone, he later implied that he had taken the step in part as a means of distancing himself from his socialist associates in Cologne as well as from his Jewish background. But all who knew him at this period of his life agree that, in contrast to Mahler who converted in furtherance of his career, Klemperer was inspired by faith and intellectual conviction. Henceforth a belief in the existence of God and the efficacy of prayer conditioned his entire outlook.”

—From Peter Heyworth's Otto Klemperer: Volume 1, 1885-1933: His Life and Times