It is 150 years since the composer’s birth. Michael Kennedy on his remarkable popularity
Approaching 60 years of writing music criticism, I have been wondering what I would nominate as the most remarkable changes on the British musical scene since I started. I decided there were three: the emergence of Mahler as a popular composer worldwide; the enthusiasm for the music of Janáček, especially his operas; and the establishment of regional opera companies. It is not as if Mahler’s music was completely unknown in Britain, even in his lifetime (1860–1911). But until about 1960 his impact on the general public was roughly the equivalent of, say, Szymanowski today. Now you cannot escape him. The history of his rise and rise in Britain can be traced through a series of historic performances and the endeavours of far-sighted pioneers among conductors and critics. But he was first known here and elsewhere as a great conductor who also wrote lengthy symphonies.
The first Mahler to have been played in Britain may have been the First Symphony, performed under Henry Wood at a Prom in 1903. The critic of the Times wrote that it was a
certainty that Herr Mahler has little or no creative faculty. It is, in fact, quite impossible, however willing one may be, to find any genuine good point in the symphony, which is a work commonplace and trite to an almost infantile degree, contains no germ of real inventive ability and is not even well scored…
Pause to recover your breath. Undeterred, Wood gave the first British performance of the Fourth in 1905.
In January 1913 he conducted the still problematical (for some) Seventh and a year later the great song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde with Doris Woodall and Gervase Elwes, a famous Gerontius, as soloists.
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