Above – Donald Runnicles… Photo credit Jay Patel
The gestation of my fascination with Mahler is twofold. Firstly, it goes back to Paul Keating, whose achievements as Treasurer (1983-1991) and Prime Minister (1991-1996) have, in my view, never been as widely appreciated as they should have been. One of the most fascinating things about him has been his keen interest in music. As Treasurer, it’s said that, when his ALP colleagues visited his home, Keating was just as likely to play them classical music, and particularly Mahler, rather than discuss the economy.
Secondly, I was heavily influenced by the great Visconti film of 1971 Death in Venice, with Dirk Bogarde playing the role of Gustav von Aschenbach, who dies at the end of the film, while the beautiful Adagietto from Mahler’s fifth symphony is played. At the time I knew of no more beautiful piece of music, and that feeling has remained with me ever since. Only a great composer could have written the Adagietto, and I have wanted to discover more about Mahler ever since.
Hearing Donald Runnicles’ outstanding interpretation of Mahler’s sixth symphony, played by the SSO on April 9, 2026 in the SOH, has therefore given me a priceless opportunity to widen my knowledge. The slight differences I was able to delineate between his interpretation and the recorded versions I’d listened to, in preparing for the live concert, were instructive.
Firstly, consider the opening movement, the Allegro. Leonard Bernstein’s 1988 version of the symphony, played by the Vienna Philharmonic, is still perhaps the most celebrated of the various versions available. Bernstein takes the Allegro at a bright clip which no doubt suited his flamboyant conducting style and also his apparent desire to create as much emotional intensity as possible. Bernstein was after all, along with other conductors, in a campaign to rehabilitate Mahler, whose music had been out of fashion between the two world wars. In fact, Symphony No 6 remained unrecorded until 1952.
I believe it’s conceivable that Bernstein was determined to create the most dramatic version possible. The Runnicles version of the Allegro which we heard in the SOH was, on the contrary, without histrionics. This was indeed a welcome discovery. The tempo adopted was slightly slower than Bernstein’s version, a very good move in my view, as this enabled the music to breathe. The Bernstein version, with the benefit of hindsight, now sounds somewhat rushed, hurtling forward incessantly.
Secondly, consider the third movement, the Andante moderato. In Bernstein’s version, I found the swelling crescendos and certain instrumental sections somewhat strident, and lacking in nuance. Runnicles’ rendition however, I found sublime. Where I was sitting in the concert hall, the SSO sounded rather soft and mellow in this movement, a somewhat unexpected delight. This created a welcome contrast to the intensity of the powerful first two movements, the Allegro and the Scherzo.
Runnicles was able to give the Andante moderato much more the flavour of a genuine slow movement than Bernstein’s version and, for that matter, the various other versions I’d heard in preparing for the concert. Whether this was simply a function of the truism that the symphony orchestra, heard live, will always be superior to recorded versions, I do not know. But I suspect this could be the case.
However, hearing the Andante at this relatively moderate volume was a revelation; suddenly the music was exquisite and deeply moving. Runnicles kept the crescendos light, creating a lovely mellowness. As a result, the symphony really came alive for me during this movement. The friend who accompanied me described it as “bucolic”, likening it to Beethoven’s symphony No 6, the Pastoral. This was a reminder that the Austrian composer Alban Berg wrote about Mahler’s symphony, “There is only one Sixth, notwithstanding the Pastoral”.
It was as if Mahler had taken the sensibility of the Adagietto from his fifth symphony, written for strings and solo harp, and kept it alive throughout the whole of the sixth’s Andante moderato, scored for the whole orchestra. In my view this was a stellar achievement on Mahler’s part, in successfully avoiding excess, and Runnicles’ sensitive interpretation was able to do it ample justice.
According to Gordon Williams, who gave a pre-concert talk in the SOH’s northern foyer, Runnicles has in the past described the symphony as a “bleak work”. It’s not my mission to quarrel with that conclusion. We know that Mahler himself eventually accepted the term “Tragic” for this symphony. Wikipedia, which sometimes uncannily exemplifies a consensus, tells us that the symphony is “a deeply personal, fatalistic work depicting the struggle of a hero—representing Mahler himself—against inexorable fate. It prophetically explores themes of despair, dark irony, and catastrophe, climaxing with massive hammer blows in the finale representing the hero’s downfall.”
This sentiment has been confirmed by umpteen writers. The Marxist philosopher and musicologist Adorno wrote that in Mahler “happiness flourishes on the brink of catastrophe”; the perceptive ABC broadcaster and composer Andrew Ford has said that, in the sixth symphony, “it is as though Mahler has deliberately destroyed his own world”. There’s no doubt that the nihilism that these observers have discerned can clearly be delineated in Mahler’s symphony.
On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that there’s a wealth of evidence in the music, as I hear it, that supports Mahler’s view, as he once expressed it in a conversation with the Finnish composer Sibelius, that “the symphony must be like the world. It must encompass everything.” In other words, while darkness and despair might well be inevitable, there is also room in his music for matters which some might consider trivial.
In this spirit I’d point to the passages in the first movement, widely known as Alma’s theme, which reflect the fact that Mahler composed the symphony during a very happy time in his life. In 1902 he married the Austrian author and socialite Alma Schindler, then in her early twenties, and pregnant with his child. Their daughter Maria was born in November 1902. While Mahler was working on the symphony, their second daughter Anna was born in 1904. Of course we shouldn’t forget that Maria died of scarlet fever in 1907, simply another example of the multitude of misfortunes to which Mahler was subject in his eventful life.
Moreover, although the fourth movement, the Finale, is dominated by the hammer blows – two of which were included by Runnicles, whereas Bernstein used three in his version, echoing Mahler’s original intention – I was struck by how much serenity I was able to detect in the music during that final movement. So, I feel it’s reasonable to conclude that Mahler, to some extent, was able to balance the darkness in the symphony with what one might call the softer, more positive emotions.
After all, this work features the largest purely instrumental forces Mahler ever wrote for, so he had ample resources available to him. Accordingly, Mahler was able to create enough orchestral colours to counterbalance the sinister forces lurking beneath the surface. I think that’s why I felt so good at the conclusion of the work; I found it immensely life-affirming. And that, I believe, could well be the secret of Mahler’s attractiveness to contemporary audiences.
How prophetic was this symphony? That’s a good question, and better minds than mine have speculated accordingly. Alma Schindler at one time thought that Mahler’s original three hammer blows anticipated three later events in her husband’s life: his so-called forced resignation from the Vienna Court Opera in 2007; the death of his eldest daughter Maria in the same year; and the diagnosis of what was eventually for Mahler a fatal heart condition. Of course Alma’s testimonies have been shown to be notoriously unreliable.
It’s conceivable that Mahler, in the company of other artists in the early 20th century, anticipated the “great war” which came to pass in 1914. That conflagration was brewing for several years. Bernstein however went even further. He once famously said that “the 20th century is the century of Death, and Mahler is its prophet’.
There’s a semblance of credibility in Bernstein’s view as Mahler was consistently subjected to antisemitism throughout his career, and this was particularly so during his tenure as director of the Vienna Court Opera from 1897 to 1907, before he and his family left to live in America. This prejudice took place usually through press hostility, often incorporating the antisemitic idea that a Jewish composer was incapable of producing true Germanic art.
Whether Mahler anticipated the holocaust I have no idea, but my intuition is that it’s a long stretch, and probably fanciful. Better to focus on the music itself, I think, which presents an amalgam of stimulating talking points, certainly enough for the Mahler enthusiast to feast upon.
This concert took place at the concert hall of the Sydney Opera House on April 9, 2026, featuring the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Donald Runnicles. The orchestra was augmented by 15 musicians from the Australian National Academy of Music, celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2026.
