Patrick Bade
Mahler at the Opera

Patrick Bade - Mahler at the Opera

- So Gustav Mahler in his lifetime was far more famous as a conductor than he was as a composer. He was a real superstar as a conductor, and conducting was the daytime job, composing was something that was confined to some holidays. He had lovely long holidays when he could leave Vienna, and he stayed in this beautiful holiday house in Carinthia at Maiernigg. And it was in this little hut close to the house that between 1900 and 1907, he composed his Symphony No. 427 and portions of the Symphony No. 8. But the greater part of his career was devoted to conducting in opera houses. He certainly conducted symphonic concerts, but he was primarily a conductor of opera. And his rise was rapid. His first job was as assistant conductor in the relatively unimportant opera house in Kassel, which you see on the right hand side. Here is Mahler as a young man, obviously not quite sure of his identity and experimenting with different styles of facial hair. Then he moves on. Obviously, a big step up from Kassel was to go to Cog where he was the conductor in the Landestheater, the Estates Theatre. Beautiful 18th Century Theatre where Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” was premiered. So he was there from ‘85 to '86, and then he moves on again, I would say probably a step upwards to Leipzig, which was of course a very important musical centre with the Great orchestra, the Gewandhaus. And he is in Leipzig again for just two years, '86 to seven, and then moves on to the Royal Opera House in Budapest. And it’s while he’s there… And here’s the interior of this wonderful theatre. Somebody was asking me, “Which is the most beautiful opera house?” one of the really grand ones, the grand 19th century ones. I would say probably Budapest.

And it’s while he’s here, that’s between '88 and '91, that he gives the premiere of his first symphony. And then he moves onto Hamburg, which was of course, an immensely rich mercantile town. And he’s in Hamburg for quite a long time, from '91 to '97. But I’m concentrating today on the decade of 1897 to 1907, when he’s in charge of the Imperial Opera in Vienna. And as I’m sure you all know, in order to get this job, he had to convert to Roman Catholicism. And that was the subject of a play by Ronald Harwood that some of you may have seen. So this decade really has become legendary, Mahler’s decade at the Vienna Imperial Opera. And he really set the standard for opera production for the whole of the 20th century. The idea, the Walgernurian idea that opera is not just an entertainment, it’s a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. And he puts enormous emphasis on assamble, that it’s not just a vehicle for star singers to come to the front of the stage and strut their stuff and then go off again. Everybody has to work together to try to fulfil the wishes of the composer. So he was very much a new broom. And he came with his famous dictum, “Tradition ist Schlamperei,” “Tradition is Sloppiness.” And I suppose he brings to an end the period in the 19th century when it was the singers who were really in charge. They were the kings and queens. They could do whatever they wanted. He initiates the period where it’s really the conductors who are in charge of the opera house. Nowadays, of course, in any opera production, it’s likely to be the producer who really sets the tone, which seems to me sometimes rather like the tail wagging the dog.

So he’s doing this in the decade '97 to 1907. And on the other side of the Alps, Arturo Toscanini is doing exactly the same at La Scala. Both of them were tyrants, stern disciplinarians. And they both of them had a kind of war of attrition with their singers. Here is the interior of the house, the staircase. Of course, it still looks like that, but the auditorium was destroyed in the Second World War. This is how it was in Mahler’s time. And so this idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, it wasn’t just that it had to be a musical totality. Everything had to work together. Also the costumes, the sets. I mean, up to this time, singers had their own costumes. They, especially the female singers, they would be expected to turn up to an opera house bringing their own costumes, which may have suited them, but they may not have fitted in with the whole production or the other singers’ costumes. In some ways, I think it was probably a big relief for the female singers that they no longer had to provide their own costumes. There were a lot of anxieties expressed around this time that this was a factor driving singers, actresses, and dancers into prostitution. Because at the beginning of their careers, many of them couldn’t actually afford to pay for their own costumes. And the only way they could pay for them was with their bodies. But also from a visual point of view, the Mahler productions were really something new and something exciting. This is a set by his star designer, Alfred Roller for “Don Giovanni.” And here are Alfred Roller’s designs for a very famous production of “Tristan” in 1907, towards the end of Mahler’s tenure, which was seen by the teenage Adolf Hitler, and which absolutely blew him away. And he recalled it to the end of his life as being one of the great experiences was hearing “Tristan” conducted by Mahler and designed by Alfred Roller. Notice that he had a kind of a war of attrition with singers. Singers were very undisciplined.

The big battles Toscanini had were with singers who wanted to sing on cause. And Toscanini forbode, whatever the word is, the practise of singers repeating arias. But a notoriously undisciplined singer was Selma Kurz, who you see on the screen on the left, leaving the Vienna Opera House. Now, she had worked with Mahler in Hamburg, and they had a brief love affair throughout much of his career, certainly until he hooked up with Alma. Mahler seems to have followed the practise common at the time that the director of the Opera House has droit du seigneur over all his female singers. He’d be in big, big trouble with the Me Too movement today because of this. They had quite a passionate affair. As you can see, she was a very beautiful woman, and he certainly influenced her in her career in that she had a big voice. And to start with, she was singing mezzo roles, but she moved on to soprano roles. And one day during a rehearsal of trovatore, Mahler realised there was something unusual about her, this incredible ease at the top of her voice. So he tricked her, he was changing the keys and making her sing higher and higher. And eventually she landed up singing stratospheric notes that are for the coloratura specialist, and she could do with them with the greatest ease. And that really changed the direction of her career. She became the great coloratura soprano of her era. Here are two more pictures of her. Which as I said, she was a beautiful woman. And particularly, the picture on the left. I think, “Oh, she looks as though she was an expressive singer.” Although apparently she wasn’t often. Puccini didn’t like her.

He thought she was lazy and boring. And Hofmannsthal said very rude things about her in letters to Strauss, but the public loved her, and they loved her because of her extraordinary virtuosity. And above all, they loved her because of her trill. The Kurz trill was very famous, and it’s a joke that because Kurz in German means short. And her trill was the longest that has ever been known or recorded. It was truly extraordinary. And of course, she loved showing it off, and it sometimes really infuriated conductors and colleagues. And the conductor just had to stand in the pit with his arms folded until her breath ran out and she stopped the trill. I was one occasion at Covent Garden, “Un Ballo in Maschera,” and she was seeing Oscar, and she walked slowly around the stage holding a trill endlessly to the absolute fury of the tenor Caruso who started waving his arms to try and get her to stop the trill. So I’m going to start off, my very first excerpt for you is The Kurz Trill. It is simply staggering and amazing. And I want to warn you, please don’t hold your breath during this trill because Lockdown University does not want to be sued for the consequences. Dennis and I today, were just lamenting, the one thing that we find difficult about lecturing online is that you can’t gauge an audience’s reaction. And I’ve played that in lectures many, many times, people at the end of it, they’re either gasping for the breath or they’re falling off their chairs with laughter.

They just can’t believe their ears at such a thing. Now, the singer who was probably most associated with Mahler throughout his Vienna tenure was Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, who you see here. And I’ve got a lot to say about her because I was given something that she wrote. I’m not sure if it’s ever been published complete, I’ve seen excerpts from it in books, but I was given the complete text of her description of her relationship with Mahler. And I want to tell you this story. It’s a bit of a digression, but it’s an interesting one. I mentioned last time this extraordinary lecture that I went to given by Gombrich at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St. John’s Wood. And the text of which I’ve given you the details, you can find it, I really recommend it for understanding situation of Jews in Vienna in 1900. And in his talk, he talked about Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, and he said she was his mother’s best friend. And he said, “What a pity that she never allowed any of her recordings to be published and that her voice has not been preserved.” Well, I knew that although she wouldn’t allow her recordings to be published, that a single test had survived and it had been discovered. And I had a copy of it. So I wrote a very enthusiastic, it was really a fan letter to Gombrich, partly ‘cause I just thought his talk was so amazing. And I sent him a copy. In those days, it was on a cassette of this. I said, “I thought you might like to hear what the voice of Anna Bahr-Mildenburg was like.” And as a result, he invited me to go and see him. And I had two wonderful days talking with him, mainly about music and musical matters. Anyway, back to Anna Bahr-Mildenburg. Those of you who saw Ronald Harwood’s play, “Mahler’s Conversion,” one of the things I actually didn’t like about the play was I felt it gave a totally false picture of Anna Bahr-Mildenburg. In the play she’s presented as a sort of good time, frivolous thing, a bit of fluff on the side. She was anything but that. She was an immensely, immensely, serious and dedicated artist.

So I’m going to read you some extracts from this unpublished account of her encounter with Mahler. She was from a rather grand family, much grander than his of course. Her father was an Austrian army officer. And she arrived in Hamburg to audition for Mahler in 1893, when she was just short of her 23rd birthday. And at the audition the first audition, she sang “Brünnhilde’s Battle Cry,” the “Queen of the Night” aria and the “Ocean” aria from Oberon. And now having said that, those of you who are really into opera will say, “What? Run that by me again. She sang what for her audition.” I mean, you wouldn’t think it was possible that on the same occasion the same singer could sing those three things because they make totally, totally different vocal demands and demand different types of voices, but she did. And so this is what she said. She said, “I was frightened by a violent stomping from the door. The hat and umbrella flew onto the piano and the co-répétiteur was dismissed with a kurt, "Thank you.” This is my translation from the German, by the way. And the German is wonderful here. You can’t really translate it into English. She says that the accompanist was… He now , which he was complimented out the door. “Mahler sat at the piano, the last remains of his impatience perceptible in the first notes he played. And with the words, , Mahler… Once again from the beginning, "Mahler came into my life.” The whole thing does sound a bit Mills & Boon with Mahler perhaps more Rochester than Darcy as the hero of the story.

Anyway, he got her to sing more bits of Brünnhilde and made her repeat Brünnhilde’s “Victor,” the pleading aria she sings at the end of several times. And he didn’t say anything. And she was just so intimidated by him that she just collapsed. And she fell across the piano weeping. And she said, “For a few moments, he sat embarrassed chewing his cheek as was his habit.” Oh, I’ve got a picture of that somewhere. Is it next? No, it’s coming up next I think. Yes, this is a bit fuzzy, but you can see Mahler chewing his cheek. “And then he shouted at me in a terrible way. My fright must have shown itself so comically that he suddenly began to laugh and shake all over. With his two hands, deep in his trouser pockets he ran up and down the room compulsively. Then he sat down calmly, cleaned his glasses and with earnest and good words, I learned that I had done my part very well. Then he began to shout again. 'And you must first start to cry when you slipped into . Then of course nobody cries.” I mean, once she worked with him in Vienna, she again continued to sing incredible range of music for a different tessitura, much higher, much lower, much bigger voices, much smaller voices. And Mahler, they had a passionate affair in Hamburg. She followed him to Vienna, where the affair was not renewed. He certainly didn’t make any allowances for her or their former relationship. He was quite brutal to her, really. He criticised her for being unprofessional when she got a cold and he made her sing things she shouldn’t have sung. And he may have been responsible for, at least in part, for the premature decline of her voice. Well, Leonie Gombrich, the mother of Ernst Gombrich Gombrich, went with her to a recording studio in the Getreidemarkt in Vienna.

And she recorded several sides. And when she listened to them she was horrified. She said, “Oh my God, do I sound like that? No, I’m not going to let those records be released.” But luckily this one copy of a test survived. And it’s amazing. I really wish that she had allowed more records to be released. It’s very short. It’s the from the big “Ocean” aria from Oberon. And it presumably reflects the way that Mahler took it, because she performed the role with him several times. It was one of his favourite operas. But if you know this aria, you’ll be surprised by this because it’s actually very different from any other versions. Much, much slower than any other version I’ve ever heard. And it’s very grand, very, very impressive. And at this speed, you think, “Yes, well, she also like Selma Kurz must have had fantastic breath control. So mightily mightily impressive. She describes working with him as being quite trying and difficult. She said, "He was a wonderful mixture of pedantry and genius.” One of the things he liked to say was, . “Correctness is the soul of artistic achievement.” And she said, “He was a real tyrant. And that sooner or later, every singer who worked with him left the opera house .” Cursing, complaining, weeping, desperate. And she said, “He was also very tough with the public. He wouldn’t tolerate any indiscipline, coughing, rustling of paper or anything like that.” And she said, “When he was conducting, people found him demonic. wild, yes, wild, grotesque, bizarre, original and weird. And they felt his monstrous power and cowered as though before something threatening.” Now a pattern emerges with all the singers that Mahler worked with in Vienna, that he was more interested in their interpretative powers than he was in their voices or their vocal skills.

And many of his favourite singers were attacked by the critics for their lack of voice. And in particular, Marie Gutheil-Schoder, who was probably after Anna Bahr-Mildenburg his favourite singer. And she worked with him a lot. She was liked by the public, but the critics dubbed her “The singer without a voice.” She was also extremely versatile. When I tell you she sang “Susannah,” , Octavian, Carmen and “Elektra.” You’re thinking, “Oh my goodness, how is that possible? How could the same singer sing "Susannah,” Carmen, and “Elektra” and all within a a short period of time. I’m going to play you… When you listen to her records, and she didn’t make a lot of records, they’re not as thrilling as or amazing as the first two I’ve played you, but they’re very nice. And I wouldn’t say she’s a singer without a voice. It doesn’t sound like a big voice. It sounds like a very pleasing voice and a well-schooled voice, so she certainly could sing. And here she’s singing a duet with a tenor called Franz Naval, who also has an interesting history with Mahler. He sang for a couple of years, well, more than that, 1898 to 1904, 6 years under Mahler then went off to New York where he didn’t have much success and he came back again and he wanted to be re-employed. And he wrote Mahler a letter in which he offered him a bribe. Well he was really trying the wrong person there. I mean Mahler was, in musical matters, absolutely incorruptible. And he just calmly coolly forwarded the letter to the management of the Imperial Opera. Anyway, here it is, he sounds quite a nice singer. This is Marie Gutheil-Schoder and Franz Naval in a duet from “La Dame Blanche.” Well enough of that. Now, this is the tenor who was most closely associated with Mahler, Erik Schmedes. He was discovered by Mahler, invited to sing at the Vienna Imperial Opera and had a very long career there and was liked by the public, but again, not always by the critics. And he was a good natured jovial man who’s also famous for his naivety. And he was the butt of a lot of jokes of Mahler himself. He had a rather cruel sense of humour and from also from his rival tenor, Leo Slezak.

But he had a sense of humour and he could play some jokes. And his best joke on Mahler, he knew that Mahler was very sensitive to the fact that everybody rated him as a conductor, but not as a composer. That he really didn’t have that much success as a composer in his lifetime. So Erik Schmedes trained a young boy to sing “Um Mitternacht” from the “Rückert-Lieder” by Mahler. And he paid him to follow behind Mahler when he was walking around the streets of Vienna singing Mahler’s piece. 'Cause Mahler was completely flabbergasted that a street boy would know one of his songs. But they had to really quite a… Here he is in “Pagliacci” on the left and it’s on the right. So again, two roles you wouldn’t really expect the same singer to sing. They had I think, really quite an affectionate relationship. And they would actually socialise, which was not something that Mahler normally did with singers. After a performance, they would go out for a meal. Here he is as Tristan. And Mahler took him. When he went to New York, he got the Metropolitan to invite him where he was not liked at all by the American critics. And one of the critics said this rather cruel thing about his singing. He said, “His voice sounds like bits of Dutch cheese fired from a cannon.” Well, I can’t say that his records are very agreeable, but I will play you a bit of his Tristan that he sung under Mahler baton of course many many times. Well enough of him. Well, there is a nice story about their rehearsing “Tristan” together that Mahler said to him in Act One of “Tristan,” of course, He has to drink the love potion that’s offered him by his old .

And he said, “I want you to sing like a baritone before you drink the love potion. But once you’ve had the love potion, you have to sing like a tenor.” Now, as you may have gathered from previous lectures, if you’ve listened to me before, I’m not usually a huge fan of Germanic tenors. And that little excerpt will demonstrate why. I really don’t like that sort of effortful sound. The star tenor in Vienna at this time was Leo Slezak. He was adored by the Viennese public. And it wasn’t just, just in Vienna. He was a huge international star. He was adored in New York, London, La Scala, Milan, everywhere. He was a huge voice. And he was I think a very interesting artist. Of course, it was particularly with these kind of singers, these star singers like Selma Kurz and Leo Slezak that international careers that there was friction between Mahler and the singer. And usually it was over the question of absences from the Vienna Opera. 'Cause they had international careers, they were getting invitations from all over the world, and Mahler didn’t like that. Leo Slezak was another very jovial character 'cause he’s very famous for his sense of humour. There are legendary funny stories about him, most famous of all, of course, being the time in “Lohengrin” when the swan got stuck in the last act and didn’t appear. And the whole opera came to a grinding halt. And Leo Slezak was heard to say, “What time does the next swan go?” He was also a great practical joker, and this sometimes annoyed Mahler. And once in the middle of a rehearsal, he stopped the rehearsal and he dismissed Slezak and he said, “I want you to come back when you’re in a more suitable frame of mind for my rehearsal.” So at the next rehearsal, of course, Slezak turns up dressed in black from head to foot as though for a funeral to make his little point.

Now his records I think were a bit of a mixed bag. Some are beautiful, some again, you’ll hear, I think the good and the bad in his singing in this piece I’m going to play you now. He can also sound very effortful when the voice is singing full out in that sort of constricted German way. But as I said, it’s a huge voice. And what is really remarkable, and you’ll hear it in this recording, is when he sings softly, particularly in the upper part of the voice, the exquisite modulation and transition from the full-out chest voice to a more ethereal head voice at the top. You hear this particularly at the end of this piece, which is the aria “Magische Töne,” “Magical Tones” appropriately enough for the way he sings at the end of this piece from Goldmark’s “The Queen Of Sheba.” Now I’d say that final note is another very remarkable vocal feat. Mahler had particularly bad relations with the deeper male voice. His star bass, Wilhelm Hesch, and his star baritone , had really poisonous relations with both. I think part of the trouble with Hesch was that he was there before Mahler and Mahler really wanted singers that he had personally chosen and he felt he could control. And Hesch got on so badly with Mahler that he publicly protested and resigned from the opera in 1905 and there were big demonstrations in his favour from the audiences.

You know, Vienna was so factionalized and the pro-Mahler faction, the anti-Mahler faction. The anti-Mahler faction obviously was often very anti-Semitic. Here is the splendid dark voice of Wilhelm Hesch. One of Mahler’s last discoveries, vocal discoveries, towards the end of his time in Vienna, was the American mezzo Madame Charles Cahier. And he introduced her as Carmen and she had a sensational success. She was obviously a very big star in Vienna, and also in Budapest. When I was in Budapest couple of years ago and I was looking around for postcards like these of singers there were mountains or postcards of her. She was obviously very, very popular in Budapest. So here she is, recorded around this time in the role of Carmen. Mahler obviously liked her a lot as a singer and he also used her in concert to sing his works. And shortly after his death, she sang the premiere of “Das Lied von der Erde.” And so I’m next going to play you a very rare recording, an interesting one. This is very late in her career. She must have been well into her 60s and you can hear that the voice has aged. But it’s fascinating to hear a singer who worked so closely with Mahler singing one of his works. This the alto solo from the “Second Symphony.” And this was recorded in the early 30s in Berlin. So you can imagine it had a very short shelf life because all music by Jewish composers was banned. And very often the masters were destroyed as soon as the Nazis took over in 1933. Now, it’s a strange fact that Mahler never wrote an opera. Most composers who had careers conducting opera houses had a go at writing operas. The only time that Mahler came near it was completing and rewriting an unfinished opera by Weber called “Die drei Pintos.”

I’m going to play an excerpt of that in a minute, but I have a theory. Dennis may disagree with me, and I think Dennis is sort of closer in spirit to Mahler than I am, or Mahler the composer. But I feel that Mahler may have been a very, very great composer, but what you really need for an opera composer is empathy with other people. I’m not sure that Mahler was capable of this. He was a very self-absorbed person and symphonies, these great symphonies, they’re really all about him and they’re about his inner life. I’m not sure that Mahler would’ve been capable in the way that say Puccini was or Strauss was of entering into the character or creating the character of another human being. Anyway, here is the other, the baritone I mentioned, Leopold Demuth, who had a very bad time with with Mahler. Came from the same area, Moravia. And he was also from a very humble background. And before he became a singer, he started off as a bank clerk and Mahler despised him and was always very demeaning and humiliating to him. And when he sang his first of course this was a huge thing for him, he went very humbly to Mahler and said, “Oh, please master, will you give me your opinion of my attempt to sing .” And all Mahler would say to him was, “Once a bank clerk, always a bank clerk.” Anyway, here he is singing a piece from “Die drei Pintos” by Webber/Mahler. Now Mahler loathed Puccini. And I think this was largely professional jealousy. Puccini was the most successful opera composer. And he had all those qualities, as I said, for writing opera that I think that Mahler probably lacked.

So I mentioned last time Mahler disdained to conduct the Vienna Premiere of “Tosca.” He let Zemlinsky take takeover for that. But perhaps surprisingly, Mahler felt an enormous affinity for Mascagni, Puccini’s great rival. And he felt an affinity with him as a man and as a composer and as a conductor. And Mahler, but he particularly loved the opera “L'amico Fritz” which he conducted the premier of in Vienna. And he was very thrilled. He writes a letter to Alma, when somebody said to him, “Oh, your conducting was exactly like that of Mascagni of the same piece.

And that if I hadn’t seen you, I would’ve thought I was actually listening to Mascagni conducting.” So I’m going to finish with Mascagni conducting a little bit of “L'amico Fritz” 'cause it’s very frustrating. We hear all these wonderful accounts of how exciting and amazing Mahler was as a conductor. If he’d lived a normal lifespan, if he’d lived to my age for instance, we would’ve had wonderful electric recordings of complete recordings and symphonies. We should have have. So I feel sort of cheated that we don’t, I mean the only recordings we have of him are very primitive piano role recordings, which don’t really give much impression of what he was like. But I’m going to play you, it’s one of my favourite scenes in the Italian Opera. I think it’s such a touching scene and I can imagine Mahler would’ve been touched by it too. There’s the Rabbi David, he’s one of the few really positive and sympathetic modern Jewish characters in all of opera. And he acts as a kind of of marriage broker and he tries to help the young Christian girl, Suzelle, to marry the man that she loves. And in this scene he sits her down and he gets her to read from the Bible to him. So here it is conducted by the composer Pietro Mascagni. Well, I think I better move on and see what comments and questions we have.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: “Did Mahler have a piano in the hut?”

A: Good question. I assume that he must have had a piano in the hut.

Q: “Shades of Arthur Two sheds Jackson?

A: I dunno who Arthur Jackson was. I can’t comment on that. ”

Mahler composed such beautiful music to words, eg. “Das Lied von der Erde” and of course the vocal parts in the symphonies.

Why do I? Well I think I explained that at the end why I think, but that’s just my personal theory and I’m sure plenty of people will really disagree with it. Longer than , oh it is. Are you thinking of the famous that recording , which is course incredibly long as well, outrageous. The conductor must have been furious. Sorry, I don’t understand that.

“Phone intact, but thanks. Great recording. Some trill. Amazing Kurz recording, gasping and laughing as you expected.” Thank you.

Q: “How can she hold the note that long?”

Q: “What was the name?”

A: It’s not a book, it’s actually the text of a talk that he gave. It’s Art in Vienna circa 1800, Ernst Gombrich. Actually it’s on the list. I put it on the list. So if you scroll down and look at the list, you’ll find it there.

Q: “How did Mahler get established being Jewish?”

A: Well, he didn’t, because he had to convert in order to get that job. He would not have had the job of the director of the opera if he hadn’t converted to Catholicism.

“Take a walk on the wild side.” Well, I’m not quite sure how we should do that, but I’m willing to take advice on it.

“Alma Mahler later married Franz Werfel yet she was…” I’m going to be talking all about that of course. That will be in a week’s time. But you know that joke about the swan? It’s like joke about the Tosca jumping off and bouncing off a trampoline. It’s told about lots of people and it certainly predates and there are some people who say it even predates Slezak and it was somebody else. He was the father of Walter Slezak. Of course that got him into big, big trouble 'cause Slezak went to America and took part in anti-Nazi movies. So Leo the father was very endangered by that.

Q: “Final tone in the Goldmark arias, is the only example of a recording?”

A: I don’t think it is the only example. I don’t think so. I’ll have to check on that. I think there are others, but you are right, it is very falsetto. It doesn’t bring it off quite as well, I think as Slezak does.

Q: “Which note it is?”

A: I don’t know, it’s very high.

Q: “Ozmean from the abduction. How did Mahler relate to the instrumental?”

A: I think conductors that it was the golden age of the conductor as they were gods and I don’t think they, he’s not the only one of course. There are many. Toscanini was an absolute pig to his singers and his musicians. You know, it is funny. I was thinking of that this afternoon, Wagner. Did he have more human empathy than Mahler. I mean, if ever somebody was a narcissist and totally self-absorbed, it was Wagner. But I think he did have, so maybe that completely undermines my theory, but Wagner clearly could create very real characters.

“The Ken Russell film.” I love the first moments of that film. It’s one of the great moments, isn’t it, when you see that hut and it explodes into flames to the accompaniment of Mahler’s music. It’s a heart-stopping moment, but it’s the best moment in the movie. I think it’s downhill all the way after that.

“A talk on Joseph Schmidt.” I’d love to do a talk on Joseph Schmidt. I admire him hugely. I’ll discuss that with Judy and see what she thinks.

“Slezak sounds like a cantor.” Well 'cause Schmidt had a cantorial background as you know. “Zemlinsky’s string quartet on radio three tomorrow.” That’s good.

“Do not avoid…” I don’t, I don’t think I do avoid disagreements. I love it. I like to be challenged. It will always be for one of the greatest pleasures for me teaching at the London Jewish Cultural Centre that you got challenged and that’s fun, I really like it. So I don’t mind if people disagree with me at all.

“Had made a decision.” I think it was a different thing. Vienna, which was so conservative and it was the capital of the Habsburg Emperor. Of course, I don’t think, some of the cities, he had positions in Leipzig and Hamburg. They were Protestant, they weren’t Catholic. And it would’ve been less of a problem for them, I suppose.

“Mahler Festival in Leipzig 2023.” I’m sure. Yes, I think Mahler was pretty hard on everybody.

Q: “How do I think Mahler would compare?”

A: That’s an impossible question to answer, really difficult question to answer. I don’t think I can say anything to that really.

Now there, thank you Barbara. You know, I think that is probably the answer. Wagner, all the characters are him, that the… Who is it? I think it’s one of the recent books on Wagner. Well maybe it’s even the Gutman biography suggests that of course. Yes, and look at “Parsifal,” they’re all him. Klingsor is him, Kundry is him. That’s a very, very interesting point. You are spot on there. Thank you for that.

Yeah, Slezak wrote a book in German, . So I have that, it’s in this new bookcase behind me.

“Arthur .” Oh, is it? I love Monty Python, I dunno why I didn’t know that. “Wasn’t it Leonard Bernstein who revived Mahler?” No, I would say, well he was certainly part of it in the 60s, the big, big Mahler revival. But if anybody really kept Mahler going, it was Bruno Walter and I will talk about that next time.

“Did Mahler start having…” I don’t think so, I think in Vienna, the languages in Mahler’s time the operas I think they were all in German. I need to check on that.

And that seems to be it. Thank you all very, very much and see you again on Sunday.