Ozawa's history with Mahler's Ninth makes it a fitting farewell
By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff, 4/17/2002
Seiji Ozawa wonders why he chose Mahler's Ninth Symphony for his final local concerts as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra this weekend.
''I don't know - this music may be too much for me,'' he admitted recently, smiling wryly. ''I have to be so much in control of the music and of myself. This music is so difficult and so full of emotion, and it holds such big memories for me.''
Beginning tomorrow night at Symphony Hall, Ozawa will lead three performances of the last symphony Mahler completed, a 90-minute work explicitly concerned with leave-taking. The first time Ozawa conducted this symphony anywhere, with the BSO in Symphony Hall back in 1984, he fainted backstage during an unscheduled intermission following the long first movement.
He was working under enormous pressure. The night before the performance he had not been able to sleep, and in the morning came a telephone call from Japan with the the news that his older brother had died.
''It was so quick,'' Ozawa recalled, his face flinching from the memory. ''No one expected it - he died of a stroke. I decided not to go to Japan until after the performances, but the music and the emotion were too much for me. By the end of the first movement, everything had gone dark, and I had to walk off the stage.''
After he had come to, and recovered his composure, Ozawa managed to finish the performance. The players delivered an extraordinarily intense, supportive, and compassionate account of the long concluding Adagio movement, pouring their hearts out, and lifting their relationship with him onto a new and different plane. That is why Ozawa feels it is one of the pieces that defined his relationship with the orchestra.
The next day Ozawa flew to Japan for the funeral, and the remaining performances of the run were taken over without rehearsal by the 33-year-old standby conductor, Kent Nagano. The beginning of Nagano's own prominent international career may be dated to his success with those 1984 performances.
Despite the tragic circumstances surrounding Ozawa's first performance of the Mahler Ninth, the symphony has remained close to his heart, and from 1984 to 1989 he conducted it 17 times with the Boston Symphony in Symphony Hall, at Tanglewood, in New York, and on tour in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. In that period Ozawa and the orchestra also made a recording that is one of the highlights of the complete Mahler cycle they recorded for Philips.
The BSO has a long association with the work - under Serge Koussevitzky, the orchestra gave the American premiere back in 1931. Since his most recent performances with the BSO 13 years ago, Ozawa has led the work with the Saito Kinen Orchestra in Japan and on tour.
Mahler's Ninth Symphony is a symphony of farewell - the first movement borrows a theme from Beethoven's Piano Sonata, Op. 81a, ''Lebewohl,'' the ''Farewell'' Sonata. A false sentimentality, lavishly encouraged by Leonard Bernstein in performances, recordings, and the Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard, also views this work as Mahler's farewell to life, because it was the last symphony he lived to finish.
The ebbing away of the music at the end is full of regret, but also of acceptance. Although Mahler was a composer obsessed with the idea of death, the Ninth is in fact a life-affirming symphony, and when he had finished it, he immediately embarked on another, which he left substantially complete in short score.
''The symphony is both a summation and a looking forward, commemorating the end of an era and the beginning of another,'' says BSO artistic administrator Anthony Fogg. ''That is one reason Seiji gravitated towards this work for his last concerts as music director in Symphony Hall, and why the rest of us fell in with his decision. He feels that the recorded Mahler cycle may make the fullest statement of what his tenure as music director accomplished.
''Mahler's Third Symphony was one of the options we considered, but he had his heart set on the Ninth from the beginning,'' Fogg added. ''He said an interesting thing the other day in his last meeting with the trustees, when he explained that this particular Mahler symphony, more than all the others, really highlights the relationship between conductor and orchestra.''
The Mahler Ninth does feature many passages with the orchestra in full cry, but much of it is orchestral chamber music, and there are many magical solo passages. The conductor must control, direct, and interpret, but he must also know when to empower and stand aside. The piece ends quietly, on the horizon between sound and silence.
This aspect of the symphony makes the piece an unconventional choice for a farewell concert, and other options were certainly discussed. One of them was to repeat one of Ozawa's greatest triumphs, Strauss's opera ''Elektra''; the possibility of a concert performance of Berlioz's ''Les Troyens'' was also explored. Ozawa has also triumphed with Berlioz, and since Charles Munch's music directorship, the BSO has been the paradigmatic Berlioz orchestra.
Neither conductor nor orchestra had ever performed Berlioz's largest and greatest work. But ''Elektra'' or ''Les Troyens'' would have removed the spotlight from the orchestra, the conductor, and their collaboration.
''I love working on this piece,'' Ozawa said. ''And I loved working on it with this group - and we worked on it very seriously, the kind of work I really enjoy. This symphony is now a part of my life, a part of the life of the Boston Symphony, and a part of our life together.''