The molten monument that is Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is routinely described as the work of a man facing imminent death. It took shape in the summer of 1909, two years after Mahler was given a diagnosis of rheumatic heart disease. Leonard Bernstein liked to argue that the strange, staggered pulse of the opening bars replicates symptoms of Mahler’s condition. The immense emotional range of the symphonic narrative that ensues—desperate longing, false triumph, vertiginous collapse, desolate meandering, damaged nostalgia, rancid rage, full-throated lament—finds resolution in twenty-seven legendarily transcendent bars for strings alone. The markings tell the story: adagissimo (as slow as possible), mit inniger Empfindung (with deep feeling), aüsserst langsam (extremely slow), ersterbend (dying away). Mahler died in 1911, with his Tenth Symphony unfinished.
The trouble with doom-laden readings of the Ninth—for Bernstein, it presaged not only its composer’s death but also “the death of tonality . . . the death of music itself . . . the death of society, of our Faustian culture”—is that Mahler’s entire œuvre dwells on mortality. If he had died at any earlier stage, his music could have been said to foretell his demise just as clearly. Furthermore, as the Mahler biographer Henry-Louis de La Grange argued, the composer’s mood after the diagnosis was far from hopeless. In a 1908 letter to his younger colleague Bruno Walter, Mahler wrote that, although he sensed something amiss in his heartbeat, he was not consumed by a “hypochondriacal fear of death.” Instead, he felt as though he were undergoing a metamorphosis: “At the end of a life, I must learn once again to walk and stand like a beginner.”
That sentence passed through my mind when, in mid-January, the Los Angeles Philharmonic gave a technically flawless, emotionally charged performance of the Ninth at Disney Hall. The conductor was Michael Tilson Thomas, who, after decades of eternal boyishness, is now an elder sage of the profession. In the summer of 2021, Tilson Thomas learned that he had glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer. His prognosis is considerably more dire than the one Mahler faced in 1907. As Tilson Thomas walked to the podium, I wondered whether he would address the audience. He is known as one of our more talkative conductors, and no one there would have begrudged him some remarks—particularly since he was born in Los Angeles, seventy-eight years ago.
Yet he remained silent, acknowledging the crowd with a couple of bows and a friendly wave of the hand. His interpretation of Mahler’s valediction gave little sign of being weighed down by Bernsteinian baggage. It was, to be sure, quite slow, extending well past the ninety-minute mark; but Tilson Thomas always tends to take his time in Mahler, as is evident in his recorded cycle with the San Francisco Symphony, which he led from 1995 to 2020. This was a spacious, nuanced, sumptuously colored account of the Ninth, free of excess angst or frenzy. The work came across less as an interior drama than as an exterior landscape of mountainous vastness, its catastrophes more seismic than psychic.
The final Adagio stopped time, for a full half hour. Rather than try to wring meaning from every phrase, Tilson Thomas seemed content to maintain his hypnotic slow beat and let the strings bask in the golden-hour harmony. The coda was eerily calm, with phrases, chords, and single notes suspended like thin brushstrokes on a white canvas. Tilson Thomas has long admired the modernist master Morton Feldman, who composed at the edge of silence. The final page of the Ninth came across, enthrallingly, as a prophecy of Feldman, of music’s future. Without words, Tilson Thomas was teaching one more lesson through the music that he loves.
In the past three decades, I’ve seen Tilson Thomas in concert thirty or so times. He has led more than a few arresting performances of mainstream repertory, but his real legacy is in the exuberant diversity of his programming. I will never forget his raucous “American Festival,” in San Francisco in 1996, which included a wake-the-dead rendition of Lou Harrison’s Organ Concerto and an improvisation with members of the Grateful Dead. I also recall his show about his grandparents, Bessie and Boris Thomashefsky, who had been stars of Yiddish theatre; his scalding account of Copland’s Piano Variations, dispatched during a lecture at Carnegie Hall; and his flamboyant excursion through John Cage’s “Song Books,” with a trio of soloists that he alone could have summoned—Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara, and Jessye Norman.
Ultimately, the greatest contribution that a conductor can make is to expand the repertory. However astounding Arturo Toscanini and Wilhelm Furtwängler may have been in Beethoven and Brahms, they failed to match the impact of Serge Koussevitzky and Leopold Stokowski, who between them brought dozens of masterpieces into the world. Tilson Thomas, who introduced major works by Feldman, Monk, and Steve Reich, will be given a comparable role when histories of the current epoch are written. In his youth, he was expected to take over one of the so-called Big Five—the venerable orchestras of the East and the Midwest. Instead, his achievement at the San Francisco Symphony, together with Esa-Pekka Salonen’s at the L.A. Phil, made the notion of a Big Five untenable.
Before tackling the Mahler, Tilson Thomas led the L.A. Phil in a much different program, one whose sensuous, buoyant energy brought back memories of his early years in San Francisco. Debussy served as the anchor, and no one alive conducts that composer better. The “Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’ ” sounded as lucid and as vital as it did when Tilson Thomas recorded it with the Boston Symphony, back in 1971. The Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, with Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist, glided over compositional weak spots—Debussy was still finding his way in this score—to achieve a kind of tipsy perfection.
The remainder of the first concert veered toward delirium. Any expectation that Tilson Thomas was making some sort of solemn farewell crumbled beneath the sublime battiness of Messiaen’s 1945 cantata, “Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine,” which followed the “Faun” and probably offended it. Messiaen’s devout Catholicism did not stop him from purveying sugary harmonies suitable to a Ziegfeld revue. Tilson Thomas, in an interview with Mark Swed, of the Los Angeles Times, aptly described the piece as “cocktail hour in heaven.” At the same time, it is an intricate construction of unearthly beauty. Standing before an eccentric ensemble of massed strings, celesta, piano, ondes martenot, and percussion, Tilson Thomas made the contradictions cohere; the Los Angeles Master Chorale supplied vocal bliss.
The Master Chorale returned for Heitor Villa-Lobos’s “Chôros No. 10,” an emanation of Brazilian modernism of the nineteen-twenties. It was a deft stroke to pair this score with the “Trois Petites Liturgies,” because, much like the Messiaen, it produces a seamless mishmash of seemingly clashing elements—in this case, Afro-Brazilian rhythms, birdcalls from Amazonian forests, urban popular song, cubistic orchestration out of “The Rite of Spring,” and Hollywoodish climaxes. Tilson Thomas revelled in Villa-Lobos’s lushness while keeping a cool grip on the proceedings. I wasn’t the only listener who went away grinning, and a little dazed.
As gripping and as haunting as the Mahler Ninth was, the Franco-Brazilian adventure may linger longer in my memory. It had the thrill of risk, the joy of discovery. The roaring ovation that erupted from a sold-out house was the sound of gratitude. The lanky kid who made his conducting début at Walter Reed Junior High School, in Studio City, some sixty-five years ago, is still a talent to watch. ♦
