I'm so glad this lectures are preserved, may you be eternal Leonard Bernstein, you really brought us closer to understanding Mahler and his awesome music.
OMG, listening to this Bernstein lecture has finally shed the light I had been desperately needing in my tunnel of discomfort and lack of understanding of Mahler. Thank you, thank you Lenny for your brilliance and great knowledge that helped me connect the dots to better understand this period of time that only those who lived in such dire need of capitulation to death and dispare understood. I have read much of the work by those authors he mentioned, Rilke was to me like Mahler himself, as was Camus, Brecht and others, and it all makes sense to me now thanks to this lecture. Damn!! I'm so glad I learned something new today! Ugh!!
I've been attached to this movement for some months and I hadn't listened to Bernstein till now comfirming what I had already understood. 'Cause Mahler talks with his music, what makes me cry every time I listen to it. I love how Bernstein explains its meaning and the wise analyse he does. I always listen to Mahler with his recordings. He was a great man.
Mahler was the greatest symphony composer ever he was brilliant and way ahead of his time! Start with no.1 and you'll be dazzled and hooked on Mahler for life, he was absolutely incredible and so was Bernstein!!!!!
As a Mahler devotee for more than 50 years, I have read all the biographies, most of which reside on my bookshelf. I know all of his compositions like old and dear friends. Bernstein was a great conductor, and I watched his excellent young people's TV shows way back in the day. That said, his pontificating about the "meaning" of Mahler's music arose from his own mind and often has little to do with Mahler's expressed views. Despite efforts to portray him as some kind of innocent savant, Mahler was a very well read man and fully aware of the political and social ethos of his times. Well before the time he composed his 9th, Mahler was consistently advising listeners to find their own meanings in his music and looked with disfavor on those who attempted to speak for him on the subject or tell people what he "meant." If Bernstein's talks help someone appreciate this exquisite music, that's great, but don't conflate his ideas with Mahler's.
Thanks very much, you're of course right--the same can be said for pretty well all composers ... unless it's a straightforward theatrical piece, like Candide, or West Side Story. Still appreciate Bernstein giving us his ideas of the music. All I can say is it's sublime--painstakingly thought out and put down by Mahler, every note sings.
These were a brilliant series of lectures. Bernstein was an excellent teacher. I remember when he was an assistant instructor of the NY Phil and led the young people's concert. In NYC the schools often took classes to the young people concerts (early 1950s). I first heard the lectures when I was on a NEH sabbatical at Duke University. Learned a lot at Duke and learned a lot from these lectures.. These lectures actually turned me on to Mahler.
Had Mahler never written another note but been fortunate enough to live another ~30 years, to die in older age at 80 in about 1940, one would hope that he would have looked favorably on the advent of jazz and its celebration of being alive that is at its core, not to mention seen and embraced the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and the coming of musicians like Kern, Gershwin, Rodgers, Porter and Ellington and Copeland; and gotten to hear works such as just the accompanying score to the film "Gone With The Wind". I can only think that he may have been comforted in knowing that tonality and passion, creativity and beauty would still have been alive and well and not in its final stages. And there isn't a film composer ever since the dawn of "talking pictures" that doesn't owe a tremendous debt to the master of musical longing, tragedy, and perseverance - who died far too young but managed to say so much, nonetheless.
I adore how Bernstein always compounded the music in discussion with the world stage. How he made it seem so relevant, even prophetic to its age and the years to follow. Mahler commented that his music would be popular only 50 years after his death, and in a way he was right. Please don't allow these interviews to get lost in obscurity. Bernstein was not only an amazing conductor, but one of our greatest teachers and elder statesmen for classical music.
This is a gigantic lesson. And he speaks to a globally cultured audience. In television. Mentioning authors and composers no one NOW has heard of. Mahler was right. The death of an era arrived.
The most magnificent and soulful music 🎶 composed by Mahler expressing all his pain sorrow and Hope and the greatest musicians being conducted by Maestro Leonard Bernstein , expressing with so much passion and feelings all of Maestro Mailer’s fears and Hopes of a better world 🌎 A beautiful symphony of life and its challenges and greed sorrow and pain An amazing composition as explained by Maestro Leonardo Bernstein and a brilliant performance by the greatest musicians conducted by his intense emotions and feelings May their souls Rest In Peace ☮️♥️♥️🌹🌹🙏
I always found this segment something of a non-sequitur to what Bernstein had been exploring up to this point. But what a non-sequitur: purple prose it may be, but a real insight into how much Mahler meant to one of his finest interpreters.
Bernstein, a very well read (and so almost inescapably verbose) person. A very interesting mind. In love with music (as we should all be), eloquent (giving to every power a double one) an individual...
His eloquence in talking about music makes me feel as if I missed something in not liking more of classical music earlier in life. It is never too late but there is quite a bit more to appreciate!
6:56, The famous lines used in his biographical portrait The Gift of Music: Act 1: Greed, hypocracy leading to a genocidal world war, postwar injustice and hysteria, boom, crash, totalitarianism etc.
A conductor needs to analyze how the music should sound, how to translate a score to sound. There are technical elements, such as finding the right balances, tempos, articulation. Bernstein's talks reveal that he worked on a deeper level - asking the question "why?" and what meaning we can attach to the music. It helps to appreciate the work he did as a conductor.
What Sergiu Celibidache is to Anton Bruckner's symphonies, Leonhard Bernstein (almost) is to Gustav Mahler's. Celi let the orchestra without interfering with its dynamics too much. Watching him conduct (without score as with all the available Bruckner synphonies - No 1 and 2 are unfortunately missing) gives me goosebumps every time. Just imagine Celi had interpreted Mahler's symphonies...
Bruckner was Mahler's teacher of harmony. If you know the second movement of Bruckner's 2nd symphony, it sounds as you are listening Mahler... Therefore Celi would definitely be as good interpreter of Mahler too.
"Celi let the orchestra without interfering with its dynamics too much." Don't agree. Celi did control orchestra's dynamics up to make musicians exhausted by rehearsals. I remember him exlaiming "We are at the middle of the crescendo passage and you are already playing FFF !" (7th) Mercy to this control, Bruckner's crescendi are none to equal when conducted by Celi. A unique experiment.
Celibidache hated Mahler although he admitted he has a great knowledge about the orchestra. But what or how he composed wasn't something that fit into Celibidache's concept of music.
That's absolutely true. What Bernstein did in this total documentary was to make explicit the transition of Western music as an expression of biblical objectivity via harmony and its slow orderly rejection of the same via atonality . Bernstein revealed that meta narrative.
Bernstein was the first to understand that when an aesthetic meaning-production system such as music is used to communicate a locality of meaning with people, it has to couple with culture, language, symbols. Schoenberg had a neat experiment with his mathematical musical model, but was instantly dismissed by the world who regard his project as artificial. It did not cybernetically couple with the socius of humanity. Mahler, Shostakovich, etc. on the other hand knew intimately how to dig into those frontlines of binaries (city/.rural, jew/christian, etc), connecting with humanity, and uplifting the epistemic tensions for all to see.
23:00 the last five minutes of the symphony despite being all calm, are a rollercoaster of emotions. This video of Abbado always makes me shiver th-cam.com/video/81AFdWXLNCU/w-d-xo.html
Mahler wasn't the first to put his tragic life into music. To say he was concerned with the prospects for the world is a stretch, most of us consider ourselves and family first. I would guess Mahler forsaking his jewishness, by converting to catholicism in order to gain traction in Vienna, weighed heavily on him as he got older. Tchaikovski is a prime example of a composer with demons who became introspective. Shostakovich must have studied Mahler, but why not? He wouldnt be the first to be influenced or indeed to copy others; Mahler 9 has copied Mahler 5 adagio, updated and revised!
I'm glad I have a strong catholic faith. They can say whatever they want, my life has sense, a meaning, and there is hope . THERE IS HOPE, lord will have mercy, there is hope
Sairam Prof. Giuseppe Savazzi head of the WORLDWIDE CIA SAIRAM secret services in India member of Rotary Club of New York District 7230 blessing to all of you from India 🇮🇳 Music Director and Founder of the Sathya Sai Universal Symphony Orchestra in Putthaparty Founder and music Director of the Rotary Youth International Orchestra with Lufthansa Sponsor since 1990. in šāʾ Allāh إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ Sairam 🙏🇮🇳❤️🙏
It’s a little, dry joke. Remember, this lecture was mid 1970’s when people began to really, really obsess about fitness, diet food, Diet Coke, fat free this that and the other.
@6:40 “mend your ways, the apocalypse is at hand. The 20th century has been a very badly written drama since the beginning. The opposite of a Greek drama.”
Mahler had to convert to Catholicism in order to advance his career in Europe due to the very active antisemitism. Notice I did not say "at that time." This was also true for Mendelsohn. The unanswered question: "Where will God be when the inevitable Holocaust occurs?" Sanjosemike (no longer in CA)
@@sanjosemike3137 Of course it happened! No dead bodies of millions of people were even found, including their bones, but that's because nazis destroyed all the evidence. They burnt them and then destroyed their bones in mobile bone grinding machines. No bone grinding machines were ever found, but they must have existed! After all, there were no bones! That's how we know that bone grinding machines existed.
Good lecture. However, and as much as I have tried, I just can't get into Mahler. Too long-winded for my taste. Listened to the finale of his "Resurrection" symphony, for example. Kept screaming in my mind for Gustav to get on with it. He drags on and on and on. Not that it isn't a good piece, but again a little too long-winded .Not to mention overblown. Although I did enjoy his 5th.
I understand. We can’t all have good taste. I’m kidding!!! Lol. I can understand why someone wouldn’t like Mahler. But for me he’s just the most amazing composer.
Bernstein was a great, although extremely flawed, champion of Mahler. His mythological BS, all of which is supplied by Alma (Jesus Christ!), will surely get poured back into the public consciousness, when this new Bernstein movie comes out. Scholarship and truth about Mahler will not matter. What will matter will be CD liner notes mythology. Bernstein was a great and awesome Mahler champion. But anyone who has followed Mahler scholarship in the last three decades knows, Bernstein is as wrong as he can be. But what can I say I’m railing against the Hollywood “composer movie” mythology machine
Disappointing, almost all intellectuals express the same opinion about their current time. I appreciate the analysis of Mahler, but not the application of it to later times.
Mahler is amazing, but I never understood this need intellectuals seem to have to wrap everything up in a neat bow. Not every single artist/clever person has been contending with the same problems. To talk about Marx, Rilke, Einstein, and Mahler in the same sentence is ridiculous and gives the impression that you are trying to sound profound but are actually just pulling at names. That said, Bernstein was a true genius of conducting and no one can take that away from om him. But why did he have to try and be more than that when he clearly wasn't and couldn't be?
George Pantzikis They WERE all contending with the same problems. Problems such as “Where are we going?”. It was curiosity and concern that fueled them in their respective fields and related those fields to the world at hand. It’s that same spirit that also leads people to attempt to wrap things into neat bows. A yearning to uncover the machinery of our existence, the rules of our universe. That spirit makes light where there was darkness. Would you begrudge the light-makers a bit of fumbling in their search for light? Will you join the ranks of those who have always opposed them, cherishing phrases like “I never understood”?
@@Alexander_D_Shaffer What you have presented is a collection of issues that may be summed up as existential questions. The stuff Bernstein is talking about (and what he proposes Mahler to have been composing in vein of) is a single question which might be dubbed the "Nietzsche" question. The whole "What do we do in the wake of modernity, as all our structures and preconceived notions crumble etc." This is a very pop-philosophy type question that gets thrown around a lot - especially now days, when, with the advent of youtube, any idiot can claim anything about anything - and really serves no actual philosophical purpose; you will find in most self proclaimed "free thinkers" and "independent minds" nothing but the desire to procure an aesthetic of posturing and a pseudo-academic flair. Music, for example, may have a narrative, an aesthetic point, or indeed a philosophical statement. To claim however that all art is about the same thing, that they all point to the same conclusion, and that these conclusions were arrived at by people living at different times and places is more than a stretch in my opinion. Same with the whole "Mahler wasn't popular until recently because he made us uncomfortable by informing us of our impending doom" is also completely pulled out of his ass. At least with the other points he made an attempt to link them a bit by providing only sad pieces of art. With this point he merely asserts it. Well, let me say this, when I listen to Mahler I do not feel existential dread weighing me down, nor am I confronted with my mortality. Yes, in the 9th, the themes of death are present and the over-all symphony leaves a very morbid aftertaste. But it is nothing unpleasant, and is certainly not present in his other symphonies. It doesn't explain why he didn't become a well known composer beforehand. To sum up: artists contend with similar questions - yes - but not with the same question; not all great artists reach the same conclusion; Mahler did not remain obscure due to an esoteric metaphysical distaste for the message he proclaimed in his work.
@@georgepantzikis7988 Even though I agree with your second comment, your question of "But why did he have to try and be more than that when he clearly wasn't and couldn't be?" sort of answers its self: We've always tried. Your point with Nietzsche makes it exactly clear, no? There is no reason, we do it because we believe we "can". Now, if you want a pragmaticistic program their are plenty in XX century. The long way of philosophy and mathematics is not preferred by everyone, unfortunately. But, returning to Bernstein, I'd say he is inclined to group all the greatest artist and thinkers in a few lines because he may figure intuitive judgement and instincts as the artist's gift. This is something he speaks in one of these lectures as "the artist's demon" or daemon (if you a Greek freak), but that, nonetheless, it is mainly a gamble of "guess work". And so it is with any other of the intellects of the XIX century until Maxwell and Peirce, and even they supposed chance to be a fundamental part of the universe, i.e., the first by statistical entropy and thermodynamics, the second by "abductive" inferential probability and triadic relations in semiotics. But it seems I've done as Bernstein and conjoined all writers in a bow, but an untied one. P.S. On Alexander Shaffer's employ of light as metaphor: "[...] once you found answers you'll want but questions, you'll want mystery, you'll want the element of darkness."
Agree with you re why "the need to wrap things up in a.neat bow" Another strong reaction I had was that though interesting, music is essentially a nonverbal medium so lends itself to multiple interpretations and trying to morph it into lots of more specific verbiage doesn't do much for me. It will speak to me what it will speak to me and to you what it will speak to you and both are totally authentic. Reminds me of Beethoven when asked by high society audience what was the meanibg of the piece he just played, sat down, played it again, stood up and said, " Gentlemen, that's what it means ".
It is true many music can have existential undertones, to say the entirety of Mahler is based on prophetic impending doom is nonsense, music is music, words are words, etc etc. At first it seemed reasonable, thinking about mr bernstein's hypothesis, that the anxious feeling of the beginning of industrial century changed art, but not as significantly nor in all authors and artists and scientists as he words it , i would say the aura around Mahler's music comes from his own life and wanting to put beauty on paper, not anything else, of course, i don't listen to mahler often or know much about him. personally i prefer simpler music; there is too much going on in Mahler's music
He improvised on paper each sommer and hit some goals from time to time, like being a game changer in history by destroing and opening music first, from inside
The Bradley Cooper movie Maestro was horrible, I almost walked out. Watching this in an attempt to clean my palette of that shallow unserious caricature.
to look for meaning in music , and even more so to look for prophetic utterance in music , is UTTER:LY ABSURD As a Jew Bernstein knew better. But his attitude to the Fount of Meaning was revealed in his Kaddish symphony, n that not by reading ambiguities of an inchoate non verbal mass of sound which is a symphony, but because of the text the composer had spoken through it at best this kind of talk is simply silly
Throckmorton's Nephew lol what??? Do u oppose academia are you a musical pragmatist. I understand their will always be someone who dislikes anything but whatttttt 😂
@@ballislife1696 My friend - oppose academia? No. But Bernstein seems to concern himself with - as I said in my other comment - how smart he thinks he is. He builds and builds on his self-deluded introspection, expanding wildly, until it's thoroughly removed from the art itself. I adore Mahler. His work has enriched my life. He's my #3 composer. And I love hearing people express their thoughts on him. But listening to the kind of talk about Mahler, like the kind above, can only diminish the beauty. God bless.
Throckmorton's Nephew I respect your mature response and I can see where you are coming from. Im a young music student and I am definitely a follower of Bernstein haha but I definitely see what your saying but I think all eccentric men or women will come off that way. I try to see pass that if possible but I understand you most like are coming from a more experienced place in life in which hopefully your looking more objectively so I will take it for what it is.👋 have a good one friend
I can never get tired of listening to Bernstein talk, especially about Mahler
Z Word The man had an amazing and captivating voice. His essays on music are phenomenal.
@@bcing75 Amen to that.
You share that fascinating in common with Leonard Bernstein, LOL.
It is more like is acting than lecturing. I can imagine him doing Shakespeare.
❤
Bernstein was the champion Mahler needed. Every great composer needs someone to teach people to properly appreciate them when they're gone.
You Said it.
Imvho.....Bersnstein proves how misunderstood and underappreciated Mahler was.
I'm so glad this lectures are preserved, may you be eternal Leonard Bernstein, you really brought us closer to understanding Mahler and his awesome music.
How beautifully you phrased that. Thanks!
The Greatest Music Teacher Of All Time.
OMG, listening to this Bernstein lecture has finally shed the light I had been desperately needing in my tunnel of discomfort and lack of understanding of Mahler. Thank you, thank you Lenny for your brilliance and great knowledge that helped me connect the dots to better understand this period of time that only those who lived in such dire need of capitulation to death and dispare understood. I have read much of the work by those authors he mentioned, Rilke was to me like Mahler himself, as was Camus, Brecht and others, and it all makes sense to me now thanks to this lecture. Damn!! I'm so glad I learned something new today! Ugh!!
I've been attached to this movement for some months and I hadn't listened to Bernstein till now comfirming what I had already understood. 'Cause Mahler talks with his music, what makes me cry every time I listen to it. I love how Bernstein explains its meaning and the wise analyse he does. I always listen to Mahler with his recordings. He was a great man.
Mahler keeps trying, in this movement, to encourage us, the listeners (though he may despair), to . . . . get it. YOU are EACH Powerful.
It's so beautiful that it literally breaks my heart.
Did you have open heart surgery?
Mahler's like my heart broke I break yours too!!! 😆
Mahler was the greatest symphony composer ever he was brilliant and way ahead of his time! Start with no.1 and you'll be dazzled and hooked on Mahler for life, he was absolutely incredible and so was Bernstein!!!!!
Putting anyone ahead of Beethoven is unacceptable. F___ you.
Hard to disagree, even for a devotee of Bruckner.
As a Mahler devotee for more than 50 years, I have read all the biographies, most of which reside on my bookshelf. I know all of his compositions like old and dear friends. Bernstein was a great conductor, and I watched his excellent young people's TV shows way back in the day. That said, his pontificating about the "meaning" of Mahler's music arose from his own mind and often has little to do with Mahler's expressed views. Despite efforts to portray him as some kind of innocent savant, Mahler was a very well read man and fully aware of the political and social ethos of his times. Well before the time he composed his 9th, Mahler was consistently advising listeners to find their own meanings in his music and looked with disfavor on those who attempted to speak for him on the subject or tell people what he "meant." If Bernstein's talks help someone appreciate this exquisite music, that's great, but don't conflate his ideas with Mahler's.
Thanks very much, you're of course right--the same can be said for pretty well all composers ... unless it's a straightforward theatrical piece, like Candide, or West Side Story. Still appreciate Bernstein giving us his ideas of the music. All I can say is it's sublime--painstakingly thought out and put down by Mahler, every note sings.
a very wise comment
These were a brilliant series of lectures. Bernstein was an excellent teacher. I remember when he was an assistant instructor of the NY Phil and led the young people's concert. In NYC the schools often took classes to the young people concerts (early 1950s). I first heard the lectures when I was on a NEH sabbatical at Duke University. Learned a lot at Duke and learned a lot from these lectures.. These lectures actually turned me on to Mahler.
Had Mahler never written another note but been fortunate enough to live another ~30 years, to die in older age at 80 in about 1940, one would hope that he would have looked favorably on the advent of jazz and its celebration of being alive that is at its core, not to mention seen and embraced the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and the coming of musicians like Kern, Gershwin, Rodgers, Porter and Ellington and Copeland; and gotten to hear works such as just the accompanying score to the film "Gone With The Wind".
I can only think that he may have been comforted in knowing that tonality and passion, creativity and beauty would still have been alive and well and not in its final stages. And there isn't a film composer ever since the dawn of "talking pictures" that doesn't owe a tremendous debt to the master of musical longing, tragedy, and perseverance - who died far too young but managed to say so much, nonetheless.
The 9th is my favorite of all musical compositions.
@once a musician I'll check that out, Thankyou.
2 nd!
@@ryanjofre Why wait? Listen to the Ancerl recording with the Czech Philharmonic on Supraphon.
He was right, almost every phrase had a resolution we imagine but it defies it each time without failure. His talk is more of a poem than a speech.
Many conductors made recorded comments about music. None of them compares to Bernstein for sheer depth of analysis and the effort to connect.
I adore how Bernstein always compounded the music in discussion with the world stage.
How he made it seem so relevant, even prophetic to its age and the years to follow. Mahler commented that his music would be popular only 50 years after his death, and in a way he was right. Please don't allow these interviews to get lost in obscurity. Bernstein was not only an amazing conductor, but one of our greatest teachers and elder statesmen for classical music.
Brilliant lecture on Mahler’s 9th. Bernstein was a genius that came from Russian prairies to bless humanity as an American. God save Bernstein.
This is a gigantic lesson. And he speaks to a globally cultured audience. In television. Mentioning authors and composers no one NOW has heard of. Mahler was right. The death of an era arrived.
no one knows about mahler, stravinsky, or schoenberg now? idiot
@@floridianbat maybe you do, but considering how you express yourself, it doesn't help you.
@@SuperMorriso there are many people who have heard of them. Jeez.
@@my_family_journal we are not many, jeez.
@@SuperMorriso That has always been the case. During Mahler's lifetime he also was known by a few. Same goes for Bach, Beethoven and the rest of them.
So beautiful, tears come to my eyes......
Never heard of Mahler ,,,,thank you Maestro!
if i could navigate my instrument the way he navigates the english language
The most magnificent and soulful music 🎶 composed by Mahler expressing all his pain sorrow and Hope and the greatest musicians being conducted by Maestro Leonard Bernstein , expressing with so much passion and feelings all of Maestro Mailer’s fears and Hopes of a better world 🌎 A beautiful symphony of life and its challenges and greed sorrow and pain An amazing composition as explained by Maestro Leonardo Bernstein and a brilliant performance by the greatest musicians conducted by his intense emotions and feelings May their souls
Rest In Peace ☮️♥️♥️🌹🌹🙏
Incredible how culture became a subculture in recent years. Bernstein explaining Mahler is today unthinkable
I just shared this with an older friend who is struggling to get through "Maestro," We can all do our part to help educate people.
Powerful stuff
Precious essay...thanks
one of the most sensitive and deepest lecture of Bernstein on MAHLER..............their two Jewish souls meet perfectly.........
What the fuck has Judaism got to do with it?
Bernstein was the Mahler expert par excellence!
This is about the 9th Symphony
Prescient words about life in past and current times!
"There is no theory, you merely have to listen." Claude Debussy.
“One day, children will whistle my melodies in the streets” - Anton Webern
@@masonb9788 That was very optimistic.
@@tarakb7606 yes, might take another century or two.
@@masonb9788 Maybe. 🤣
Master class!
This is what my anxiety feels like. Intense, calm, relaxed, intense, suspicious, afraid. In words, is hard to understand, with music, you feel trap.
I always found this segment something of a non-sequitur to what Bernstein had been exploring up to this point. But what a non-sequitur: purple prose it may be, but a real insight into how much Mahler meant to one of his finest interpreters.
Wow, just WOW!
I just finished to listen to the last Addagio
Bernstein, a very well read (and so almost inescapably verbose) person. A very interesting mind. In love with music (as we should all be), eloquent (giving to every power a double one) an individual...
Thank you.
after this, be sure to read "Late Night Thoughts Upon Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony" by Lewis Thomas..
Dio mio, che siano benedetti tutti quelli che hanno fatto in modo che potessimo godere di questi documenti
Amazing...
His eloquence in talking about music makes me feel as if I missed something in not liking more of classical music earlier in life. It is never too late but there is quite a bit more to appreciate!
If you haven't already: th-cam.com/video/aIaoAuUSiYM/w-d-xo.html
It's heartbreaking to know the insight Bernstein had into Mahler's mind. I can barely bring myself to listen to the movement.
And the insight they both had for the times then and now. Astonishing.
Fear of death is the basis of all fear.
I believe that Christ’s message was ,” Do not fear death”
It is fear of death that makes life hell.
This man!!
6:56, The famous lines used in his biographical portrait The Gift of Music: Act 1: Greed, hypocracy leading to a genocidal world war, postwar injustice and hysteria, boom, crash, totalitarianism etc.
A conductor needs to analyze how the music should sound, how to translate a score to sound. There are technical elements, such as finding the right balances, tempos, articulation. Bernstein's talks reveal that he worked on a deeper level - asking the question "why?" and what meaning we can attach to the music. It helps to appreciate the work he did as a conductor.
This is actually the conclusion of the 6th Norton Lecture!!✔✔✔
nope, it's the 5th. the 6th is on stravinsky.
That dig about 'your low calorie cigarette.' Go, bro, Bernstein. He was throwing shade at a cigarette advertising campaign. Was it Chesterfield's?
we're not worthy of this.
What Sergiu Celibidache is to Anton Bruckner's symphonies, Leonhard Bernstein (almost) is to Gustav Mahler's. Celi let the orchestra without interfering with its dynamics too much. Watching him conduct (without score as with all the available Bruckner synphonies - No 1 and 2 are unfortunately missing) gives me goosebumps every time. Just imagine Celi had interpreted Mahler's symphonies...
Bruckner was Mahler's teacher of harmony. If you know the second movement of Bruckner's 2nd symphony, it sounds as you are listening Mahler... Therefore Celi would definitely be as good interpreter of Mahler too.
"Celi let the orchestra without interfering with its dynamics too much."
Don't agree.
Celi did control orchestra's dynamics up to make musicians exhausted by rehearsals.
I remember him exlaiming "We are at the middle of the crescendo passage and you are already playing FFF !" (7th)
Mercy to this control, Bruckner's crescendi are none to equal when conducted by Celi. A unique experiment.
Celibidache hated Mahler although he admitted he has a great knowledge about the orchestra. But what or how he composed wasn't something that fit into Celibidache's concept of music.
That's absolutely true. What Bernstein did in this total documentary was to make explicit the transition of Western music as an expression of biblical objectivity via harmony and its slow orderly rejection of the same via atonality . Bernstein revealed that meta narrative.
Bravo ! Da Capo
I thought this was his greatest lecture in the series.
Mahler's music conveys emotion ......
Bernstein was the first to understand that when an aesthetic meaning-production system such as music is used to communicate a locality of meaning with people, it has to couple with culture, language, symbols. Schoenberg had a neat experiment with his mathematical musical model, but was instantly dismissed by the world who regard his project as artificial. It did not cybernetically couple with the socius of humanity. Mahler, Shostakovich, etc. on the other hand knew intimately how to dig into those frontlines of binaries (city/.rural, jew/christian, etc), connecting with humanity, and uplifting the epistemic tensions for all to see.
He knows.
When we die, we die for eternity. Let that sink for a moment.
Hey, thanks for the cheery reminder.
@@plekkchand Our body dies, our soul is Eternal.
@@plekkchandremember my comment as a Memento mori!
We cease to live in this physical body. Our soul/essence/spirit lives eternally.
21:17 23:43 26:09 30:27 32:47 33:27 33:40 40:27
warum sind da ständig schwarze Models vor jedem Clip?
the problem is that this kind of music can be heard as well in a totally different scenario such as the nazi regime
👍👍👍👍👍👍🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏❤️❤️❤️
wow
What year was this?
23:00 the last five minutes of the symphony despite being all calm, are a rollercoaster of emotions. This video of Abbado always makes me shiver th-cam.com/video/81AFdWXLNCU/w-d-xo.html
Mahler wasn't the first to put his tragic life into music. To say he was concerned with the prospects for the world is a stretch, most of us consider ourselves and family first. I would guess Mahler forsaking his jewishness, by converting to catholicism in order to gain traction in Vienna, weighed heavily on him as he got older. Tchaikovski is a prime example of a composer with demons who became introspective. Shostakovich must have studied Mahler, but why not? He wouldnt be the first to be influenced or indeed to copy others; Mahler 9 has copied Mahler 5 adagio, updated and revised!
Enough with Abbado. He never came close to Lenny in Mahler.
I Just need to hear Mahler
Sounds like Russell Brand.
I'm glad I have a strong catholic faith. They can say whatever they want, my life has sense, a meaning, and there is hope . THERE IS HOPE, lord will have mercy, there is hope
9:40 - 10:45
14:52 - 16:54
21:17 - 23:23
"Any way the wind blows.... " Heard Freddy clearly there near the end.
My dinner with Andre ?
life is meaningles for these demons
Sairam
Prof. Giuseppe Savazzi head of the WORLDWIDE CIA SAIRAM secret services in India member of Rotary Club of New York District 7230 blessing to all of you from India 🇮🇳
Music Director and Founder of the Sathya Sai Universal Symphony Orchestra in Putthaparty
Founder and music Director of the Rotary Youth International Orchestra with Lufthansa Sponsor since 1990. in šāʾ Allāh إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ Sairam 🙏🇮🇳❤️🙏
what does low calorie cigarette mean?
at 1:33
does he mean weed? lol
It’s a little, dry joke. Remember, this lecture was mid 1970’s when people began to really, really obsess about fitness, diet food, Diet Coke, fat free this that and the other.
He’s being dry: a cigarette is a low calorie/no calorie snack, if you like
First!
There is a new movie about Bernstein’s love life. Skip it. Watch his face as he conducts Mahler and there you see the real love story!
Bernstein was a brilliant actor. Bradley Cooper's attempt, no.
@6:40 “mend your ways, the apocalypse is at hand. The 20th century has been a very badly written drama since the beginning. The opposite of a Greek drama.”
Please un Espanis.
Mahler had to convert to Catholicism in order to advance his career in Europe due to the very active antisemitism. Notice I did not say "at that time." This was also true for Mendelsohn. The unanswered question: "Where will God be when the inevitable Holocaust occurs?"
Sanjosemike (no longer in CA)
well, when it actually occurs, like, for real, then we'll find out, I guess
@@garrysmodsketches You are apparently suggesting the Holocaust never happened. What am I missing?
Sanjosemike (no longer in CA)
@@sanjosemike3137 Of course it happened! No dead bodies of millions of people were even found, including their bones, but that's because nazis destroyed all the evidence. They burnt them and then destroyed their bones in mobile bone grinding machines. No bone grinding machines were ever found, but they must have existed! After all, there were no bones! That's how we know that bone grinding machines existed.
I fuese
listening to this at work while trap 'music' plays over the speakers, realising that Mahler and Bernstein was right...
Good lecture. However, and as much as I have tried, I just can't get into Mahler. Too long-winded for my taste. Listened to the finale of his "Resurrection" symphony, for example. Kept screaming in my mind for Gustav to get on with it. He drags on and on and on. Not that it isn't a good piece, but again a little too long-winded .Not to mention overblown. Although I did enjoy his 5th.
I understand. We can’t all have good taste.
I’m kidding!!! Lol. I can understand why someone wouldn’t like Mahler. But for me he’s just the most amazing composer.
Good music is like acquiring a taste for wine. Don't listen for a while and then give it another shot.
Bernstein was a great, although extremely flawed, champion of Mahler. His mythological BS, all of which is supplied by Alma (Jesus Christ!), will surely get poured back into the public consciousness, when this new Bernstein movie comes out. Scholarship and truth about Mahler will not matter. What will matter will be CD liner notes mythology.
Bernstein was a great and awesome Mahler champion. But anyone who has followed Mahler scholarship in the last three decades knows, Bernstein is as wrong as he can be.
But what can I say I’m railing against the Hollywood “composer movie” mythology machine
Disappointing, almost all intellectuals express the same opinion about their current time. I appreciate the analysis of Mahler, but not the application of it to later times.
Mahler is amazing, but I never understood this need intellectuals seem to have to wrap everything up in a neat bow. Not every single artist/clever person has been contending with the same problems. To talk about Marx, Rilke, Einstein, and Mahler in the same sentence is ridiculous and gives the impression that you are trying to sound profound but are actually just pulling at names. That said, Bernstein was a true genius of conducting and no one can take that away from om him. But why did he have to try and be more than that when he clearly wasn't and couldn't be?
George Pantzikis They WERE all contending with the same problems. Problems such as “Where are we going?”. It was curiosity and concern that fueled them in their respective fields and related those fields to the world at hand. It’s that same spirit that also leads people to attempt to wrap things into neat bows. A yearning to uncover the machinery of our existence, the rules of our universe. That spirit makes light where there was darkness. Would you begrudge the light-makers a bit of fumbling in their search for light? Will you join the ranks of those who have always opposed them, cherishing phrases like “I never understood”?
@@Alexander_D_Shaffer What you have presented is a collection of issues that may be summed up as existential questions. The stuff Bernstein is talking about (and what he proposes Mahler to have been composing in vein of) is a single question which might be dubbed the "Nietzsche" question. The whole "What do we do in the wake of modernity, as all our structures and preconceived notions crumble etc." This is a very pop-philosophy type question that gets thrown around a lot - especially now days, when, with the advent of youtube, any idiot can claim anything about anything - and really serves no actual philosophical purpose; you will find in most self proclaimed "free thinkers" and "independent minds" nothing but the desire to procure an aesthetic of posturing and a pseudo-academic flair.
Music, for example, may have a narrative, an aesthetic point, or indeed a philosophical statement. To claim however that all art is about the same thing, that they all point to the same conclusion, and that these conclusions were arrived at by people living at different times and places is more than a stretch in my opinion. Same with the whole "Mahler wasn't popular until recently because he made us uncomfortable by informing us of our impending doom" is also completely pulled out of his ass. At least with the other points he made an attempt to link them a bit by providing only sad pieces of art. With this point he merely asserts it. Well, let me say this, when I listen to Mahler I do not feel existential dread weighing me down, nor am I confronted with my mortality. Yes, in the 9th, the themes of death are present and the over-all symphony leaves a very morbid aftertaste. But it is nothing unpleasant, and is certainly not present in his other symphonies. It doesn't explain why he didn't become a well known composer beforehand.
To sum up: artists contend with similar questions - yes - but not with the same question; not all great artists reach the same conclusion; Mahler did not remain obscure due to an esoteric metaphysical distaste for the message he proclaimed in his work.
I'm kinda with you. Beautiful piece nonetheless.
@@georgepantzikis7988 Even though I agree with your second comment, your question of "But why did he have to try and be more than that when he clearly wasn't and couldn't be?" sort of answers its self: We've always tried. Your point with Nietzsche makes it exactly clear, no? There is no reason, we do it because we believe we "can". Now, if you want a pragmaticistic program their are plenty in XX century. The long way of philosophy and mathematics is not preferred by everyone, unfortunately. But, returning to Bernstein, I'd say he is inclined to group all the greatest artist and thinkers in a few lines because he may figure intuitive judgement and instincts as the artist's gift. This is something he speaks in one of these lectures as "the artist's demon" or daemon (if you a Greek freak), but that, nonetheless, it is mainly a gamble of "guess work". And so it is with any other of the intellects of the XIX century until Maxwell and Peirce, and even they supposed chance to be a fundamental part of the universe, i.e., the first by statistical entropy and thermodynamics, the second by "abductive" inferential probability and triadic relations in semiotics. But it seems I've done as Bernstein and conjoined all writers in a bow, but an untied one.
P.S. On Alexander Shaffer's employ of light as metaphor: "[...] once you found answers you'll want but questions, you'll want mystery, you'll want the element of darkness."
Agree with you re why "the need to wrap things up in a.neat bow" Another strong reaction I had was that though interesting, music is essentially a nonverbal medium so lends itself to multiple interpretations and trying to morph it into lots of more specific verbiage doesn't do much for me. It will speak to me what it will speak to me and to you what it will speak to you and both are totally authentic. Reminds me of Beethoven when asked by high society audience what was the meanibg of the piece he just played, sat down, played it again, stood up and said, " Gentlemen, that's what it means ".
It is true many music can have existential undertones, to say the entirety of Mahler is based on prophetic impending doom is nonsense, music is music, words are words, etc etc. At first it seemed reasonable, thinking about mr bernstein's hypothesis, that the anxious feeling of the beginning of industrial century changed art, but not as significantly nor in all authors and artists and scientists as he words it , i would say the aura around Mahler's music comes from his own life and wanting to put beauty on paper, not anything else, of course, i don't listen to mahler often or know much about him. personally i prefer simpler music; there is too much going on in Mahler's music
He improvised on paper each sommer and hit some goals from time to time, like being a game changer in history by destroing and opening music first, from inside
The Bradley Cooper movie Maestro was horrible, I almost walked out. Watching this in an attempt to clean my palette of that shallow unserious caricature.
to look for meaning in music , and even more so to look for prophetic utterance in music , is UTTER:LY ABSURD
As a Jew Bernstein knew better.
But his attitude to the Fount of Meaning was revealed in his Kaddish symphony, n that not by reading ambiguities of an inchoate non verbal mass of sound which is a symphony, but because of the text the composer had spoken through it
at best this kind of talk is simply silly
what a tedious music. you can say anything about everything but the sound itself of thsi adagio is mediocre.
Still doesn't hold a candle to Michael Jackson.
True
Youngboy better
This is the most depressing crap I’ve ever tried to listen to. Move on.
Native Virginian ? Explain
It's academic BS.
Throckmorton's Nephew lol what??? Do u oppose academia are you a musical pragmatist. I understand their will always be someone who dislikes anything but whatttttt 😂
@@ballislife1696 My friend - oppose academia? No. But Bernstein seems to concern himself with - as I said in my other comment - how smart he thinks he is. He builds and builds on his self-deluded introspection, expanding wildly, until it's thoroughly removed from the art itself. I adore Mahler. His work has enriched my life. He's my #3 composer. And I love hearing people express their thoughts on him. But listening to the kind of talk about Mahler, like the kind above, can only diminish the beauty. God bless.
Throckmorton's Nephew I respect your mature response and I can see where you are coming from. Im a young music student and I am definitely a follower of Bernstein haha but I definitely see what your saying but I think all eccentric men or women will come off that way. I try to see pass that if possible but I understand you most like are coming from a more experienced place in life in which hopefully your looking more objectively so I will take it for what it is.👋 have a good one friend
What year was this?