At first sight there seems little that connects Beethoven and Mahler, working at opposite ends of a long century, the one steeped in a time of revolution and war, the other caught up in a fin de siècle slide into the abyss. However, quite apart from the fact that they both wrote nine complete symphonies (and bits of a tenth), the latter made a number of Retuschen or retouchings to the former’s symphonic output involving, in the case of the Eroica, a very angst-ridden E flat clarinet. As a connoisseur of death, Mahler would also have been drawn to that symphony’s funeral march. And he himself suggested that, as composers, they had something else in common: a view of music which aimed at realising a musical allegory of the entire universe.
Something else linked the two in this particular programme, in which Thomas Hengelbrock conducted the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester for his final run of concerts in charge, namely pain and a sense of loss resulting from rejection. In Beethoven’s case this was the discovery that Napoleon, whom he had initially idolised, was not the incarnation of the spirit of freedom after all; with Mahler it was the realisation that his beloved Almschi had been two-timing him with Walter Gropius.
Hengelbrock started off with the full orchestra (the strings, seated antiphonally, were reduced for the following two pieces) playing the Adagio from Mahler’s Tenth. This was a curiously good-mannered reading, in which most of the edges were smoothed out, the great central dissonances – where nine notes are piled upon one another in utter tonal disintegration – having most of the sting removed, as if Hengelbrock was wary of making the horses shy. Lyricism was highlighted but the drama left to look after itself, so that this movement became a distant cousin of the Adagietto in the Fifth Symphony.
Whereas the over-bright acoustics in the Elbphilharmonie had given the orchestral sound a lighter quality in the Adagio, it provided a satisfying clarity for the chamber-like delicacy of the instrumentation in the Kindertotenlieder. Of more than four hundred poems that the grief-stricken poet Friedrich Rückert wrote on the death of two of his children, Mahler selected just five, stipulating however that they were to be seen as a suite in the specified order, with no breaks between the individual songs. Arguably the greatest exponent of musical irony that there has ever been, he stamps his mark in the very first song, where the rising of the sun is depicted in the minor mode and the reference to the “ill luck” announces itself in the major. Later Mahler uses the glockenspiel to herald the death-knell.