Newsgroup: it.cultura.ebraica
Titolo: la seconda sinfonia di Mahler in tele sabato sera

Sabato sera quando sono arrivato a casa di mia madre ho fatto in tempo 
ad ascoltare gli ultimi istanti della Seconda Sinfonia di Mahler (che 
tra l'altro per l'imponente organico avevo scambiato erronemente per 
l'Ottava) eseguita in presenza del Papa, del Rabbino capo di Roma e - mi 
pare - di qualche imam. Immagino si fosse trattato di un evento legato 
al dialogo tra le religioni, qualcuno di voi che ha visto la 
trasmissione sa dirmi qualcosa di più riguardo a quell'evento?
Grazie. Ciao,
-- 
Cris Carampa (
spamto:cri...@operamail.com
)
"Welcome to the new world order
  Families sleepin' in their cars in the southwest
  No home no job no peace no rest" (Bruce Springsteen)
---
Per il manifesto, le FAQ ed un'interfaccia Web visita 
http://www.menorah.it/

 trasmissione sa dirmi qualcosa di più riguardo a quell'evento?
no, ma su questa cosa è in atto un flame su it.arti. musica.classica.
Un flame che sarebbe molto on topic qui, ed è off topic lì.
Poichè riguarda proprio gli aspetti che hai suggerito.
Si è ricordato che Mahler fu convertito di forza.
E inoltre, c'è una discussione sul razzismo in generale che promette bene.
SI è partiti dall'antisemitismo, e qualcuno tenta di spiegare che
l'antisemitismo è una cosa (cioè razzismo) e invece avercela su con gli
immigrati è un'altra cosa (non è razzismo).
Interessantissimo e istruttivo.
Lo trovate sotto il thread *miracolo*
A.


 Si è ricordato che Mahler fu convertito di forza.
Quindi la sua conversione fu solo di facciata? Ma nel profondo che 
cos'era? Perchè trovo che ci sia molta spiritualità nella sua musica.
Ciao,
-- 
Cris Carampa (
spamto:cri...@operamail.com
)
"Welcome to the new world order
  Families sleepin' in their cars in the southwest
  No home no job no peace no rest" (Bruce Springsteen)
---


> Si č ricordato che Mahler fu convertito di forza.
In che senso "di forza"?
Credevo si fosse convertito per poter dirigere l'opera di Vienna. Intendevi
questo o č stato veramente costretto a farlo?
Tb


 cos'era? Perchè trovo che ci sia molta spiritualità nella sua musica.
Era ebreo di nascita.
La sua definizione di sè stesso fu questa "Sono straniero in Germania perchè
Austriaco, straniero in Austria perchè boemo, straniero nel mondo perchè
ebreo".
Un uomo che patì molto il tormento di essere uno sradicato, o meglio, che
patì il fatto che altri facessero di lui uno sradicato.
In quanto all'ebraismo di Mahler, esso è sicuramente evidente in alcune
sinfonie, dal punto di vista strettamente musicale.
Ecco cosa pensava Mahler della sua conversione (da una lettera a un amico):
"Tutta questa storia non è stata altro che una farsa, per me, poichè non
credo a nulla di tutto ciò e potevo anche contestare ogni parola del prete.
Ho memorizzato interi passi da recitare come fossero poesie in una lingua
straniera".
Che la musica di Mahler sia intensamente spirituale, non ci piove, concordo
assolutamente.
Essa testimonia anche di un mondo in disfacimento.
Sarebbe un discorso lungo.
Per agevolarlo, cercherò qualcosa in rete da postare.
ciao
A.


 questo o è stato veramente costretto a farlo?
beh, dipende come la metti.
Nessuno gli ha messo un fucile davanti al naso.
In sostanza (e c'è lo zampino di Cosima Wagner, la quale dichiarò "Finchè
vivrò io, nessun ebreo metterà piede all'Opera di Vienna), fu invitato a
convertirsi.
Il posto di Direttore dell'Opera di Vienna non contemplava che si fosse
ebrei.
Ergo, Mahler si convertì nel 1897.
Per guadagnarsi il pane.
Se non ti sembra forzare, questo, non so.....
(cosa ne pensasse lui, lo scrivo nel post di risposta a Cris).
Ricordo anche che Mahler in quanto *compositore* (e non direttore
dell'Opera) fu fortissimamente osteggiato perchè ebreo.
A.


 A.
Ho capito.
Io, per rispetto ai martiri delle crociate e della controriforma, non direi
proprio "conversione forzata", anche se certamente non direi nemmeno
"conversione per opportunismo", come spesso vengono etichettati quel tipo di
passaggi.
E' difficile ritagliare con una parola la situazione degli ebrei tedeschi e
austroungarici di quel tempo: un groviglio tra parità di diritti teorica e
discriminazioni concrete, tra ebraismo ormai in gran parte secolarizzato e
barriere messe in nome di una religione in cui molto spesso nessuno credeva
più (spesso nemmeno gli antisemiti).
Poi, è arrivato l'antisemitismo razziale. E tutto è diventato tragicamente
più chiaro.
Vabbè. Che tu sappia, Mahler ha diretto prima a Budapest o a Vienna?
(Io credo a Budapest, mi sembra di ricordare che sia stato uno dei direttori
più giovani che l'Opera di Budapest abbia avuto, il che, stranamente,
vorrebbe dire che all' Opera di Budapest non c'era lo stesso ostracismo che
a Vienna).
Tb


 a Vienna).
esatto per Budapest.
attenzione che la situazione non era facile nemmeno lě, perň.
Incollo brano del Grove sulla carriera mahleriana a Budapest.
5. Budapest, 1888-91.
In Prague the politics of nationalism had provided a complicated backdrop to
Mahler's role as official representative of German culture; in Budapest they
were problematically internal to the institution he headed from October
1888. Hungary's position in the dual monarchy led to irresolvable tensions
between two forms of nationalist identity. Each had its proponents among the
Magyar aristocrats who formed a significant part of the audience that
supported opera in Budapest; for both groups nationalism entailed curbing
desires for self-determination on the part of Hungary's internal ethnic
minorities (Slovaks, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes). The more liberal Magyar
nationalists, whose influence was increasing when Mahler arrived,
sympathized with the formerly unifying German culture of Austria but
required that librettos be translated into Hungarian and that native
Hungarian singers fill as many roles as possible. The conservative faction
favoured a more radical, anti-Austrian policy of cultural Magyarization, for
example entailing the composition of 'Hungarian' operas by Hungarian
composers.
Mahler's enforced Magyar sympathies were easily reconciled with his own
artistic ideals where members of the liberal, German-orientated tendency
were concerned. The significant Hungarian politician Count Albert Apponyi
and the composer Ödön de Mihalovich, director of the Budapest Academy, were
admirers of Wagner and became influential supporters of Mahler. So too did
the State Secretary Ferenc von Beniczky, who was responsible for the
management of the Budapest theatres and assumed the role of Intendant of the
Royal Opera. The reason for the ascendancy of the liberals lay partly in the
failure to maintain standards and audience levels on the part of the Erkel
family, which had come to dominate the Royal Opera. Anti-Austrian
nationalism was expressed in the historical and folklorist stage works of
the aging composer Ferenc Erkel, whose sons Alexander (Sándor) and Gyula
were employed as conductors at the opera house. Sándor Erkel had in fact
been running it, as nominal director, in an increasingly negligent and
unadventurous fashion. His continued presence, effectively demoted to a
subordinate role as conductor, was to pose obvious problems to the incoming
'Austrian' director.
Mahler addressed the double task of increasing box-office returns while
pursuing an effective Magyarization policy by concentrating initially on
administration, planning and rehearsal. He took the conductor's stand
himself for the first time in January 1889, in a half Ring cycle. Das
Rheingold and Die Walküre, sung for the first time in Hungarian, were
performed in the correct order, with no tickets available for individual
operas; the audience was required to attend both or none. The demands of the
liberal, Germanophile Magyars were thus satisfied in characteristically
idealistic fashion. The critic Ludwig Karpath later recalled the
electrifying effect of Mahler's innovations and performance style on the
Royal Opera's partly philistine audience. Some of its members, particularly
supporters of the Erkel brothers, resented the new director on anti-Semitic
grounds and questioned the appropriateness of his relatively high salary.
Other valuable accounts of Mahler's strategy and day-to-day life in Budapest
(where he made efforts to learn Hungarian) were recorded by his Viennese
friend, the historian and archaeologist Fritz Löhr and by a former
conservatory acquaintance, the violinist and viola player Natalie
Bauer-Lechner, who established a friendship with Mahler that was to last,
with an increasing intensity of commitment on her part, until Mahler's
marriage in 1902. Löhr, on his first visit to Budapest, observed Mahler's
efforts to establish productive social relationships with influential
members of Budapest society. Bauer-Lechner's observations from the end of
Mahler's time in Budapest (autumn 1891) reflect his latterly embattled
position in the city's cultural life, which helped to exacerbate minor
opera-house disputes of the kind that he was always prone to generate. (On
this occasion two singers, who considered themselves to have been
dishonoured by his criticism, had publicly challenged Mahler to a duel; he
declined.)
The intervening years were marked both by triumphs and by a series of
personal and professional crises. Mahler's domestic circumstances and
emotional life were profoundly affected in 1889 by family deaths. His father
died in February; in the autumn the death of his married younger sister
Leopoldine was followed by that of his long-ailing mother. By the end of the
year Mahler had become head of a family comprising his two sisters, Emma and
Justine, and his brothers Alois and Otto. Since Alois was doing military
service, Mahler's primary concern was for his two sisters. After the sale of
the Iglau house and Bernhard Mahler's business, he arranged for them to move
in with Fritz Löhr and his wife in Vienna (Otto, now a student at the
conservatory, was already lodging there). The elder of Mahler's sisters,
Justine, stayed with him in Budapest for two extended periods during which
their already affectionate relationship deepened into a mutually supportive
friendship on which Mahler came increasingly to rely.
His stressful public life in Budapest disrupted the routine of spare-time
composition that he had established in Leipzig. New projects seem not to
have been significantly advanced between 1888 and 1891; however, music of
the Leipzig period was presented there in the two earliest concerts in which
works he considered important were performed in public. On 13 November 1889,
shortly after his mother's death, Mahler included his songs Frühlingsmorgen,
Erinnerung and Scheiden und Meiden (all subsequently published in the 1892
collection Lieder und gesänge) in a group he performed with the soprano
Bianca Bianchi at a Budapest chamber concert. The local critics responded
favourably to what they judged accomplished examples of German song. More
momentous was the premičre of the first version of the First Symphony
(presented as a five-movement 'Symphonic Poem in two Parts') a week later,
on 20 November.
The symphony's reception was later represented by Mahler and his friends as
a disaster which hindered the development of his reputation as a composer.
Both operatic and wider cultural politics must in fact have influenced the
Budapest audience's response to its performance under Mahler's baton in the
middle of an otherwise conventional concert conducted by Sándor Erkel.
Mahler and Erkel factions had expressed their feelings audibly in the hall,
but the performance had clearly been of considerable power (Fritz Löhr
testified to the impression made on both him and Mahler by the
dress-rehearsal on 19 November, before an invited audience). The critics
were most inventively nonplussed by the final two movements, in which the
symphony's radical 'new Romanticism' seemed perplexingly and perversely
expressed. What particularly hurt Mahler was a negative review by Viktor von
Herzfeld, a Vienna Conservatory contemporary who had won (in 1884) the
coveted Beethoven Prize that Mahler had twice failed to secure.
Following a Christmas spent with his brothers and sisters at the Löhrs'
house in Vienna, Mahler found his position at the Budapest Opera beginning
to change in the early months of 1890. There had been a significant move to
the nationalist-conservative right in Hungarian politics. The resignation in
March of the Prime Minister Kalman Tisza and his replacement by Count Gyula
Szapáry were the outward signs of a process that was clearly threatening to
the Intendant, Beniczky. Mahler was meanwhile occupied with productions of
Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots and Halévy's La Juive, along with further
performances of Die Walküre (public opinion militated against his completion
of a full Hungarian Ring cycle). His concern to respond pragmatically to the
political situation in Budapest may be gauged from his care to mark the
national celebration of the 400th anniversary of the death of King Matthias
Corvinus with a gala concert featuring music by Ferenc Erkel, who shared
some of the conducting with his son Sándor. The closing highlight of the
1889-90 season, however, was a new production of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro
with which Mahler delighted liberal supporters such as Count Apponyi.
The summer of 1890 began with a working Italian tour with his sister
Justine, the purpose being to seek out promising future guest singers
(Mahler had persistent difficulty in finding suitably trained Hungarians)
and to assess the viability of some of the new Italian operas. Of the two
such operas he staged in Budapest, Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana was to
prove influentially successful (the other was Franchetti's Asrael). The
second half of the summer brought the Mahler and Löhr families together
again in a rented villa in Hinterbrühl, where Mahler worked on Wunderhorn
settings that later appeared in the second and third volumes of the Lieder
und Gesänge (1892).
The 1891-2 season in Budapest opened against a background of mounting
tension which led Mahler to begin negotiations with the director of the
Hamburg Stadttheater, with a view to obtaining a post there. The decision
proved timely. On 22 January 1891 Beniczky was replaced as Intendant by the
nationalist Magyar aristocrat Count Géza Zichy. His agenda, supported by the
conservative press and the new political climate, was clear: to remove from
Mahler all executive power over artistic decisions. Zichy, a one-armed
pianist with pretensions as a poet and composer, imposed his own artistic
views with a determination that was coloured by anti-Semitic prejudice.
Mahler's final triumph in Budapest was another Mozart opera, mounted before
Zichy took over: a production of Don Giovanni in which he aimed for an
unfashionable degree of 'authenticity' by restoring the original recitatives
(long abandoned in favour of spoken dialogue), accompanying them himself on
an upright piano in the orchestra pit. The production was received with
unusual enthusiasm by Brahms, who was visiting Budapest. The satisfaction at
winning the support of so influential a musician was deepened by the
knowledge that it might open doors that would otherwise remain closed to
him, particularly in Vienna; Mahler began to foster a respectful friendship
with the older composer.
The end of Mahler's period at the Royal Hungarian Opera was marked by
inevitable conflict between himself and Zichy, although he managed to show a
degree of judicious forbearance once his contract with Hamburg was settled.
He submitted his resignation in March 1891. An audience demonstration in his
favour at a Lohengrin performance on 16 March (he was not conducting) must
have given Mahler some satisfaction as he prepared to take up his new, if
technically lower-status, position in Hamburg. (By a curious turn of events,
his successor in Budapest was his former Leipzig rival Arthur Nikisch, whom
Zichy honoured with a considerably higher salary.)


 Incollo brano del Grove sulla carriera mahleriana a Budapest.
Grazie mille. Domani me lo leggo con calma, sembra interessante.
tb



http://www.gustav-mahler.it/it/index.htm
All'età di quindici anni entrò nel conservatorio di Vienna, dove studiò
pianoforte e composizione, ottenne vari premi e finì gli studi nel 1878. Dal
1880 fu direttore d'orchestra e "Kapellmeister" a Hall, Lubiana, Olmütz,
Kassel, Praga, Lipsia e nel 1888 divenne direttore del Teatro Reale
dell'Opera a Budapest. Dal 1891 fu primo direttore d'orchestra ad Amburgo.
Nel 1897 fu chiamato all'Imperial Regio Teatro dell'Opera di Vienna e ben
presto ne divenne il direttore.
