Brawl breaks out at Mahler concert

[Dan]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/10/22/concert-goer-rustled-bag-gum-during-mahler-symphony-violent-attack-ensued/?utm_term=.9607da866a7e

Yep I hate it too when people make needless noise at a concert but I'm not bold enough to do more than the evil glare. I'm sure this is getting worse all over not better. I'm avoiding concerts till after my sinus surgery because I have a steady cough and my ears are a bit stuffed so not only can't I hear well I'd ruin it for others.

 

[lovinthehd]

A bag of gum?

 

[Swerd]

A bag of gum?

A bag of gum is for those few who would never be satisfied with just one pack of gum. I bet that woman rustled that bag of gum loudly and frequently.

Note that this was at a concert of a Gustav Mahler symphony. People who aren't classical music fans in general may believe those who do like it suffer from being too serious. But Mahler fans are a special breed of classical music fan – most are harmless – but some can be seriously crazy!

 

[lovinthehd]

Is this a common thing in Sweden, to have bags of gum, tho? Were they sold at the concert's concession counter? So many questions I really don't care about

 

[TLS Guy]

A bag of gum is for those few who would never be satisfied with just one pack of gum. I bet that woman rustled that bag of gum loudly and frequently.

Note that this was at a concert of a Gustav Mahler symphony. People who aren't classical music fans in general may believe those who do like it suffer from being too serious. But Mahler fans are a special breed of classical music fan – most are harmless – but some can be seriously crazy!

We don't know how good the performance was though do we? This is a frequently misunderstood piece of music.

Properly played it is one of the most beautiful slow movements ever written. The problem is that it is so often played as a funeral dirge and not a love letter to a young bride. The movement is marked adagietto and not adagio which is slower. Mahler also marked it Langsam which means lento which is faster then largo. Mahler never used metronome markings. We do know that Bruno Walter marked Mahler's timing for the music at seven and half minutes at the premier. For a long time, timings were around 8 minutes for the movement. Leonard Bernstein and others have dragged it out as long as 12 minutes. This in my view destroys the movement.

So may be the lady was making an ill advised protest. Much more likely though she was uncouth, and her behavior was totally unacceptable.

 

[Alex2507]

Much more likely though she was uncouth, and her behavior was totally unacceptable.

If anyone is gonna learn a lesson in manners it's gonna be punched-out 4 eyes.

You don't f^%& with a Swede's gum.

 

[lovinthehd]

If anyone is gonna learn a lesson in manners it's gonna be punched-out 4 eyes.

You don't f^%& with a Swede's gum.

Guess farting during a piece like this would not be a good thing unless it's SBD? No long squeekers for sure. A little excitement could only help, I usually fall asleep during classical music concerts.

 

[Out-Of-Phase]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/10/22/concert-goer-rustled-bag-gum-during-mahler-symphony-violent-attack-ensued/?utm_term=.9607da866a7e

Yep I hate it too when people make needless noise at a concert but I'm not bold enough to do more than the evil glare. I'm sure this is getting worse all over not better. I'm avoiding concerts till after my sinus surgery because I have a steady cough and my ears are a bit stuffed so not only can't I hear well I'd ruin it for others.

Good grief.

Nothing is safe anymore.

 

[shadyJ]

I'm not normally OK with vigilante justice, but if someone became obnoxious with chewing gum and got their lights punched out at a classical music concert, I don't see what's so wrong.

 

[Swerd]

Note that this was at a concert of a Gustav Mahler symphony. People who aren't classical music fans in general may believe those who do like it suffer from being too serious. But Mahler fans are a special breed of classical music fan – most are harmless – but some can be seriously crazy!

We don't know how good the performance was though do we? This is a frequently misunderstood piece of music.

My first exposure to Mahler was a performance of his 9th symphony. It is extremely long, the ushers warned us there would be no intermission. The restrooms were very busy before the start. A typical performance takes from 75 to 90 minutes. I can only imagine how difficult that was for the musicians. Although I saw no catheter or IV bags in the orchestra, I wondered how many musicians wore adult diapers that evening. It must be like running a marathon for them.

Mahler 9 has been both praised and hated by critics. Whether you like it or not, it's (in my honest opinion) a difficult piece for a listener. There are numerous changes in key and meter. Mahler 9 is described as being in the key of D major, but the symphony varies its tone so often that I was both fascinated and worn out from listening to it. When it ended, I noticed there was a wide range of emotions visible among other concert goers – from delighted elation – to sheer relief – to down & out exhaustion. I didn't know exactly how I felt as I left that night, but I was certainly glad to hit the men's room again on the way out. I wasn't alone.

Views on and quotes about the Symphony (quoted from Wikipedia)
The enjoyment of Mahler's Ninth Symphony prompted the essayist Lewis Thomas to write the title essay in his Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony.

• Many Mahler interpreters have been moved to speak with similar profundity about the work:It expresses an extraordinary love of the earth, for Nature. – Alban Berg
• It is music coming from another world, it is coming from eternity. – Herbert von Karajan
• It is terrifying, and paralyzing, as the strands of sound disintegrate ... in ceasing, we lose it all. But in letting go, we have gained everything. – Leonard Bernstein
• I believe it to be not only his last but also his greatest achievement. – Otto Klemperer
• [Mahler's] Ninth is most strange. In it, the author hardly speaks as an individual any longer. It almost seems as though this work must have a concealed author who used Mahler merely as his spokesman, as his mouthpiece. – Arnold Schoenberg
• It was voted the 4th greatest symphony of all time in a survey of conductors carried out by the BBC music magazine

Less favorable views include:

• Someday, some real friends of Mahler's will ... take a pruning knife and reduce his works to the length that they would have been if the composer had not stretched them out of shape; and then the great Mahler war will be over ... The Ninth Symphony would last about twenty minutes. – Deems Taylor

As you can see, there is no shortage of opinions on Mahler 9. A joke I heard while leaving the concert hall that night, was that Mahler composed his 9th and last symphony while he knew he was dying from heart disease. His 9th was his wish to to take his audience with him.

At the advice of a good friend, I avoided forming any lasting opinion of Mahler until I heard some of his other work. Since then I've heard Mahler 1 and 3 and liked them much better than the 9th.

Perhaps the woman with the bag of gum or the concertgoer who sat next to her were suffering from full bladders.

 

[TLS Guy]

My first exposure to Mahler was a performance of his 9th symphony. It is extremely long, the ushers warned us there would be no intermission. The restrooms were very busy before the start. A typical performance takes from 75 to 90 minutes. I can only imagine how difficult that was for the musicians. Although I saw no catheter or IV bags in the orchestra, I wondered how many musicians wore adult diapers that evening. It must be like running a marathon for them.

Mahler 9 has been both praised and hated by critics. Whether you like it or not, it's (in my honest opinion) a difficult piece for a listener. There are numerous changes in key and meter. Mahler 9 is described as being in the key of D major, but the symphony varies its tone so often that I was both fascinated and worn out from listening to it. When it ended, I noticed there was a wide range of emotions visible among other concert goers – from delighted elation – to sheer relief – to down & out exhaustion. I didn't know exactly how I felt as I left that night, but I was certainly glad to hit the men's room again on the way out. I wasn't alone.

Views on and quotes about the Symphony (quoted from Wikipedia)
The enjoyment of Mahler's Ninth Symphony prompted the essayist Lewis Thomas to write the title essay in his Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony.

• Many Mahler interpreters have been moved to speak with similar profundity about the work:It expresses an extraordinary love of the earth, for Nature. – Alban Berg
• It is music coming from another world, it is coming from eternity. – Herbert von Karajan
• It is terrifying, and paralyzing, as the strands of sound disintegrate ... in ceasing, we lose it all. But in letting go, we have gained everything. – Leonard Bernstein
• I believe it to be not only his last but also his greatest achievement. – Otto Klemperer
• [Mahler's] Ninth is most strange. In it, the author hardly speaks as an individual any longer. It almost seems as though this work must have a concealed author who used Mahler merely as his spokesman, as his mouthpiece. – Arnold Schoenberg
• It was voted the 4th greatest symphony of all time in a survey of conductors carried out by the BBC music magazine

Less favorable views include:

• Someday, some real friends of Mahler's will ... take a pruning knife and reduce his works to the length that they would have been if the composer had not stretched them out of shape; and then the great Mahler war will be over ... The Ninth Symphony would last about twenty minutes. – Deems Taylor

As you can see, there is no shortage of opinions on Mahler 9. A joke I heard while leaving the concert hall that night, was that Mahler composed his 9th and last symphony while he knew he was dying from heart disease. His 9th was his wish to to take his audience with him.

At the advice of a good friend, I avoided forming any lasting opinion of Mahler until I heard some of his other work. Since then I've heard Mahler 1 and 3 and liked them much better than the 9th.

Perhaps the woman with the bag of gum or the concertgoer who sat next to her were suffering from full bladders.

In the world of opera 90 minutes is not long for just one act.

 

[Swerd]

In the world of opera 90 minutes is not long for just one act.

True, but things are much better when you can hit pause with your remote control, step out to the porcelain facility, return, and resume play .

I still maintain that Mahler induces stress in a concert hall audience. Why else would that woman feel the need to bring a bag full of chewing gum with her? Why else would she attack her neighbor for taking her gum away?

Would opera attendees tolerate that any better? Or would they mob the opera director to set up an unscripted beheading in the 3rd act ? (That may depend whether the opera is performed in London or Milano.)

 

[Verdinut]

We don't know how good the performance was though do we? This is a frequently misunderstood piece of music.

Properly played it is one of the most beautiful slow movements ever written. The problem is that it is so often played as a funeral dirge and not a love letter to a young bride. The movement is marked adagietto and not adagio which is slower. Mahler also marked it Langsam which means lento which is faster then largo. Mahler never used metronome markings. We do know that Bruno Walter marked Mahler's timing for the music at seven and half minutes at the premier. For a long time, timings were around 8 minutes for the movement. Leonard Bernstein and others have dragged it out as long as 12 minutes. This in my view destroys the movement.

So may be the lady was making an ill advised protest. Much more likely though she was uncouth, and her behavior was totally unacceptable.

According to what has been reported in Bruno Walter's biography, he worked closely with Gustav Mahler as the composer's assistant and protégé. As a young man, he was Gustav Mahler's first Kapellmeister at the Vienna Opera from 1901 to 1907 (when Mahler resigned and left Walter co-director with Franz Schalk). Thus he worked at the feet of his master, who studied with him all his compositions and discussed his aims and ambitions.

He surely knew how his master wanted to have the symphonies performed.

I have his performances of all Mahler symphonies with some as he directs the Columbia Symphony Orchestra and others with the New York Philharmonic.

 

[Alex2507]

Why else would she attack her neighbor for taking her gum away?

I'm surprised the gum chewer waited for the show to end before launching that dude's glasses off his head with a smack.

 

[Swerd]

I'm surprised the gum chewer waited for the show to end before launching that dude's glasses off his head with a smack.

She also is a Mahler junkie, and didn't want to spoil the performance.

 

[Swerd]

We don't know how good the performance was though do we? This is a frequently misunderstood piece of music.

Properly played it is one of the most beautiful slow movements ever written. The problem is that it is so often played as a funeral dirge and not a love letter to a young bride. The movement is marked adagietto and not adagio which is slower. Mahler also marked it Langsam which means lento which is faster then largo. Mahler never used metronome markings. We do know that Bruno Walter marked Mahler's timing for the music at seven and half minutes at the premier. For a long time, timings were around 8 minutes for the movement. Leonard Bernstein and others have dragged it out as long as 12 minutes. This in my view destroys the movement.

I didn't know about Bruno Walter's timing notes. Thank you for pointing that out. It does suggest that others going slower did make it plod along.

Views on and quotes about the Symphony (quoted from Wikipedia)
The enjoyment of Mahler's Ninth Symphony prompted the essayist Lewis Thomas to write the title essay in his Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony.

• It is music coming from another world, it is coming from eternity. – Herbert von Karajan
• It is terrifying, and paralyzing, as the strands of sound disintegrate ... in ceasing, we lose it all. But in letting go, we have gained everything. – Leonard Bernstein
• [Mahler's] Ninth is most strange. In it, the author hardly speaks as an individual any longer. It almost seems as though this work must have a concealed author who used Mahler merely as his spokesman, as his mouthpiece. – Arnold Schoenberg

However, my personal opinion of Mahler 9 falls somewhere between that of Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, and Arnold Schoenberg.

At the advice of a good friend, I avoided forming any lasting opinion of Mahler until I heard some of his other work. Since then I've heard Mahler 1 and 3 and liked them much better than the 9th.

That good advice came from Dennis Murphy, the musician and speaker designer. For what its worth, he agrees that certain Beethoven symphonies suffer in modern interpretations by being played too slowly. He prefers Carlos Kleiber's version of Beethoven's 7th. So do I.

 

[TLS Guy]

I didn't know about Bruno Walter's timing notes. Thank you for pointing that out. It does suggest that others going slower did make it plod along.
However, my personal opinion of Mahler 9 falls somewhere between that of Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, and Arnold Schoenberg.
That good advice came from Dennis Murphy, the musician and speaker designer. For what its worth, he agrees that certain Beethoven symphonies suffer in modern interpretations by being played too slowly. He prefers Carlos Kleiber's version of Beethoven's 7th.

I would agree Mahler is controversial. It is a shame you stated with the 9th, probably the most difficult. I think the fourth is a good place to start, the most classical of them all.

Mahler was hardly ever programmed until Deryck Cooke gave a series of lectures on the BBC third program in the late 1950s. That really was my introduction to Mahler. In the UK performances of his works became regularly programmed, especially at the Proms.

There is a Blu Ray set I really recommend of no. 1 - 7 under Claudio Abbado.

For number 8 the symphony of a 1000 I recommend Dudamel

You can get Claudio Abbado's No.9 here.

Mahler certainly had his critics like the late British composer John Tavener, who said that his problem with Mahler was that his music was all about him!

If you want something I think you will enjoy then I will link you to a post I put up today, where you can enjoy an about to be released disc from Sony Classical, by one of our greatest living composers. Don't take my word for it, Sir Simon Rattle, Daniel Barenboim and Zubin Mehta say so as well. I have pre ordered my copy already. I anticipate a fast sell out which is the norm for this artist. The problem is the ravishing melodies will stay in your head for days.