Харуки Мураками - Absolutely on Music

OZAWA: Well, this is all very complicated, but I do think there are such openings.

MURAKAMI: I remember when we talked about Berlioz and you said that his music had openings that a Japanese conductor could exploit, because it was “crazy.” Can’t you say pretty much the same thing about Mahler?

OZAWA: The big difference between Berlioz and Mahler is that Berlioz doesn’t put in all these detailed instructions.

MURAKAMI: Ah, I see.

OZAWA: So we performers are a lot freer when it comes to Berlioz. We have less freedom with Mahler, but when you get to those final, subtle details, I think there exists a sort of universal opening. We Japanese and other Asian people have our own special kind of sorrow. I think it comes from a slightly different place than Jewish sorrow or European sorrow. If you are willing to attempt to understand all of these mentalities, and make informed decisions after you do so, then the music will naturally open up for you. Which is to say that when an Easterner performs music written by a Westerner, it can have its own special meaning. I think it’s well worth the effort.

MURAKAMI: You mean you have to dig down to something deeper than superficial Japanese emotionalism to understand it and internalize it?

OZAWA: Yes, that’s it. I like to think that a performance of Western music that also makes full use of Japanese sensibilities—assuming the performance itself is excellent—has its own raison d’être.

MURAKAMI: Earlier we listened to Mitsuko Uchida playing Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, and I don’t think it would be wrong to say that her performance is very Japanese with regard to the transparency of her piano or her perfect placement of those moments of silence. I don’t think she is deliberately aiming for such things but rather that they emerge quite naturally as a result of her pursuit of the music itself. In that sense, they are not superficial at all.

OZAWA: You may be right about that. There may be uniquely Eastern ways of playing Western music. I would like to go on believing in that possibility.

MURAKAMI: I guess you could say that Mahler was a person who, half consciously but also half unconsciously, departed from what you might call orthodox German music.

OZAWA: It’s true. Which is precisely why I want to think that there is plenty of room for us non-Europeans to cut our way inside. Professor Saito had some very helpful things to tell us in that regard. “You youngsters are blank slates at the moment. So when you go to other countries, you will be able to absorb their traditions. But traditions are not always good. There are both good traditions and bad traditions. That’s true of Germany, of France, and of Italy. Even in America now there are both good traditions and bad traditions. You’ll have to learn to distinguish between the two, and when you go to those countries, you should absorb their good traditions. If you can do that, you will find there is a role for you as Japanese, as Asians.”

MURAKAMI: If you ask me, I would guess that, for a very long time, conductors like Karajan had an almost visceral intolerance for the hybridity, the vulgarity, the disunity of Mahler.

OZAWA: I see what you mean. It’s probably fair to say that.

MURAKAMI: We talked before about Karajan’s performance of the Mahler Ninth Symphony, and I agree it’s a wonderful performance. It practically drips with beauty. But if you listen to it carefully, it’s—how should I put it?—it’s not really Mahleresque Mahler. He’s playing Mahler with the same tone he might use for a Schoenberg or a Berg or some other early work of the New Viennese school. In other words, it sounds to me as if Karajan is performing Mahler by dragging him into the area where he himself is at his best.

OZAWA: That is exactly right. It’s especially true of the final movement. Even during the earliest rehearsals, he gave the orchestra the orders he always gave them and made the same kind of music he always did.

MURAKAMI: Instead of producing a Mahleresque sound, he was borrowing the “Mahler” container and filling it with his own music.

OZAWA: Which is why the only Mahler symphonies he played were the Fourth, the Fifth, and this Ninth we’re talking about.

MURAKAMI: I’m pretty sure he did the Sixth, too, and Das

Lied von der Erde.

OZAWA: Oh, really? He did the Sixth, too, did he? So that means the ones he didn’t do were the First, Second, Third, Seventh, and Eighth.

MURAKAMI: Which is to say that he chose to record the containers—the works—that were best suited to his own musicality. Maybe he couldn’t quite accept the deep, truly Mahleresque parts of Mahler’s music, which were, in other words, incompatible with orthodox German music. Böhm might have had a tough time with those qualities in Mahler, too. In Germany, especially, Mahler’s music was quite literally wiped out over the twelve long years following 1933, when the Nazis took power, to the end of the war in 1945. That’s a huge gap that put it at a great disadvantage. “A bad tradition” doesn’t begin to encompass the things that happened.

OZAWA: Hmm.

MURAKAMI: Afterwards, it fell to America, and not Europe, to become the powerhouse for the current Mahler revival. In that sense, in some ways, the advantage was given to performers outside of the European home base, or at least the music of someone like Mahler was under no dis advantage there.

OZAWA: It’s not “someone like Mahler”—it is Mahler. He was special in that sense.

MURAKAMI: Speaking of “special,” when I’m listening to Mahler, I always think that there are deep layers of the psyche that play an important role in his music. Maybe it’s something Freudian. In Bach or Beethoven or Brahms, you’re more in the world of German conceptual philosophy, where the rational, unburied parts of the psyche play the most important role. In Mahler’s music, though, it feels as though he is deliberately plunging down into the dark, into the subterranean realm of the mind. As if in a dream, you find many motifs that contradict one another, that are in opposition, that refuse to blend and yet are indistinguishable, all joined together almost indiscriminately. I don’t know whether he’s doing this consciously or unconsciously, but it is at least very direct and honest.

OZAWA: Mahler and Freud lived at just about the same time, didn’t they?

MURAKAMI: Yes. Both were Jewish, and their birthplaces were not far apart, I think. Freud was a little older, and Mahler came to Freud for a consultation when his wife, Alma, had an affair [with the architect Walter Gropius, whom she married after Mahler’s death]. Freud is said to have been deeply respectful of Mahler. That kind of straightforward pursuit of the underground springs of the unconscious may make us cringe—but I think it is probably what helps to make Mahler’s music so very universal today.

OZAWA: In that sense, Mahler rebelled singlehandedly against the sturdy mainstream of German music, from Bach through Haydn to Mozart, and from Beethoven to Brahms—at least until the emergence of twelve-tone music.

MURAKAMI: When you stop to think about it, though, twelve-tone music is extremely logical, in the same sense that Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is logical music.

OZAWA: That’s true.

MURAKAMI: Twelve-tone music itself has hardly survived, but different elements of it were absorbed into the music that came afterwards.

OZAWA: Indeed.

MURAKAMI: But this is really quite different from the kind of influence that Mahler’s music has had on later generations. I think you can say that, don’t you?

OZAWA: I do.

MURAKAMI: In that sense, Mahler was really one of a kind.

Ozawa and the Boston Symphony