Oregon Symphony
Nerve Endings Series:
"Sigmund Freud and the Dreams of Gustav
Mahler"
Arlene
Schnitzer Concert Hall 1037 SW Broadway, 228-1353
7:30 pm Friday, Jan. 14, $6-$37
A pre-concert lecture begins at 6:30 pm.
Oregon Symphony's "Nerve
Endings" series lifts the mysterious veil from classical
music by placing music in the personal context of the composer's
life. The series' latest performance dramatizes the historical
meetings between Late Romantic composer Gustav
Mahler and Sigmund Freud. The two greats did in fact meet
three times, and possibly in secret a fourth, at the turn
of the century. About Mahler, Freud later wrote, "I've never
encountered anyone so open and able to benefit from psychoanalysis."
Now's your chance to become a fly on the wall and listen in
on one of therapy's most fascinating conversations, as imagined
by resident conductor Murry Sidlin.
Mahler was born a Jew in Kalischt, Bohemia, in 1860, a
member of an outcast people in a conquered Czech province
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. "I am thrice homeless,"
said Mahler, "as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian
among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world."
Add to this sense of estrangement a tempestuous parental
relationship, a mortuary of tragic family deaths (Mahler
was the only child of many to reach adulthood), a suicide
and a rumored rape that he allegedly witnessed as a boy,
and you've got the hands-down winner of a race to Bedlam's
finish line. Instead Mahler went on to become one of the
finest conductors of his time and a composer of such monumental
and individual works that his popularity has continued to
snowball since his death in 1911. With its mix of the beautiful
and the banal, the ethereal and the tumultuous, his music
may be the perfect soundtrack to the 20th century's theme
of dysfunction.
Mahler first sought out Freud because of marital difficulties
with his wandering wife, Alma. But the analytical fodder
bulging from the conductor's familial baggage must have
caused the whiskers on Freud's beard to stand up. Sadly,
there is no surviving record of these talks except what
can be learned through letters and memoirs.
Instead, series founder Murry Sidlin has created a "dramatic
fantasy" of how these sessions may have played out. Using
pieced-together passages from Mahler's letters and Freud's
articles, actors will dramatize exchanges between the great
therapist and the patient, interspersed with a program of
some of the composer's most stirring movements.
The pairing of Mahler with Freud complements Nerve Endings'
motto of experimenting with "music in context" and should
be one the most electric faceoffs since Shostakovich went
head-to-head with Stalin a few seasons back. In Mahler,
Sidlin has found a composer ripe for experimentation, while
the Freud match-up is ideal for a composer as personal as
Mahler. It helps when hearing the music and its schizophrenic
mood swings--from brightest heaven to darkest hell--to understand
the composer's troubled life and his quest for existential
fulfillment. You will hear "bizarre collisions in the midst
of delicious melodies," says Sidlin, as well as an understanding
of how Mahler's many "exotic anxieties ended up in the same
highly conflicted artist."
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Willamette Week | originally
published January 12,
1999
|
