Mahler No 2 and the five minute pause
By Mark Vernon on Wednesday, March 25 2009, 07:17 - Personal observations - Permalink
Last night, we went to hear a performance of Mahler's massive Second Symphony, the 'Resurrection', in the enormous space of Westminster Cathedral. It was monumental, as it is supposed to be.
It turns out that Mahler left the instruction that after the first long movement, on death, there should be a five minute silence. He felt an audience might gain from such a long pause after the tremendous emotions of the movement. This instruction is usually ignored, though last night, the charismatic conductor Benjamin Zander, thought he would try it out.
In short, it didn't work. The woman next to me opened her handbag and unwrapped sweets when we were trying to sit still. The woman next to her started to read the Evening Standard. There were split seconds when the cathedral fell silent, but mostly people rustled and sought distractions. Zander brought the pause to a close after three minutes, not five.
I'm not sure why it didn't work. It felt different from the religious silence of a church service: it might have been that although the symphony is supposed to conjure up a similarly powerful experience, and although we were in a cathedral, the concert-going audience resisted the implications of that. But you'd have thought that if any section of the population could 'do' silence today, classical music lovers would be one.
Which then made me think that perhaps our culture has lost the art of being silent. And if you believe Blaise Pascal that matters: 'All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.'
Comments
I think you're right. As a society, we have lost the skill of silence. We feel uncomfortable without the background noise of the TV or radio, and when presented with an enforced silence, many people struggle and fill the time with noisy activity. Even in the setting of a religious service, people often feel uncomfortable with more than a few seconds of silence. The Quakers could probably teach us all something here!
I think a lot of people are just plain afraid of silence. That if they are too still, those things in their own inner landscape will rise up, and have to be confronted. A great deal of "culture" in our very loud world is about distraction: so that we don't have to deal with our own silences. That's one of the things you see most commonly in beginning meditation classes: people have completely lost the habit of stillness, of silence. They need to fill the Void however they can. Facing the Void can be very frightening, so this is forgivable. I quite agree that the Quakers have a lot to teach us about all this; I find myself increasingly attracted to their style of gathering.
Mahler's idea is fascinating. I didn't know about his request for silence after the first movement.
But impishly I wonder if the silence would have worked if it had been reframed, placed in another context. Say, for example, an interpolated performance of John Cage's 4'33". Give people something conceptual to hold onto, as it were, during the long pause.
Interesting observation. I felt something similar last night at a youth concert of classical and contemporary music at the RFH. Several times pauses in a piano recital or cello piece were interrupted by premature applause, and at the end of every single piece there was no appreciative pause of silence before applause, but a rush into a storm of clapping and whooping. The young performers deserved every bit of applause (and whoops) but also a split second of silence at the end of their pieces, I felt. Perhaps the eagerness to break into applause reflected unfamiliarity with classical pieces and concert-going, and perhaps also the excitement of youngsters and proud parents in the audience. At all events, it was hardly a problem, but I left wondering if the hysterics encouraged on Pop Idol-style talent contests on TV, where the performance is a prelude to uncontrollable audience frenzy rather than an end in itself, have had a wider effect in reducing capacities to sit in quiet and wait just a bit for a performer really to finish her or his piece.
I do think that there are still people who can sit silently and still for long periods of time, and I am one of those people.
When I'm at any concert I'm as still as a statue. I have too much respect for the musicians and the concert goers around me
to be restless, or even make any sound at all. Not to mention, the spell the music holds over me keeps me in a trance. But I have always been a quiet person, and I generally talk very little, so I guess it's really a personality thing. The funny thing is that, a couple hundred years ago, they used to clap in between movements, and sometimes during performances (such as Beethoven's 9th premiere, I think). Today, clapping between movements is a sign of ignorance and seen as rude, and I'm glad that it just isn't done. Like the comment above me mentioned, I find it ridiculous when watching America's Got Talent that people clap and cheer during a good performance.