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Amy Trottier is the Social Media Coordinator at the Flint Institute of Music, this is the first in a three part series that came from her conversation with Enrique Diemecke.
It was my pleasure to interview Maestro Enrique Diemecke, music director and conductor of the Flint Symphony Orchestra, about his admiration for the late 19th and early 20thCentury composer Gustav Mahler. Maestro Diemecke gives his insight into this challenging composer and his brilliant, and arguably, most modernist work; his Seventh Symphony, which the Flint Symphony Orchestra will perform at their classical concert on January 23.
As FSO audience members know, Maestro Diemecke always includes Mahler in the Flint Symphony Orchestra’s season line-up. This year, he has chosen Mahler’s least popular, and perhaps most challenging work, his Seventh Symphony. Diemecke explains why he selected Mahler’s Seventh and how it connects to the larger “It’s in the Stars” theme of the 2009-2010 Flint Symphony Orchestra Season.
“His music always brings out of the performers and listeners an introspective view about life. Mahler believed that the most important universe that exists is within each person. It [the Seventh Symphony] is a challenge; Mahler’s music is a challenge. He had a Germanic way of doing things, more philosophical - an inward search,” states Maestro Deimecke.
Diemecke points out that Mahler was part of the Modernist movement that emerged in Europe in the early 20thCentury and included radical changes in philosophy, art, music, literature and the birth of psychology. His contemporaries, and in some instances friends and acquaintances, were Freud, Mann, Klimt and Nietzsche. “Like Nietzsche, Mahler was interested in the mythological aspect of the superhero that every society has. But he looked at it as more of a supersoul, while in Western philosophy, it is more of a rescuer,” Diemecke observed.
“His music was ahead of its time, it is challenging and people were not ready. You hear music once, it passes over you and then it is gone, it is ephemeral.” The challenging aspect of Mahler’s music is what attracts the maestro most. Diemecke feels that Mahler was not appreciated as a great composer in his own time because his music is more complicated than audiences at the time were ready to hear. The Seventh Symphony lacks a narrative and combines aspects of ethnic folk music and other influences that the Viennese audience of 1908 found too low-brow for the symphonic genre. But, as Diemecke points out, Mahler was a pioneer, sampling music nearly a century before it became common in popular music.
Gustav Mahler was, however, appreciated in his lifetime as a great conductor, leading the New York Philharmonic, the Viennese Opera, the Metropolitan Opera and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, among others. “He was a champion of Germanic composers. In fact, Tchaikovsky said that the best interpreter of his music was Mahler,” Diemecke noted. There is no doubt in Diemecke’s mind that Mahler’s ability to interpret the music of the great composers was what made him such a sought after conductor.
In the next post, Maestro Diemecke offers his in depth analysis of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony.
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