Mahler in Rio? Wish I could be there!

(Forgive a non-political post, but I permit such indulgences on Sundays.)

Would that I could be in Rio tonight. From Wikipedia's entry on Mahler's Symphony No. 8:

In addition, a free performance billed as the "first-ever outdoor presentation" of the symphony will be given on a specially constructed stage on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on August 20, 2006, conducted by Isaac Karabtchevsky leading 412 choral singers and 8 soloists in addition to the orchestra. It will include full amplification, lighting effects, and eight screens that will display illustrative images to accompany the symphony in time. It is a particularly notable cultural achievement because concerts of this magnitude in Copacabana are generally given by rock stars such as Lenny Kravitz and the Rolling Stones (to cite two examples from the past couple of years).

Karabtchevsky remains unknown to me, but -- and this may be nothing more than an indication of my own wretched taste -- I've long dreamt of mounting such a presentation of this work. The Mahler Eighth -- a massive choral work dubbed the "Symphony of a Thousand" because 1029 performers participated in the premiere -- is a festival piece. It's drama. Theater. There should be a visual element.

Despite the element of spectacle, this is an intensely personal and even neurotic work -- inspired, in part, by Gustav Mahler's love for his wife Alma. She had just cheated on him, and Mahler, shattered, consulted Dr. Sigmund Freud. (As Tom Lehrer later wrote: "While married to Gus she met Gropius/And soon she was swinging with Walter./Gus died, and her tears were so copious/She cried all the way to the altar." Architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus movement.) Despite this unsettling news, or perhaps because of it, Mahler here seems to have visualized his wife as the Virgin Mary, or the Eternal Feminine, or whatever the heck it was that Goethe had in mind when he wrote Faust. It is one of the oddities of musical history that a Jewish composer wrote the most moving and other-worldly musical portrait of the Virgin.

Alma's later husband, Franz Werfel -- also Jewish -- wrote The Song of Bernadette. Something about that lady turned nice Jewish boys into big BVM fans.

I love the Mahler Eighth more than I love any other work of art, and the performance I love best is the one conducted by Leonard Bernstein in Vienna, in 1975. Fortunately, the performance was filmed. That DVD is, by my reckoning, the summit of human achievement. You probably won't share that reckoning, but this is my site, so there.

The only time I have ever heard theEighth live was a remarkable opening-night performance at the Hollywood Bowl in 1978, conducted by the great Erich Leinsdorf. I snuck into the box seats -- and I'll never forget what I heard. Astonishing. Not long ago, I spoke with Leinsdorf's son, a political animal with an expert knowledge of vote fraud. (Believe it or not!) He told me that the Bowl probably has a recording of that performance buried somewhere in its archives; alas, the folks who run the place now have ignored my emails.

Sorry to bore you with the merely sublime. This blog will return to politics and skullduggery within hours.