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By Mahler Possessed
Felice Maranz
An American Jewish millionare lives out his obsession with the composer on the podium
The contradictions surrounding Gilbert Kaplan swirl about much in the same way as Mahler's Symphony No. 2 does: He's a self-made millionaire with a music background consisting of three years of piano lessons as a kid, but he conducts what may be the world's most complex symphony. Although he conducts nothing else, and he had to pay the first orchestra he performed with, he's actually good at it. Kaplan has been invited all over the world to conduct the Mahler symphony; his 1988 recording of it with the London Symphony has so far sold 130,000 copies.
The 51-year-old entrepreneur came to Jerusalem for the first time in mid-June to conduct the piece yet again; this time at the Israel Festival with the Rishon Letzion Symphony, an orchestra with so many new immigrant musicians it's often referred to as the "Russian Letzion." Under his direction, the orchestra's single performance emphasized the mood shifts in the symphony, subtitled "The Resurrection," changing from light passages to heavy blasts, followed again by quiet stretches.
Like the shifts in the music itself, the performance evoked a strange series of conflicting feelings. There was a silly "Look Ma, I'm conducting Mahler!" sense, coupled with an admiration for Kaplan's absolute seriousness, his scholarly intent and the magnitude of his obsession.
He's scoured libraries across the world, looking for clues to what Mahler wanted, and conducts according to the original handwritten score for the symphony, which he owns. He even looks like Mahler, wearing spectacles and his longish hair swept back. Is this as close to Mahler as you get? Has Mahler himself been "resurrected?" Or is it all a half-baked joke?
Meanwhile, the orchestra played on. Suddenly a brass band began crashing away outside the doors of the upper balcony and the audience turned around, looking for the sound. The choir started to hum, then to sing, then suddenly they rose to their feet, and the hall was filled with a sense of a masterpiece in progress. The audience applauded wildly, but Israeli critics called the performance "shallow."
The day before the concert Kaplan, tall and wearing a linen suit, strides across the lobby of Jerusalem's King David Hotel for an interview. He apologizes for a slight delay; it's been a busy week. In addition to rehearsing a new orchestra, choir and brass band for the herculean task of performing the symphony, he's been getting up at 5 in the morning to tour the country with his family. And, he's been interviewing the likes of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and opposition leader Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu for Institutional Investor, the magazine he founded at age 25. Today it is considered the bible of the international banking community.
Kaplan welcomes the opportunity to kick back and talk about Mahler. Sprinkling his conversation liberally with quotes from the composer, he is intense, intelligent, driven.
"I heard Mahler for the first time in 1965, when I was 24," he begins. He was a music lover, familiar with Beethoven and Brahms, but he'd never heard Mahler and was under the impression that the Austrian Jewish composer's music was heavy and dull. A friend took him by chance to hear Symphony No. 2 and he was so moved by the music that his life was changed. He became obsessed by Mahler, dead for over 50 years, and began to attend every performance of the Second that he could.
"For a reason I can't explain," he says, "one day it occurred to me that the best way I could get closer to the music, to try to understand why it has such an impact, was to conduct it." He worked at it for nine months, and then, for the 15th anniversary of Institutional Investor, in 1982, he hired the American Symphony Orchestra and conducted the symphony in New York. "It was supposed to be my first and last performance," he says, but two critics, in Newsweek and the Village Voice, wrote glowing reviews, and he was invited to conduct again. He's never paid for an orchestra since.
Kaplan, a man who's made a fortune in the cold world of finance, is drawn to Mahler's music, oddly, because "it's a powerful emotional experience. There's great hope, happiness, yearning. Pick another part, simultaneously, and there's gloom."
Not only that, but mounting the piece is an Everest-size challenge: "It's enormous. In Mahler's day, you needed three conductors. Nowadays," he smiles, "they follow me on closed-circuit TV."
Symphony No. 2 premiered in Berlin on December 13, 1895. Virtually no tickets were sold and Mahler, then 35, had to give them away to fill the hall. Although he was struck by a brutal migraine, he forced himself to conduct, collapsing afterward. Still, Mahler's sister Justine wrote of the performance: "Afterwards, I saw grown men weeping and youths falling on each other's necks."
The son of an inn-keeper in Bohemia, Mahler was a gifted pianist and composer even as a child, and started conducting at age 20 in order to make money. At 37, he converted to Catholicism and became director of the Vienna Opera. At 42, he married a woman 20 years his junior, and they had two daughters. He died at 50, in 1911, the victim of a weak heart.
"There's no question that Mahler considered himself a Jew," insists Kaplan. "He converted to get a job. In Vienna, if you worked for the government, you had to be Catholic. He said, `I would give up anything of myself not to give up my music.' He was not a practicing religious person - but he was certainly a God-seeker."
Like Mahler, Kaplan is married to a non-Jew. "I don't practice any religious activities," he says, pointing out, though, that he had a bar mitzvah. "I live in the home of someone who's Christian and she doesn't observe her holidays, either."
Kaplan tells a story reflective of what he believes is the heart of Symphony No. 2: "Mahler went to see Freud in 1910, because of problems he was having with his wife, Alma. Many people believe he was impotent, the problem of the older man and the younger woman. Mahler told Freud that when he was a child he witnessed a terrible fight between his parents, and ran out of the house. An organ grinder was cranking out a merry tune in the street. Mahler said any time he experienced passion, it brought out frivolity.
"In the last movement he writes music exactly like this - the cellos are very passionate, yet the brass band is playing a silly, frivolous march. It's a reenactment of the scene he told Freud about. The difference is that when he was a child, the one followed the other, and as an adult, he experiences them directly."
The explanation is a suitable one, especially given the one who is delivering it - the eccentric millionaire indulging a passion, yet becoming better at it, maybe, maybe not, than the experts. "We're all full of contradictions," Kaplan grins.
1993
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© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2000 |  |