This article is taken from the November 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The day the Queen died I was supposed to be in the high Dolomites, listening to young musicians wrestle with Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony on original instruments. Mahler composed his last two symphonies in the summers of 1909-10 near the mountain resort of Toblach (Dobbiaco) and, while he did not live to hear them performed, he knew exactly how he wanted them to sound.

Mahler was a stickler for timbre. As director of the Vienna Opera, he replaced all the orchestra’s wind, brass and percussion instruments, declaring them unsuited to the volume, velocity and sophistication of Richard Strauss’s shocking new operas and his own universalist symphonies, drifting as they were to the brink of atonality.

Other traditions were left unchanged. His violinists used no shoulder rest and cellists played with a short pin, yielding less hand-made vibrato but more stage-floor vibrations. The halls Mahler occupied were rectangular, producing a tighter acoustic than a modern hall, and geared to flexibility.

Mahler tailored every performance to the state of the hall. “If [my music] doesn’t work,” he told the young Otto Klemperer, “change it. You have the right — no, the duty — to change it.” He was also fond of saying that the music “is not in the notes”. Every player and listener must figure out where to find it. Human agency is paramount in Mahler performance; instruments don’t matter that much.

So it was with a frisson of curiosity that I packed my bags for a short flight and two non-connecting trains to Toblach, only to crack my knee and collapse on a sofa, where I spent the week mourning the Queen and watching The Queue when what I really craved was to hear Mahler played in a manner as close as possible to what might have been his style.

This idea was initiated by Philipp von Steinaecker, a cellist in the Mahler Chamber Orchestra who thought most conductors were getting it wrong. In pursuit of the real Mahler, Steinaecker dug out the composer’s purchase notes at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum and set out to find the instruments he ordered.

The Mahler we hear is not what he heard

One by one, he sleuthed horns and oboes in organ lofts, antique shops and military bands. Some he bought on eBay for next to nothing, others in auction rooms for a small fortune.

Rarely 1900s instruments differ materially from current models. The metal is thinner, the cylinders narrower and the keys fewer, making precision much harder to obtain, and often unobtainable. It is reasonable to assume that Mahler did not need to have every note nailed on the head. “If we let them, the instruments teach us something about the sound,” says Steinaecker.

At his academy in Bolzano, near Toblach, he tried out his theories on students. Next, he recruited professionals from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and from towns where Mahler once worked — Vienna, Prague, Leipzig, Kassel, Budapest, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Ljubljana. For the better part of a year he bombarded musicians with radical notions about how not to play Mahler. “Instruments have changed in the last 110 years,” was his mantra. The Mahler we hear is not what he heard.

Mahler spent his Toblach summer months in a bare wooden hut, overlooking a lush green valley and irresistible mountain trails that doctors had forbidden him to ascend. Fated by a cardiac weakness, he filled his last symphonies with intimations of approaching death.

The ninth symphony opens with a hesitant beat that some conductors argue is a stethoscopic echo of his diagnosis (cardiologists I have consulted dismiss this as ridiculous). Along with other myths of the ninth symphony, it seemed plausible to me that contemporary instruments might reveal more of Mahler’s intentions.

The symphony confronts fate and never blinks. One day an eagle flew into the hut, leaving Mahler cowering behind the piano until it left. There is terror in this symphony at the force of nature, along with a transcendence in the finale that promises an unbroken continuum of life and death. How might its composer have intended us to receive it? “The truth is we will never know,” says Steinaecker, but his original-instrument performance at Toblach, delivered to my London sofa by soundcloud, proved thought-provoking.

It seemed plausible to me that contemporary instruments might reveal more of Mahler’s intentions

A blurrier attack adds a wooshy, numinous dimension to the opening. Unvibrated strings create an enveloping immediacy. The string players, it is clear, have listened to early recordings of Arnold Rosé, Mahler’s concertmaster, and know when to add a soupy swoon.

I loved the raw reediness of the flutes and oboes and was physically shocked by assaults on animal-skin drums, made by the family of Mahler’s own percussionist. But the essence lies in how players shed everything they had been taught about unison and accuracy in favour of a gut response to the immediacy of this masterpiece. “In the moment, our response is emotional — not philological,” said Steinaecker. My response to the performance was much the same: I forgot about the instruments and lost myself in the marvels of the music.

This was not my virgin immersion in period-instrument Mahler. When Roger Norrington had a go at the fifth symphony in the 1990s, I found it preposterous. Taking Mahler back in time is not about the vintage of instruments and how they are played. It is about entering a pre-gramophone mindset where what you hear will never sound the same again.

Mahler would be appalled at the recorded perfectionism of the modern Vienna Philharmonic. He changed his mind from one rehearsal to the next. His music is about living in the moment. That’s what Steinaecker’s Toblach ensemble achieved. I will run out on crutches to hear them if they ever take to the road.