By Misha Horenstein
With the approaching Mahler centenary just over a year away, excitement was
brewing in musical London. In October 1958 Harold Newby, Controller of the BBC’s
Third Programme, discovered that he risked under-spending his budget allocation for
the fiscal year and unless he could find a costly enterprise to mop up the surplus
funds, he would probably have to take a cut in the following year’s budget. It did not
take long for the music department to come up with a suggestion, Mahler's Eighth
Symphony, the most expensive piece of music to mount in the entire symphonic
canon and a work previously heard in London just three times. On the strength of
Horenstein’s Vox recordings and his favorably reviewed performances of Mahler in
London, he was considered the obvious and only candidate for the job, as confirmed
by Bernard Keeffe, conductor of the BBC Chorus and Choral Society and the BBC’s
producer in charge of organizing the event:
Hardly anyone knew the work, not even by ear, for there were virtually no
recordings. London orchestras were not yet at home with the elusive Mahler
style and there were few conductors with the experience and authority to teach
it to them. But one name stood out in our minds, Jascha Horenstein. Although
he was not yet an international figure his superb recordings for the Vox label,
the only ones at that time, revealed a Mahler conductor of the first rank. But
would he be free at this short notice? To our great delight he was, and our
enterprise could get under way.
There was little time to prepare, barely five months to book the orchestra, find a cast
of eight soloists, recruit the choruses and secure the venue and rehearsal facilities
before the end of March 1959, being last-minute arrangements for any concert in a
city like London let alone for one as complicated to organize as Mahler’s Eighth. As
late as January 1959 an agitated Horenstein had still not heard from the BBC, did not
know if the choirs were already working on the symphony, nor whether any soloists
had been engaged. “I know nothing,” he complained to Berthold Goldschmidt, in
charge of the overall musical preparation of the choruses and soloists before his
arrival. It is doubtful whether Goldschmidt’s reply pacified him:
To my question when we would begin with rehearsals for choir and soloists, to
my astonishment I received the answer it was not being considered before the
beginning of February and indeed was not being thought of at all. English
choirs could sing this kind of music quasi off the page and apart from that all
the planning was aimed at not starting the work for this piece too early... The
BBC people are so involved in Christmas [...] that one can hardly get hold of
anyone on the phone for today’s problems. But please, don’t get agitated; it’s
like that in England in wartime and in peace. In the long run it is to be hoped
that everything will work out.
The question of soloists was also unresolved. Overtures were made to sopranos
Teresa Stich-Randall, Sena Jurinac, Aase Nordmo-Løvberg, Erna Spoorenberg and
Elisabeth Grümmer, and to the alto Norma Procter, none of whom were available or
willing to take on the project at such short notice, and there was still no tenor or
baritone. In short, wrote Goldschmidt quoting the text of a famous song, Dunkel, wie
dunkel in Wald und in Feld! [“Dark, how dark it is in forest and field!”, Brahms, Von
ewiger Liebe, Op. 43, No. 1]. All this could not have provided much solace for the
perpetually tense and anxious Horenstein and probably left him more than usually
nervous about conducting Mahler’s Eighth for the first time. It took the BBC another
two weeks before Keeffe, just two months before the concert, was able to confirm
that he now had “a fairly clear picture” of the personnel and the logistic
arrangements. In addition to the eight soloists Keeffe also engaged a full cast of
understudies as a precautionary measure since there would be no possibility of
finding anyone who already knew the work in case one of the soloists fell ill. Two of
the understudies, Joyce Barker and Beryl Hatt, were eventually used in the concert.
Choir rehearsals started in earnest on 11 February, but Horenstein’s request to attend
was politely turned down by the still unprepared choruses which were “a little
unhappy that you should be coming so early.” Horenstein's own rehearsals started a
week before the concert. Three took place with the 144-piece orchestra but without
the choruses at St. Pancras (now Camden) Town Hall, as the Royal Albert Hall, the
venue for the concert, was not available. In addition, Horenstein had four piano
rehearsals with the choruses, the understudies and some but not all of the soloists at
the BBC’s Maida Vale facility. In an interview many years later Hugh Maguire, the
leader of the orchestra, remembered the occasion:
In Mahler's Eighth there was an enormous number of people involved and in
the preparation at Maida Vale it was like Paddington Station, really, thousands
of people milling about. But when it came to getting things started and getting
us all together Horenstein was very, very specialized and very able.
The only full rehearsal with everyone present took place on the evening before the
concert at the nearby Royal Academy of Music, whose platform was not large enough
to comfortably accommodate everyone, forcing Horenstein to conduct from the right
side of the stage with the huge orchestra arranged in some manner in front of him and
the choruses occupying the seats in the auditorium to his left. However, these
arrangements and the constant changes of venue did not appear to disturb him: “The
rehearsals are going very well;” he wrote enthusiastically to Alma Mahler, “all are in
great excitement and I am occupied day and night with the score, therefore
unspeakably happy.” Alma did not accept Horenstein’s invitation to attend the
concert.
The dress rehearsal took place at the Royal Albert Hall on the morning of the concert,
which the amateur choirs were unable to attend, meaning that at no time before the
performance was there a full rehearsal in the auditorium with all the participants
present. This presented a particularly trying situation not only for Horenstein and the
musicians but also for the BBC engineers, who had just one short pre-concert warm-
up to adjust their microphones for the broadcast and to set up and calibrate their
equipment for the BBC’s simultaneous experimental stereo recording. Testimony
from one of the singers, a young member of the girls’ choir, gives an idea of the
atmosphere:
My memory of the Maestro is of a man who was not very tall but was very
imposing. He conducted very energetically, and his wild white hair flew up
around his head. During a rehearsal, I was looking at my score when suddenly
a voice boomed out, ‘You! Girl!’ I looked up and was aghast to see that Mr.
Horenstein was pointing straight at me, ‘take your nose out of your score, and
watch ME!’, he shouted. Needless to say, I obeyed, and didn’t dare look at my
score again. The atmosphere on that Friday in 1959 was electric; even at the
age of thirteen I realized that I was a small part of something very special.
Another young vocalist, a member of the boys’ choir, also remembered the occasion:
It triggered a life-long interest in Mahler though, to be honest, at the time we
were more interested in the young ladies of the Orpington Junior Singers. It
was also the only time that a Maestro spoke to me. We had been rehearsing at
the Royal Academy and Horenstein was concerned that the boys weren’t
cutting through the din of a huge orchestra and multiple choirs. He put his arm
on my shoulder as we were leaving for our orange squash and biscuits. “You
boys need to eat more porridge,” he said. We were prepared in school by
Berthold Goldschmidt, to whom I recall we were rather unkind. Learning later
about his struggles as a musician in Nazi Germany and his neglect here in the
UK, I felt guilty… I wish I’d been able to say to him all those years ago,
“Don’t worry, one day, like Mahler, your time will come.”
According to further testimony from Keeffe, “It was a miracle that we got a
performance at all, and on the night with a packed hall, we were all crossing our
fingers or praying.” Their prayers were answered in ways that few could have
imagined when the six thousand strong audience exploded at the end into a raucous
twenty-minute ovation. “Seldom, if ever, have I known in an English concert hall so
tremendous a demonstration as this,” wrote Neville Cardus the next day in The
Manchester Guardian. For The Times, which headlined its review Spirit of Mahler
Triumphant, the performance “hurled the precarious spirit of Mahler’s mind
scrupulously and irresistibly into the audience,” a view echoed even more
emphatically by the critic in The Observer:
With Jascha Horenstein’s inspired conducting of the Eighth Symphony, Mahler
came into his kingdom. Horenstein bestrode the performance like a colossus…
The multitude of details in the score emerged with clarity and overwhelming
poetic truth, and the whole work moved with the inevitability and the fluent
forward-drive of a planet in its orbit.
The performance had far-reaching consequences for Horenstein, for the BBC, for the
LSO and especially for Mahler, whose star shone brighter than ever in the British
musical firmament. “To the extent that one can date the upsurge of British enthusiasm
for Mahler this was the crucial moment,” opined Christopher Ford in The Guardian,
and even the normally sober New Groves Dictionary observed that the concert was “a
landmark in the recognition of Mahler in Britain.” To some extent this was also true
internationally after radio stations around the world broadcast copies of the recording
to enthusiastic feedback from listeners, who were informed that the occasion
documented the opening event of the Mahler centenary celebrations to be held in
London the following year in which Horenstein would play a major role.
Rebuffed was Horenstein’s agent Sander Gorlinsky's suggestion to EMI, sent two
months before the concert, to make a commercial recording of the symphony. “We
don’t want this work at the present time,” answered David Bicknell, EMI's Manager
of International Artists, in another calamitous case of record company misjudgment.
The BBC’s recording of Mahler’s Eighth, for years commanding outrageous prices in
its mono version as it circulated in the pirate underground, was officially released
only in 1998 after the Corporation discovered that the experimental stereo version,
long thought to have been lost, had survived the periodic purges of its archives
(although an LP bootleg of the stereo version had appeared as early as 1983).
Horenstein’s only preserved comment on the event came with characteristic modesty
in a note accompanying a tape of the recording he sent to one of his friends. “In the
Albert Hall,” he wrote, “there were about seven thousand people and in the very
pianissimo places there is often a terrible coughing! Otherwise the tape is not bad.”
Misha Horenstein (© & ℗ 2025)