To misquote the legendary football manager Bill Shankly, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony isn’t a matter of life and death. It’s much more important than that. Another doughty figure from Liverpool is sitting opposite me in a corporate hotel room, sheltered from a chill January morning. It’s a fair bet that Sir Simon Rattle knows as much about football as Shankly did about Romantic music, so, resisting the urge to quiz him on the puzzling rotation policies of Shankly’s current successor in the Liverpool FC hot seat, I  get down to business. What does Mahler’s Ninth mean to him? ‘When Berg saw the first movement he said that this is a movement full of the joy of living. That’s really important for us to remember, that it is not just Dirk Bogarde with his make-up running or whatever other sentimental picture we might have. It’s completely haunted by death but is actually all about life.’

Later on he applies this description to the symphony as a whole, which he recorded with ‘his’ Berlin Philharmonic last October. Such a view doesn’t sit easily with the orthodoxy promoted by Leonard Bernstein, that whereas the Pathétique Symphony peers over the abyss, Mahler’s Ninth plunges into it. But then Bernstein had no truck with the Tenth, as completed by Deryck Cooke, which showed that Mahler could move on even after taking the most apparently final of adieus, just as he had done with the Ninth after composing Das Lied von der Erde. Together, they form a symphonic triptych: three different ways of saying goodbye?

Rattle and his Berliners brought this insight home with unusual force last autumn by touring a three-concert programme to New York, ‘Berlin in Lights’. Bearing in mind the designation of Das Lied as a ‘Song Symphony’, it placed Mahler’s last three symphonies in order, each accompanied by a modern work (from Christian Jost, Thomas Adès and Kaija Saariaho). Rattle has always taken pride and perhaps a subversive delight in showing that ‘anyone who sits down with the sketches of the Tenth and plays them from start to finish on the piano will realise that, like it or not, there is really a complete work there. And that is what people don’t seem to get. They think it’s something like the Elgar Third Symphony – or let’s be heretical and say the Mozart Requiem, a lot of which is so clearly not by Mozart.’

So the Ninth is not the end. In fact this is clear on the most basic level of continuity. The descending whole-tone of those repeated ‘Ewigs’ at the end of Das Lied survives to the Ninth, where it metamorphoses into the melodic fragment (or seed? We come back to that) of the Ninth’s opening theme. The Ninth in turn closes with the softest imaginable cadential caress from the violas…and it is they who introduce the very uncadential, irresolute, questing melody of the Tenth.

Rattle finds the strongest links between Das Lied and the Tenth, where the pain emitted by the famous dissonance (over which Mahler scrawled ‘Almschi!!!’, in agony over his wife’s affair) is so strong as to transcend instrumental abstraction. On a less exalted level, however, all three are connected by the fact that Mahler never heard them – and crucially never conducted them. Rattle is talking of Michelangelo when he refers to ‘those wonderful sculptures which are not finished but look as though they’re actually trying to struggle out of the granite…it’s…I find them incredibly moving.’ Such as the Moses? ‘Absolutely. It looks as though it was designed like that. It’s how we respond to it and of course, for Mahler no piece was ever quite finished anyway. He spent his whole life revising and revising and revising, even details of scoring and balance. With Das Lied he would have made changes to the orchestration. You have to change dynamics in the first and the fourth songs. There are areas in the fourth song where I sling the orchestration around a lot, particularly if we’re using a mezzo. And I have no doubt that the Ninth would have been revised.’

Later on, to prove his point, we huddle over my pocket score. There is singing. His is unusually good for a conductor. He points out where a return to the first tempo is marked, but no prior indication of how to get there. ‘[The conductor] Karl Anton Rickenbacher came up to me in Lucerne and asked, Simon, who do you think started off 
the tradition of speeding up here [the second theme of the first movement]? Where did that come from? And I’d never thought of it before. It was Bruno Walter who did this. Klemperer didn’t.’ There must even be the memory of a funeral march about this countervailing, passionate theme, Rattle thinks, that looks forward to the explicit instruction of ‘Wie ein Kondukt’ in the wake of the movement’s death knell (the indication itself casting us back to the first movement of the Fifth). ‘Mahler had no impression of a solid tempo, a rigid tempo in a Toscanini-like sense, but I believe he was right.’

Even so there are more than enough pernickety admonitions in the Ninth, as in every Mahler symphony, to test the patience of most orchestral players. Very much in the line of Weber whom he championed so ardently, Mahler is a conductors’ composer, because he was a conducting composer. Elgar is the same. ‘The wonderful thing with Elgar is that whatever the level of the orchestra, it sounds marvellous from the beginning. Maybe all his work with the lunatic asylum orchestra and learning every instrument gave him something. Mahler is something else, he’s a hyper-realist. Not only do you see the mountain but every little lichen and every little butterfly and it’s important for him to see all those things simultaneously. This is particularly true of the Ninth.’

This nature-imagery perhaps unconsciously chimes with Mahler’s own feeling for Naturlaut – the cows in the meadow, the birds in the forest and the drunkard in spring – that many thought Mahler had left behind. Again, Rattle talks about the ‘organic’ nature of the symphony’s opening D minor theme: ‘it’s like watching a flower open’. Rattle had made earlier reference to the letter Alban Berg wrote to his wife Helene, with its famous identification of the first movement as ‘an expression of an exceptional fondness for this earth, the longing to live in peace on it, to enjoy nature to its depths’. But against that stands the no-less-holy writ from Arnold Schoenberg: ‘[The Ninth] contains what may be termed objective, almost dispassionate statements of a beauty which will be perceived only by those who can dispense with visceral warmth and who feel comfortable in a climate of intellectual coldness.’

Rattle is having none of it: ‘Schoenberg was always deeply ambivalent about Mahler anyway. The only piece he really loved was the Seventh because it was the piece that was most like him. In a way the First Chamber Symphony is the one fan letter that Schoenberg wrote to Mahler – he used a lot of the same intervals, even the same kind of scoring.’

Certainly there has been no ‘intellectual coldness’ about Rattle’s journeys through the Ninth. They started in Birmingham, naturally. I  remember the broadcast from the old Town Hall on January 17, 1991, when there was already the sense of a fully fleshed, all too human interpretation, one which survived the main road traffic noise but not the depredations of a restless Proms audience the following summer. The Ninth has not been a talisman for him like the Second, the Seventh or the Tenth, but in making his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1993, he chose this symphony, that ‘belongs’ to this orchestra as much as any symphony does: the Austrian Radio broadcast became, at Rattle’s request, the EMI recording to document ‘an immensely happy time, where I think I was more nervous than I  have ever been at any moment in my life, even waiting before the headmaster’s study aged 11.’ The Viennese have not always done the piece justice, but they put something on the line for Rattle that made the first three movements sound as though every bar could be the last, a spontaneous desperation that eluded two plusher and somewhat distant concert performances with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1999.

Now the Ninth has landed back in Berlin, where the performing tradition is at least as strong as Vienna. Never mind Barbirolli’s speculative recording and Karajan’s elusive relationship with the work, the orchestra asked Rattle to go easy on the piece when he took charge in 2002, because they had played it with Claudio Abbado no fewer than 51 times. When they and he returned to it, did he go back to the attic of the mind to look for clues, or decide to have a clear-out?

‘It’s very Freudian but I moved house a couple of times and I could not find my score. The set of parts I used for all these other performances I  have, but my score, marked up with everything everyone has ever said to me, everyone I’ve ever worked with…gone. Maybe it’s good when you’re forced to start again. A lot of the physical habits and tics have disappeared – this physical memory you have as a conductor. And that’s quite good.’

He may have lost his workings, but Rattle has not forgotten the teachings of his mentor Berthold Goldschmidt. It was Goldschmidt who alerted Rattle to the odd hinaufziehen [drawing up] marking for the cor anglais in the fourth movement of the Third Symphony, producing an alien, swooping accompaniment for Nietzsche’s poem of desolation that many conductors have since copied. It was also Goldschmidt who memorably described some of the emptier pages of the first movement of the Ninth as ‘cosmic dust’. I  mention that extraordinary passage where the solo winds grope for a theme in flat counterpoint, before the strings find it  – ‘and is it becoming the next line or is it the debris, being thrown out by a comet, of everything that’s happened before? Then it’s suddenly like the complete works of Webern, it’s just frightening.’

What’s more extraordinary still about the symphony is how it holds such music of the future within a fairly classical structure. The old forms increasingly took hold of Mahler. The concerto grosso of the Seventh, with its virtuoso solo parts and ritornello-based finale, the closed fugues and arias of the Eighth, what Rattle calls ‘the exploded Suite’ for Das Lied, and then the eternal verities of Classical form for the Ninth. ‘For Mahler as for Haydn,’ notes Rattle, ‘the symphony is where you could tell the most important truths. The Ninth is the one Alfred Brendel likes,’ he adds. ‘He has real problems with a lot of the others.’ Indeed, and just as the influence of Mahler’s contemporaneous study of the Pathétique comes to mind when considering the form of the Ninth, so does Brendel’s scabrous remark about Tchaikovsky’s ‘crocodile tears’. ‘But not the Pathétique,’ counters Rattle. ‘Then he’s really writing about himself. This is a different situation. I don’t know what the very latest research is, but the idea that you would write a symphony about your own enforced suicide does give another perspective on the piece.’

Be that as it may, are Mahler’s life and work so inextricably linked? Rattle offers a comparison informed by his continuing work on the Ring with the Berlin Philharmonic (they are halfway through). ‘Those of us who are not privileged – who are not cursed – to be geniuses need to know everything we can. For this generation of composers, everything was in there and so it is a gold mine. What is dangerous for an interpreter is when you get lost within that. It’s fascinating and what’s important then is to remove it to the back of the brain. With Wagner I choose not to know because I find the more I know about him as a human being, the harder it is to conduct his astonishing music. With Mahler I really choose to know because I find that it enlightens. And Wagner’s music is transcendentally beautiful and very often deeply benevolent and good and I don’t think any of those phrases could be used about him as a person. That’s really a mystery, whereas Mahler as a personality is so completely tied up with his music that I find it helpful.’

What about the inner movements of the Ninth? If we decided not to apply the terms ironic or satiric to the second and third movements, would they not still be a Ländler and a rondo? Rattle’s answer comes characteristically sideways on.

‘At the end of Così fan tutte it is perfectly clear that Mozart knows how to write a joyous release in C major but it is equally perfectly clear that this is not a joyous release. This is not Mozart trying to write in C major and it hasn’t quite worked because he’s perfectly capable of doing that. He’s saying something else and [the melody of the coda] is no kind of resolution. With Mahler it’s more complicated. For me the two middle movements are in a strange way – particularly the second, the blackest and most vicious music he ever wrote – everything you most hate about the country followed by everything you most hate about the city. But the movements outside, despite these immense convulsions, really end in a kind of peace.’

Yet by writing the Adagio in D flat, rather than the expected D, is Mahler really offering closure? So often performances of the Ninth enter a different realm at this point, as though the first three movements hadn’t happened. Perhaps this is Rattle’s point. ‘What is extraordinary is that it’s some kind of release. It’s the opposite process to the Fifth which is moving from C sharp to D, and the Fifth spends almost its entire length attempting to make a climax which doesn’t work, which is one of the reasons why it is so hard to conduct. Whereas in the Ninth it’s particularly after these paroxysms of rage and sarcasm in the second and third movements (and having shown us what a D  major can be in the middle of the third movement) that when you finally come to the Adagio, there’s a feeling of – [sigh] – “I accept this” – which is why, for instance, a performance by Klemperer, who was maybe the conducting world’s great stoic, can be so very moving.’

Where in the Adagio ‘there are no solutions’ for Bernstein, for Klemperer ‘there is only the majesty of death…come as a friend, and not to punish.’ Rattle, after Berg, is happier to court sentimentality. ‘I think some of it comes from the other side. This is music from an unknown region – in some ways it’s already taken this leap of what the future was going to be.’ Eh? ‘What Kurtág says is that Haydn was very influenced by Stravinsky. There is the idea of Mahler saying farewell to music that had not yet been heard or that he was not yet going to have time to explore. Mahler loved things that encompassed everything. It’s no coincidence that his favourite novel was Don Quixote.’

Our time is almost up, and Rattle is about to go and do Desert Island Discs for BBC Radio 4. He too has selected Cervantes’ omnium gatherum, ‘because it has the seeds of every single opera plot ever written. It’s all there, and it’s not all perfect, but it says “this can happen and this can happen”. There are wonderful stories about Mahler loving to read this aloud at parties and laughing with tears streaming down his face, and I can imagine it’s something to do with the potentiality which is so vital for him.’

Rattle, it turns out, is a Ted Hughes man. ‘That great Northern bluntness’ – and here he puts a Scouse fist to the side of his head. We exchange recommendations – Tales from Ovid for me, the newly published diaries for him. It’s a long time since any Ovid passed my eyes – 14  blessed years, actually – but on the way home I  take his advice and buy a copy. I  stand chastened, and enlightened. Hughes’s account of Ovid’s Augustan age, when ‘the obsolete paraphernalia of the old official religion were lying in heaps, like old masks in the lumber room of a theatre, and new ones had not yet arrived’: this is also Mahler’s age, ‘at one extreme wallowing in the bottomless appetites and sufferings of the gladiatorial arena, and at the other searching higher and higher for a spiritual transcendence’. The first movement of the Ninth is in Ovid and Hughes’s cosmogony: ‘Air was simply darkness. Everything fluid or vapour, form formless.’ The Rondo here too, with ‘These madhouse brothers, fighting each other, all but shake the earth to pieces’. It takes art to understand art.

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