ABSTRACT
Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974) is a film that, despite its musical subject, features no scenes of concert performance. At first glance, then, it might be thought to be of little interest to a study focussed on such scenes. Yet, in presenting us with a soundtrack formed of extracts from the composer’s symphonies, often stitched together in thought-provoking ways, it has the potential to offer us a rather different perspective on the interaction between music and cinema. Moreover, at the end of the film, this Mahlerian assemblage is offered to us with all the trappings of concert presentation: as the last orchestral excerpt (the first movement of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony) finishes, well into the closing titles sequence, and a title appears crediting the musical contributions of the Concertgebouw Orchestra and conductor Bernard Haitink, an unseen audience bursts into noisy applause and cheering. This imaginary audience, it seems, has been listening not to a performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, but to a new Ken Russell musical creation. Having explored cinema’s depiction of concert listening in Chapter 4, and looked briefly at its ability to tell us something about the nature of cinematic listening (something that will be explored much further in Chapters 6 and 7), here I want to open out the discussion to consider more broadly the effect of cinema on the culture of listening, and in particular the way in which our exposure to film narrative may prompt a different kind of listening experience when we encounter concert music outside of the cinema.
