Berlin Phil’s Kirill Petrenko: On being Jewish

After five years in charge, the chief conductor has given a rare interview to the elite orchestra’s website:

Are there aspects of Mahler’s personality to which you have felt particularly drawn?

His Jewishness has always played an important role for me, since there is naturally a connection here, even though my family had no links with the Jewish religion during my childhood and adolescence in the Soviet Union. We were familiar with a couple of customs and religious holidays, but only to the extent that these were observed by my grandparents and by my great-grandparents. I was not able to develop any relationship with this religion, something that I now find a great pity. But I felt this longing for a religious dimension in my life, something that I can also sense in Mahler’s music. It’s not a religious feeling in a denominational sense, but more of a longing for a sacred element as such, a longing for the Creator spiritus that Mahler invokes in his Eighth Symphony. You can find this in every one of his works.

How close are you to Mahler’s world of emotions in general?

With Mahler there is this feeling of being a stranger. I feel the same way too. Mahler famously described himself as “homeless three times over: as a Bohemian among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans and as a Jew in the whole of the world”. This is a feeling with which I too became familiar after I emigrated from the Soviet Union.

The Jewishness you hear in Mahler is not just a religion, but a cultural tradition, too.

Yes, it’s impossible not to hear this. Some people say that all of Mahler’s music is Jewish. I think they’re wrong. Of course, there are certain elements of klezmer music, elements that he picked up as a child in Bohemia, where he heard Jewish dance bands and then took these elements over into his own music – think of the wind music in his First Symphony. But these are mere artefacts. Mahler’s music is not Jewish; it’s universal.

You have just said that you have no connection with the Jewish religion. Not even to this Jewish sound world?

Not even that. In the Soviet Union we had to do everything we could to hide the fact that we were Jewish. Wherever I went, I never stopped hearing anti-Semitic remarks – on the bus, in the supermarket and at the cinema. This was very unpleasant. Of course, my parents kept reminding me where I come from. But I never had any contact with any living tradition of Jewish musical culture.

Do you regret this?

Of course. But perhaps I can still make up for lost ground. Only in Israel do I feel that I’m Jewish. But as a very different kind of Jew from those in Israel….

More here.

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