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Several of
Mahler’s symphonies embody a
struggle with some spiritual
problem which is eventually
resolved in the finale. In
the Second, which he
completed in 1894 at the age
of thirty-four, the problem
is that of finding some
assurance in the face of
human mortality; and the
resolution is a
reaffirmation of the
Christian belief in
resturection and
immortality. This ‘meaning’
is conveyed clearly by the
symphony itself; but Mahler
ratified it in a verbal
‘programme’ which he drew up
for the work in 1896, a year
after its first performance,
in Berlin, at the request of
a young composer and
journalist, Max Maschalk,
who was one of his earliest
admirers.
At first, he
was unwilling to satisfy the
young man's curiosity,
insisting that the symphony
spoke for itself. He wrote
to Marschalk:
‘I should
regard my work as having
completely failed, if I
found it necessary to
give people like
yourself, even an
indication as to its
mood-sequence. In my
conception of the work,
I was in no way
concerned with the
detailed setting forth
of an event, but much
rather of a feeling. The
conceptual basis of the
work is spoken out
clearly in the words of
the final chorus, and
the sudden emergence of
the contralto solo [the
fourth movement] throws
an illuminating light on
the earlier movements’.
After several
protests, however, Mahler
consented to put into words
the idea behind the
symphony. He wrote as
follows:
‘I have
named the first movement
‘Totenfeier’ [Funeral
Rites, or Obsequies],
and if you want to know,
it is the hero of my D
major symphony [No.1]
whom I bear to the grave
there, and whose life I
catch up, from a higher
standpoint, in a pure
mirror. At the same time
there is the great
question: ‘Why did you
live? Why did you
suffer? Is it all
nothing but a huge,
terrible joke?' We must
answer these questions
in some way, if we want
to go on living -
indeed, if we are to go
on dying! He into whose
life this call has once
sounded must give an
answer; and this answer
I give in the final
movement.
The second
and third movements are
conceived as an
interlude. The second is
a memory - a shaft of
sunlight from out of the
life of this hero, It
has surely happened to
you, that you have
followed a loved one to
the grave, and then
perhaps, on the way
back, there suddenly
arose the image of a
long-dead hour of
happiness, which now
enters your soul like a
sunbeam that nothing can
obscure - you could
almost forget what has
just happened. That is
the second movement.
But when
you awake nom this
wistful dream, and have
to retum, into the
confusion of life, it
can easily happen that
this ever-moving,
never-resting,
never-comprehensible
bustle of existence
becomes horrible to you,
like the swaying of
dancing figures in a
brightly-lit ball-room,
into which you look from
the dark night outside -
and from such a great
distance that you can no
longer hear the music.
Life strikes you as
meaningless, a frightful
ghost, from which you
perhaps start away with
a cry of disgust. This
is the third movement;
what follows is surely
clear to you.’
Five years
later, for another Berlin
performance, Mahler drew up
another programme, this time
for public consumption. His
explanation of the first
three movements was along
exactly the same lines as
before, but it was now
followed by a commentary on
the rest of the symphony:
‘Fourth
Movement: the morning
voice of ingenuous faith
strikes on our ears.
Fifth
Movement: we are
confronted once more
with terrifying
questions. A voice is
heard crying aloud: ‘The
end of all living things
is come - the Last
Judgment is at hand’
.....
The earth quakes, the
graves burst open, the
dead arise and stream on
in endless procession.
The great and the little
ones of the earth -
kings and beggars,
righteous and godless -
all press on; the cry
for mercy and
forgiveness strikes
fearfully on our ears.
The wailing rises higher
- our senses desert us,
consciousness fails at
the approach of the
eternal spirit. The last
trumpet is heard - the
trumpets of the
Apocalypse ring out; in
the eerie silence which
follows, we can just
catch the distant,
barely audible song of a
nightingale, a last
tremulous echo of
earthly life. A chorus
of saints and heavenly
beings softlly breuks
forth: "Thou shalt
arise, surely thou shalt
arise’. Then appears the
glory of God: a wondrous
soft light penetrates us
to the heart - all is
holy calm.
And behold,
it is no judgment; there
are no sinners, no just.
None is great, none small.
There is no punishment and
no reward. An overwhelming
love illuminates our
being. We know and are.'
On the very
day of the performance,
however, Mahler had a
revulsion back to his
earlier distrust of
programmes. He wrote to his
wife:
‘I only
drew up the programme as
a crutch for a cripple
(you know who I mean).
It can give only a
superficial indication,
all that any programme
can do for a musical
work ..... In fact, as
religious doctrines do,
it leads directly to a
flattening and
coarsening, and in the
long run to such
distortion that the work
..... is utterly
unrecognisable.’
In view of
Mahler’s ambivalent attitude
towards his programme, what
value can it have for us
today? Some modern musicians
would advise us to ignore it
altogether - quoting
Mahler’s own disparagement
of it as the best reason -
and to experience the
symphony purely as ‘absolute
music’, as so much
fascinating melody, harmony,
rhythm, orchestration, and
form. But this seems
impossible, since the work
itself contains its own
programme: the last two
movements have explicit
verbal texts, while the
wordless first movement
mounts an assault on our
emotions which we can hardly
ignore. In any case, Mahler
himself would not have
agreed with this point of
view. In his letter to
Marschalk outlining the
programme, he wrote:
‘We find
ourselves faced with the
important question how,
and indeed why music
should be interpreted in
words at all ..... As
long as my experience
can be summed up in
words, I write no music
about it; my need to
express myself musically
- symphonically - begins
at the point where the
dark feelings hold sway,
at the door which leads
into the ‘other world’ -
the world in which
things are no longer
separated by space and
time.'
Clearly then,
Mahler expected us to
experience the symphony, not
at all as absolute music,
but as the musical
expression of feelings too
mysterious and deepseated to
be described in words, even
his own, without being
distorted. But this would
demand an ideal listener,
who could so immediately
respond to the feelings in
the music as to have no need
of reflection or
clarification. Many a
music-lover likes to analyse
the feelings that music
awakens in him; moreover,
those who are puzzled by the
work may need some
indication as to the general
area of feeling the
music is concerned with.
What we should do, perhaps,
is neither reject Mahler's
programme, nor take it
literally, but try to
penetrate to its valid
psychological core, shearing
away all inessentials.
To begin with,
the later addition,
concerning the last two
movements, is strictly
redundant. In the fourth
movement, both the folk-poem
and its hymn-like setting
proclaim explicitly their
‘ingenuous faith’; and the
vivid tone-painting in the
finale portrays unmistakably
the image of the Day of
Judgment, while the final
chorale-like setting of
Klopstock’s ‘Resurrection
Ode' (with even more
explicit verses added by
Mahler himself) also speaks
for itself. (Mahler had
actually stressed all this
in his letter to Marschalk,
as we have seen.) And the
final paragraph, about there
being ‘no judgment’, is not
only redundant, but
irrelevant: Mahler was no
doubt carried away by
writing about the concept of
an after-life into adding a
purely doctrinal view, which
he happened to hold at the
time, but which has no
bearing on the symphony at
all. Indeed, it may well
have been his later
realisation of this which
caused his revulsion from
the whole programme - a
conjecture which finds
support in an amusing
unecdotc in his wife’s book:
‘There was
a beautiful old lady of
hysterical tendencies,
who ..... when Mahler
was in Russia .....
summoned him and.told
him that she felt her
death to be near, and
would he enlighten her
about the other world,
as he had said so much
about it in his Second
Symphony. He was not so
well informed about it
as she supposed, and he
was made to feel very
distinctly, when he took
his leave, that she was
displeased with him.’
How should
Mahler have known anything
about the nature of the
after-life, or even whether
there was such a thing? In
his last two movements he
had simply expressed, in
symbolic terms, his own faith
- in God, resurrection, and
eternal life; and they need
no programme, nor any
doctrinal gloss.
The
‘resurrection’ finale links
back, thematically and
emotionally, with the large
opening movement; and
according to Mahler’s
programme, it ‘answers the
questions’ of this movement.
But it is rather the
questions of Mahler’s programme
(Why did you live? Why did
you suffer? Is it all
nothing but a huge, terrible
joke?) which are answered by
part of the text he
himself added to Klopstock’s
Ode for his finale (O
believe, thou wert not born
in vain, hast not lived in
vain, suffered in vain).
Obviously, a purely
orchestral movement cannot
ask questions, because music
by itself is incapable of
doing so. If Mahler had not
drawn up his programme, we
should have had no idea that
it was intended to ask
questions at all.
It is here
that we have to look beyond
Mahler’s loose phraseology
to the psychological reality
behind it. The first
movement has the rhythm and
character of a funeral
march, but a quicker tempo;
and whereas the normal
funeral march is a dignified
expression of grief,
Mahler’s movement is full of
anger, revolt, and wild
despair. It clearly
expresses the state of mind
of one who feels a sense of
outrage at the apparent
omnipotence of death, and
can find no ultimate
significance in human life
in the face of it - a state
of mind which implies the
‘questions’ in the
programme.
The same approach is
necessary with Mahler’s
curious phrase ‘it is the
hero of my D major symphony
whom I bear to the grave
there’. A symphony cannot
have a hero, and its
composer cannot bear him to
the grave in the next
symphony. But
programme-symphonies of this
kind deal in universal
statements about mortal
humanity, and the ‘hero’ of
a Mahler symphony is simply
Mahler’s projection in his
own mind of the person whom
these statements concern:
Everyman, or at least every
man in the same predicament
as Mahler. Mahler’s phrase
was only a symbolic way of
saying that in the First
Symphony the universal
implications of the funeral
march (the third movement in
this case) are eventually
swept aside and ignored in
the finale through an
affirmation of youthful
vitality and confidence; but
in the Second Symphony these
implications are ‘caught up
from a higher standpoint’ -
i.e., confronted on the
metaphysical plane and
resolved by an act of
religious faith.
The
programme’s description of
the second and third
movements confronts us with
visual images, but again we
must penetrate to their
underlying psychological
meaning. The images of the
memory at the graveside and
the far-off inaudible
ballroom music are poetic
analogies indicating that
the first movement’s vision
of death’s omnipotence is
followed by a two-movement
interlude concerned with
life - its happiness and its
bitterness. For these
Mahler, as so often, used
the Austrian country waltz,
the Ländler, to symbolise
the ‘dance of life’. But the
first movement’s
overpowering character has
the effect of shrinking the
vision of life’s happiness
here to a small space, and
to a subdued and fragile
thing. The second movement
is a short slow Ländler,
basically wistful in mood
and eventually overshadowed
by an intrusion of the first
movement’s angry atmosphere
(in the second statement of
its trio-section); this
reduces the final statement
of the wistful Ländler
section to a disembodied
ghost of itself (though it
later regains its
substance).
In the third
movement, the scherzo,
Mahler uses the quicker type
of Ländler for his vision of
life’s bitterness - total
bitterness, according to his
programme, though most
admirers of the symphony
sense other feelings there
as well - genial vitality,
humour and longing. The
relentless twisting and
twining of the main material
certainly has something
sinister about it, but
something comical as well;
in fact Mahler lifted it
bodily from his amusing song
‘St. Anthony of Padua’s
Sermon to the Fishes’, where
he had conceived it to
portray the aimless
gyrations of the fish, as
they listened to the sermon
but swam away as sinful and
greedy as before. And in the
two trio-sections there is
some exuberant popular
dance-music and a haimtingly
nostalgic passage for four
trumpets in close harmony.
Yet the
general effect of the
movement, in the context of
the whole symphony, is
without doubt that of a
complacently persistent
busy-ness, on a plane of
easy pleasure, which does at
times take on a macabre
shadowiness: the ‘Dance of
Life’ appears here as a
purely mechanical and
sometimes insubstantial
activity, with no high aim
and purpose. Whether it
appears ‘horrible’, as
Mahler believed it did, may
be a matter of personal
reaction; but undeniably,
the sense of an apparently
unstoppable nattering and
nagging does become so
strong in the end as to
motivate the extraordinary
revulsion which is the
climax of the movement - the
great outburst which Mahler
described as ‘a cry of
disgust’. And the opening of
the hymn-like movement for
contralto solo, which
follows this movement
without a break, certainly
comes as a welcome relief
and an elevation to a higher
plane.
So the
‘programme’ of the symphony
resolves itself into a
symbolic description of a
psychological mood-sequence:
a sense of outrage at the
omnipotence of death, a
haunting awareness of the
fragility of life’s
happiness, and a feeling of
disgust at the mechanical
and aimless triviality of
everyday life, followed by a
turning away to faith in God
and belief in resurrection
and etemal life.
Even so, we
are still left with a
nagging question. The ‘call’
which ‘sounded through’
Mahler’s life - the
challenge to find some
significance in a life which
is doomed to extinction - is
one familiar to most of us,
and we can find no
difficulty in responding to
the feelings expressed in
the first three movements.
But for the many of us who
cannot answer this challenge
by invoking the Christian
belief in immortality, what
significance can there be in
the culmination of the
symphony - the part which
presents the ostensible
‘message’ of the work?
Strangely
enough, it does have great
significance for us, since a
hearing of it comes as a
kind of tremendous emotional
experience. Yet the reason
is clear. Music cannot
express intellectual
concepts, but only feelings;
and what we all respond to
is the feelings of faith and
inspiration in the music,
whether or not we are
convinced by the concepts in
the text which were the
object of these feelings.
Mahler’s affirmations are
ultimately of faith and
inspiration in life itself,
whether they arose, as in
the second, third, and
eighth symphonies, from the
religious beliefs he held at
the time, or, as in The
Song of the Earth and
the unfinished tenth, from
his realistic coming to
terms with mortality when
his religious beliefs failed
him. The ‘Resurrection
Symphony’ raises us, not
into another world, but on
to the plane of spiritual
conflict and achievement
where life alone has value
and significance.
From the musical point of
view, the separate movements
of the symphony have an
immediate formal clarity and
impact which makes analysis
unnecessary. But it may be
helpful to point out the
symphony’s broader formal
cohesion - the thematic
interconnections between the
earlier movements and the
finale.
In the
development section of the
first movement, Mahler
introduces two new themes.
The second of these is a
kind of chorale-melody,
given out by the horns,
which begins with the first
four notes of the Dies
Irae, but continues in
more confident mood (Ex. 1).
The last idea which the
finale takes up from the
earlier part of the symphony
is a passage from the fourth
movement; and here there is
a verbal as well as a
musical connection. The
melodic line to which the
contralto sings ‘I am from
God, and will return to God’
(Ex. 4a) is developed in
much faster tempo by both
soloists in the finale, to
the words ‘With wings which
I have won me, in love's
fierce striving, I shall
soar upwards to the light to
which no eye has penetrated’
(Ex. 4b).
Deryck
Cooke
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