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Bruno Walter
has left us an unforgettable
pen-portrait of Mahler at
the time when he had just
completed his Second
Symphony and would soon be
starting his Third. The year
was 1894: Walter, a youth of
eighteen, had gone to
Hamburg to try for the post
of repetiteur at the Opera
there. After his interview
with the Theatre Director,
he was introduced to the
chief conductor, Gustav
Mahler, who, although only
thirty-four, was rapidly
becoming famous as an
outstanding conductor and a
highly controversial
composer.
Walter had
read the scathing reviews of
the recent Weimar
performance of Mahler's
First Symphony, denouncing
it for ‘sterility',
‘triviality', and above all
‘immoderation'. He had
wanted to meet this
‘immoderate' man, and now he
found himself face to face
with him:
‘There he
stood ... thin, pale,
slight of stature; the
steep forehead of his
long face framed in
jetblack hair; his eyes
full of meaning behind
his glasses; lines of
sadness and humour
furrowing a countenance
which revealed an
amazing range of
expressions as he spoke
to anyone: as
fascinating, demonic and
intimidating an
incarnation of
Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister
Kreisler as could have
presented it self to a
youthful reader of that
author...'
Kapellmeister
Mahler certainly worked
like a demon, during his six
years at Hamburg, to improve
the standard there; and he
also introduced many new
works, including Verdi's Falstaff
and Puccini's Manon
Lescaut (both
completed as recently as
1892). All this activity so
fully occupied the winter
months that he was only able
to compose during his summer
vacations. Each year, when
the opera season was over,
he retired to the Austrian
countryside-to the village
of Steinbach-am-Attersee in
the Salzburg Alps - to carry
on his work as a composer;
and it was there, during
1895 and 1896, that he
composed his Third Symphony.
In Steinbach, Mahler had a
little hut in the middle of
a field, furnished only with
a piano, a table, an
armchair, and a sofa. Every
morning he went there at six
o'clock; breakfast was
brought at seven, and he
worked on till midday, or
more often till three in the
afternoon. Then, after
lunch, he would wander about
the fields, or go for long
tramps across the hills,
working out his musical
ideas in his head.
Occsionalliy he would find
relaxation in entertaining a
privileged visitor or two.
His retreat to
the countryside was not
merely due to his need for
seclusion. He was a
passionate nature-lover-or
rather, he felt himself absorbed
by nature: not only by the
beautiful and the charming,
but by the comical and the
grotesque, even by the
alien, and above all by the
awe-inspiring. His wife,
writing some twelve years
later of a different summer
retreat, described a most
unnerving experience:
‘One day
in the summer he came
running down from his
hut in a perspiration,
scarcely able to
breathe. At last he came
out with it: it was the
heat, the stillness, the
Pan-ic horror. He was
overcome by this feeling
of the goat-god's
frightful and vivid eye
V upon him in his
solitude, and he had to
take refuge in the house
among human beings, and
go on with his work
there'.
Scarcely
credible-yet Mahler was a
quite incredible human
being. It was this intense
awareness of nature that was
the inspiration of the Third
Symphony.
When he had
almost completed it, he
wrote in a letter to the
great dramatic soprano Anna
Bahr-Mildenburg:
‘Just
imagine a work of such
magnitude that it
actually mirrors the
whole world-one is, so
to speak, only an
instrument, played on by
the universe ... My
symphony will be
something the like of
which the world has
never yet heard! ... In
it the whole of nature
finds a voice ... Some
passages of it seem so
uncanny to me that I can
hardly recognise them as
my own work ... `.
Indeed, so
overwhelming was Mahler's
inspiration that he felt
almost as if he were God,
creating the universe. When
Bruno Walter turned up at
Steinbach, and stared in
wonder at the magnficent
mountain scenery, Mahler
said ‘You needn't stand
staring at that - I've
already composed it all!'
And at the rehearsals for
the first performance of the
work, in Crefeld six years
later, he walked over to his
wife after the run-through
of the first movement, and
laughingly quoted Genesis,
I, 25: ‘And he saw that it
was good!'
If such an
attitude seems alarmingly
like megalomania, we might
remember Mahler's constant
awareness of the
impersonality of the force
that was driving him. He did
in fact feel like an
instrument that was being
played on by some unknown
power: as he said in another
context, 'We do not compose;
we are composed. And
if his intoxication with his
own work seems laughable to
those who regard the
symphony as a great fuss
about nothing, we may recall
the effect it had on the
young Schoenberg. After
hearing the first Vienna
performance in 1904, he
wrote to Mahler, saying:
‘I think I
have experienced your
symphony. I felt the
struggle for illusions;
I felt the pain of one
disillusioned; I saw the
forces of evil and good
contending; I saw a man
in a torment of emotion
exerting himself to gain
inner harmony. I sensed
a human being, a drama,
truth, the most ruthless
truth!'
The striking
fact here, however, is that
Schoenberg's view of the
inner meaning of the work
was so different from
Mahler's own. As in the case
of the Second Symphony (the
‘Resurrection’), we are
faced with the question how
far Mahler's own programme
for the work actually
explains what it is ‘about',
or has any real relevance
for the listener.
What was it, exactly, that
was eating Mahler during
those two Austrian summers
of 1895 and 1896? In letters
to friends, written in
August 1895, after he had
fully sketched all the
movements except the first,
he outlined a comprehensive
programme for the symphony,
as follows:
THE
JOYFUL KNOWLEDGE
A
Summer Morning’s Dream
I.
Summer Marches In
II.
What the meadow-flowers
tell me
III.
What the creatures of
the forest tell me
IV.
What night tells me
(mankind)
V.
What the morning-bells
tell me (the angels)
VI.
What love tells me
VII.
The heavenly life (what
the child tells me)
The main
title, ‘The Joyful
Knowledge’ (Die fröhliche
Wissenschaft) came from
Nietzsche's book of the same
name; and although the whole
programme is hardly
Nietzschean in the true
sense-it has, as we shall
see, eventual Christian
connotations-the title was
borrowed by Mahler to
indicate a new-found
optimism, or rather a kind
of mystical revelation of
the validity and purpose of
existence.
The sub-title
‘A Summer Morning’s Dream'
later became 'A Summer Noonday’s
Dream'; this was after he
had completed the work by
composing the fantastic
first movement. The idea of
noonday brings to mind ‘the
heat, the stillness, the
Pan-ic horror' of Mrs.
Mahler's description; and in
fact Mahler now dropped the
title ‘The Joyful
Knowledge’, and described
the introduction to the work
as 'Pan awakes'. (By this
time also,the seventh
movement had been excluded:
it was in fact composed, but
it was set aside, and became
the hnale, and seed, of the
Fourth Symphony).
Mahler's clearest
explanation of the idea
behind this strange
programme is to be found in
a letter to Dr. Richard
Batka, written in February
1896. Already, before the
completion of the symphony,
the second movement ('What
the meadow-flowers tell me')
had been performed several
times, and Mahler complained
of the misconception that
would result from this:
‘That this
little piece (more of an
intermezzo in the whole
thing) must create
misunderstandings when
detached from its
connection with the
complete work, my most
signihcant and vastest
creation, can`t keep me
from letting it be
performed alone. I have
no choice; ifl want to
be heard, I can't be too
fussy, and so this
modest little piece will
doubtless ... present me
to the public as the
'sensuous', perfumed
'singer of nature'. -
That this nature hides
within itself everything
that is frightful,
great, and also lovely
(which is exactly what I
wanted to express in the
entire work, in a sort
of evolutionary
development) - of course
no one ever understands
this. It always strikes
me as odd that most
people, when they speak
of 'nature', think only
of flowers, little
birds, and woodsy
smells. No one knows the
god Dionysus, the great
Pan. There now! You have
a sort of programme-that
is, a sample of how I
make music. Everywhere
and always, it is only
the voice of nature! ...
Now it is the world,
Nature in its totality,
which is, so to speak,
awakened from fathomless
silence that it may ring
and resound'.
So the idea
behind the work was a
conception of existence in
its totality. The vast first
movement was to represent
the summoning of Nature out
of non-existence by the god
Pan, symbolised by the
emergence of summer out of
the dead world of winter;
and after this, the five
shorter movements were to
represent the ‘stages of
being’ (as Mahler expressed
it in another letter), from
vegetable and animal life,
through mankind and the
angels, to the love of God.
For the word ‘love' in the
title ofthe sixth movement
was used in a Christian
sense, as Mahler explained
to Anna Bahr-Mildenburg:
‘It’s a
matter of a different
kind of love from the
one you imagine. The
motto to this movement
reads:
Vater,
sieh an die Wunden mein!
Kein Wesen
lass verloren sein!
[Father,
see these wounds of
mine!
Let not be lost one
creature of thine!]
... I
could almost call the
movement ‘What God tells
me'. And truly in the
sense that God can only
be understood as love.
And so my work is a
musical poem embracing
all stages of
development in a
stepwise ascent. It
begins with inanimate
nature and ascends to
the love of God'.
As in the case
of the first and second
symphonies, Mahler
eventually discarded his
programme, leaving the music
to speak for itself; and
this it can certainly do,
whether one accepts the
programme or not. No doubt
those with as strong a
pantheistic sense as Mahler
possessed when he conceived
it will find the programme
full of meaning, but there
will be others who, although
they may admire the work
itself, will regard the
programme as ridiculous. And
some may even feel that
Mahler was actually
expressing something
different from what he
imagined: as we have seen,
Schoenberg felt it to be the
expression of a tormented
personal conflict. And Bruno
Walter described the first
movement as being concerned
with a stark opposition
between two irreconcilable
opposites-what he called
‘primordial inertia' and
‘savage, lust-impelled
creativeness'.
Although we
cannot deny the pantheistic
inspiration of the symphony,
which is so clear from
Mahler’s letters, it has to
be admitted that the work is
not dependent on its
programme. Those who have no
pantheistic sense, or no
mystical intuition of any
kind, are not thereby
debarred from responding to
the content of the work.
This is because, like all
great music, it operates on
a psychological level
beneath all concepts,
mystical or otherwise, and
gives voice to the
mysterious driving-force of
sentient existence. The
fundamental meaning at the
root of Mahler's
‘existence-in-its-totality’
programme is that the
symphony is concerned with
the creative spring of life,
whatever that may be; with
its struggle to overcome
hindrances and barriers;
with its delight in beauty,
and even what is grotesque
and ugly; with its
‘intimations of immortality'
and its aspiration to
replace discord and hate
with concord and love.
Words, vague words, of
course; and yet the vaguer
the better, perhaps, if we
are to try to hint at the
inexplicable ‘meaning of
this music, which delves so
deeply into the source of
life and feeling.
Mahler gave this vast work
such a coherent and
crystal-clear shape that the
listener needs no
‘analytical notes' to guide
him: the many themes say
what they have to say with
powerful exactitude, and the
ways in which they are
developed have an equal
lucidity. But a few hints as
to the cross-references
between the movements may be
helpful.
After the introductory
horn-theme of the first
movement, the music sink
into the depths, and we hear
alternations of two chords,
followed by a melodic
oscillation of two notes:
Ex. 1.
Later on, after rhythmic
chord-repetitions for the
trombones, with savage brass
fanfares and agitated
horn-calls, a fierce
trumpettheme is heard: Ex.
2.
And this, too,
returns in the fourth
movement, very quietly on a
solo violin, at the words
‘Tief ist ihr Weh’.
At the end of the first
movement’s huge exposition,
there is a tremendous climax
(which appears again near
the end of the movement):
Ex. 3.
Here we have
the basis of the
farthest-flung relationship
of all: Ex. 3 returns as the
main climax of the Adagio
finale, in exactly the same
form, except that a new
counter-hgure is thrown
against it: Ex. 4.
Not long
before the inal arrival of
this climax in the first
movement, there is a bright
hymn-like cadence for high
woodwind (accompanied by a
fanfare theme for trumpet,
not shown in the example):
Ex. 5.
The second and third
movements lie outside this
pattern of cross-references:
they function as interludes,
after the enormous first
movement, before the
intensity of mood is resumed
in the last three movements.
But originally, the second
movement was to have shared
in this pattern: it contains
material which was taken up
again in the seventh
movement. As said above,
Mahler finally excluded this
seventh movement, and used
it as the finale, and the
seed, of the Fourth
Symphony; so in the event
there is a fascinating
cross-reference between the
Third Symphony and the
Fourth. The passage in the
second movement of the Third
is a swiftly flowing line in
the quick second section:
Ex. 6.
Deryck
Cooke
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