Thinking life & death with Mahler

What can Gustav Mahler, the Viennese late Romantic symphonist, teach us about life and death? Some links are obvious: his 2nd symphony is called Resurrection, and his other symphonies often mention “Ewigkeit” (eternity) and “Tot” (death). Listening through his 9+2 symphonies*, and reading about his biography, it is apparent that Mahler was engaged in an ambitious, life-affirming, cosmological project. There is a famous story (true or not) about his encounter with Sibelius, where Mahler exclaimed: “The symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything.” This Romantic pathos may be scoffed or admired, but it clearly framed Mahler’s core artistic and metaphysical challenges. He was a “synthetic philosopher” of sounds.

(*Mahler published nine numbered symphonies in his lifetime, but many also count his Das Lied von der Erde as one of his core symphonies. He also left behind a half-finished manuscript for a 10th symphony. Hence, Mahler’s “9+2” symphonies.)

First, some background. After Beethoven’s 9th, especially with Bruckner and Mahler, the symphonic form burst forth across two Romantic dimensions: maximal self-expression (individualism, heroism) and unbounded cosmic-spiritual expression. These two poles, which are complementary, explain Mahler’s project very well: the unity of sensual humanism with transcendental “cosmism.” His mad desire to express everything in music - and to burst through the veil of experience - forced Mahler into a near-impossible territory. How can one express everything in music, let alone 9+ times?

This quest not only led Mahler down a multitude of different spiritual paths, but also reshaped, and increasingly distorted, the expressive capacities of the symphonic orchestra, the sonata form, and Western tonality. This helps to make sense of the magnificent craziness of his symphonies - and the limits of our language, even musical language, to map out that “zone without a name,” the zone between reason and passion, language and sound, and life and death. Every single symphony that he wrote aimed to express the whole world. This kind of “eternal recurrence” of the cosmic perspective (to borrow the language of Nietzsche, one of Mahler’s explicit early influences) is fascinating and frightening to behold. After one has expressed the whole world in a symphony, how can one do that again? Should one simply stop composing? Mahler’s solution was to embrace a kind of cosmic multi-perspectivism: every single symphony of Mahler’s offers a different cosmic vision, a unique metaphysical sound-picture. He thus gave us 9+2 different cosmologies - 9+2 unique “revelations” of world’s eternity.

This is already apparent in Mahler’s first symphony (“Titan”). The opening descending scales echo (or quote?) the first movement of Beethoven’s 4th. The calming, sustained notes equally evoke Wagnerian operatic motifs, including the cosmic prelude to Das Rheingold, and the medieval ecstasies of Parsifal. I personally really love Mahler’s first symphony, for all its youthful boldness. But the cosmic perspective really achieves its first apotheosis in his 2nd symphony, “Resurrection,” which culminates in a theosophic, metaphysical ecstasy in a joyous celebration of the Jesus story. Here, the "totalizing” world picture (Weltbild, to use Heidegger’s terminology) takes on a Christian-Abrahamic form: the cosmic order as divine creation, the fallen human experience as redeemed, Christ as saviour.

But where do you go after the Resurrection? Nowhere and everywhere. His 3rd, by necessity, recapitulates his 2nd. This is where the strange “eternal recurrence” of his cosmic vision become apparent. The 3rd is equally cosmic, but in an explicitly “pagan” fashion, inspired by Pan, Dionysus, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Its cosmic unity is more chthonic, pre/post-Christian, and modern. Its final movement quotes Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (the same text that also inspired the famous tone poem of that other Romantic giant, Richard Strauss!). It ends in a celebration of the “deep” (tief) human desire for joy, affirmation, and “deep eternity” (tiefe Ewigkeit):

Die Welt ist tief,

und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.

Tief ist ihr Weh —,

Lust — tiefer noch als Herzeleid.

Weh spricht: Vergeh!

Doch all’ Lust will Ewigkeit —,

— will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!

…

Having thus completed three cosmic symphonies, each more grandiloquent than the next, where does Mahler go next? Does he abandon his cosmic grandiosity? Not at all! Superficially, it might seem that he does: his 4th symphony is whimsical, playful, joyous, dance-like, even “vulgar” and “trivial” in its neo-classical moods. Some have compared it to the innocence of a child. The selection of musical themes and expressions also brings to mind the Romantic perspective of a young person in love with life, sex, dance, and intoxication. The glorious final movement celebrates the whimsical staccato of youth. Musically, it contains repeated string hits that are equally life-affirming, joyful, and a little bit scary. Their excessive life-affirming power - the natural violence of youth overtaking the old world - occurs in the gilded guise of passing beauty. A beautiful youth has the natural right to dance to victory - even if this means killing the old and metaphorically dancing on their graves.

Whereas the cosmic vision of the 4th is more scaled back and down-to-earth, his 5th and 6th symphonies abandon all restraint and reach for the skies. Together, they form a majestic, powerful pair that fully express late Mahler’s cosmic vision. Both 5th and 6th start with expressive first movements that announce themselves powerfully to the world. The guiding mood of the 5th is very Beethovenian. Indeed, the parallels between Beethoven’s 5th and Mahler’s 5th are apparent: they both deal with “fate knocking at the door” as part of the archetypical “hero’s journey.” Aggression, defiance, anger, passion, trepidation, vigour, enthusiasm, and joy are all cycled through in the course of a single symphony. Cosmic depths are explored in human depths. Mahler here embraces Terence’s humanistic dictum, “humani nihil a me alienum puto.” The all-encompassing cosmic vision “becomes flesh” as the sentimental perspective of the heroic individual reveals the “God within us all.” This journey is mirrored, darkly, in his “tragic” 6th symphony, the bombastic, somber twin of the 5th. It embraces the entirety of the world from the perspective of the fallen, the suffering, the vanquished, the crying, the dying. Although cosmic tragedy has no happy ending, the forcefulness of this pathos hints at future Nietzschean self-overcoming that embraces the eternal recurrence of suffering and, with its, all the joys of the world. Our great capacity to suffer is thus transmuted, alchemically, into élan vital.

After 6 cosmic symphonies, and after embracing wild, bombastic Romantic gestures, where does he go next? To really strange, quirky, and odd directions!

Mahler’s 7th, perhaps his most controversial one, is an “ugly duckling.” Its dissonant notes are like an intoxicated parody of the super-seriousness of his 5th and 6th. Is he toying with us? Yes. Has he abandoned his cosmic quest? Far from it! Instead, he is playing with new sounds - new, strange sounds! - to re-orient, and disorient, his old cosmic vision. After having already, in his previous six symphonies, said “everything” - heroically, beautifully, majestically, religiously, humanistically, etc… - the 7th undertakes two bold innovations: 1) A sonic exploration of the limits of the expressive power of Western tonality - with ample use of dissonance, partly based on polyphonic baroque music - thus paving the way for later atonality. (Post-tonal breakthrough as cosmic transcendence.) 2) A thematic exploration of "vulgarisation” (a thematic parallel to the sonorous atonal shift) that openly embraces the anarchic, guttural, drunken, ribald, sinful, and chaotic forces of modern society. Much like the playful 4th, the intoxicated 7th could be mistaken for a trivial, unserious musical statement; but this would be a mistake. It is a profound metaphysical quest: “Expressing the world in music requires exploring the limits of traditional musical expression and putting one’s sanity at risk! It requires siding with the drunkard, the whore, the fool, and the madman!”

I love the 7th for its daring risk. I am less keen on the 8th, although I admire its oomph. Mahler’s 8th attempts yet another ecstatic (to me, seriously flawed) pathway for expressing “the world as a whole.” As the symphony’s nickname, “the Symphony of a Thousand,” indicates, the 8th employs a massive, gargantuan, choral orchestra, the likes of which are rarely seen in symphonic music. In my interpretation, the 8th symphony embraces the world as a “MASS” in two very different meanings: both in the sense of the scientific, Newtonian concept of “mass” - closely related to “gravity” and “(quantity of) force” - as well as in the religious sense of “mass” (missa): a massive choral work devoted to maximal theological expression. By employing a massive, oversized orchestra, Mahler achieves two things: a return to the religious “mass” and a gargantuan musical tornado for overwhelming a modern audience. Note that the religious staging does not make it any more “elevated”: the 8th constitutes just as much an attempt at transcendental “excess” as the bawdiness of the 7th. Mahler pursued “God” wherever he could: from the brothel to the high church.

His 9th, last completed symphony, pushes tonal expression to its limit, and achieves a mature summation of Mahler’s cosmic vision. It does not reinvent the wheel, but arguably perfects it. It showcases his masterful ability to extract the maximum effect from the symphonic form. It is also comparatively “conservative” in expression. The excesses of the 8th, the distortions of the 7th, the Weltschmerz of the 6th, the Oriental resignation of Das Lied, and the other cosmic visions of the past are assembled together in a more traditional, but still thematically bold, diverse, and tonally adventurous form. Herbert van Karajan said, of the 9th, that “It is music coming from another world, it is coming from eternity.” Yes; just like all of his music. But unlike the somewhat “violent” use of the orchestra in the previous few symphonies, here the World Soul comes through effortlessly, with minimal friction; Mahler had, at this point, turned himself into a sensitive, unbending conduit for cosmic forces.

Before concluding, let me say a few things about his “other two” symphonies. While not part of the “official 9,” they are very important. First, that “other 9th symphony,” Das Lied von Der Erde, “Song of the Earth,” which he refused to put a number to, and which he completed before his official 9th symphony, expresses a magnificently sensual reconciliation of eternity with the passage and passing of time. Das Lied is structured around old Chinese poems. The first half of the symphony is a melancholic celebration of youth, vitality, drunkenness, love, and twinkling beauty. The long final movement, “Der Abschied” (Farewell) is both heartbreaking and transcendentally beautiful. It announces that “the earth will stay beautiful forever, but man cannot live for even a hundred years.” The poet recommends accepting the necessary “closure” to life’s passing mortality - whether in the form of physical death or spiritual resignation - that reconciles humanity with the world’s eternity. The final lingering notes of “ewig” (eternally), repeated to literal death, remind us that “eternity” for human beings is ambivalent between the purely negative vision of physical decay and destruction and the hopeful promise of a spiritual unity with the cosmos.

Finally, the surviving first movement of his unfinished 10th symphony, which is rightfully considered one of his lost masterpieces, gives us indication of the sort of quasi-atonal late Romantic style that Mahler was moving towards. We can only imagine how majestic the rest of the symphony would have sounded like, had it been fully completed. Deryck Cooke’s “performance version” is a surprisingly competent effort to string together the incomplete manuscript. But Mahler would have undoubtedly done something even more amazing with it!

Conclusion

Mahler’s symphonies can teach us many things about life and death, joy and sorrow, humanity and eternity. He chose the Western symphonic form as a medium for his mad, Romantic quest to express “eternity in music.” In so doing, he faced a metaphysical dilemma: “How can I paint the whole world in music? And how can I do so 9+ times without repeating myself?” This led him to compose 9+2 majestic works, each of which is a self-contained package - a unique microcosm onto itself.

Each Mahler symphony contains a “self-contained” vision of transcendence - a unique ecstatic experience at the edge of musical expressivity and rational comprehension. This takes, as we have seen, different forms in different symphonies: Christian apotheosis and resurrection (2nd), pagan revelry and natural mysticism (3rd), childhood innocence and youthful passion (4th), the heroic struggle against fate (5th), the dark tragedy of a violent cosmos (6th), the distorted revelry of a drunken madhouse rebelling against sanity and tonality (7th), the overwhelming “mass power” of a supersized, religiously ecstatic orchestra (8th), the Oriental nihilism of a world-resigned poet (das Lied), the mature perfection of Romantic tonality (9th), and the intimations of atonal “pure sound” beyond the bounds of the symphonic tradition (10th). Each of these perspectives is both a whole and a part. None of them “lack” anything, since they all encompass eternity, and eternity is adequately comprehended through them - even if they express competing perspectives on “ewigkeit.”

(I want to say more about why attempting to “express the inexpressible” is a viable strategy for Romantic music, but dangerous in philosophy. Another time..)