Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), Symphony No.2

I. Andante maestoso
II. Andante moderato
III. In ruhig fließender bewegnung (With quietly flowing movement)
IV. Urlicht. Sehr feierlich, aber schlicht (Primeval Light. Very solemn, but simple)
V. Im tempo des scherzos (In the tempo of the scherzo) wildly erupting

Gustav Mahler was born in 1860 into a German-speaking Jewish family in Kalischt (now Kaliště) in Eastern Bohemia, then part of the Habsburg Empire; now in the Czech Republic. His grandfather started work as a peddler; his father was a coachman turned innkeeper, who moved to Iglau (now Jihlava), where his business grew to include a successful distillery and tavern. Mahler was the second of fourteen children, of whom only six survived infancy: his childhood was punctuated by the death of siblings, which however traumatic, would not have been uncommon at that time. Mahler’s musical interest started aged four with discovering his grandparents’ piano; the rich array of street music, bugle calls from a neighbouring army barracks, and the natural world all had a profound and lasting impression which would find expression in his compositions. With his father’s support and thanks to the Habsburg Empire’s gymnasium education system, Mahler succeeded in entering the Vienna Conservatory, his gateway to joining the Central European musical elite; after graduation, he succeeded rapidly in obtaining increasingly prestigious conducting positions, culminating in his ten-year reign as director of the Vienna Court Opera from 1897 to 1907, and subsequently at the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

Mahler’s Second Symphony was composed intermittently over six years from 1888 to 1894; the first complete performance was given by the Berlin Philharmonic on 13 December 1895, conducted by the composer, with the cost of 5,000 underwritten by two friends, Dr Hermann Behn, a lawyer and composer who was a pupil of Bruckner’s, and Wilhelm Berkhan. Mahler left substantial descriptions of each movement, commenting that ‘it is advisable at first … for the listener to be given a few signposts and milestones for the journey’, but cautioned: ‘that is the most this sort of explanation can offer’. A written programme was only an aid to gaining insight into an interior programme or ‘succession of feelings’ that ‘communicated immeasurably more than the word is able to express.’ Mahler described how ‘my need to express myself in a symphony only begins at that point where dark feelings hold sway: at the gateway leading to the “other world”, the world in which things are beyond classification into time and place.’

The first movement, ‘Andante maestoso’ was first conceived in Prague in summer 1888 as a single-movement sequel to the First Symphony, and was entitled ‘Totenfeier’ (‘Funeral Rites’):

If you wish to know, it is the hero of my Symphony in D major whom I am bearing to his grave and whose life I am reflecting, from a higher vantage point, in a pure mirror. … We stand by the coffin of a person well loved. His whole life, his struggles, his passions, his sufferings and his accomplishments on earth once more for the last time pass before us. And now, in this solemn and deeply stirring moment, when the confusions and distractions of everyday life are lifted like a hood from our eyes, a voice of awe-inspiring solemnity grips our heart —a voice that, blinded by the mirage of everyday life, we usually ignore: "What next? What is life – and what is death? Why did you live? Why did you suffer? Is it all just a huge, frightful joke? Will we live on eternally? Do our life and death have a meaning?" We must answer these questions in some way if we are 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.

Musical Comparisons about at the opening: Schubert’s song Der Erlkönig; the stormy introduction to Act I of Wagner’s Die Walküre; Act IV of Verdi’s Otello, after Desdemonia’s ‘Ave Maria’, when the main character enters her bedroom before killing her. This debt to operatic recitative – a large part of Mahler’s professional life as a conductor – and this potentially eclectic range of influences, augurs a huge movement of boundless originality. Especially remarkable are Mahler’s use of the lowest ranges of the orchestra, novel sonorities (for example at one point hearing oboes accompanied by trumpets), and the use of the percussion section to generate moods and structural significance: this going far beyond its previous function of enhancing the drama or providing surface colour. The turbulent opening, with its monumental rhetoric, contrasts with an idea of supreme serenity; however, when first played, it remains underpinned disturbingly by fragments of the initial idea, as if unable to shake it off. The movement ends with a cataclysmic collapse – a huge downward chromatic scale leading, apparently, to nowhere.

The second movement could not offer a greater contrast. Composed in the summer of 1893, and completed by Mahler in seven days, it opens as a rural idyll – an Austrian ‘Ländler’ folk dance which he told a conductor colleague ten years later, could symbolise ‘a memory of youth’:

The Andante is a kind of intermezzo (like a last echo of bygone days in the life of the man who was carried to his grave in the first movement—"for the sun still shines upon him"). Whereas the first, third, fourth and fifth movements are connected as to theme and atmosphere, the second stands alone and rather interrupts the austere progression of events.

Even here, however, reminiscences from the first movement creep back to threaten the atmosphere, through a triplet theme that also recalls the Scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; they threaten but ultimately fail to change the mood.

If in the second movement the naïve and sentimental reigns; the third movement shatters them from its opening timpani blows. Mahler’s ‘Is it a joke?’ comment raised in his comments on the first movement is now explored fully. The music, with what Mahler called its ‘aimless circling’ semiquavers, is shared with his contemporaneous setting of the ironic song ‘St. Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fish’, taken from the German folk poetry collection, Des Khaben Wunderhorn (‘The Youth’s Magic Horn’). Mahler even kept a photograph of Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin’s painting on the subject above his piano while working on the music. St. Anthony finds his church empty and goes instead to the river bank to preach to the fish. He imagines they are listening with rapt attention, but the fish weave and waltz, indifferent to his ministrations:

When St. Anthony goes preaching the churches are empty. He’s off to preach to the fish. They all flick their tails and glint in the sunlight. The carp with their eggs have all come along, their mouths open wide all the better to listen. No sermon has ever pleased the fish so much. The speckled pike that are always fighting have come hurrying along to hear the holy man ... As God desires, they listen to the sermon. But once it is over they turn away. The pikes stay thieves, the eels remain lechers. The liked the sermon and they remain like everyone else. The crabs go backward, the cod stay stupid, the carp still gorge themselves. They forgot the sermon, the liked the sermon and they remain like everyone else.

Mahler conjures a terrifying vision in which St. Anthony’s deluded and pointless preaching provides an allegory for a crisis of faith. The music changes mood as if on a whim; for a short moment, a marvellously-score trumpet quartet offers a moment of nostalgia. The culmination in what Mahler calls a ‘scream of anguish’, which will return as the apocalyptic opening of the Fifth Movement:

When you awaken from that blissful dream and are forced to return to this tangled life of ours, it may easily happen that this surge of life ceaselessly in motion, never resting, never comprehensible, suddenly seems eerie, like the billowing dancing figures in a brightly lit ballroom that you gaze into from outside in the dark—and from a distance so great that you can no longer hear the music. Then the turning and twisting movement of the couples seems senseless. You must imagine that, to one who has lost his identity and his happiness, the world looks like this—distorted and crazy, as if reflected in a concave mirror. Life then becomes meaningless. Utter disgust for every form of existence and evolution seizes him in an iron grip, and he cries out in a scream of anguish.

The Fourth Movement sets another Wunderhorn song, Urlicht (‘Primeval Light’). Over a brass chorale, the mezzo-soprano soloist announces that ‘mankind lies in terrible pain and need’, and that ‘I would prefer to be in heaven’. The second part lightens the mood with a simple affirmation of faith: ‘I am from God and will return to God; the dear Lord will give me a little light to guide me to eternal life’. Attractive as these certainties may be, the questions posed by the first three movements, whether as Mahler described in his written commentaries, as what he called his ‘art work of ideas’, or in purely musical terms, needed a far more substantial answer.

The inspiration for the Fifth Movement came to Mahler at the funeral of conductor Hans von Bülow in March 1894. The Service included a chorale setting Klopstock’s poem Messias: ‘Arise, arise, my dust, after your brief repose’. At the funeral procession after the Service, Mahler rushed back to his study:

The mood in which I sat and pondered on the departed was utterly in the spirit of the work with which I was occupied. – Then the choir in the organ loft intoned the Klopstock chorale ‘Aufersteh’n’ (‘Rise up’)! It affected me like a flash of lightning.

The phrase ‘flash of lightning’ describes the opening perfectly: its musical pandemonium offers an angry rebuttal to the fourth movement’s vision of faith, the music takes up the ‘scream of anguish’ heard previously in the third movement, no with a brass melody above it. The next ten minutes present fragments of different musical ideas. In contrast with the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, where reminiscences of previous movements are heard, Mahler gives short previews of the drama to come:

Once more we must confront terrifying questions. The movement starts with the same dreadful scream of anguish that ended the scherzo. The voice of the Caller is heard. The end of every living thing has come, the Last Judgment is at hand, and the horror of the Day of Days has come upon us.

Only after these introductory episodes does the main drama begin with what sounds like the musical evocation of an earthquake:

Just listen to the drum roll and your hair will stand on end! ... The earth trembles; the Last Trumpet sounds; the graves burst open; all the creatures struggle out of the bowels of the earth, with wailing and gnashing of teeth. Now they all march in a mighty procession: rich and poor, peasants and kings, the whole church with bishops and popes. All give vent to the same terror, the same lamentations and paroxysms; or none is just in the sight of God. The cry for mercy and forgiveness sounds fearful in our ears. The wailing becomes gradually more terrible. Our senses desert us; all consciousness dies as the Eternal Judge approaches. The trumpets of the Apocalypse ring out as if from another world. Finally, after all have left their empty graves and the earth lies silent and deserted, there comes only the long-drawn note of the bird of death. Even it finally dies.

Mahler turns the concert-hall into a cosmic theatre, echoing to distant drums and off-stage fanfares, upstaging anything imagined by Berlioz or Verdi in their respective Requiems. What happens next is no apocalyptic Last Judgement:

There now follows nothing of what had been expected: no Last Judgement, no souls saved and none damned; no just man, no evil doer, no judge! Everything has ceased to exist. The gentle sound of a chorus of saints and heavenly hosts is then heard. Soft and simple, the words gently swell up: "Rise again, yes, rise again thou wilt! Then the glory of God comes into sight. A wondrous light strikes us to the heart. All is quiet and blissful. Lo and behold: there is no judgment, no sinners, no just men, no great and no small; there is no punishment and no reward. A feeling of overwhelming love fills us with blissful knowledge and illuminates our existence.

From silence, the chorus enters, at first almost inaudibly, singing Klopstock’s resurrection poetry. The solo soprano detaches imperceptibly from the chorus and floats above it. Mahler used only two of Klopstock’s three stanzas, and omitted the concluding ‘Hallelujah!’ to each. The remainder of the Symphony’s text was Mahler’s own, started with ‘O glaube’ (‘Oh believe!’), introduced by the mezzo soloist. The end is a soaring E-flat major hymn, from which ‘an overwhelming love lightens our being. We know and we are.’

James Ross