Anton Bruckner, Symphony No.9 in D minor
I. Fierlich. Misterioso
II. Scherzo: Bewegt, lebhaft – Trio (schnell) – Scherzo
III. Adagio: Langsam, fierlich
Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony is on a monumental scale: its relentless spiritual searching invites comparison with epic literature such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, and in music, Beethoven’s Ninth, with which it shares a home key of D minor. But if Beethoven's work is a public affirmation of faith in humanity, Bruckner’s presents a radical alternative. Wittgenstein claimed that ‘Bruckner’s Ninth is, as it were, a protest against Beethoven’s, and that is what makes it tolerable, which it would not be if it were some kind of imitation. Its relationship to Beethoven’s Ninth is very similar to that between Lenau’s Faust and Goethe’s – between the Catholic and the Enlightenment Faust.’ The same parallel is drawn by Peter Palmer, for whom both Lenau and Bruckner ‘embodied the main pre-occupations of the European nineteenth-century Romantics: the reaction against rationalism, Nature-worship, nostalgia for a childhood faith, metaphysical ecstasy.’
However, to regard Bruckner’s Ninth as a metaphysical reaction to Enlightenment values imposes too rigid and narrow a vision. Bruckner, who was famously naïve and unworldly, dedicated his final Symphony to ‘my dear God’; when Joseph Schalk, a former pupil, gave a pictorial explanation of the Seventh Symphony, the composer asked: ‘If he has to write poetry, why should he pick on my symphony?’. His music defies all superficial fashion, subjective feelings or sentimentality; far from transient postmodernism, Bruckner gives us art of unshakeable conviction.
Bruckner symphonies are famously expansive, and in the Ninth both the first and third movements last around twenty-five minutes. However, what is extraordinary about these movements is not their length but, given the amount of musical ideas Bruckner presents, how concise they are. Macaulay observed: ‘What could be more vile than a pyramid thirty feet high?’; a ten-minute symphony by Bruckner would be no less absurd. From the opening bar of the first movement, Bruckner’s vast scale is compelled by the logic of his music ideas. In such large structures, conventional sonata form as used by Beethoven or Brahms are redundant, and Bruckner ‘telescopes’ his form to combine development and recapitulation; in the hands of a lesser composer using the same amount of musical material, these movements could easily have lasted half as long again.
Bruckner worked on the Ninth between 1887 up to the day of his death in 1896. He completed the first three movements and sketched most of a fourth; however, it remained unfinished. There is no doubt that Bruckner intended the Symphony as a four movement work – at the first performance his great Te Deum in C was used as a finale – but the three surviving movements form as richly rewarding a work as Schubert’s two-movement Unfinished Symphony. The third movement’s quiet conclusion works as naturally as the end of Brahms’ Third Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, or Mahler’s Ninth.
The first movement explores three sets of ideas. The Symphony opens with the fragments of the first group assembled inexorably, then swept into an almighty unison tutti. A short transition dominated by pizzicato strings prefaces the second group of themes. Bruckner’s name for this section was his ‘Gesangperiod’ (song-period): we hear two related themes dominated by the utmost lyricism, building to a forthright fortissimo statement. A colder, more ritualistic third section concludes the exposition. During the rest of the movement, Bruckner develops and reaffirms all three groups of ideas in an ‘expanded counter-statement’ (Robert Simpson) before a timpani roll starts the coda’s massive peroration.
The demonic visions and primitive rhythms of the second movement bear scant relation to the German folk-dance inspiration of his earlier Scherzos. The link between D-minor and the Diabolic, dating back to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, is exploited vividly; ‘if’, as composer Robert Simpson writes, ‘the first movement is a kind of Dies irae, the Scherzo is the business of the fiendish attendants of those found wanting.’ Dissonance and consonance are juxtaposed remorselessly; the trio, in the remote key of F# major, is a surreal version of the sound-world of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.[DR2]
The ‘slow and solemn’ third movement opens with an anguished minor 9th leap in the violins; a brief vision of E major is revealed by a motif reminiscent of the ‘Dresden Amen’ used in Wagner’s Parsifal; the rest of the movement is an unyielding quest to establish this key – to give the music its point of ultimate destination and rest. The structure is similar to the first movement: the first group culminates in a fanfare whose rhythm then underscores the second section, dominated by a motif in the Wagner tubas which Bruckner is supposed to have described as a ‘farewell to life’; then follows a two-melody ‘song period’ before a combined development (starting with the minor 9th again) and recapitulation. A recurrence of the ‘song period’ music provides a deceptive beginning to the most intense section of the entire symphony. The dissonant opening melody supported by an ostinato in the strings and woodwind cross-rhythms leads now to the loudest and most tortured six-note chord of unprecedented dissonance. After this music whose ‘rugged and angular lines which make late Mahler look like Mantovani’ (Derek Puffet), the closing stages achieve transcendent peace.
James Ross
[DR1][Howie et al, p.358]
[DR2](Essence of Bruckner, p.190)
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), Symphonie fantastique, op.14
'Oh, if only I did not suffer so much! So many musical ideas are seething within me. Now that I have broken the chains of routine, I see an immense territory stretching before, which academic rules forbade me to enter. Now that I have heard that awe-inspiring giant Beethoven, I realise what point of art music has reached; it’s a question of taking it up at that point and carrying it further – no, not further, that’s impossible, … but as far in another direction. If it turns out well, a whole new work of music would spring fully armed from my brain, or rather my heart.' (Berlioz, letter: 11 January 1829)
Symphonie fantastique is one of the most original and daring orchestral scores ever written. No previous composer had created such overtly personal and blatantly programmatic music, nor connected it so intimately to literary inspiration. For the first performance, at the Paris Conservatoire on 5 December 1830, the twenty-six year old Berlioz published a story-line drawing on the most fashionable literature of the age, including Goethe’s Faust, Hugo’s Ronde du sabbat and Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné, and especially to the bizarre visions of Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, first translated freely into French by Alfred de Musset in 1828. (There is no evidence, however, that Berlioz was addicted to anything stronger than coffee and cigars.) Equally important was Berlioz’s own infatuation with Irish actress Harriet Smithson, whom he eventually married. Berlioz’s love for Shakespeare drew him to the English productions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet at the Paris Odéon Theatre in 1827. Harriet played Ophelia and Juliet to great acclaim, and became the object of Berlioz’s boundless passion and vivid imagination:
'A young musician of morbid disposition and powerful imagination poisons himself with opium in an attack of despairing passion. The dose, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a deep sleep accompanied by strange dreams in which sensations, feelings and memories are transformed in his sick brain into musical images and ideas. His beloved appears to him as a melody, like an idée fixe, an obsessive idea that he keeps hearing wherever he goes.
I. Rêveries (largo) – Passions (allegro agitato e appassionato assai)
He first recalls the sickness of the soul, the flux of passion, the unaccountable joys and sorrows he experienced before he saw his beloved; then the volcanic love that she suddenly inspired in him, his delirious raptures, his jealous fury, his persistent tenderness, his consolation in religion.
II. Un Ball (Valse: allegro non troppo)
In a ballroom, amidst the confusion of a brilliant festival, he finds his beloved again.
III. Scène aux champs (adagio)
Summer evening: he is musing in the countryside when he hears two shepherds playing the ranz des vaches (used by the Swiss to gather their animals together) in dialogue. This shepherd-duet, the locality, the soft whisperings of the trees stirred by the zephyr-wind, prospects of hope recently made known to him, all these sensations united to impart long-unknown repose to his heart and lend a smile to his imagination. And then she appears again. His heart stops beating, painful foreboding fills his soul. ‘Should she prove false to him!’ One of the shepherds resumes the melody, but the other answers no more … Sunset … distant rumbling of thunder … loneliness … silence.
IV. Marche au supplice (allegretto non troppo)
He dreams that he has murdered his beloved, that he has been condemned and is being led to the scaffold. The procession moves forward to the sound of a march sometimes dark and sinister, sometimes brilliant and ceremonious, while a heavy tread persists through the clamour. At the end the idée fixe reappears for a moment like a last memory of love before being cut short by the fatal blow.
V. Songe d’une nuit du sabbat (larghetto – allegro assai – allegro)
He dreams that he is present at a witches’ dance, surrounded by horrible spirits, amidst sorcerers and monsters in many fearful forms, who have come to attend his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, shrill laughter, distant yells, which other cries seem to answer. The beloved’s melody is heard again but it has its noble and shy character no longer; it has become a vulgar, trivial and grotesque dance. She it is who comes to attend the witches’ gathering. Friendly howls and shouts greet her arrival …. She joins the infernal orgy …. Bells toll for the dead … burlesque parody of the Dies irae … the witches’ round-dance … the dance and the Dies irae are heard at the same time.'
In musical terms, Symphonie fantastique uses the orchestra as never before. The cor anglais, high E-flat clarinet, cornet, ophicleide (soon replaced by tuba), harp, bells, multiple timpani, a vast range of special effects including ‘col legno’ string playing (using the stick of the bow instead of the hair) and off-stage playing are used in a symphony for the first time. Berlioz canibalised much of the music from his student works (the opening melody is a teenage song, Je vais donc quitter pour jamais; the ‘Scène aux champs’ melody is from the Messe solennelle, the fourth movement from ‘Marche des Gardes’ in his unfinished opera Les Francs-juges; even the idée fixe from his cantata Herminie). However, the most important influence is Beethoven, especially the Pastoral Symphony, with its five movements including rural idyll, storm, and programmatic description, combined with the rhetorical grandeur of the Eroica Symphony. The result is music of unprecedented emotional frankness which takes a new, uninhibited pleasure in orchestral sound.
© Dr James Ross
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
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
