Today is the 100th anniversary of the death of the composer Gustav Mahler. He was born in 1860, in the Bohemian village of Kaliště, midway between Prague and Vienna, where he later “hit the big time” as the conductor of the court opera (1897–1907). At the end of his life he was in his second season conducting at the Metropolitan Opera and the Philharmonic in New York.
He was almost exclusively an orchestral composer, producing nine symphonies (a tenth was left unfinished at his death), and several cycles of orchestral songs (vocalists and choruses have significant roles in four of the nine symphonies, especially the Second and Eighth).
In 1907 he was diagnosed with heart disease (a valve problem), and despite warnings from his doctors, Mahler kept up a heavy schedule of conducting and composing. In 1911 a sore throat and fever that had interrupted his conducting in New York led to a diagnosis of bacterial endocarditis. In the days before penicillin, such an infection was an almost certain death sentence. It was his desire to return to Vienna where he died on 18 May.
I first heard the music of Mahler in 1971 in the soundtrack for Luchino Visconti’s film, Death in Venice. The opening scene — the protagonist approaching Venice on a ferry boat in the pre-dawn twilight to the music of the “Adagietto” from the Fifth Symphony — was breathtakingly beautyful. A few years later I heard my first complete symphony (the First) on a recording at the home of a friend, David Julien, during a GA visit to the Chicago area. It didn’t bowl me over as the “Adagietto” had, but it was interesting enough to make we want to listen again.
Mahler biographer Guido Adler wrote that on first impression Mahler’s music “produces attraction at one place, repulsion at another and must be courted lovingly.” That has been my experience. Over the years I sampled all the symphonies and songs. Some movements were immediately attractive, others I could not enjoy at all. The only symphony I took to as a whole on the first hearing was the Third.
But I kept at it, “courting” the music lovingly, and perseverance led me to appreciate what Mahler was doing (though still from a layman’s perspective). Mozart and Beethoven are pretty readily accessible for most listeners, and there are beautiful melodies throughout the standard classical repertoire from all periods. But Mahler will make you work hard — he’s big (so his structures are hard to grasp aurally), his orchestration sometimes seems to include everything, including the kitchen sink (he even has cowbells!), he uses huge orchestras often in chamber-like ensemble combinations, etc. But it’s all worth it. I have just finished listening through all whole cycle again (in Leonard Bernstein’s recordings with the New York Philharmonic from the 1960s). I can now enjoy most all the symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde and I’m closing in on the last two holdouts (for me) — the Seventh and Eighth.
Mahler said the symphony should “take in the whole world,” and his certainly do, and time and eternity as well. It’s all there — the beauty, ugliness, love, loss, pain, confusion, yearning, consolation, and hope.
If I had plenty of money, I’d hire the local symphony orchestra where I die to perform a concert of Mahler’s Third for all my friends after my funeral (no, not the Second, “Resurrection”).
Mahler originally provided a programme for the symphony though it was withdrawn before the score was published in 1898. The six movements were titled as follows:
1. "Pan Awakes, Summer Marches In"
2. "What the Flowers on the Meadow Tell Me"
3. "What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me"
4. "What Man Tells Me"
5. "What the Angels Tell Me"
6. "What Love Tells Me"
I’ve recast them in my own mind with a more gospel-oriented story.
The colossal opening movement (a 30+ minute march) I would title, “Aslan on the Move” (after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) — Christ marching through the world, reversing the effects of the “winter” of sin and death, bringing life and immortality to light through the gospel. The present reality of “new creation.”
The third movement is a wonderful scherzo that features (near the end) an off-stage posthorn fanfare that seems a summons to another world, and gives rise to a powerful crescendo that intimates that the promise will soon become a reality.
In the fourth movement (marked “very slow, mysteriously”), the contralto soloist sings a text from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra that Francis Schaeffer used to quote as a proof that “the manishness of man” demonstrates the truth of the Christian worldview in that even the non-believer who proclaims that “God is dead” cannot help but yearn for that which God alone can give — eternal blessedness. Nietzche wrote (as translated by Udo Middlemann and cited in How Should We Then Live?, 180)):
Oh man! Take heed
of what the dark midnight says:
I slept, I slept—from deep dreams I awoke;
The world is deep—and more profound than
day would have thought.
Profound in her pain—
Pleasure—more profound than pain of heart,
Woe speaks; pass on.
But all pleasure seeks eternity—
a deep and profound eternity.
The believer’s confidence is that in Christ that deep, deep yearning is, and will be, satisfied.
And then there is the Finale, “What Love Tells Me.” It is the song of Jesus, “the lover of my soul,” speaking comfort and hope as he brings the believer through death and out the other side into the glory of “a new heavens and a new earth where righteousness dwells” — where the Lamb is the light of the City.
Sadly, Mahler himself did not find the hope of glory that his music points to and yearns for. But for those in Christ who have, his music will take you there again and again and again.
Well, I’m never going to have enough money for my “funeral concert,” but you can get a CD of Mahler’s Third (or any of the other symphonies) and give it a try. And you don’t have to wait till I’m dead.
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