Song for the Earth
Mahler’s Symphonic World: Music for the Age of Uncertainty by Karol Berger; University of Chicago Press, 392 pp., $60
Gustav Mahler—the man and composer both—has been so exhaustively studied that one Mahler scholar, Charles Youmans, counsels: “If we want to get closer to the truth of Mahler and music, if we hope to improve our understanding of the person and his creations, we need to acknowledge the role our imagination must play. … The essential facts have long been known. What we need now are fresh attempts to conceive what further truths they might contain.” Karol Berger’s new Mahler’s Symphonic World: Music for the Age of Uncertainty thrives on the author’s singular breadth of perspective. The outcome is nothing if not a “fresh attempt”: a philosophical-analytical study yielding an exigent message.
As in his terrific Beyond Reason: Wagner Contra Nietzsche (2016), Berger brings to the task at hand a combination of intellectual heft, precise understanding, and contemporary awareness. One starting point is Theodor Adorno’s 1960 contention that Mahler’s gift was essentially pessimistic, that he did not succeed as an ostensible “yea-sayer.” Adorno was a frequent windbag. Berger, in rigorous disagreement, never obfuscates or fudges.
In Beyond Reason, Berger takes topics elsewhere a muddle and keenly finishes them off. I am thinking especially of Mahler’s two most memorable musical leavetakings: the “Abschied” (“Farewell”) concluding Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth, 1909) and the Adagio finale of the Ninth Symphony (1910). Both vanish to wisps of tone. The first, for voice and orchestra, ever more faintly sets the word “ewig” (“forever”) seven times. The second is symphonic.
Are these kindred versions of a sublime dissolution of the ego? Berger’s meticulous answer, bearing on Mahler’s state of mind in the wake of personal travail, is: not really. Mahler was a man consumed with the meaning of death. He read about it, worried about it. As Berger writes: “The music of this unusually literary and intellectual composer (Wagner was arguably the only one among his predecessors to read equally voraciously and broadly) repeatedly and insistently calls for interpretations that go beyond the confines of formal analysis.” And here is a bit of Berger on the two musical endings in question (which are at the same time ways of ending a life on earth):
[Surveying the closing pages of the Ninth Symphony], we are left to conclude that [a] transcendent realm above … is our true home. … It is the emergence of these heights, at once Alpine and metaphysical, into full view in the coda, that the airy, widely spaced texture … has been preparing all along. The transcendent nature of this consolatory image differs from the … this-worldly consolation offered by the earth’s eternity in the final measures of Das Lied von der Erde. … Where the “Abschied” plays with the simultaneity of closure and open-endedness, the Ninth ends with a totally untroubled and unambiguous tonic major triad. … [T]he music deposits us with the last measure at the threshold of eternity.
And so, Berger’s topic becomes: what to make of Mahler’s departure from the varied redemption scenarios of his Second, Third, Eighth, and Ninth Symphonies to a “this-worldly” consolation that admits no redemptive afflatus, no serene personal afterlife, no transcendental realm? Here he is again:
[Das Lied von der Erde] celebrates the earth but from the perspective of someone who knows that he is only a temporary guest on it and that he is about to take his leave. … Uniquely in Mahler’s oeuvre, no consoling vision of a transcendent beyond is on offer here: death is death and there is no hereafter to recompense us for its finality. The only consolation is that the earth will go on, forever renewing itself and offering its life, love, and beauty to others. It is the … beauty of the ever self-renewing earth, that is offered as the only transcendence possible, the only consolation for individual transience. … Hence, the special expressive ambience of the work’s ecstatic ending, its peculiar mixture of rapture and regret, at once genuinely consoling and infinitely sad.
This close consideration of Mahler’s dissipating “Ewig, ewig” in serene submission to nature (and, not insignificantly, adapting a classical Chinese poem) yields a personal note that feels exigent right now, with the world more distressed than at any point in Mahler’s lifetime. “We take it for granted that the earth is filled with so much beauty. We shouldn’t. Beauty is not like air or water, absolutely indispensable for our existence and survival. Humanity would have survived on a planet deprived of beauty. Beauty is something optional.” So Mahler, in Berger’s reading, is saying to us: “For me, this beauty [is] a gratuitous and welcome gift. And for this very reason, it seems a promise that the earth is not necessarily hostile, that it might potentially be a suitable, hospitable, delightful place for me and beings like me. When the time comes, I shall take leave of it with regret but also with gratitude.”
Writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Adorno fastened on Mahler’s discontent and labeled him “a poor yea-sayer.” Writing in the midst of an “age of uncertainty,” Berger exquisitely affirms the credibility of every Mahlerian yea. Of the ending of Mahler’s Fourth—the song “Das himmlische Leben” (“The Heavenly Life”), evoking a candied child’s paradise not without pain—he writes that it balances bitterness and sweetness, testifying to the truth of hunger and bliss both. Assaying the layered ending of Mahler’s Fifth—a work that begins with a ferocious funeral march—he writes: “Mahler chooses to call into question the traditional symphonic answer” to turmoil of the soul by “first providing it and then immediately making fun of it … its irony is life affirming rather than bitter.” Then, this bonus for Wagnerites, referencing the elusive finale to Mahler’s Seventh: “I have proposed to recognize in the fundamental tone … the same attitude that Wagner displayed toward his mastersingers: a perfectly balanced mixture of irony at their pompous self-importance and sympathetic recognition of the genuine value of their contribution to the community’s flourishing.”
Any book as protean as Mahler’s Symphonic World is bound to ignite personal digressions. In my own reading, the ignition point came on page 291. Of Mahler’s scherzos, Berger writes: “Invariably, these are marked by moments when the exuberance … threatens to become uncontrolled, sliding into something frightening and ghostly.” These movements are caught in an “inexorable temporal stream.” Mahler himself wrote of the Scherzo of his Second Symphony: “It may easily happen that this surge of life ceaselessly in motion, never resting, never comprehensible, suddenly becomes eerie.” And Berger adds: “Mahler must have been the first composer to attempt to capture in his music … the absurdity of existence.”
But surely the first composer to do that was Franz Schubert. His “Die Krähe,” in the song cycle Winterreise, limns an unsettling and hallucinatory intimacy between a man existentially adrift and—his sole faithful companion—an ominous black bird. The cycle ends with a barefoot hurdy-gurdy man in the snow attended only by growling dogs. And in the second movement of Schubert’s Ninth, an “inexorable” march, “ceaselessly in motion,” becomes a juggernaut halting at the cusp of a cataclysm.
The composer Arthur Farwell’s scrupulous review of a 1910 New York Philharmonic performance of Schubert’s Ninth conducted by Mahler says it all. “An exaggerated effect of dramatic contrast was given to the different phrases” of the opening horn proclamation—a Farwell observation borne out by Mahler’s marked score (Schubert himself, notably, here indicates accented downbeats that are barely observed today). “The second theme of the allegro, for the woodwind instruments in thirds,” seemed to be “accentuated in a degree unbefitting its character.” (Schubert here marks accents, staccatos, and a fortepiano—again, a contour hardly smooth.) “The lyric beauty of the melody in the andante was somewhat marred by the persistent staccato.” (Schubert here marks persistent staccatos.) Another New York critic, the formidable W. J. Henderson, wittily observed of Mahler’s Beethoven: “We are rapidly learning that it is quite as contrapuntal as Bach’s and that what he foolishly supposed were mere third or sixths in chord formation are in reality individual melodic voices which must be brought out by exploring conductors.” Farwell was ultimately won over by Mahler’s Schubert, but does not find it “Schubertian” any more than Henderson finds Mahler’s Beethoven “Beethovenian.” In retrospect, both Mahler readings were surely “Mahlerian.” They rejected the cathedral sonority of blended string choirs supported by recessed winds and percussion—in favor of a flatter, more prickly, more soloistic template. (Think of Gustav Klimt’s contemporaneous Viennese portraits, with their flat perspective and busy iconography.)
That the Mahler template is already nascent in Schubert’s Ninth was brought home to me decades ago, because my main experience of the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert has always been at the piano, playing four-hand keyboard reductions. Only one of those symphonies could possibly work in concert as a piano duet: Schubert’s Ninth, the knitted textures of which are so pervasive, so active, that tremolos and other accompanimental formulae prevalent in the usual secondo parts are wholly absent. The symphony’s famous first-movement passage for pianissimo trombones, for instance, is so enveloped in clockwork figures in the winds and strings that 20 fingers barely suffice: the trombone tune becomes an awkward afterthought for thumbs. Schubert is here already Mahler.
Mahler’s notion of a finale in paradise—the ending of his Fourth Symphony—originates in two Schubert Piano Sonatas, in D major (D. 850) and G major (D. 894). One of Mahler’s tunes (it ultimately seduces the symphony’s final pages) is borrowed verbatim, top and bottom, from the Schubert D major finale—Mahler wants us to know it’s Schubert’s. And the evaporative endings of these two Schubert sonatas are deft exercises in “morendo” (fading away). Berger asks:” By which route did [Mahler] arrive at the idea of a morendo ending for a symphony?” He answers with Wagner: Tristan und Isolde, Die Walküre, Götterdämmerung, and Parsifal, all which end softly. But Schubert is at least as close at hand.
In Schubert, again, the Mahlerian oscillation of the quotidian and sublime is already present. I am thinking of the first of the late Klavierstücke (D. 946), whose sublime central Andante, in B major, migrates clairvoyantly to a tavern zither and back.
Is Schubert a “yea-sayer”? In those two piano sonatas—most certainly. Is his the same as Mahler’s “yea”? A step en route, I would suggest.
Berger’s book ends with a tour de force summary of “worldview music.” “Mahler was not the first composer to make his music a medium of the search for an adequate worldview,” he begins. Mahler’s pertinent models were his two favorite composers: Beethoven and Wagner.
In Beethoven’s Fidelio and Ninth Symphony, an ecumenical faith in humanity embodies the Age of Reason, discovering truth and goodness not in God but in rationally enlightened thought. In his conversation books, Beethoven may be discovered excitedly endorsing “the moral law within us” as discerned by Immanuel Kant. Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” set by Beethoven, declares a brotherhood of “all men.”
But this, in Berger’s narrative, was not quite Wagner’s understanding when he led Beethoven’s Ninth in 1872, laying the foundation stone for the Bayreuth Festival. By then, G. W. F. Hegel had displaced Kant as a dominant intellectual influence throughout central Europe. Hegel re-understood Reason as part of a historic continuum, rather than an absolute presence in Schiller’s starry heavens. Marx’s theory of history came next—a determinist view trumping individual initiative. Adding Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s nationalism and Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism to this philosophical odyssey, Berger concisely extrapolates the “worldview” girding Wagner’s evolving understandings of the human condition. Ultimately, in Parsifal, Wagner concocted a drama of renunciation and compassion in which Schopenhauer, Buddha, and Christ are all pertinent influences.
By the time Mahler began composing in the 1870s, Wagner’s onetime acolyte Friedrich Nietzsche had become a cultural bellwether. In Nietzsche’s positive understanding of a “plurality of worldviews,” Berger recognizes “a sign not of disintegration but of maturity.” He here infers: “We can create our values on our own, are not bound by, or answerable to, any higher power, be it God, Reason, History, Nation, or Will. The philosopher realized and joyfully accepted that from now on we shall have to dispense with rock-solid foundations. Thus, [Nietzsche] became the prophet of our own Age of Uncertainty.”
The eventual result of Berger’s exegesis is an intellectual underpinning for Mahler’s quest that both affirms its continued pertinence and supports its “yea-saying.” He by no means proposes that Mahler simply follows Nietzsche (who “viewed compassion with utmost suspicion”). Rather, Mahler in Berger’s view “is the first major composer whose work as a whole embodied in music some of the most essential features of the [new] age, its pluralist perspectivism and its lack of foundations.” Though this existential quest never culminated in a single answer, Mahler—pace Adorno—is at all times painstakingly truthful. I find this reading of Mahler—the man, the composer—both credible and moving. In fact, it is essential.
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