Mahler: Symphony No. 9 in D major
Mahler, in his life as well as his music, represents a study in dichotomies, an unlikely and unsustainable collision of seemingly incompatible poles. First, there is the messy business of his tangled domestic identities. It was Vienna that bore many of the fruits of Mahler’s professional life, as it had for Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms before him. There, in that cultural Mecca, he wrote music that bespeaks his humbler roots in provincial Bohemia, the same roots that would undermine his sense of belonging in the cosmopolitan capital, even as it supported his professional activities. There is his dual career as a conductor and composer, alternately complementary and conflicting pursuits. Not least of all, there is his straddling of two embittered religions, a begrudging conversion to Catholicism that clinched his appointment as director of the Vienna Court Opera, but didn’t spare him from the anti-Semitic forces resolved to attack his career.
And in the Ninth Symphony, there is the elegiac farewell that somehow affirms life with its dying breath. Leonard Bernstein called it “a sonic presentation of death itself…which paradoxically reanimates us every time we hear it,” and the heralds of this dual reading are present from the opening bars of the symphony. Cellos and horn utter the symphony’s first sounds as they trade pedal A’s at odd intervals, often likened to irregular palpitations of a faltering heart. But the skipping heartbeat grows distant as bell tones in the harp and its echoes in the horn awaken other voices (or is this all a dream, an illusion of extra time?). Stirring violas and double basses add to this ethereal nostalgia before the second violins, in a series of wonderful sighs, breathe fragments of lyricism into the woodsy scene. And with this breath, this most fundamental life-force, Mahler celebrates life even as he juxtaposes it against the backdrop of the inevitable death announced in the first measures.
Life begets life, and so Mahler permits his two-note sighing figure to bloom into ever-stretching threads of melody — never the long-spun, lyrical theme we’re waiting for, but intimations of one, a melody shrouded in the gossamer veil of memory, or, perhaps, a tune in its twilight years that strives for a life of its own but lacks the vitality to skirt the warm caress of death. What emerges is a charming and intimate elaboration on the sighing motive that sways gently, like trees in the breeze. A pickup note syncopated over the barline and a leap upward that resolves down in the sigh provide more than a vaguely familiar Viennese lilt; this is Mahler’s counterintuitive quote of a waltz by Johann Strauss, “Freuet Euch des Lebens” (Enjoy Life).
Mahler’s tender, if peculiar, homage to Strauss will serve as a place of repose throughout the movement, a shelter from the storm of the more agitated episodes in between. But for now, Mahler upsets the tranquil scene as the orchestra reels into a violent fanfare led by the horns. The turmoil is short-lived; a brief but turbulent build-up spills over into a luxuriant, resplendent recasting of the sigh motive at fortissimo. This quicksilver movement lacks the comforting organization of strict sonata form; we never know where we’re going next, only that we won’t be there for long. Instead of a formal blueprint to latch onto, we have the guideposts of the opening omens — the tripping heartbeat and the harp’s tolling of the bells, both refracted through different instruments and interval mutations — and the soothing reminder to Enjoy Life along the way, even as we don’t know what’s coming.
After the celestial settling of the first movement, the second introduces an earthbound ländler, made rustic by the hollow composite sound of widely-spaced instrument pairings: bass clarinet doubling oboe, bassoons in conversation with piccolo. This is music of the country, a dead giveaway of Mahler’s Bohemian origins. The cumbersome, provincial dance is left behind as strings take over in a più mosso section, instead suggesting a sort of demented waltz — drunken, maybe, but always good-natured. The movement continues to explore this familiar dichotomy, simple joys amid disfigured, even hostile dance rhythms, until the raucous scene recedes apologetically into the distance.
The sardonic third movement Burleske sees a crass intersection of dissonance with Baroque-style counterpoint. But even here, Mahler creates oases of calm as a solo trumpet, hopeful, but not without a tinge of melancholy, heralds the theme of the coming Finale.
That the Ninth Symphony came on the heels of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde suggests an interesting creative impetus for the symphony, the last he would complete. For all of its grand, symphonic scope, its all-encompassing summation of the past and its prophetic look toward the future, Das Lied von der Erde was still bound to the individual experience by the personal vessel of song. To give voice to the general human condition itself, Mahler had to abandon the voice altogether and take up instead the more universal language of the instrumental cosmos. The symphony is more than autobiographical, and the failing heart of the opening isn’t just Mahler’s. It signifies a farewell to tonality — to music as Mahler knew it — and maybe also an instinctual farewell to society, written on the eve of the political traumas that would plague the 20th century.
To characterize the titanic Adagio that frames the Ninth Symphony, the final chapter of this work of a lifetime, it is difficult to imagine words more eloquent than Leonard Bernstein’s:
"And so we come to the final incredible page. And this page, I think, is the closest we have ever come, in any work of art, to experiencing the very act of dying, of giving it all up. The slowness of this page is terrifying: Adagissimo, he writes, the slowest possible musical direction; and then langsam (slow), ersterbend (dying away), zögern (hesitating); and as if all those were not enough to indicate the near stoppage of time, he adds äusserst langsam (extremely slow) in the very last bars. It is terrifying, and paralyzing, as the strands of sound disintegrate. We hold on to them, hovering between hope and submission. And one by one, these spidery strands connecting us to life melt away, vanish from our fingers even as we hold them. We cling to them as they dematerialize; we are holding two—then one. One, and suddenly none. For a petrifying moment there is only silence. Then again, a strand, a broken strand, two strands, one . . . none. We are half in love with easeful death . . . now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain . . . And in ceasing, we lose it all. But in letting go, we have gained everything."
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
Mahler, in his life as well as his music, represents a study in dichotomies, an unlikely and unsustainable collision of seemingly incompatible poles. First, there is the messy business of his tangled domestic identities. It was Vienna that bore many of the fruits of Mahler’s professional life, as it had for Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms before him. There, in that cultural Mecca, he wrote music that bespeaks his humbler roots in provincial Bohemia, the same roots that would undermine his sense of belonging in the cosmopolitan capital, even as it supported his professional activities. There is his dual career as a conductor and composer, alternately complementary and conflicting pursuits. Not least of all, there is his straddling of two embittered religions, a begrudging conversion to Catholicism that clinched his appointment as director of the Vienna Court Opera, but didn’t spare him from the anti-Semitic forces resolved to attack his career.
And in the Ninth Symphony, there is the elegiac farewell that somehow affirms life with its dying breath. Leonard Bernstein called it “a sonic presentation of death itself…which paradoxically reanimates us every time we hear it,” and the heralds of this dual reading are present from the opening bars of the symphony. Cellos and horn utter the symphony’s first sounds as they trade pedal A’s at odd intervals, often likened to irregular palpitations of a faltering heart. But the skipping heartbeat grows distant as bell tones in the harp and its echoes in the horn awaken other voices (or is this all a dream, an illusion of extra time?). Stirring violas and double basses add to this ethereal nostalgia before the second violins, in a series of wonderful sighs, breathe fragments of lyricism into the woodsy scene. And with this breath, this most fundamental life-force, Mahler celebrates life even as he juxtaposes it against the backdrop of the inevitable death announced in the first measures.
Life begets life, and so Mahler permits his two-note sighing figure to bloom into ever-stretching threads of melody — never the long-spun, lyrical theme we’re waiting for, but intimations of one, a melody shrouded in the gossamer veil of memory, or, perhaps, a tune in its twilight years that strives for a life of its own but lacks the vitality to skirt the warm caress of death. What emerges is a charming and intimate elaboration on the sighing motive that sways gently, like trees in the breeze. A pickup note syncopated over the barline and a leap upward that resolves down in the sigh provide more than a vaguely familiar Viennese lilt; this is Mahler’s counterintuitive quote of a waltz by Johann Strauss, “Freuet Euch des Lebens” (Enjoy Life).
Mahler’s tender, if peculiar, homage to Strauss will serve as a place of repose throughout the movement, a shelter from the storm of the more agitated episodes in between. But for now, Mahler upsets the tranquil scene as the orchestra reels into a violent fanfare led by the horns. The turmoil is short-lived; a brief but turbulent build-up spills over into a luxuriant, resplendent recasting of the sigh motive at fortissimo. This quicksilver movement lacks the comforting organization of strict sonata form; we never know where we’re going next, only that we won’t be there for long. Instead of a formal blueprint to latch onto, we have the guideposts of the opening omens — the tripping heartbeat and the harp’s tolling of the bells, both refracted through different instruments and interval mutations — and the soothing reminder to Enjoy Life along the way, even as we don’t know what’s coming.
After the celestial settling of the first movement, the second introduces an earthbound ländler, made rustic by the hollow composite sound of widely-spaced instrument pairings: bass clarinet doubling oboe, bassoons in conversation with piccolo. This is music of the country, a dead giveaway of Mahler’s Bohemian origins. The cumbersome, provincial dance is left behind as strings take over in a più mosso section, instead suggesting a sort of demented waltz — drunken, maybe, but always good-natured. The movement continues to explore this familiar dichotomy, simple joys amid disfigured, even hostile dance rhythms, until the raucous scene recedes apologetically into the distance.
The sardonic third movement Burleske sees a crass intersection of dissonance with Baroque-style counterpoint. But even here, Mahler creates oases of calm as a solo trumpet, hopeful, but not without a tinge of melancholy, heralds the theme of the coming Finale.
That the Ninth Symphony came on the heels of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde suggests an interesting creative impetus for the symphony, the last he would complete. For all of its grand, symphonic scope, its all-encompassing summation of the past and its prophetic look toward the future, Das Lied von der Erde was still bound to the individual experience by the personal vessel of song. To give voice to the general human condition itself, Mahler had to abandon the voice altogether and take up instead the more universal language of the instrumental cosmos. The symphony is more than autobiographical, and the failing heart of the opening isn’t just Mahler’s. It signifies a farewell to tonality — to music as Mahler knew it — and maybe also an instinctual farewell to society, written on the eve of the political traumas that would plague the 20th century.
To characterize the titanic Adagio that frames the Ninth Symphony, the final chapter of this work of a lifetime, it is difficult to imagine words more eloquent than Leonard Bernstein’s:
"And so we come to the final incredible page. And this page, I think, is the closest we have ever come, in any work of art, to experiencing the very act of dying, of giving it all up. The slowness of this page is terrifying: Adagissimo, he writes, the slowest possible musical direction; and then langsam (slow), ersterbend (dying away), zögern (hesitating); and as if all those were not enough to indicate the near stoppage of time, he adds äusserst langsam (extremely slow) in the very last bars. It is terrifying, and paralyzing, as the strands of sound disintegrate. We hold on to them, hovering between hope and submission. And one by one, these spidery strands connecting us to life melt away, vanish from our fingers even as we hold them. We cling to them as they dematerialize; we are holding two—then one. One, and suddenly none. For a petrifying moment there is only silence. Then again, a strand, a broken strand, two strands, one . . . none. We are half in love with easeful death . . . now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain . . . And in ceasing, we lose it all. But in letting go, we have gained everything."
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music