Today is the birthday of one of Central Europe’s greatest sons, the immortal Austrian composer Franz Schubert, whose music has become such a big part of my life over the last couple of years. His music has been an important part of my journey to recovery from the evils of Marxist totalitarianism and Trotskyist cultism. He personifies a dreamy Romantic individualism utterly incompatible with the cold, unyielding rigidities of ‘scientific socialism’ and Leninist philistinism. His ravishing, mesmerising melodies and engrossing song cycles, with their lonely, wandering, heart-broken protagonists, are a wonderful riposte to the moronic philosophy that would like to reduce feeling human souls to ridiculous automatons and programmed puppets in the hands of a cruel god of political economy.
Like most people, my introduction to Schubert was the second movement of his Piano Trio in E Flat, made famous by Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon (1975). The melancholy tinkling of the piano, in mournful counterpoint with the wailing strings, is among the last gems that this musical pioneer gave to humanity before his untimely death. Since then, I have discovered so many other aspects of his magnificent oeuvre, such as his Unfinished Symphony and his Symphony No 9, but most importantly, his song cycles. It was on a winter morning commute into work that I discovered his Winterreise song cycle through German bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff’s recording. The very first song, ‘Gute Nacht’, became a fast favourite. Haunting, moody, march-like, the lyrics gave poetic expression to all the disappointments of my adolescent life.
Fremd bin ich eingezogen,
Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus.
Der Mai war mir gewogen
Mit manchem Blumenstrauss.
I followed the bitter, jaded protagonist across the snowy wastes of rural Austria for the next twenty-three songs. On and on he sung of his spurned love, his mental suffering, his fruitless search for respite on his self-imposed, wandering exile. I had discovered Gustav Mahler and his sublime song cycles around the same time, and reflected deeply on the similarities and the differences. Mahler’s songs had their own grandeur, but I found (and still do) that Schubert’s songs were subtler and somewhat more abstract. Not for Schubert the melodramatic frenzy of the protagonist in Mahler’s ‘I have a gleaming knife in my breast’ from his Songs of a Wayfarer. Instead, there is the quiet despair of the miller in ‘Des Baches Wiegenlied’ from Die schöne Müllerin as he waxes poetic about being rocked into eternal sleep by the river in which he plants to drown himself.
With the help of my singing teacher, a Schubert scholar, I have been able to uncover so much of what is magical about Winterreise, and it remains one of the great staples of my musical existence. More recently, however, I have fallen head over heels for his other great song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin. Over twenty songs, we follow the journey of a wide-eyed, wandering apprentice miller, full of youthful curiosity about the world as he prepares to take his apprenticeship under the master and his wife. He begins the cycle brimming with naivety and optimism, meets and falls in love with the master miller’s daughter (who for a time appears to return his feelings), is jilted by her when she falls in love with a dashing young hunter, and decides, in his despair, to drown himself in the very stream that he once believed was prophetically leading him to a great destiny full of love and happiness. The cruelty with which the universe crushes his hopes and grinds him into the dust, and the dizzying transition from the joy of the first half of the song cycle to the utter despair of the second half, makes this cycle for me easier to relate to than Winterreise, with its unbroken mood of sorrow. It also relates very strongly to events in my own life.
The follies and foibles of youth in the throes of first love are vivdly drawn out in these lyrical pieces. In ‘Am Feiarabend’, the young miller desperately seeks to impress the young maiden with his work ethic, and laments that he is not strong enough to surpass his fellows and woo his sweetheart. In ‘Ungeduld’, the lovesick young man sings of how he wishes to tell all of nature about his great passion, to ‘carve it on the bark of every tree’ and ‘inscribe it on every pebble’. In ‘Mein’, we see him celebrating a love returned, an emotion so overwhelming for him that it manifests itself in hiccuping, staccato quavers as he lets us know that ‘My beloved, the maid of the mill, is mine, is mine!’ The colour green becomes the emblem of their love, represented by the green ribbon he sends to her in ‘Mit dem grünen Lautenbande’. This emblem takes on a darker significance in ‘Die liebe Farbe’, when he is jilted, and begins fantasising about dying and being buried in green grass strewn with green plants of various kinds, his corpse also dressed in green as a symbol of his faithfulness to a faithless lover. The cycle terminates when the miller decides to escape his misery once and for all by throwing himself into the stream that once led him to the beautiful, faithless maid of the mill.
This heart-wrenching song cycle is a wonderful counterpart to another song cycle I have discovered, Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe. These musical gems remind me that I am and will always be more 19th-century German Romantic than Marxist revolutionary, and that is for the best. My Schubert journey is still in its infancy. Just today, I practiced singing one of his greatest pieces, Erlkönig, which sets the famous poem by Goethe to unforgettable music, and happens to be fiendishly difficult for pianists, more so than the singing. Here is one of my favourite classical singers, the great German lyric baritone Hermann Prey, singing it live, with James Levine conducting:
I am excited to discover more of Schubert’s oeuvre as the years go by. Whether my life be long or short, it shall always be blessed with the beautiful strains of ‘Ständchen’ from Schwanengesang, the plaintive melodies of Winterreise, the jolly triplets of ‘Das Wandern’ from Die schöne Müllerin. Thanks to him, I shall never be without a song in my heart to accompany me in both sorrow and sunshine. His music, in the words of ‘An die Musik’, ‘Hast mich in eine bessre Welt entrückt!’
Dont you think, that you do exaggerate a lot, if you try to turn almost every subject you write about into an “healing from the marxist cult”? people of any political direction like Schuberts music; how funny to think that only anticsocialists could do so. For me, “He personifies a dreamy Romantic individualism utterly incompatible with the cold,… exploitation,social cuts off and worldwar preparing in the capitalist world, who also shows with the Epstein files how clearly degenerated all the rich pack of the so-called “High Society” is, including many nowadays artists. .—- With your knowledge, it cant be unknown to you that especially the earliest romantics had been very critical about the upcoming modern,industrialised capitalism around 1800. His 2 great song cycles you mentioned expressed nothing else than strong estrange/alienation from this. His personal letters with friends -if you know them- express anything else than an non-political conservative as later history tried to make out of him. He did hate his reactionist duke and once was arrested because someone in his friends circle was involved in a coup/plot, but there was no proof that Schubert did also know from it or was involved (I suppose he had some secret sympathy for it,although in public he was not politically outspoken.) Until the bourgeous-democratic revolution 1848 in Germany, the romantic movement was completly dead- the reality of capitalism had wiped out all romantic feelings. The “re-poetrysation of the world” which Novalis and other romantics did preach,never took place.—–So, happy birthday to Schubert, and although I dont believe in astrology, I find it amazing that Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn and many other highly sensitive greats are from the same sign, while my birthday on saturday is sourrounded by Bob Marley and James Dean.— 2.: I had in mind a extended reply on your Maduro.article, but my present serious health problems didnt allow me to do so yet- actually just a few days ago, I consider it also as an non-democratic behaviour from you,to always close the comment section so quickly. I wanna challenge you to leave it open.Perhaps I could reply on Sunday -if I dont end up in Hospital until then.
More or less everything I do in my life nowadays is a form of healing from totalitarian slavery. I make no apology for sharing this with ordinary people. I find in all forms of art and culture a celebration of individual genius and a rebuke to the impoverished Marxist vision of mankind. It is truly a balm after the Leninist philistinism I was made to experience in the cult.
I wonder what they would have thought about the monstrous totalitarian socialist regimes of the twentieth century, which were a million times worse!
There is nothing remotely political in either Winterreise or Die schöne Mullerin, but trust a communist to corrupt every form of art into a justification for revolution.
The comments close automatically after a period of time. I’d have to look into whether I can disable that function.
“There is nothing remotely political in either Winterreise or Die schöne Mullerin, but trust a communist to corrupt every form of art into a justification for revolution.” Sorry, but this is getting ridiculous. Far from being something like an explicit communist statement , every scholar who ever was familar with Schubert, noticed this strong feelings of alienation in there what had to do with the political repression of the time, although expressing feelings is indeed not remotely political. but i gave you other stronger examples why Schubert was not nonpolitcal.Do you think its meaningless that the romantic movement had its end with the further developing of capitalism? You have a strong rhetoric and good writing skills, but you use them to understand what you wanna understand and leave out what you cant refute or twist around. I think you let your hate against anyone left from you overwhelm you. And your claim that EVERYTHING in the so-called socialist states (which had been non-socialist stalinist states with state-capitalism) had been million times worse, then you downplay the 12 hours of childwork in factories during early capitalism, whole families in 1 room, their early deaths and so on. And you ignore that all which later became better (as the introducing of the 8-hour workday) never was a present from the capitalist governments but always the results of long bloody battles of the sociaist workers movements; the first persons who ever demonstrated for the 8-hour workday had been hanged and so on! seems that your irrational hate kills any rational discussion. And what do you mean with your “sharing it with ordinary people”? I remember that once you declared yourself as an intellectual… well Iam “only” a purely autodidact from working class (retired) but I dont feel to know less than you do.
I stand by my view that neither of Schubert’s two song cycles express meaningful political sentiments of any kind. The closest you’ll get is perhaps a romanticisation of pre-capitalist economic relations in Die schöne Mullerin, or the anger the protagonist in Winterreise feels at his former bride jilting him for a richer man. You won’t get much further than that. These observations, quite frankly, are less interesting to me than the beating heart of these genius pieces of work, the emotional turmoil of the protagonists. These artistic efforts transcend any silly, parochial concerns with class struggle.
The Romantic movement did not ‘end’ until the beginnings of the twentieth century. Its last great exponent was that immortal composer, Gustav Mahler.
I would unironically rather live in Schubert’s Austria of the 1800s than spend even five minutes in Stalinist Russia. I do not think that all of these ‘gains’ you people bang on about are worth totalitarian dictatorship, civil war and millions of dead in forced collectivisation and political repression. You need to read my post on ‘The balance sheet of October’ and re-assess the value of these revolutions and social struggles you uncritically praise.
Moreover, the claim that all of the social gains that have occurred since the 19th-century are exist purely because of ‘class struggle’ is simply Marxist propaganda. The welfare states that came into being in Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly after WWII, could not have come into being without a basis of economic prosperity resulting from capitalist development. Note that this was achieved without revolution and millions of dead in forced collectivisation and totalitarian terror. Liberal democracy is a thousand times better than any ‘workers’ state’ ever has or will be. I don’t care how much welfare people in Cuba get, they are still poor, oppressed slaves compared to even the poorest person in America or Britain. I like living in a society where I can read what I want, think what I want, associate with who I want and express my individualism, which would not be possible in any socialist society, where I would be cancelled/gulagged/disappeared/killed for not fitting in – and I have never had any intention of fitting in with the herd.
I think hating an ideology that has been responsible for killing and enslaving millions of people worldwide, and subjected me to intellectual, emotional and psychological slavery in the prime of my youth (causing me to waste precious time), is very rational indeed. Especially when its adherents are even now busily working for the destruction of Western civilisation and the triumph of the most resentful and vengeful elements of the human race – Russian and Chinese imperialists, embittered fifth columnist minority groups seeking ‘justice’ (by which they mean mass murder and extortion), Islamist extremists, goose-stepping woke warriors etc – all the world’s worst people. And you say my hate is irrational? Between right-wing nationalists and the anti-Western left, I don’t know who is more unjustifiably hate-filled. Either one of them would do genocide if given half a chance.
*strokes chin* I’m not too sure about that…
Leonard Bernstein about Gustav Mahler (1962):
Mahler: His Time Has Come( Leonard Bernstein)
伯恩斯坦谈马勒的经典文章。原网址附有译文。
Has come? Had come, rather; was there all along, even as each bar of each symphony was being penned in that special psychic fluid of his. If ever there was a composer of his time it was Mahler, prophetic only in the sense that he already knew what the world would come to know and admit half a century later.
Basically, of course, all of Mahler’s music is about Mahler – which means simply that it is about conflict. Think of it: Mahler the Creator vs. Mahler the Performer; the Jew vs. the Christian; the Believer vs. the Doubter; the Naïf vs. the Sophisticate; the provincial Bohemian vs. the Viennese homme du monde; the Faustian Philosopher vs. the Oriental Mystic the Operatic Symphonist who never wrote an opera. But mainly the battle rages between Western Man at the turn of the century and the life of the spirit. Out of this opposition proceeds the endless list of antitheses – the whole roster of Yang and Yin – that inhabit Mahler’s music.
What was this duple vision of Mahler’s? A vision of his world, crumbling in corruption beneath its smug surface, fulsome, hypocritical, prosperous, sure of its terrestrial immortality, yet bereft of its faith in spiritual immortality. The music is almost cruel in its revelations: it is like a camera that has caught Western society in the moment of its incipient decay. But to Mahler’s own audiences none of this was apparent: they refused (or were unable) to see themselves mirrored in these grotesque symphonies. They heard only exaggeration, extravagance, bombast, obsessive length – failing to recognize these as symptoms of their own decline and fall. They heard what seemed like the history of German-Austrian music, recapitulated in ironic or distorted terms – and they called it shameful eclecticism. They heard endless, brutal, maniacal marches – but failed to see the imperial insignia, the Swastika (make your own list) on the uniforms of the marchers. They heard mighty Chorales, overwhelming brass hymns – but failed to see them tottering at an abyss of tonal deterioration. They heard extended, romantic love songs – but failed to understand that these Liebesträume were nightmares, as were those mad, degenerate Ländler.
But what makes the heartbreaking duplicity is that all these anxiety-ridden images were set up alongside images of the life of the spirit, Mahler’s anima, which surrounds, permeates, and floodlights these cruel pictures with the tantalizing radiance of how life could be. The intense longing for serenity is inevitably coupled with the sinister doubt that it can be achieved. Obversely, the innate violence of the music, the excesses of sentiment, the arrogance of establishment, the vulgarity of power-postures, the disturbing rumble of status-non-quo are all the more agonizing for being linked with memories of innocence, with the aching nostalgia of youthful dreams, with aspirations towards the Empyrean, noble proclamations of redemption, or with the bittersweet tease of some Nirvana or other, just barely out of reach. It is thus a conflict between an intense love of life and a disgust with life, between a fierce longing for Himmel and the fear of death.
This dual vision of Mahler’s, which tore him apart all his life, is the vision we have finally come to perceive in his music. This is what Mahler meant when he said, “My time will come.” It is only after fifty, sixty, seventy years of world holocausts, of the simultaneous advance of democracy with our increasing inability to stop making war, of the simultaneous magnification of national pieties with intensification of our active resistance to social equality – only after we have experienced all this through the smoking ovens of Auschwitz, the frantically bombed jungles of Vietnam, through Hungary, Suez, the Bay of Pigs, the farce-trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, the refueling of the Nazi machine, the murder in Dallas, the arrogance of South Africa, the Hiss-Chambers travesty, the Trotzkyite purges, Black Power, Red Guards, the Arab encirclement of Israel, the plague of McCarthyism, the Tweedledum armament race – only after all this can we finally listen to Mahler’s music and understand that it foretold all. And in the foretelling it showered a rain of beauty on this world that has not been equaled since.
Now that the world of music has begun to understand the dualistic energy-source of Mahler’s music, the very key to its meaning, it is easier to understand this phenomenon in specific Mahlerian terms. For the doubleness of the music is the doubleness of the man. Mahler was split right down the middle, with the curious result that whatever quality is perceptible and definable in his music, the diametrically opposite quality is equally so. Of what other composer can this be said? Can we think of Beethoven as both roughhewn and epicene? Is Debussy both subtle and blatant? Mozart both refined and raw? Stravinsky both objective and maudlin? Unthinkable. But Mahler, uniquely, is all of these – roughhewn and epicene, subtle and blatant, refined, raw, objective, maudlin, brash, shy, grandiose, self-annihilating, confident, insecure, adjective, opposite, adjective, opposite.
The first spontaneous image that springs to my mind at the mention of the word “Mahler” is of a colossus straddling the magic dateline “1900.” There he stands, his left foot (closer to the heart!) firmly planted in the rich, beloved nineteenth century, and his right, rather less firmly, seeking solid ground in the twentieth. Some say he never found this foothold; others (and I agree with them) insist that twentieth-century music could not exist as we know it if that right foot had not landed there with a commanding thud. Whichever assessment is right, the image remains: he straddled. Along with Strauss, Sibelius and, yes, Schoenberg, Mahler sang the last rueful songs of nineteenth-century romanticism. But Strauss’s extraordinary gifts went the route of a not very subjective virtuosity; Sibelius and Schoenberg found their own extremely different but personal routes into the new century. Mahler was left straddling; his destiny was to sum up, package, and lay to ultimate rest the fantastic treasure that was German-Austrian music from Bach to Wagner.
It was a terrible and dangerous heritage. Whether he saw himself as the last symphonist in the long line started by Mozart, or the last Heilige Deutsche Künstler in the line started by Bach, he was in the same rocky boat. To recapitulate the line, bring it to climax, show it all in one, soldered and smelted together by his own fires – this was a function assigned him by history and destiny, a function that meant years of ridicule, rejection, and bitterness.
But he had no choice, compulsive manic creature that he was. He took all (all!) the basic elements of German music, including the clichés, and drove them to their ultimate limits. He turned rests into shuddering silences; upbeats into volcanic preparations as for a death blow. Luftpausen became gasps of shock or terrified suspense; accents grew into titanic stresses to be achieved by every conceivable means, both sonic and tonic. Ritardandi were stretched into near-motionlessness; accelerandi became tornadoes; dynamics were refined and exaggerated to a point of neurasthenic sensibility. Mahler’s marches are like heart attacks, his chorales like all Christendom gone mad. The old conventional four-bar phrases are delineated in steel; his most traditional cadences bless like the moment of remission from pain. Mahler is German music multiplied by n.
The result of all this exaggeration is, of course, that neurotic intensity which for so many years was rejected as unendurable, and in which we now find ourselves mirrored. And there are concomitant results: an irony almost too bitter to comprehend; excesses of sentimentality that still make some listeners wince; moments of utter despair, often the despair of not being able to drive all this material even further, into some kind of paramusic that might at last cleanse us. But we are cleansed, when all is said and done; no person of sensibility can come away from the Ninth Symphony without being exhausted and purified. And that is the triumphant result of all this purgatory, justifying all excesses: we do ultimately encounter an apocalyptic radiance, a glimmer of what peace must be like.
So much for the left foot: what of the right, tentatively scratching at the new soil of the twentieth century, testing it for solidity, fertility, roots? Yes, it was found fertile; there were roots there, but they had sprung frm the other side. All of Mahler’s testing, experiments, incursions were made in terms of the past. His breaking-up of rhythms, his post-Wagnerian stretching of tonality to its very snapping point (but not beyond it!), his probings into a new thinness of texture, into bare linear motion, into transparent chamber-music-like orchestral manipulation – all these adumbrated what was to become twentieth-century common practice; but they all emanated from those nineteenth-century notes he loved so well. Similarly, in his straining after new forms – a two-movement symphony (#8), a six-movement symphony (#3), symphonies with voices, not only in the Finales (#3, #8, Das Lied), movements which are interludes, interruptions, movements deliberately malformed through arbitrary abridgment or obsessive repetition or fragmentation – all these attempts at new formal structures abide in the shadow of Beethoven’s Ninth, the last Sonatas and string quartets. Even the angular melodic motions, the unexpected intervals, the infinitely wide skips, the search for “endless” melody, the harmonic ambiguities – all of which have deeply influenced many a twentieth-century composer – are nevertheless ultimately traceable back to Beethoven and Wagner.
I think that this is probably why I doubt that I shall ever come to terms with the so-called Tenth Symphony. I have never been convinced of those rhythmic experiments in the Scherzo, of the flirtation with atonality. I often wonder what would have happened had Mahler not died so young. Would he have finished that Tenth Symphony, more or less as the current “versions” have it? Would he have scrapped it? Were there signs there that he was about to go over the hill, and encamp with Schoenberg? It is one of the more fascinating Ifs of history. Somehow I think he was unable to live through that crisis, because there was no solution for him; he had to die with that symphony unfinished. After all, a man’s destiny is nothing more or less than precisely what happened to him in life. Mahler’s destiny was to complete the great German symphonic line and then depart, without it being granted him to start a new one. This may be clear to us now; but for Mahler, while he lived, his destiny was anything but clear. In his own mind he was at least as much part of the new century as of the old. He was a tormented, divided man, with his eyes on the future and his heart in the past.
But his destiny did permit him to bestow much beauty, and to occupy a unique place in musical history. In this position of Amen-sayer to symphonic music, through exaggeration and distortion, through squeezing the last drops of juice out of that glorious fruit, through his desperate and insistent reexamination and reevaluation of his materials, through pushing tonal music to its uttermost boundaries, Mahler was granted the honor of having the last word, uttering the final sigh, letting fall the last living tear, saying the final good-by. To what? To life as he knew it and wanted to remember it, to unspoiled nature, to faith in redemption; but also to music as he knew it and remembered it, to the unspiled nature of tonal beauty, to faith in its future – good-by to all that. The last C major chord of Das Lied von der Erde was for him the last resolution of all Faustian history. For him?
Leonard Bernstein about Gustav Mahler (1962):
Mahler: His Time Has Come( Leonard Bernstein)
伯恩斯坦谈马勒的经典文章。原网址附有译文。
Has come? Had come, rather; was there all along, even as each bar of each symphony was being penned in that special psychic fluid of his. If ever there was a composer of his time it was Mahler, prophetic only in the sense that he already knew what the world would come to know and admit half a century later.
Basically, of course, all of Mahler’s music is about Mahler – which means simply that it is about conflict. Think of it: Mahler the Creator vs. Mahler the Performer; the Jew vs. the Christian; the Believer vs. the Doubter; the Naïf vs. the Sophisticate; the provincial Bohemian vs. the Viennese homme du monde; the Faustian Philosopher vs. the Oriental Mystic the Operatic Symphonist who never wrote an opera. But mainly the battle rages between Western Man at the turn of the century and the life of the spirit. Out of this opposition proceeds the endless list of antitheses – the whole roster of Yang and Yin – that inhabit Mahler’s music.
What was this duple vision of Mahler’s? A vision of his world, crumbling in corruption beneath its smug surface, fulsome, hypocritical, prosperous, sure of its terrestrial immortality, yet bereft of its faith in spiritual immortality. The music is almost cruel in its revelations: it is like a camera that has caught Western society in the moment of its incipient decay. But to Mahler’s own audiences none of this was apparent: they refused (or were unable) to see themselves mirrored in these grotesque symphonies. They heard only exaggeration, extravagance, bombast, obsessive length – failing to recognize these as symptoms of their own decline and fall. They heard what seemed like the history of German-Austrian music, recapitulated in ironic or distorted terms – and they called it shameful eclecticism. They heard endless, brutal, maniacal marches – but failed to see the imperial insignia, the Swastika (make your own list) on the uniforms of the marchers. They heard mighty Chorales, overwhelming brass hymns – but failed to see them tottering at an abyss of tonal deterioration. They heard extended, romantic love songs – but failed to understand that these Liebesträume were nightmares, as were those mad, degenerate Ländler.
But what makes the heartbreaking duplicity is that all these anxiety-ridden images were set up alongside images of the life of the spirit, Mahler’s anima, which surrounds, permeates, and floodlights these cruel pictures with the tantalizing radiance of how life could be. The intense longing for serenity is inevitably coupled with the sinister doubt that it can be achieved. Obversely, the innate violence of the music, the excesses of sentiment, the arrogance of establishment, the vulgarity of power-postures, the disturbing rumble of status-non-quo are all the more agonizing for being linked with memories of innocence, with the aching nostalgia of youthful dreams, with aspirations towards the Empyrean, noble proclamations of redemption, or with the bittersweet tease of some Nirvana or other, just barely out of reach. It is thus a conflict between an intense love of life and a disgust with life, between a fierce longing for Himmel and the fear of death.
This dual vision of Mahler’s, which tore him apart all his life, is the vision we have finally come to perceive in his music. This is what Mahler meant when he said, “My time will come.” It is only after fifty, sixty, seventy years of world holocausts, of the simultaneous advance of democracy with our increasing inability to stop making war, of the simultaneous magnification of national pieties with intensification of our active resistance to social equality – only after we have experienced all this through the smoking ovens of Auschwitz, the frantically bombed jungles of Vietnam, through Hungary, Suez, the Bay of Pigs, the farce-trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, the refueling of the Nazi machine, the murder in Dallas, the arrogance of South Africa, the Hiss-Chambers travesty, the Trotzkyite purges, Black Power, Red Guards, the Arab encirclement of Israel, the plague of McCarthyism, the Tweedledum armament race – only after all this can we finally listen to Mahler’s music and understand that it foretold all. And in the foretelling it showered a rain of beauty on this world that has not been equaled since.
Now that the world of music has begun to understand the dualistic energy-source of Mahler’s music, the very key to its meaning, it is easier to understand this phenomenon in specific Mahlerian terms. For the doubleness of the music is the doubleness of the man. Mahler was split right down the middle, with the curious result that whatever quality is perceptible and definable in his music, the diametrically opposite quality is equally so. Of what other composer can this be said? Can we think of Beethoven as both roughhewn and epicene? Is Debussy both subtle and blatant? Mozart both refined and raw? Stravinsky both objective and maudlin? Unthinkable. But Mahler, uniquely, is all of these – roughhewn and epicene, subtle and blatant, refined, raw, objective, maudlin, brash, shy, grandiose, self-annihilating, confident, insecure, adjective, opposite, adjective, opposite.
The first spontaneous image that springs to my mind at the mention of the word “Mahler” is of a colossus straddling the magic dateline “1900.” There he stands, his left foot (closer to the heart!) firmly planted in the rich, beloved nineteenth century, and his right, rather less firmly, seeking solid ground in the twentieth. Some say he never found this foothold; others (and I agree with them) insist that twentieth-century music could not exist as we know it if that right foot had not landed there with a commanding thud. Whichever assessment is right, the image remains: he straddled. Along with Strauss, Sibelius and, yes, Schoenberg, Mahler sang the last rueful songs of nineteenth-century romanticism. But Strauss’s extraordinary gifts went the route of a not very subjective virtuosity; Sibelius and Schoenberg found their own extremely different but personal routes into the new century. Mahler was left straddling; his destiny was to sum up, package, and lay to ultimate rest the fantastic treasure that was German-Austrian music from Bach to Wagner.
It was a terrible and dangerous heritage. Whether he saw himself as the last symphonist in the long line started by Mozart, or the last Heilige Deutsche Künstler in the line started by Bach, he was in the same rocky boat. To recapitulate the line, bring it to climax, show it all in one, soldered and smelted together by his own fires – this was a function assigned him by history and destiny, a function that meant years of ridicule, rejection, and bitterness.
But he had no choice, compulsive manic creature that he was. He took all (all!) the basic elements of German music, including the clichés, and drove them to their ultimate limits. He turned rests into shuddering silences; upbeats into volcanic preparations as for a death blow. Luftpausen became gasps of shock or terrified suspense; accents grew into titanic stresses to be achieved by every conceivable means, both sonic and tonic. Ritardandi were stretched into near-motionlessness; accelerandi became tornadoes; dynamics were refined and exaggerated to a point of neurasthenic sensibility. Mahler’s marches are like heart attacks, his chorales like all Christendom gone mad. The old conventional four-bar phrases are delineated in steel; his most traditional cadences bless like the moment of remission from pain. Mahler is German music multiplied by n.
The result of all this exaggeration is, of course, that neurotic intensity which for so many years was rejected as unendurable, and in which we now find ourselves mirrored. And there are concomitant results: an irony almost too bitter to comprehend; excesses of sentimentality that still make some listeners wince; moments of utter despair, often the despair of not being able to drive all this material even further, into some kind of paramusic that might at last cleanse us. But we are cleansed, when all is said and done; no person of sensibility can come away from the Ninth Symphony without being exhausted and purified. And that is the triumphant result of all this purgatory, justifying all excesses: we do ultimately encounter an apocalyptic radiance, a glimmer of what peace must be like.
So much for the left foot: what of the right, tentatively scratching at the new soil of the twentieth century, testing it for solidity, fertility, roots? Yes, it was found fertile; there were roots there, but they had sprung frm the other side. All of Mahler’s testing, experiments, incursions were made in terms of the past. His breaking-up of rhythms, his post-Wagnerian stretching of tonality to its very snapping point (but not beyond it!), his probings into a new thinness of texture, into bare linear motion, into transparent chamber-music-like orchestral manipulation – all these adumbrated what was to become twentieth-century common practice; but they all emanated from those nineteenth-century notes he loved so well. Similarly, in his straining after new forms – a two-movement symphony (#8), a six-movement symphony (#3), symphonies with voices, not only in the Finales (#3, #8, Das Lied), movements which are interludes, interruptions, movements deliberately malformed through arbitrary abridgment or obsessive repetition or fragmentation – all these attempts at new formal structures abide in the shadow of Beethoven’s Ninth, the last Sonatas and string quartets. Even the angular melodic motions, the unexpected intervals, the infinitely wide skips, the search for “endless” melody, the harmonic ambiguities – all of which have deeply influenced many a twentieth-century composer – are nevertheless ultimately traceable back to Beethoven and Wagner.
I think that this is probably why I doubt that I shall ever come to terms with the so-called Tenth Symphony. I have never been convinced of those rhythmic experiments in the Scherzo, of the flirtation with atonality. I often wonder what would have happened had Mahler not died so young. Would he have finished that Tenth Symphony, more or less as the current “versions” have it? Would he have scrapped it? Were there signs there that he was about to go over the hill, and encamp with Schoenberg? It is one of the more fascinating Ifs of history. Somehow I think he was unable to live through that crisis, because there was no solution for him; he had to die with that symphony unfinished. After all, a man’s destiny is nothing more or less than precisely what happened to him in life. Mahler’s destiny was to complete the great German symphonic line and then depart, without it being granted him to start a new one. This may be clear to us now; but for Mahler, while he lived, his destiny was anything but clear. In his own mind he was at least as much part of the new century as of the old. He was a tormented, divided man, with his eyes on the future and his heart in the past.
But his destiny did permit him to bestow much beauty, and to occupy a unique place in musical history. In this position of Amen-sayer to symphonic music, through exaggeration and distortion, through squeezing the last drops of juice out of that glorious fruit, through his desperate and insistent reexamination and reevaluation of his materials, through pushing tonal music to its uttermost boundaries, Mahler was granted the honor of having the last word, uttering the final sigh, letting fall the last living tear, saying the final good-by. To what? To life as he knew it and wanted to remember it, to unspoiled nature, to faith in redemption; but also to music as he knew it and remembered it, to the unspiled nature of tonal beauty, to faith in its future – good-by to all that. The last C major chord of Das Lied von der Erde was for him the last resolution of all Faustian history. For him?