Mahler Mode
On music reaching across the centuries
Last April, I went to see the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra play Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. I’d never heard Mahler before, but Theodor Adorno wrote a book about him, his Fifth Symphony was the animating force behind Tár, Leonard Bernstein conducted Mahler’s Fifth to vault himself to greatness, and my friend Fran Hoepfner wrote in 2018 that “without Mahler, and his willingness to [take risks] with his music, I’m not sure I could be here writing [my own column] now.” I wanted to understand the man who stands behind so many great thinkers the way pagan goddesses stand in the shadow behind the Virgin Mary. I figured going to see his symphony was a good way to start.
Gustav Mahler was born in 1860 in the Kingdom of Bohemia, which is now the Czech Republic, to working-class Jewish parents. He displayed musical gifts at an early age, graduated from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, converted to Catholicism to secure a position as the Director of the Vienna Court Opera in 1897, and earned most of his money conducting other people’s work throughout his life. He faced regular antisemitism despite his strategic religious conversion and was only able to compose part-time, meaning his œuvre, or body of work, is limited compared to other composers. Nevertheless, he completed nine symphonies, which are now considered to be some of the greatest ever written.
Mahler was a working man, and his symphonies are a working man’s art. He bought the time to write them between playing balms for the ruling class. In that sense, he’s like commercial oil painters who did commissions for the rich to subsidize their personal experiments with the form. In his Marxist art history text Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes that “the average [oil painting]... was a work produced more or less cynically: that is to say the values it was nominally expressing were less meaningful to the painter than the finishing of the commission or the selling of his product.” Only the truly dedicated were able to take that money and make something new with it.
I’m drawn to Mahler and the painters who struggled through that because I want to do the same. I currently work a full-time job and devote at least one night a week in the University library to writing from 6-9pm, and another night to reading. I want to figure out how to buy back enough of my time to write the book that only I can write, which is a book I don’t believe people will pay me a living wage for. I find Mahler inspirational in the same way I do Herman Melville, Rembrandt, and Tilly Olsen.
I arrived at the Auckland Town Hall that night with a group of friends at around 7:30pm. The orchestra played a contemporary symphony before Mahler’s Fifth called “Losing Earth” by Adam Schoenberg. I hated it. It sounded derivative of Jurassic Park and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s soundtracks, and the composer’s speech that the symphony was meant to “raise awareness of climate change” reminded me of Lauren Oyler’s 2018 argument that people call art “necessary” when they want to protect it from qualitative assessment—namely, when it’s bad. “Losing Earth” was thankfully short, and it sat in clear contrast with the symphony’s magnificent performance of Mahler afterwards.
Mahler’s Fifth opens with a lone military horn. The orchestra tears itself out of silence about 30 seconds later. It’s forceful, it’s dramatic, and it’s immediate. It was the opposite of the tepid, derivative “Losing Earth” piece that came before it, and it burned with white-hot intensity. I immediately got the impression “this man has something to say.” Mahler grouped his Fifth Symphony into three movements, and for the first, titled “Funeral March,” he wrote instructions to play it “In gemessenem Schritt. Streng. Wie ein Kondukt” which translates to "At a measured pace. Strict. Like a funeral procession.” Mahler’s march resembles the military music he grew up hearing and it sweeps you along. It issues commands even as, per Adorno’s Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, “it mimetically anticipates your steps.”
The second movement gets darker. In the sheet music, Mahler tells the orchestra to play it “Stürmische bewegt, mit grösster Vehemenz” which translates to “Stormily agitated, with the greatest vehemence.” It’s a violent, booming section that begins with a cello piece that Mahler marks as “Klagend,” or “grieving.” The bass and brass then enter and conflict with rage, and the music heats up from within. In Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s Recollections of Gustav Mahler, she reports that Mahler sonically simulates force by making instruments to do things they usually don’t. Mahler himself writes that “If I wanted to produce a soft, subdued sound I don’t give it to an instrument which produces it easily, but rather to one which can only get it with effort and under pressure — often only by forcing itself and exceeding its natural range. I often make the basses and bassoon squeak on the highest notes while my flute huffs and puffs down below.” He makes his forced tones expressive to express something words can’t.
I think the music’s intensity reflects his political world, too. Adorno writes that “The Jew Mahler scented fascism decades ahead,” and that “in the mutually interrupting duet of the piercing trumpets and disordered violins, the gestures of the hetman, inciting to murder, are confused with the wails of the victims: pogrom music, much as the Expressionist poets prophesied the war.” Mahler grew up in a violent world, and he transmutes that violence into his music. Adorno reports that no matter how successful he became, he couldn’t escape antisemitic attacks from jealous rivals in the media. Folk music inexorably blended with military marches in Mahler’s world, heralding a turn to antisemitic fascism that thankfully occurred after his death but which he scented like a deer smelling rain on the horizon.
Mahler’s Fifth’s second movement also has clashes that feel contemporarily urban. In Bauer-Lechner’s Recollections, Mahler claims that polyphony, or his style of combining conflicting sounds into a singular melody, comes from living in a sonically discordant world. His friends write that he’d step outside and hear “innumerable barrel-organs blaring out from merry-go-rounds, swings, shooting galleries and puppet shows,” next to “a military band and a men’s choral society,” all in the same forest clearing, “creating an incredible musical pandemonium without paying the slightest attention to each other.” He took the sonic detritus of that clashing world and turned it into recognizable melody.
The third movement of Mahler’s Fifth is unexpectedly beautiful. Mahler reportedly wrote it as a love letter to his wife, Alma, and it moved me to tears. After the stormy, imperial second part ends, it segues into dreamy strings and harps. It feels like the sun shining on your face after a storm. It feels like falling in love. I haven’t heard a better sonic representation of that feeling since.
Mahler’s Fifth ends on a harmonious note, having resolved its turmoil in a triumphant swell of drums, strings, and horns. It integrates the symphony’s conflicting parts and makes it feel complete. It’s lingered with me for a year after. In Mahler: A Musical Physiognamy, Adorno writes that “Mahler, filled with the tension of what, from the standpoint of the philosophy of history, was at the same time overdue and impossible, survives only through the strength of what is temporal within him.” I think he speaks to me now because we’re at a similar historical juncture. The old world is dying, the new one is struggling to be born, and the liberal, censored language we have to mobilize ourselves is insufficient for the moment. We need to take existing, derivative forms like he did and fashion them into something that can set dead and petrified matter into motion. We need to be brave and make something new. He reminded me of that across the century with his Fifth, and I’m grateful to him for it.
Tāmaki (Auckland) Events
The Capitol Cinema Film Club is playing Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975) about a man who assumes a dead man’s identity on Wednesday, April 30 at 8pm at The Capitol Cinema in Mt. Eden. Antonioni's L’Eclisse (1962), which I also saw at the film club, is one of my favorite movies, so I’m looking forward to this one.
My friends are putting on a rave to raise funds for a Universal Dental Care Campaign on Saturday, May 17 and I think it’ll be good. You can buy tickets here.
I absolutely love Mahler's Fifth, my mom used to blast it through the house when we would do a "cleaning day." All the best pieces from the Romantic Era express this deep-seating emotion; you listen to the piece and you feel something in your chest, you're moved to tears without understanding why. I don't know if any era of music before or after has found a way to stir my emotions quite like it. Mahler 5, Tchaikovsky's 5th, Dvorak's New World Symphony, Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre and his Carnival of the Animals, and Elgar's cello concerto are some of my favorites.