Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 2 ("Resurrection")
In January of 1888, Gustav Mahler conducted the premiere of the opera Die
drei Pintos, which he had completed from original sketches by the late Carl
von Weber (Der Freischütz, Oberon). The event was a rousing
success. Mahler brought home as many of the flowers showered on him at the
premiere as he could, set them around his bed, then lay down and imagined
himself on his funeral bier.
This morbid gesture arose because, while working on the opera at the request
of von Weber's grandson, Mahler had fallen in love with young von Weber's wife,
Marion. Although Marion pulled him out of that evening's depression (and removed
the flowers), Mahler's unhappy state led him to begin work a month later on an
orchestral piece he called Todtenfeier (Funeral Rites). Leaving it for a
few months to complete his Symphony No. 1, also inspired by his affair with
Baroness von Weber, he finished his funeral piece in September of that year. (He
also moved to Budapest, away from the von Webers.)
By 1893 he had decided the piece was really part of a symphony--and he found
he had ideas from previous compositions to apply to it. The third-movement
scherzo is based on the theme from the song "Des Antonius von Padua
Fischpredigt" (Antony of Padua's Sermon to the Fish), written for Des
Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn, 1892). The fourth is another
song, "Urlicht" (Primal Light), that he used in its entirety, with
voice, and withheld from the Wunderhorn collection.
Searching for a sufficiently weighty finale, he was inspired by a chorale by
Friedrich Klopstock, "Resurrection Ode," that he heard sung at the
funeral of the conductor Hans von Bülow (who was generally supportive of
Mahler, even though he had not liked the Todtenfeier when Mahler had
played it for him years earlier). As Mahler told a friend, "It struck me
like lightning ... and everything was revealed to my soul clear and plain."
Mahler took part of Klopstock's poem and wrote additional poetry to go with it,
building his final movement toward this culminating text. He completed the
symphony in 1894, and though he continued to adjust the score well into 1909, it
was first performed under Mahler's baton by the Berlin Philharmonic in December,
1895. It was the only one of his symphonies that was truly successful in his
lifetime.
Mahler's scores are always full of extremely specific instructions (this work
includes "with rapture, but don't hurry," and "without coming
forward in the least"), and although he said he disliked
"programmatic" music, he wrote several programmes explicating this
symphony. According to these, the first movement celebrates the death of the
hero from Symphony No. 1; the second is innocent nostalgia and the third a
grotesque parody of remembrance; the fourth and fifth movements represent the
last judgment and resurrection.
The opening Allegro maestoso is a grand expansion of the classical
sonata form, and juxtaposes a funeral march in C-minor with a more lyrical theme
in E-major. Low strings, instructed to play "ferociously," open the
movement with broken figures giving the march a lurching, rushing feeling that
reappears throughout the movement. The development section includes a hymn-like
theme for horns that begins with the first four notes of the Dies irae chant
from the Mass for the Dead.
The Andante moderato that follows features a gentle Ländler that
depicts, according to Mahler, the "image of a long-dead hour of
Happiness." This moment of innocent nostalgia was a bit too reminiscent for
Claude Debussy who, joined by Paul Dukas and Gabriel Pierné, walked out during
its performance in Paris in 1910, saying it was too much like Schubert.
The third movement, In ruhig fliessender Bewegung (In quietly flowing
motion), is a sardonic dance based on the story of St. Anthony's sermon to the
fishes--who, after being admonished by the saint on their thoughtless lives,
swim off just as before. The movement is animated by perpetually moving
sixteenth-note figures, conjuring images of the ever-swimming fish.
The fourth movement brings a complete reversal of spirit and theme, as the
introduction of the human voice in the tender song "Urlicht" turns us
from death and bitterness toward hope and resurrection. The alto solo is
accompanied simply, by a chorale of brass and then woodwinds. But its simplicity
is deceptive, as Michael Steinberg writes: "its naturalness [is] achieved
by a metrical flexibility so vigilant of prosody ... that the opening section of
thirty-five bars has twenty-one changes of meter."
Though this movement brings a sense of peace, with the image of
"blissful life" to come, the fifth movement, Im Tempo des Scherzos,
shatters that peace with a ferocious recollection of the opening movement's wild
emotion and the third movement's discordant angst. Mahler builds upon this,
however, to a new end. Thunderous timpani and drum rolls and bursting brass
chords usher in the wildly explosive climax. Silence, and Mahler's grosse Appell
(great summons) is heard from offstage horns and trumpets instructed to sound as
if coming from a great distance and then growing nearer, with a birdlike flute
and piccolo in contrast. Another silence falls, and in that calm the chorus is
heard alone, in the hymn of resurrection. Solo voices break free and soar in
Mahler's own words of affirmation: "O believe, you were not born in vain!
Have not lived, suffered in vain!" And so Mahler brings us to his vision of
the final triumph of the soul, with bells pealing and chorus swelling, "Sterben
werd' ich, um zu leben: I shall die, so as to live."
June, 2005
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