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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
A sublime new recording of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, and the recent publication of "Letters to His Wife," recall the chilling summer when the Austrian composer faced down his demons and wrote his masterpiece.
Aug 16, 2005 | In June 1909, Gustav Mahler didn't want to go back into his hut. At the time, the incorrigible composer was living in a big farmhouse in the Dolomite mountains in South Tyrol, Austria (now Italy). His restless wife, Alma, and daughter, Anna, were staying at a spa 60 miles to the south in the town of Levico, taking the waters. The hut, a wooden shack with windows, furnished with a piano, sat in a grove of pine trees, a quarter mile from the farmhouse.
For over a decade, Mahler had been shacking up in the woods to write music. Alone in his huts with his fountain pens and blank staves, he drew his musical breath from the encompassing forests, lakes and mountains. In the summer of 1896, the German conductor Bruno Walter visited Mahler in the Austrian alps and gazed up at the steep cliffs. The bold composer told his young acolyte not to bother looking at them. "I have already composed that all away," he said. He was referring to his Third Symphony, with its exhilarating peaks of cellos and basses, rushing river of trumpets and trombones.
But now his Tyrolean shack, which he called a cellar, had to wait. "I haven't yet summoned the courage to move into the cellar," he wrote Alma. (Mahler's "Letters to His Wife," the first complete edition in English, was published in October 2004.) For one thing, it was cold and the hut needed a new stove. So Mahler dawdled around the farmhouse, where he was renting the upper floor, complaining, as he often did, about the noise made by the owners.
"When these yokels whisper, the windows rattle, when they tiptoe, it shakes the rafters," he wrote. "All day their two sweet offspring chirp away: 'Bibi! Bibi!'" Then of course there was the dog. It "barks from sundown until long after the yokels have entered the Land of Nod. Every quarter of an hour I'm woken by the dulcet tones of their snoring. Damn it all: how wonderful the world would be if one could fence off a couple of acres and live within them completely undisturbed." Yes, Mahler could be a real charmer.
The courage he was trying to summon, though, wasn't just to face the frigid weather. He was bursting with new ideas and was anxious to start his Ninth Symphony; earlier in the year, he had exclaimed to Walter, "I see everything in such a new light -- am in such a state of flux, sometimes I should hardly be surprised to find myself in a new body." But exposing that new light meant descending into solitude, and as much as Mahler loved only the company of his own music, that journey had been getting more difficult to make. The previous summer in the Dolomites had been one of the most emotionally wrenching in his career.
During those months, Mahler wrote "Das Lied von der Erde" ("The Song of the Earth"), a symphony of six songs based on "The Chinese Flute," an adaptation of ancient Chinese poems by a young German lyric poet, Hans Bethge. The song cycle was a musical breakthrough for him, although not an uncharacteristic one. He had been setting poetry, including his own love poems, to orchestral music since he was a budding composer in his teens. By 1908, two years shy of 50, he had illuminated his volatile symphonies, particularly the sprawling Eighth, with vocal music, and transformed lieder with the magnetic hues of his own dark soul. "The Kindertotenlieder," finished in 1904, and based on tales about the death of children by German poet Friedrich Rückert, seemed to foretell the death of Mahler's own 4-year-old daughter, Maria, from scarlet fever and diphtheria in 1907.
But "Das Lied von der Erde" was something else altogether. Two days after Maria died, Alma collapsed when she glimpsed the tiny coffin being loaded onto a carriage. After treating her, the doctor examined Mahler and discovered he had a congenital heart defect. The prognosis wasn't fatal and the eternally willful Mahler wasn't devastated by it. He was upset mostly because the doctor told him to go easy on the long walks in the woods and swims in cold mountain lakes, which had always undammed the first torrent of notes in his symphonies. But in the wake of his daughter's death, learning he had a flawed heart understandably scattered his musical bearings. In a remarkable letter to Walter, written from the farmhouse in July 1908, Mahler tried to explain his mood.
"If I am to find the way back to myself again, I must surrender to the horrors of loneliness. But fundamentally I am only speaking in riddles, for you do not know what has been and still is going on in me; but it is certainly not that hypochondriac fear of death, as you suppose. I had already realized that I shall have to die. But without trying to explain or describe you something for which there are perhaps no words at all, I'll just tell you that at a blow I have simply lost all the clarity and quietude I ever achieved ... and now at the end of life am again a beginner who must find his feet."
That Mahler found his feet with "Das Lied von der Erde" is one of the most magnificent accomplishments in music history. Composed for tenor and alto voices, Mahler orchestrated the unadorned oriental poems with exquisite precision. The finished work blooms with his innate passion for nature, soaring like the sun, and settling, like a falling leaf, into a trembling reconciliation with death. Its final song, "Der Abschied" ("Farewell"), particularly as sung by Kathleen Ferrier in a now legendary 1952 recording, conducted by Walter, stops any listener's heart from beating, filling the stillness with a longing for which, truly, there are no words.
"It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful," Benjamin Britten, the literary British composer, wrote to a friend in 1937, after playing a recording of "Der Abschied" all night. "It has the beauty of loneliness, and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony."
"Tomorrow I'll go down to the shack," Mahler wrote to Alma on June 21, 1909, having finally decided to brave the cold weather with a cheap paraffin stove. By the end of the summer, the chilled composer had written an encore to "Das Lied von der Erde." Much more than an encore. "To anyone who knows how to listen, my whole life will become clear, for my creative works and my existence are interwoven," Mahler boasted early in his career. The Ninth, written in an amazing four months, embodies his clarion, stunning summation.
