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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Scrawled on the messy score of the Ninth's first movement are the words, "O days of youth! Vanished! O Love! Scattered!" At the end of the fourth and final movement, Mahler inscribed, "O Beauty! Love! Farewell! Farewell! World! Farewell!" You might say the portentous notes are a good indication of the composer's state of mind. But Mahler composed all of his symphonies as if Thanatos was staring in his window. Intimations of mortality were his middle name. While the melodramatic notes suggest he was writing with a renewed force and immediacy, they don't reflect the intensely refined symphony that he ultimately produced.
Unlike his practice in his earlier, signature works, such as the Third and Sixth, Mahler didn't kick off his Ninth with a throat-grabbing fanfare or heart-pounding march. By the time of the Ninth, the mature composer had honed his arsenal of big statements into concentrated chords of exquisite power. He channeled the Zen clarity of the poems in "Das Lied von der Erde" into every last grace note in the Ninth.
The symphony dawns on two spare phrases, played on cello and harp, that sway like a haunted lullaby, punctuated by a muted trumpet as keen as an owl's call. Conductor Leonard Bernstein maintained that this seesaw rhythm symbolized Mahler's unsteady heartbeat. A melody slowly arises, evoking the quivering serenity of "Der Abschied," and lodges in profoundly simple rhythms that feel unlike any Mahler ever wrote. In the first movement alone, this simple band of motifs journeys through the firmament of the orchestra -- and Mahler's memory -- gaining menacing violins at one turn, haunting trombones at another, and thundering cymbals at yet another. Churning violins, with trumpets and timpani in tow, pick up speed and race toward crescendos that erupt but never climax. Like fireworks, the notes seem to trickle down from the sky.
In a letter to his wife, early 20th century Austrian composer Alban Berg described the emotional pull of the Ninth's first movement: "Everything earthly that has been dreamt away culminates in it (hence the climaxes breaking forth like new ebullitions after the sweetest passages) -- strongest, naturally, at the uncanny place where this premonition of death becomes certainty, where in the midst of the deepest, most painful lust for life ... Death announces his arrival."
You don't have to be a masterful composer, though, to feel that in the Ninth, Mahler is no longer animating nature but has become the animating force of nature itself. The music is so pure it makes a humble mystic out of you. And that's just the first movement. The symphony's simple motifs are not done casting their spells. In the following movements, they transform into a drunken waltz, dissonant rondo, and tranquil adagio. They borrow phrases from the Johann Strauss tune "Enjoy Life," Beethoven's Sonata Op. 81, and Mahler's own Second ("Resurrection") Symphony, always retaining their unadorned shape and power.
The Ninth's collage of forms signal Mahler's trademark style -- but this time they embody much more. The Ninth is his remembrance of things past, mostly musical things. Theodor Adorno, the German critic, philosopher and passionate Mahler scholar, wrote that the Ninth's first movement evokes the "splendor of immediate life reflected in the medium of memory." He was referring to the composer, but also listeners, who are drawn by the Ninth's open spaces into their own pasts, when music evoked a mysterious world of charm and danger. Adorno beautifully described the unfolding music in the Ninth as "irresistibly remembering."
Throughout his career, Mahler had stitched his influences into his symphonies, where he colored them to suit his own manic emotions. From his country kin in rural Bohemia, where he was raised, he sampled popular marches and songs, most notoriously "Freres Jacques" in his First Symphony. From the urban swirl of life in Vienna, where he went to college, he borrowed waltzes that were all the rage among the bourgeoisie, only to paint a mustache on them with pre-dadaist glee. Many critics -- Mahler sarcastically called them "superiors" -- labeled the composer a snob for bossing around popular music in his symphonies. But his pop references fueled his symphonies with urgency and energy and melted, as Mahler intended, the carapace of classical music traditions.
You might expect by the time Mahler got to the Ninth, he would have outgrown his punk-rock days of trashing his influences. He hadn't. The second ("Landlers") and third ("Rondo-Burleske") movements are as smart-alecky as he gets, sending up pastoral waltzes and bawdy country dances with a killer smirk. But the thrilling movements, unparalleled in structure, strike listeners as anything but one-dimensional. Coursing beneath their irony is a nostalgia as strong as a rip tide, pulling you under the music's dark currents. The two movements are Mahler's last dances, desperate and erotic, in a teeming ballroom. For 25 dizzying minutes they erase the mystical presentiments that surround them. "Joy flares high at the edge of horror," writes Adorno.
In the concluding adagio, the yearning cellos and trumpets, rollicking timpani and trombones, have shed their importunate edge. Only a serene tune, tenderly fleshed out by violins, deep as a mountain lake, remains. While sitting around the farmhouse, waiting for a new heater for his hut, Mahler answered a letter from Alma, explaining the meaning of the last scene in Goethe's "Faust." The structure of all great art vanishes, he wrote; after all, art is only a place holder for the inexpressible. He must have been anticipating the closing of the Ninth. "We have arrived," he wrote, "we are at rest, we are in possession of that which on earth we could only desire or strive for."
