a long farewell?

 

On Monday the 21st of April we begin rehearsals on Mahler’s last completed symphonic work, the Ninth Symphony.  As we rehearse each movement (one each rehearsal) I’ll post thoughts on this large and emotionally exhausting work as a preparation for the performances to come.

Mahler’s Ninth Symphony has been described as a farewell of an artist who was very much grappling with his mortality.  As with many things, sometimes the language of the composer works best in describing what they’re getting at.  In Mahler’s case, that would be German, and the term of art might be die Verabscheidung, meaning farewell, or leave-taking.  

While it is very tempting to leap to the Romantic ideal (á la the movie Amadeus) to see Mahler stricken by a fatal illness, frantically working to complete a valedictory work before death comes to collect its due, I don’t necessarily see the Ninth as having been written with impending death in mind, but rather as an acknowledgment that death is inevitable, and that it is time to take stock of the long thread of life already lived.

The composer Alban Berg, who was present at the work’s premiere (given after Mahler’s death by Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic in June of 1912) wrote the following in a letter to his wife:

I have once more played through Mahler’s Ninth. The first movement is the most glorious he ever wrote. It expresses an extraordinary love of this earth, for Nature; the longing to live on it in peace, to enjoy it completely, to the very heart of one’s being, before death comes, as irresistibly it does. The whole movement is based on a premonition of death, which is constantly recurring. All earthly dreams end here; that is why the tenderest passages are followed by tremendous climaxes like new eruptions of a volcano. This, of course, is most obvious of all in the place where the premonition of death becomes certain knowledge, where in the most profound and anguished love of life death appears ‘mit höchster Gewalt’; then the ghostly solos of violin and viola, and those sounds of chivalry: death in armour. Against that there is no resistance left, and I see what follows as a sort of resignation. Always, though, with the thought of ‘the other side. […]. Again, for the last time, Mahler turns to the earth—not to battles and great deeds, which he strips away, just as he did in Das Lied von der Erde in the chromatic morendo downward runs—but solely and totally to Nature. What treasures has Earth still to offer for his delight, and for how long?

For more background and a concise and excellent analysis of the symphony, head over to this page at andante.com, written by the eminent Mahler scholar Henry-Louis de la Grange.