Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony – Program Notes

Despite the massive forces required, Mahler’s second symphony remains one of his most performed thanks to its visceral emotional impact. The December 13, 1895 premiere hung by a thread. Mahler himself was the only one capable of conducting it and he was ill with a migraine attack that would ordinarily have sidelined him. As principal conductor of the Hamburg Opera, he was responsible for leading an array of productions at any given time, including marathon Wagner music dramas. The administration there took a dim view of what they surely saw as his vanity hobby of composing. So each night Mahler conducted an opera, hopped a night train to Berlin, rehearsed his symphony in the morning, and made it back to Hamburg for the next opera. No wonder he fell sick. What justified such a herculean effort?

As a composer, Mahler had no parallel in the late nineteenth century. Though familiar with much music of the past through his conducting, he reserved his greatest respect for Beethoven and Wagner. Like many geniuses, he had a knack for combining the best of what came before him. The scoring of Beethoven’s ninth symphony with a chorus singing text of nondogmatic spiritual uplift held great appeal, as did Wagner’s expanded orchestral resources and unfolding time spans. Both influences found their way into this symphony. Mahler had already tried combining chorus and orchestra in Das klagende Lied in 1880 but structural problems made that work less than totally successful.

The second symphony for Mahler was mentally a continuation of the first, which is purely instrumental. That D major work had hints of the composer’s preoccupation with mortality—he lost multiple siblings in childhood—but the concern is front and center in the C minor symphony. “I called the first movement Todtenfeier (Mourning Rite),” he explained to a critic. “It may interest you to know it is the hero of my D major symphony who is being borne to his grave, his life being reflected, as in a clear mirror… my Second Symphony grows directly out of the First.” Indeed, the earlier symphony hadn’t even been publicly heard when a draft of Todtenfeier was finished as a tone poem (free-form program music) in summer 1888.

Like Wagner, Mahler had a strong interest in literature and philosophy and the tone poem’s name probably came from a poetry collection translated from the work of an earlier Polish writer. One tale therein is autobiographical, recounting the suicidal despair of a jilted lover. Likewise Mahler adopted a Romantic approach in the two symphonies of having “written into them in my own blood everything that I have experienced and endured.”

Busy with his conducting responsibilities and outdoing himself with the audacity of the new music, Mahler put it aside for a few years. In 1891 he had the opportunity to play it through at the piano for Hans von Bülow, a major establishment figure Mahler worshiped. Bülow as a maestro championed Wagner, so it wasn’t unreasonable he might sympathize with Mahler’s aims. But the stark, almost shockingly despairing music went too far despite its more consoling moments. At various points Bülow could be seen covering his ears and pronounced an awful verdict: “If this is music, I understand nothing of music.” Bülow was known for theatrical disapproval—if he really didn’t like your piece he’d run outside and vomit in the street—but Mahler was surely dismayed.

Almost two more years passed until the composer, now in his thirties, found a suitable successor to his somber tone poem: songs. Taking texts from a collection of German folk poetry, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn), he selected moods and narratives conducive to his new sound world. Realizing he needed peace and quiet, he escaped to a lake at Steinbach in Upper Austria, renting five rooms for himself, his sisters, and confidant Natalie Bauer-Lechner who left invaluable written observations about Mahler. That summer of 1893 saw the bulk of work on the second through fourth movements of the symphony, mostly based on song.

Cynical in spirit, the third movement came to fruition first with a foundation in “St. Anthony’s Sermon to the Fish.” That song describes the aquatic approval of the saint’s audience only to resume their sinful ways in a clear metaphor for human congregations. More broadly the music evinces despair for the futility of mankind’s striving. Hence the inclusion of a fanfare by Mahler’s prematurely deceased classmate Hans Rott, a shining talent extinguished by mental illness, and an allusion to the wedding dance in Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe, relating the poet’s despair as his beloved weds another—a similar theme to the first movement’s origins.

Very different is the major-key second movement, a genial and comforting dance whose themes Mahler had conceived years before. The vibe is Schubertian, almost cozy, to the point that Mahler realized how jarring a contrast it makes with the opening funeral rites. He suggested conductors take as long as five minutes before proceeding to this movement. Highlights of scoring here include a soaring cello countermelody that reportedly made some Viennese players later go overboard and exceed its delicate effect. At another point the strings play the opening theme pizzicato (plucked) in a well-judged variation. Mahler even considered asking the violins and violas to hold their instruments like guitars as some of his French contemporaries requested in their music. Maybe that could have prevented Claude Debussy walking out of a subsequent performance, so offended was he by its simplicity!

The fourth movement is a mesmerizing song for alto soloist with orchestra in the style of a deathbed prayer, containing a quasi-hallucination of an angel as gatekeeper over the soul’s destiny. It is not certain when Mahler knew this short song would fit into the symphony’s overall plan.

Although he considered the finale by this point, he was uncertain what to do and needed to return to conducting that fall of 1893. Fortuitously for the symphony, Hans von Bülow died the following year and Mahler attended the service, hearing an unseen choir intone a text about resurrection by the eighteenth-century poet Friedrich Klopstock followed by the ringing of church bells. He was thunderstruck and rushed home to complete a plan for his finale containing the same text plus words of his own, following Wagner’s tradition as double author. Now lit with inspiration, he composed even in the thick of the opera season and a short score was finished by June 1894. Back at Steinbach, he had a tiny shack constructed and outfitted with a piano on the gorgeous lakefront to be his oasis where he resumed the titanic finale. It is now a one-room museum.

Despite his ambivalence toward providing explanations for his music which inevitably run the risk of trivializing it, Mahler couldn’t help but try to facilitate acceptance of his demanding creations. At various points over the years he commented on the imagery associated with certain movements or passages, some of which are now detailed along with the text of the final movements. It is important to remember the long time period over which the symphony was designed, so these impressions don’t necessarily lead seamlessly one to the next, and there are many passages of music probably unconnected to any comments yet no less vivid for that.

I. “We stand by the coffin of a well-loved person. His life, struggles, passions and aspirations once more, for the last time, pass before our mind’s eye… our heart is gripped by a dreadfully serious voice which always passes us by in the deafening bustle of daily life: What now? What is this life— and this death? Do we have an existence beyond it? Is all this only a confused dream, or do life and this death have a meaning?—And we must answer this question if we are to live on.”

II. “the echo of long past days in the life of the man borne to his grave in the first movement— ‘when the sun still smiled on him.’”

III. “The experience behind the Scherzo I can describe only in terms of the following image: if, at a distance, you watch a dance through a window, without being able to hear the music, then the turning and twisting movement of the couples seems senseless, because you are not catching the rhythm that is the key to it all. You must imagine that to one who has lost his identity and his happiness, the world looks like this— distorted and crazy, as if reflected in a concave mirror.”

IV.
O little red rose!
Man lies in greatest need!
Man lies in greatest suffering!
How much rather would I be in Heaven!
I came upon a broad road.
There came an angel and wanted to block my way.
Ah no! I did not let myself be turned away!
I am of God, and to God I shall return.
Dear God will grant me a small light,
Will light my way to eternal, blissful life!
—From Des Knaben Wunderhorn

V.
Arise, yes, you will arise from the dead,
My dust, after a short rest!
Eternal life!
Will be given you by Him who called you.
To bloom again are you sown.
The lord of the harvest goes
And gathers the sheaves,
Us who have died.
—Friedrich Klopstock

O believe, my heart, oh believe,
Nothing will be lost to you!
Everything is yours that you have desired,
Yours, what you have loved, what
you have struggled for.
O believe,
You were not born in vain,
Have not lived in vain, suffered in vain!
What was created must perish,
What has perished must rise again.
Tremble no more!
Prepare yourself to live!
O Sorrow, all-penetrating!
I have been wrested away from you!
O Death, all-conquering!
Now you are conquered!
With wings that I won
In the passionate strivings of love
I shall mount
To the light to which no sight has penetrated.
I shall die, so as to live!
Arise, yes, you will arise from the dead,
My heart, in an instant!
What you have conquered
Will bear you to God.
—Gustav Mahler

Klopstock’s Enlightenment-era poem is not used in its entirety, and Mahler’s addition is conspicuous for avoiding theological specifics. His graphic description of events in the finale makes clear a divergence from the fearsome judgment of Christian orthodoxy. He was not an academic or theologian and felt no obligation to profess a unified, consistent belief system. Unlike the other movements, the finale contains tone-painting, or musical illustrations of specific 2022-2023 SEASON 59 happenings. Its first sounds are those of chaos just as in Beethoven’s ninth symphony, one of its models, as Judgment Day arrives. After confusion and (sur)realization, the great summons is heard in a guise much like a Jewish shofar, or ram’s horn, which Mahler would have encountered as a boy in the synagogue. (He was later baptized for greater acceptance in society circles.) Enormous percussion build-ups indicate an earthquake leading to the raising of the dead: “…graves spring open, and all creation comes writhing out of the bowels of the earth, with wailing and gnashing of teeth.” The undead enact a sinister and implacable march.

A striking effect is achieved with offstage brass (a technique familiar from opera), and “the trumpets from the Apocalypse call;—in the midst of the awful silence we think we hear in the farthest distance a nightingale, like a last quivering echo of earthly life.” After the Earth has thus been suitably leveled, the chorus at last enters with its message of redemption, barely audible. The remainder of the movement is uplifting, almost deliriously so at times. “A miraculously mild light penetrates us to the heart— all is still and blissful. And behold: there is no judgment; there are no sinners, no righteous ones, no great and no humble— there is no punishment and no reward! An almighty love shines through us with blessed knowing and being.”

Mahler had tried out the purely orchestral movements of the symphony at a March 1895 concert thanks to his friend Richard Strauss pulling some strings for him. It was probably only that practice that allowed him to triumph over his migraine in December when the complete work was performed. His follower and champion Bruno Walter recalled years later: “To this day I can see him… on the exceedingly high and far-from-steady podium, pale as death, his superhuman willpower conquering his pain as he conquered performers and audience.” While most of the audience was indeed persuaded, some critics carped about the untraditional format for a symphony.

Mahler’s style changed in the fifteen years that remained to him but he tellingly chose this symphony as a farewell to his eventual base of Vienna even in 1907. Its extraordinary boldness of subject matter is matched by deliberately chosen means, using the largest possible group of strings and augmented personnel including seven percussionists. Mahler’s experience as a practical musician meant he understood the exact way to notate rhythms and tone colors to achieve maximum vividness. The experience of his “Resurrection” is not easily forgotten.