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MAHLER is a problem, one might almost say a cause célèbre, and a mass of literature, eulogistic and otherwise, has accumulated about his name. We may discuss Strauss, Reger, Pfitzner, coolly; but on a subject like Mahler, who touches us more nearly, it must be difficult for the modern musical critic to write calmly. His personality, moreover, is of a type that arouses controversy. He hurried through life in a fever of creative ardour, attempting at one and the same time to revolutionise the theatre and to leave to the world, after the example of the great masters, nine symphonies. He wrought at white heat and his work, highly provocative, bears traces of continuous tension.
Mahler was a Jew--a Jew, moreover, of the new epoch-and a composer of symphonic works in the grand style. The question, "Can the apparently dead symphonic form, consecrated by Beethoven, be reborn in a Jew?" need not surprise us. It is not uncommon for the connection of race with music to be superficially scrutinised and spitefully pilloried, to the detriment of unbiassed judgment on the aims and ideals of composers. Those, however, who wish to do Mahler justice, must not overlook his Judaism as a contributory element of power in his work. Jewish blood is not a negligible quantity; eternally restless, it reacts in many ways, destructively as well as constructively, but true Judaism has a capacity for an ennobling and fruitful union with surrounding Teutonism, whence may spring the man of metaphysical intellect, intense emotion, psychic sensibility and broad international sympathies. Judaism was deeply rooted in Mahler's unusual personality, complicating for him the problems of the modern spirit. His nervous sensibility constantly threatened to wreck his physique; for though he accounted himself a thorough German, his energy was purely nervous. He defended his intense emotionalism and his metaphysical leanings with the passion of a fanatic. His intimacy with nature was profound, one might also add naif. He wished to stand for the people of Austria, but he was goaded and tormented under the threefold burden of modernity, Judaism, and a tendency to imitate the composers whom he ardently admired. The echo of this agony resounds through his music, and accounts for its many contradictions, for a certain superficiality, an ironic treatment of small matters, coupled with a genius for interpreting nature. Most notable of all, a token of his race, is something Christ-like in Mm, contending for righteousness.
These complexities of character become clearer with study. He threw himself into both original and imitative creation with equal enthusiasm. He was the consummation of the German Jew; Wagner's saying, "A German does a thing for its own sake," was for him, "A German wears himself out in a cause." He lived in a state of incessant nervous tension, goading himself remorselessly.
This fanatic zealot had, nevertheless, a remarkably clear insight into his own character, recognising, unwillingly, his weaknesses and flaws. Because of this self-consciousness, essentially genuine as he was, he posed to himself a little, drawing a veil over his own failings. He could not altogether forgo the beaux gestes, the pathos, of his idol, Wagner. He had unusual gifts of mimicry and the passion of an actor for the world of the stage, to which he gave fine work, but the metaphysical side of his nature fled from the atmosphere of the theatre and found fulfilment in another world, the world of the symphony. It was his fate to be torn between the two. As he turned his back on the stage, it was with the tormented sense of a task only half fulfilled. He loathed the business side of it, yet longed to complete the work which he regarded as a mission. This continuous conflict between original and imitative impulses, between theatre and symphony, was the cause of nervous overstrain; and perpetual unrest was ever behind his creative work.
For the same reason he could do nothing final, but was ever making a new beginning. In a kind of frenzy he produced work after work, each unsparing of self, each exact in detail, each a self-revelation made with the fervour of an actor and expressed with the lucidity learned from his experience as a conductor, yet lacking finality.
Between the artist and the public a gulf is fixed. Every artist feels this loneliness, but Mahler felt it more than most. By nature he was reserved; yet he had an urgent desire to communicate himself to others, to win the love of his fellow-men. Hence results the paradox of the shy man, who in attempting to cover his shyness, makes an exaggerated display of emotion.
There are traces in Mahler of Dostoievsky's ecstatic horror, and indeed Mahler seems to have recognised a kindred spirit in this writer whom he loved; but, on another aside, he had much in common with the man of intellect--Goethe. He reminds one of Faust in his longing for that illumination which is not for the sons of earth. In the realms of music he looked to Beethoven and to Wagner, honouring Beethoven as an architect, but Wagner as something yet more than a musician. He felt himself an executor of the Bayreuth inheritance. Even when professional duty committed him to an operatic repertory inconsistent with the creed of Bayreuth, he did his utmost to raise it to a more Wagnerian level. His metaphysical and ethical trend also, the desire to serve mankind, not merely the theatre, bound him to Wagner; but on the purely musical side he differed from him widely. The selftormenting ecstatic, the psychic subject haunted by uncanny forms, the mystic moving in regions not realised, was at heart homesick for the world of instinctive music, in which his being had its roots. Trumpet-calls, marching rhythms, roll of drums, peasant-dances, country sights and sounds, were the transoms of his art. He understood the poetry in primitive sounds, yet produced no genuinely homely work, because restlessness, scepticism, his over-sensitive nervous make-up in short, overthrew faith and naïveté in the critical moment of creation; and his acute intellect often gave an ironical twist to what should have been instinctive. He could neither admit nor exclude the sources of torment in himself, and so he remained at heart "diatonic."
No such contradictory nature had previously sought expression in the symphony. Mahler's symphonic work is psychologically important, as the revelation of a distraught soul; and musically important, as exhibiting a blend of the most primitive with the most modern in music. As a musician, Mahler looks to the past; as a psychological type, he looks to the future; he is more creative in the latter than in the former role, stronger where he appears weaker, but most certainly he was never born to become a classic.
Mahler's treatment of melody is unprecedented; one might suppose that all past developments in this branch of music had been obliterated from his consciousness. Bruckner must, indeed, be excepted; but it is impossible to make a serious comparison between his crystal-clear soul and Mahler's turbid spirit. Bruckner is truly naïf, while Mahler expresses his naïveté and gives it force in the full consciousness of his heritage from Berlioz, Wagner and Liszt.
Mahler desired to communicate his thoughts, unmistakably, in primitive language to the world, and sought to make his melodies stand out as clearly as possible. As a conductor he bent his energies to the absolute elucidation of the meaning of a work--just as, when writing letters, he tended almost morbidly to underline what he thought essential; and, in developing a theme, his aim was ever to convey it to the mind with emphatic clearness. To achieve this, he makes every part sing. In Wagner, otherwise so unlike him, this same emphasis of the melody sometimes occurs (for instance, in the last act of Siegfried), but Mahler, with his nervous temperament and acute sensitiveness to sound, goes much further in the attempt to express his naïveté in the most forcible style he could find. One repeatedly hears this style, which somewhat destroys the unity of his work, called primitive; but its artlessness is in reality the latest product of a long course of development, a blend of the conscious and the unconscious, a nervous hypersensitiveness always on the watch to reject the fortuitous in the performance, yet unwilling to take the printed score as final. The tone-value peculiar to an instrument, its graduated unisono, its registers, the independence of the wood-wind, the ingenious use of percussion instruments, the curious attraction of the D and E flat clarinets, the revaluation of certain formerly merely accessory instruments of the orchestra, such as the harp as a solo instrument, and, last but not least, the tender and searching study of violin tone (for instance, in the Fourth Symphony), all this, and more, under the constant direction of innumerable expression-marks, secures the singing of the instruments. This over-emphasis is, as a matter of fact, not due to the modern temperament, but to a highly sensitive ear; for colour, as colour, is not sought after; and a haze over details resulting from colouring is as much shunned in the "vertical" treatment as any substitution of colour for development. On the contrary, the development is prolonged, curtailment of expression being no part of Mahler's plan. Excitable as he is, he is in no hurry when it is a question of clearness. The fanatic objectivity with which he conducted Wagner's work he applies to his own compositions. He will allow nothing to oppose his progress. Possessed by the spirit of primitive music, directed to ethical and metaphysical ends, he is determined that his titanic schemes shall be fully worked out.
Yet it is remarkable how his plans are crossed, through the contradictions of his own nature. The plastic emergence of a melody, however fundamental, into prominence, is not sufficient matter for an entire symphony, particularly when the composer's almost hysterical frenzy is bound to cause certain abruptnesses. A sudden outcry rings through the orchestraone recalls Berlioz--and for the moment all melodious beauty is lost; or again, a tornado of percussion instruments, meant to signify "world-music," almost takes away one's breath, or a shake, in which even the trombones participate, whispers some deep secret. Such abruptnesses, arising in Mahler's nervous temperament, pierce the very vitals of his works. Moreover, the melody is too diffuse to admit of a balanced development. Each part is tuneful, but we get no nearer to polyphony. The work becomes markedly homophonic, the "vertical" treatment dominates, and even colour as colour becomes more prominent than the composer intends. A confusion of styles becomes increasingly obvious, revealing Mahler's lacerated soul and the lack of organic unity in his symphonies. There is, however, a true world of music in his restless dynamic orchestration, a sincerity of feeling which not even theatrical pathos can disguise, perhaps because Mahler always took the theatre in dead earnest.
The clarity with which Mahler's melodies are set forth exposes the carelessness of their construction. The echoing or borrowing of an idea may be justified by its successful adaptation to the new context, and hunting for resemblances and coincidences is in any case a thankless task; but it must be admitted that Mahler was an unusually open and shameless plagiarist, often making no effort at all even to develop on his own lines the thoughts he took from others. Had he been a composer of programme-music, a colourist, the underlying idea of his compositions would have been comparatively unimportant; but he was on his own showing an "absolute" musician. He paid Beethoven and Wagner the naïf tribute of borrowing their ideas; it is a striking instance of the confusion between originality and imitativeness in his nature. He expended little trouble on his melodies, taking them at random from nature, from folk-songs and dances. Occasionally such a theme passes, in the course of a symphony, through most astonishing metamorphoses, worthy of a primitive fairytale--the cuckoo's cry in the First Symphony is an example; but this is exceptional, a somewhat too obvious emotionalism usually working against this method of treatment. This brings us once more to the question, "What was the value of the underlying idea in Mahler's work?" Mahler's over-subtle reasoning, his passionate grappling with universal concepts, his God-seeking idealism, his musicianship, all determined the form and outline of his symphonic work; but organic unity ultimately depends on creative imagination in the whole and in every part. Our admiration for Mahler's work need not blind us to its weak points. It has been suggested that an architect has the right to do as he will with his building materials, however poor in themselves these may be. This is a possible, though not, perhaps, quite a satisfactory, way of judging a composer of a definitely architectural type, but Mahler's work shows architectural intention without adequate accomplishment, and its essential weakness, careless selection of material, cannot be disguised. There is no other composer whose work can so little endure adaptation to the pianoforte, and it is better not to subject it to this test. In this medium, the Third Symphony, great revelation of nature, loses both brilliance and impressiveness, and sounds appallingly thin.
It is unjust to Mahler to represent him as a great architectural composer, exercising absolute control over his own thoughts; he is, rather, a most striking example of unresolved complexes. Regarded in this light we realise that his is a nature of intermingled greatness and littleness unparalleled in our time; but we cannot for that reason throw off his spell. By the passionate determination, the fiery earnestness with which he seeks a way to the hearts and minds of his fellows, he is, and will remain, a compelling force.
It is recognised that song is the germ of Mahler's work. It seems, indeed, his fate that song and symphony shall fight against each other, that memories of a song shall constantly intrude in his symphonic work, yet the best in his work, and in his life, was nevertheless built up on song. His tendency to make musical instruments "sing" arose from his love of the human voice, and even in composing a symphony he relied, according to his own confession, in some way or other, on words. Mahler's songs are rooted in nature and imagination; they are a way of escape for his restless stormy spirit back to peace and childhood. He finds his home in natural sounds and in the voices of mankind, particularly in the gentle melancholy of folk-song, which expressed for him the fate of his race, its heritage of oppression and pain. Thus it was that he found the underlying meaning of the Lieder aus des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Wonder-born), which appealed to the Faust in him; he here achieved a marvellous, a unique, mating of nature with poetry, of music with words. Even here, the contradictions of Ms nature are apparent, for only when he worked on the smallest scale did he attain perfect coherence. Homesickness, restlessness, produce here wonderful and dynamic effects; voices and orchestra work in closest collaboration. Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen (Where the high-toned Trumpets Blow) and Revelge are intensely moving; but in Des 4nionius Fischpredigt (St. Anthony Preaching to the Fishes) is something grotesque and eerie; a shadow falls suddenly, and the laughter has a hollow ring.
In this last song originated the Scherzo of the Second-the C Minor Symphony -- Mahler's finest, if not his most popular, work. Alternating moods, sorrow, clamour, dread, exhaustion, sweetness, the pathos which culminates in the Resurrection Chorus, are powerfully expressed orchestrally, through unprecedented gradations of tempo and intensity, through significant pauses, which give promise of the soaring effects of his Ninth Symphony. Nevertheless, Mahler's strength and weakness are at grips here, even more than elsewhere. The C Minor Symphony is characterised by grandeur of conception and a feebleness of execution, which even beauty of sound and strength of emotion cannot disguise; yet, after all the intricacies of a kind of broadly decorative Wagnerianism, we return again and again with delight to the song-begotten Scherzo with its irresistible eerie fancifulness.
As the notes of the idyllic Fourth Symphony die away, Death beckons, and the shades which hover about the souls of men give Kindertotenlieder to the world. One by one they come, leaving Rückart's words far behind, penetrating deep into the abyss of bitterness. The friendly aspects of nature and home vanish temporarily, to return once more in the remaining symphonies. Deprived of the help of words, Mahler wrestles more laboriously than ever with the form of his work. He had always tormented himself over the inversion and re-arrangement of the movements. Such restless, uncertain experiments are the natural result of lack of coherence in the elements on which the work is founded. The Fifth and Seventh Symphonies are contrapuntal in design; but here too the clash between homophony and polyphony is something more than a technical problem, and Mahler could not solve it. It is the result of interwoven natural and metaphysical concepts in the composer who, on a sure foundation of song, built up a more elaborate but less stable musical superstructure.
In the Eighth Symphony, Mahler musters his imaginative powers afresh to express a comprehensive philosophy, a faith strong enough to conquer the inner contradictions of his nature. The symphony is written for a double four-part mixed chorus, a boys' choir and seven solo voices and orchestra, and suggests to us a blend of ancient and modern--Hrabanus Maurus and Goethe, the Veni Creator and the closing scene in the second part of Faust. In spite of many beauties, the previous purely instrumental symphonies were orchestrally obscure through lack of complete adaptation of form to idea, but here words are introduced and dominate the work with excellent results, satisfying, apparently, some essential need in the composer. His technique acquires ease and sweep, mastering all contrapuntal problems, and successfully conveying the peculiar emotional quality, at once theatrical and sincere, which was natural to the man. In the Accende lumen sensibus is expressed awe in the presence of Omnipotence; in the Gloria, the blessedness of fulfilment and the ardour of the words is magnificently echoed by the music. In the second part, which has more numbers and is richer in shading--the chorus of anchorites and the trio for female voices are examples--the union of words and music is less natural, more forced.
This symphony was, in a sense, a triumph, but it was the work of a man who had suffered too much, who, having summoned every power for this effort, was exhausted, and knew it. The strain had at last broken his spirit and his heart. Thereafter his music has the pathos of a voice from the grave. Das Lied von der Erde is Mahler's most perfect work. It is a symphony--or rather a song-sequence with symphonic interludes--based on Hans Bethge's version of some Chinese lyrics, breathing the spirit of isolation, of weariness, of worldsorrow, of youth and beauty, long past and remembered dimly in dreams. Emotion is stilled; nature, home, beauty, are but echoes, and Mahler's utter sincerity stands out, flooding the dark places of the mind with autumnal light. The theme is blurred, but the music is luminously expressive. Something of folk-song, something of the third act of Tristan, something of Berlioz Scène aux champs is there, coloured by the sorrows of a whole race; yet the work has its own strongly-marked individuality; it is such music as can spring only from a fine humanity. The instrumentation is extremely simple; laughter and lamentation are expressed by the wood-wind until near the end, when the oboe proclaims utter loneliness. Dusk falls over the landscape and over the spirit; the tenor voice has long since sunk into silence, and the last word is left to a contralto voice (or baritone). It is an unforgettable experience to hear in that Ewig, rendered by such a singer as Mme. Cahier, in that mysterious, almost supernatural landscape, interpreted by such a conductor as Bruno Walter, the farewell of a lonely spirit to a world in which it has dwelt as an alien. Rightly understood, this work is a true reconciliation between homophony and polyphony; it attains harmonic freedom and realises the aspirations of the modern spirit.
The Lied von der Erde is Mahler's real farewell to the world, although it was followed by a Ninth Symphony and he had sketched a tenth. The Ninth Symphony is apparently a return to the world and to nature; it begins, as of old, with a march, but a suggestion of the uncanny is ever present, mingling with the country-dances, dominating the rondo and the burlesque. There is a long and wearisome adagio, in which any final close is avoided. The parts move harshly; but how far this was intentional it is impossible to say; Mahler himself did not consider this work final; but it cannot be doubted that, simple as he was, he was not unaware of the problems of modern music, nor of its possibilities as a means of expression. Mahler was a close friend of Arnold Schönberg.
Mahler is a curiosity among composers of the present epoch. He never wholly succeeded in expressing his ideas; his art turned, Janus-like, to both past and future; it was compounded of both great and petty qualities. As an ardent imitative composer, he admired and lived in other men's work, and could not escape from exterior influence when doing original work. Nor dared he forget it if he could; for the genius for detail which inspired him as conductor was the same which drove him to creative expression; it was the life of his orchestration, the means by which he made his melodies tell. His love of pure music militated against his metaphysical leanings. His work was derived from many sources, and his art was more varied than that of any contemporary; shining metal mingled with the dross. He was theatrical yet sincere, wrote programme-music without a programme, and his elaborate constructions were primitively inspired. For the most part, his work belongs to the older school of music, though after a fashion of its own; but his farewell, the Lied von der Erde, the perfect type of his song composition, conceived in the secrecy of chamber-music, is essentially, though not aggressively, modern.
The future fame of Mahler's less modern music is uncertain. It depends largely for its effect on interpretation by a conductor and orchestra possessed by the same instinctive feeling which inspired its composition, and thus enabled to bring out its characteristic blend of vocal and instrumental music.
Mahler's intensity, his passionate gestures, appear to many a young conductor a tempting highway to popularity. It is a common experience to hear an echo of Mahler, as man and kapellmeister, from those, whether qualified or unqualified, who set out to interpret him. Moreover, Mahler has not been overlooked in the general scramble for pecuniary profits. Mistaken friends, who fail to distinguish between the man and the composer, and others who see Mm as a profitable speculation, have endangered his fame by indiscriminate praise.
As regards the more modern portion of his work, with its closely-interwoven vocal and instrumental music, its future appreciation is assured. Nevertheless, his life was greater than his work, which was for the most part baulked of fulfilment by imitativeness; the man himself retains our hearts.
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