"The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets" -- Poppy Z. Brite.
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold..." -- Yeats.
"Make no mistake, this was the soundtrack of a decadent age in its later stages of unraveling, even as unsuspecting Europe celebrated itself as a beacon of civilization, blissfully ignorant of the horrific calamities about to be unleashed, totally unaware that a whole way of life was about to end." -- John McManamy
"Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light." -- Dylan Thomas
"Ours is the century of death, and Mahler is its musical prophet." -- Leonard Bernstein.
That last quote comes from one of Leonard Bernstein's famous Harvard Series Lectures on music, that particular one about Mahler's 9th. Last year, I uploaded the important parts of that lecture to Youtube for a diary on Mahler. You can listen to it here(1), here(2), and here(3), but do it later. We have a lot to wade through yet.
Before we get started, let's establish ground rules. NO ABUSIVENESS, which we have had before when I have written about Mahler. If you vehemently disagree with me in some way about Mahler, and you can't express your disagreement respectfully, then either keep it to yourself or write your own diary.
Music is not a universal language. It's a Rorschach test.
Rorschach Test Inkblot #1
In my first year of college, I took Psych 101, a nice place to hide out until you get a major. I remember the Rorschach test they gave us in class, using that very same picture above. I told the instructor that, to me, it looked like "two bears dancing." He paused for a second, then nodded his head, and said, "Oh. Animal motion. Interesting." He was supposed to say, "Right you are, Mr. Dumbo!" Recently, the whole Rorschach test, which used to be copyrighted, with all the pictures, was posted to Wikipedia, where I cribbed the above the photo. To my disgust, I find that most people (53%) see a bat, butterfly, or moth. What's the matter with them? Can't they see the two bears? They're whirling around in a circle with each other, heads and arms asplay. And if you look very closely (I just noticed this today), you can see a little conductor in the middle, conducting their dance. A conductor who has no head.
Well, I always thought my answer was brilliant. According to Wiki, part of the test is to see how much elaboration you invest and insert into the narrative of the picture. Which, really, is just a blob of ink on a folded piece of paper. So my answer is brilliant.
Harold Schonberg, who used to be Music Editor for the New York Times, wrote a book, Lives of the Famous Composers. In it, he commented (and I paraphrase from memory), "Any music editor can tell you how if you criticize Mahler, you'll get tons of hate mail that you wouldn't get if it were any other composer." This is a composer who generates a great deal of loyalty in his fan base, of whom I count myself a member in good standing of almost forty years. Listening to people speak about how they come to love Mahler is a bit akin to listening to people speak of a religious conversion. I almost wrote just now, "Or of the first time they fell in love," but no, that doesn't nearly catch the intensity of the bond between Mahler-fan and Mahler-music.
And I have peculiar ideas of my own about Mahler, most of them projections, I admit. If the music of Mozart and Bach hints at the existence of some objective ideal outside the self, like a Platonic form, Mahler's musical world offers us a glimpse into a subjective, an inner world that reflects violent passions, ecstasy, terror, and angst.
Angst? Oh my. I swear, I just now googled Mahler+Angst. 595,000 hits. The first hit was for the entry on Wikipedia (how could I ever do these diaries without Wiki?!) "Angst."
I don't know who writes this stuff. It's not what I would put in an encyclopedia entry for "Angst," but now that I've got it, here it is...
... Classical music
Angst in serious musical composition has been a reflection of the times. Musical composition embodying angst as a primary theme have primarily come from European Jewish composers such as Gustav Mahler and Alban Berg, written during the period of great persecution of the Jewish people shortly before and during the period of Nazi activity in Europe. A notable exception is the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich whose symphonies use the theme of angst in post-World War II compositions depicting Russian strife during the war. However, it is the Jewish artists, Gustav Mahler and Franz Kafka in music and literature that have embraced the theme of angst so highly in their work that they have become synonymous with the term to the point of popular joking and cartoons today.
I've always felt a strong connection between Mahler and Kafka, although I'll say I feel a bit uncomfortable that somebody put all the above under the Wiki heading of angst. I suppose anybody who felt compelled to write the Wiki entry on Angst probably is already a Mahler fan. But, wait! It says popular joking and cartoons? Huh. Okay, let's google Mahler+Angst+Cartoons, because that's a new one for me. And I find...
Damn... You know, this is how I get late with my diaries. They start to write themselves. It's a dumb cartoon, interesting only because it exists at all.
I feel intimidated writing about Mahler's 9th, although it's a symphony I know very well. My old CSO-Georg Solti vinyl of it was worn to a snap-crackle-pop nub decades ago. I learned long ago how hard it was to proselytize Mahler, but oh, how I tried! If you have not been exposed to the structure of long music, it's an impenetrable mess. But if you've been here since the first diary, then even if you've never heard it, you've been shepherded to where you're ready for it. And this is not harder music than anything we've had in the past couple of months.
The thing that is most different about Mahler's music isn't the musical style, but the narrative content. This is a symphony that forces us into realms of philosophy and religion and psychology and a deeper discussion of mortality and the nature of the human condition than you may have ever expected from a piece of music. That is a huge accomplishment. However, it thus lends itself to multiple contradictory interpretations of its meaning.
Before I talk about the Ninth, let me give you a little background by playing a small portion from his Symphony #8, the most life-positive piece of music Mahler ever composed. I offer this as contrast to the Ninth.
Excerpt from Mahler Symphony #8, Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein
A little background on this. The lyrics tell the story of Faust, redeemed by the pure love of the Eternal Feminine (the Madonna), near the end of the symphony. The orchestra becomes hushed. A spotlight falls on a soprano deliberately placed far off-stage, her voice echoey and angelic. And she sings, "Komm! Komm! Hebe dich zu hohern spharen!" "Come! Come! Raise yourself to the eternal sphere!"
Maybe we'll have a diary about this work someday, but I offer it only to show you part of the arc that led to the Ninth, because Mahler's music is funny that way, nine very long symphonies (eleven if you count the unfinished tenth and Das Lied) of an intense personal nature that form the arc of a life. Theodore Adorno describes the Symphony #8 as the end of Mahler's middle period. With his next work, Das Lied von der Erde, and with the Ninth, we enter Mahler's late period, a period both cosmic and bitter that reaches new levels of introspection, exceeding even Beethoven's late quartets.
With Beethoven, the music explains itself. Mahler's music on the other hand, seems to tell a story, albeit we don't know what story, and can't even agree amongst ourselves on what that story could be. Something happens in his music beyond just the musical form; the narrative of the music dwarfs the music. In his early symphonies, Mahler provided programs explaining what it was about, although Mahler's programs are kind of lame and put uncomfortable boundaries on its meaning. Beginning with his Fourth symphony, he gave up programs (except when the music had lyrics, of course), leaving them open to personal interpretation. It was a much cleaner way to do things.
So what is the Mahler Symphony #9 about? We have to use that word, about, when speaking about Mahler. There is dissension here, so I'll try to cover the main theories.
1. It is about death. In fact, the whole symphony has been compared before to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's stages of dying. There is support for this in the fact that Mahler's health, a heart condition, had taken a turn for the worse, and there had been other family problems. Supposedly, Mahler, foreseeing his own demise, composed the works of this late period with an eye towards his end and the next life.
2. It is a farewell. In a way, this is probably the same thing, with the same justifications. However, we can point here to the lyrics of Das Lied von der Erde (the final movement titled, aptly enough, The Farewell). And in the Ninth, final movement, which we will hear soon, he quotes a melody by Beethoven from his Piano Sonata #26, the Adieux sonata. And if that isn't enough, he flat out writes the word Farewell into the score.
3. It is a prophecy of the end of an era. One version of this, by Leonard Bernstein, is that Mahler, who was friends with and supportive of the early German Expressionist composers like Arnold Schoenberg, foresaw the impending demise of music itself as we know it. Or to be more precise, as we knew it up until then. Mahler's music may be difficult for some people, at first, but it is clearly tonal with lots of sweet, sweet cadences, the mother's milk of music. As he entered his late period, though, Mahler's music became what we might call slightly more experimental. The tonality becomes tenuous at times, sometimes totally breaking down. In the finale of the Ninth, we will hear some of this, especially after the last climax, as the harmony wanders away at points, disintegrating into atonal mist, like lost balloons floating away.
4. Another version of "end of an era" would have it that his music is recognition of the dissolution of Western civilization. Theodore Adorno in his book, Mahler: A Musical Physignomy (which I only recently realized, hey, I read this book in college), says, "That the Jew Mahler scented Fascism decades ahead, as Kafka did in the piece on the synagogue, is no doubt the real source of the despair of the wayfarer." A quite offensive quote it would be but for the fact that Adorno was Jewish and a late German escapee emigrant.
5. Mahler was coming unglued. And this is sort of where I lean. There are no shortages of psychological profiles of Mahler, including the recent film, Mahler on the Couch. It has always interested me that I hear something unbalanced in Mahler. Where so many people find in Mahler a prophet, a guru, someone who has looked over the other side of life's travails and found peace that he expressed through his music, I hear a troubled man trying to find peace and doing so with great difficulty. The peace he finds, when he does find it (as in the previous Eighth Symphony excerpt), is sublime, and that is one of the things that makes Mahler's music so great. But in Mahler's late period, there is a new, extra level of bitterness tainting the peace. The music has a confused, mixed message, and I suppose it's not surprising then that we can hear the same music multiple ways.
This image of Mahler as neurotic Jew that keeps popping up, a kind of musical Woody Allen stereotype -- shit, it's even in the Wikipedia Angst article, remember? -- may have some basis. There has never been a shortage of troubled artists and musicians in the world. And there are Jewish musical elements (this is debatable) in his music. But there is nothing genetically neurotic about Jews.
What is genetic, however, is bipolar disorder, and here we get into another realm of interpretation. Kay Redfield Jamison is the author of several books on bipolar disorder, including An Unquiet Mind, a semi-autobiographical book my own psychiatrist wanted me to read. In her book, Touched by Fire, she explores the relationship of bipolar disorder to creativity and analyzes Gustav Mahler and his music in this light. She points, for example, to this letter by Mahler:
When the abominable tyranny of our modern hypocrisy and mendacity has driven me to the point of dishonoring myself, when the inextricable web of conditions in art and life has filled my heart with disgust for all that is sacred to me -- art, love, religion -- what way out is there but self-annihilation? Wildly, I wrench at the bonds that chain me to the loathsome, insipid swamp of this life, and with all the strength of despair I cling to sorrow, my only consolation. Then all at once the sun shines upon me and gone is the ice that encased my heart again. I see the blue sky and the flowers swaying in the wind and my mocking laughter dissolves in tears of love. Then I needs must love this world with all its deceit and frivolity and its eternal laughter.
It's enough to give you whiplash reading it. He goes from wrenching at his bonds to talk of suicide to clinging to his sorrow to the blue sky and its flowers. And then he must need love the world, a world that he knocks in the very same sentence for its deceit and frivolity and laughter...
Mahler wrote that when he was eighteen years old. Not a famous composer, not married to an unfaithful wife, no known health problems, no religious conversions. But, oh yeah, those of us that know his music can match the letter of his youth to the music, even the music of his late period. With a few tweaks, the above letter could be the lyrics of Das Lied von der Erde. This is just the way Mahler was.
Kay Redfield Jamison explains this as bipolar disorder, in particular, Cyclothymia, also called rapid-cycling. The other types of bipolar disorder are Bipolar I, which is classic manic-depression, and you can usually tell a Bipolar I because of the public wreckage they make of their lives; and Bipolar II, which is a milder form that shows itself as recurring depression interspersed with periods of great productivity and joy. Beethoven, for instance, has long been thought to be a Bipolar II.
And yours truly is a bipolar II. I was first diagnosed back around 1986, after I had experienced almost a whole year of the most crushing depression of my life, a depression that set in at a time when I was making the most money I had ever made and had clients out the yin-yang. Nervous breakdown, some said. You never take a vacation. Take a vacation, two weeks, four weeks.
The thing is, it wasn't the first time. My first breakdown happened in junior high school, the eighth grade, which, conveniently, was a time when I didn't have bills to pay.
Bipolar depression is a different kind of animal from typical depression. Even though it may be temporary, it is deeper, darker, and scarier.
Let's ignore for the moment the temptation that bipolar sufferers may have to want to give honorary memberships in their club to famous artists that may not deserve it. Even if Mahler himself was not bipolar, his music can be described as bipolar. I think, perhaps, that is why it has always had an appeal to me, although I'm more of a Mozart guy as I get older. I never heard solutions to problems in Mahler. I never heard a guru offering me a way out. What I heard, what I connected with, and still connect with in his music, is the touch of madness, the seduction of ecstasy mixed with terror (and the 9th finale is a primo example of this). At times, listening to Mahler is like standing on the edge of a tall cliff, one without rails, and wondering if the wind will blow you away.
6. Mahler's 9th is about existential crisis. To quote Mahler expert Deryck Cooke (who also first completed Mahler's Tenth Symphony). I can only find an indirect quote:
Perhaps Deryk Cooke said it best: "Although the Ninth is Mahler's ... dark night of the soul, ... his unquenched love of life still shines through, thanks to the capacity of great music for expressing contrary feelings simultaneously." No composer conveys this duality of expression as masterfully as Mahler.
Dark night of the soul is a classic way of saying the same thing. From our friendly Wikipedia, on Existential Crisis:
An existential crisis is a stage of development at which an individual questions the very foundations of his or her life: whether their life has any meaning, purpose or value.[1] This issue of the meaning and purpose of existence is the topic of the philosophical school of existentialism.
[...]
Description
An existential crisis may result from:
The sense of being alone and isolated in the world;
A new-found grasp or appreciation of one's mortality;
Understanding that one's life has no purpose or external meaning;
Awareness of one's freedom and the consequences of accepting or rejecting that freedom;
An extremely pleasurable or hurtful experience that leaves one seeking meaning;
An existential crisis is often provoked by a significant event in the person's life — marriage, separation, major loss, the death of a loved one, a life-threatening experience, a new love partner, psychoactive drug use, adult children leaving home, reaching a personally-significant age (turning 20, turning 30, turning 40, etc.), etc. Usually, it provokes the sufferer's introspection about personal mortality, thus revealing the psychological repression of said awareness.
"The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets." So, is this what Mahler felt? Is this what The Ninth is really about? Those two questions may be less important than Is this what we feel while listening to it?
Mahler's earlier music periods had more uplifting and optimistic endings than the Ninth or Das Lied. The Ninth does not. It bombards us with double-messages. Listen closely, soon, during the most glorious full-orchestra parts of the Ninth finale, and you'll notice the troubling notes in the harmony that serve to undercut the message. The brilliance of Mahler was the delicate way in that he avoided resolving all these things.
There is a new edge of doubt characterizing Mahler's late period. That certainty of the grandeur of heaven becomes submerged under the immediacy of death and the absurdity it posed to make of life. In the Eighth symphony, Mahler showed us the gates of heaven opening. In the Ninth, we only hear, at the very end, death, and it is a very lonely death, the death of a roadkill, too tired at the end to protest its own demise.
Having said all that, having dissected the meaning of the music to death and taken a survey of all the autopsies, what should we do? I suggest: Forget it all. Forget every numbered point. Well, stow it away, then. Because it's all dross. What is important is the music. I'm proud enough to show off just how much I know about what Mahler's music is supposed to mean, but it's all subjective bullshit.
What amazes me, what amazes me, what really, really amazes me is not that any of the above could be true or false, but that all of the above can be said about a work of music, dots placed on paper to represent vibrations in the air. Music is an abstract art form! No, what amazes me is that Mahler composed some thing that so many people could argue so vehemently about the meaning of. That's an accomplishment. That is stunning.
Compare music to literature for a moment. If we argue about the meaning of The Fool in King Lear, we might turn to Shakespeare and ask him to tell us who and what The Fool meant, and we might be able to believe what he said because it's art work based on language and the concepts of language. But Mahler, were he here, could spend all day telling us what his symphony was supposed to mean, and at the endi, it would be totally irrelevant. Perhaps interesting, but irrelevant. Because the music has to speak for itself.
Before we begin, let's break down the music a little
The musical glue that holds the fourth movement together is this little musical figure played in the intro, the very first measure.
I've shaded it in pink. No, I don't expect you to read music, and especially not the above mess, but I think, maybe as it flies by you, you'll be able to identify that little four note wiggle. As da-da-da-DAH was to Beethoven's Fifth, this wiggle is to the Mahler 9th finale. It shows up dozens of times in drastically different forms, sometimes in the melody, sometimes buried deeply in the turgid harmony. And it ends the symphony, as well, giving us our final cadence.
After the short intro begins the beautiful main melody. Which has the wiggle buried in it. It will repeat through a number of variations, building up in intensity to a climax before the first interlude, a subdued, colder, more abstract melody. After the interlude, more variations on the main melody, working up to another climax, and then another interlude.
Then the main melody returns, working itself into the wrenching climax of the symphony. But at that point the musical fabric begins to break down in a disintegration process, losing its propulsion, its energy, its volume, its harmony coming unglued, as if parts of the orchestra are quietly abandoning the battlescene.
The ending itself is very slow, and in an orchestral hall, very, very intense. It seems to be coming to an end, but it lingers, lingers, the violas fighting, resisting the end. Long-held notes high in the violins create a sense of tension around this ending. The music slows, slows, and slows again, the last page taking five minutes to perform.
I said that in an orchestral hall, this is intense, but I admit some of that tension may be lost while listening to it over the internet where you can open up another window or write an email while listening to it. And I am limiting this to just the twenty-five minute final movement out of context because we don't have the space and I don't have the horsepower to break up and explain this whole ninety minute symphony. I hope, though, that it will inspire you, intrigue you, or touch you enough to make you want to explore the whole symphony on your own.
For today's Mahler piece, I broke apart and uploaded the final movement of the Ninth performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed by Georg Solti. Solti was long believed to be the definitive Mahler conductor. I tried hard to find a good recording already on Youtube to go with, but couldn't find anything already online with high enough quality of recording and conducting.
Mahler Symphony #9, final movement, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Georg Solti (1 of 2)
Introductory theme (0:00 to 0:23).
Notice the four note wiggle I marked in pink, between 0:07 and 0:10. That's the glue that holds this movement together.
At 0:23, the main theme begins in strings alone, comforting and cradling. The harmony is rich and dense. After a brief interruption by the bassoon at 1:23, the main theme continues.
At 2:27, the theme begins again, led by a beautiful horn solo. The theme continues, but the harmony has become even denser. It reaches a small climax at 3:25, and here we hear Mahler abusing the violins, soaring them out of their natural range, making them almost shrieky.
At 4:05, we begin the first interlude, a contrasting melody. Just strings, faint and high above the very deep, growly, bassoon. In contrast with the main melody, it is somewhat cold and abstract. Enigmatic. At 5:04, a solo violin performs this theme, giving it a tragic passion. This theme will return again in the second interlude.
At 6:30, the warmer main theme returns, announced by a trombone. And with it, the harmony has become even more dense, ratcheting up the complexity.
And oh, what a sweet climax at 7:30! The warmth, the passion pours forth in a flood.
After another, small climax at 8:30, we begin another variation on the main theme. This one less joyous, more troubling in its harmony.
The horns enter, pulling the music in a different direction. It is a seething cauldron of music, too many things to be heard at one time. And at 9:26, we have yet another climax, louder and more complex.
And suddenly it hushes, giving way to a peaceful variation on the main theme in just the violins, at 9:54. The music is comforting again, but the intrusions of chromaticisms in the music slightly undercut the peaceful message.
At 11:06, the main theme is passed over to a solo violin, a simplified romantic variation. And this serves as a kind of coda, a separator before the second (and last) interlude), which will begin in the next clip.
Clip 2 of 2
At 0:25, the second interlude begins, the cold, abstract interlude. This time it is almost a chamber music piece, performed by only a few solo instruments while the orchestra sits idle. The down time here is important, because it is setting us up for the coming return of the main theme in the greatest climax of the symphony.
2:29. The main theme returns. Troubled at first, it soon becomes ecstatic, sexual in its intensity, as the whole orchestra gradually joins in
At 3:21, we have the grandest restatement of the main theme yet, but the rhythm is broken and confused by the thick polyphonic soup.
And this leads to the earth-shattering climax of the symphony at 3:41. The horns bully their way to the forefront, restating the middle of the main theme (and, notice, it's the part that has that wiggly pink motif), the drums rumble, the cymbals crash.
And here, at 4:11, an amazing thing happens. In the midst of this very dramatic climax, the rest of the orchestra drops out, leaving the violins alone, way above the comfortable part of their playing range, shrieking, like air raid sirens, long held notes. And to me, this is terrifying, soul-crushing music. This is passion and terror and ecstasy all mixed together. And we wonder what's going to happen next as these long held siren notes gradually settle downwards.
At 4:36, the main theme returns again, it's final full orchestra statement. At 6:30, it repeats again, but now! Notice how the solidity of the music has begun to disintegrate. Bernstein calls this the "failed climax."
In Bernstein's analyses of Mahler's Ninth, he spends most of his time analyzing the music from this point onwards. And if you weren't looking at the time bar on the clip, you might convince yourself that it's almost over. In the context of a ninety minute symphony, it is, but the last five minutes of this symphony take up a full page of the score because Mahler slows the music down, slows it again, and again, reducing the orchestration, making what was once so vertically dense threadbare.
At 10:09, the most touching part of the whole symphony, as the violins try to play the theme one last time, but part of it wanders away, distracted. Or as Bernstein would say, shedding its earthly bonds.
The strings struggle now for one last cadence. And it eludes them, slipping from major to minor and trying again, and again.
At 12:24, it finally achieves its cadence, its musical resolution, the violas ending it for us with the wiggly four note motif I highlighted earlier, but now played so slowly, so softly it's almost invisible.
And that's the end of Mahler's Ninth Symphony.
Next week: I don't know! This diary took a lot out of me, not so much emotionally (I've had thirty five years to think about how to explain Mahler's Ninth), but just in organizing my thoughts into something coherent, something that wouldn't be a Bernstein rehash. I've been making bookmarks for a diary on Bach fugues, so that may be coming soon.