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Resurrect ME!: Christianity and Judaism in Mahler's Second Symphony
Allen Gimbel

Hendrix College, Conway, AR, 3/25/2010

This lecture was commissioned by the Crain-Maling Center for Jewish Culture, Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas, in conjunction with a performance of Mahler's Second Symphony by the Arkansas Symphony. The lecture was given March 25, 2010. Performers for the lecture were mezzo-soprano Martha Antolik and pianist Norman Boehm. Roman numerals refer to movements of the Mahler (you will need to score with measure numbers to negotiate this lecture). Other works referred to are the Mozart Requiem, Mahler's First Symphony, Bach's B minor Mass, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Wagner's Siegfried, and the Dies Irae chant. Some of these passages need to be transposed as directed.
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Resurrect ME!: Christianity and Judaism in Mahler's Second Symphony
Allen Gimbel
Hendrix College, Conway, AR

[I: m. 1]

Mahler's Second Symphony (1888-1894) opens with fortissimo octave G's in the upper strings, played tremolando-- that is, "trembling". This Wagnerian gesture (and it is significantly a Wagnerian gesture) will strike fear into the heart of any mortal man. Fear and trembling. And then:

[I: mm. 2-5]

2: C-B-C-D-Eb (pause):ll (slow down to --)

[Mozart: Requiem, mm.1-8, transposed to Cm]

Mozart's Requiem, that composer's final work, opens with that phrase, the first five notes of which are the same as those that open Mahler's Symphony. The choral basses enter with that phrase, singing the words "Requiem aeternam": "Eternal rest".

[Mozart mm.8-10, transposed to Cm]

In Iglau, the town where Mahler grew up in Moravia, there was a Catholic church (near the local synagogue -- Jews and Catholics coexisted peacefully there at the time) where the talented young Mahler sang in the choir. Peter Franklin, in his recent "Life of Mahler", points out that that choir had in its repertoire "large-scale works like Beethoven's 'Christ on the Mount of Olives' and the Mozart Requiem (20)".
And now the entire first phrase of the Mahler:

[I: mm. 2-5]

And then:

[I: m.5 pickup-m.8 (fade)]
G-C-G-C-G-C-G-C-B-C-D-C-B-C...
G-C-G-C-G-C-G-C

In his previous Symphony (the First), Mahler makes special use of this figure: oscillating fourths accompany the following tune (transposed here to Cm), in the rhythm of a funeral march.

[Sym. 1: III opening]

"Frére Jacques" is, in the German version, "Brother Martin", but the text is the same:

"Brother (Friar) Martin, Brother Martin,
Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping?
Morning bells [that is, church bells] are ringing, Morning bells are ringing,
Ding,dang,dong, Ding,dang, dong."

And following these fourths we get:

[I: m. 5 pickup-7]: G-C-B-C-D-C-B-C

Taking the C as an axis, we have a note to the left of it (B), a note to the right of it (D), and a resolution back to the beginning. If you use your heart as the axis, we have the traditional gesture symbolizing the Cross, and indeed this is a classic musical symbol of that Christian icon. [A famous standard repertoire example is the opening of Bach's Mass in Bm, the figure appearing, not surprisingly, on the word Kyrie.]

[Bach: Mass in Bm; repeat I: 5 pickup-7]

Franklin reports of a recurring dream Mahler had from the age of 8. He, his favorite brother Ernst, and his dear mother "had been standing at the window of their first floor sitting room when their mother had suddenly exclaimed 'God, what's happening?' as the sky filled with sulfurous mist in a kind of Apocalypse. Then Mahler found himself alone in the marketplace. Through swirling vapor he glimpsed a fearful figure of the Eternal Jew, his coat billowing in the wind in such a way as to suggest a huge hump on his back. Carrying a staff topped with a golden cross (NB), he pursued the fleeing boy and tried to give him a staff before he had awoken with a cry. Mahler interpreted the staff as a symbol of restless wandering -- perhaps we should link this story with his childhood assertion, to the question of a relative about what he would do when he grew up, that he wanted to be 'a martyr'". Keep all this in mind as we proceed. (23)

So a lot happens in the first eight bars of this piece. We are given musical representations of fear, eternal rest, death, and the Cross, which is not only a death symbol (as in grave markers), but also a symbol of (potential) resurrection. That latter notion (Resurrection) is explored virtually immediately in the new contrasting theme that appears in m. 48 along with a magical change of key from the grim C minor to a transcendent, radiant E major, traditionally a key associated with that topic:

[I: m. 48-50]: B-E-F#-G#-A-B-C#-D#-F#-E

We have here a slowly ascending scale (note the direction) with its final note delayed by a leap before its final resolution. This figure is an extremely important one in Mahler, not only in this Symphony, but from this point on in his entire output [British scholar Philip T. Barford published 92 samples from Mahler's symphonies in a 1960 article]. The explicit (i.e. verbal) definition of this figure is withheld until the close of the vocal fourth movement, a song from Mahler's song collection "Des Knaben Wunderhorn": "Urlicht", or "Fundamental Light". That rising figure is that song's last phrase and is given early on in the Symphony as what Wagner would call an example of "Foreboding". [Quote from Wagner article] The text at this point in the song is as follows:

"I am of God and shall return to God! Beloved God!
Dear God will lend me a little light and lead me to EWIG SELIG LEBEN -- Eternal Blessed Life!"

[IV: 54 pickup-68, with soprano] (...F-Gb-Ab-Ab-Bb-C-Eb-Db)

And listen to the accompanying cellos and basses -- there's that reference to the Cross again, which is notably obsessive.

Those that might be put off by the apparently fanciful nature of my working method, should take note of a quote from Mahler's lifelong friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner where she reminisces:

"From earliest childhood, G.(ustav) associated concrete ideas with all compositions. He would think up for himself and recount long stories to do with them, and from time to time he would recite them with musical accompaniment to his parents and to visiting friends of theirs" (Bauer-Lechner, in Lebrecht 14). Thus Mahler really did work this way from childhood, and would not have found it difficult to take up Wagner on this approach, though in the realm of abstract music rather than Opera. Wagner, in outlining his idea of what would become his Leitmotives, wrote "Music cannot think, but she can materialize thoughts... This she can do, however, only when her own manifestment is conditioned by a poetic aim" (Wagner 222). Wagner's poetic aims included things like the Ring, the Rhine River, or hordes of gold; Mahler's poetic aims were perhaps more exclusively abstract in nature: death, the Cross, and eternal life, though both composers had similar life altering aims and Wagner definitely did not shy away from less obviously pictorial symbols. The historical point to be made is that it was Wagner's technique that Mahler borrowed in his construction of his pathbreaking Wagnerian Symphonies.

These particular passages' substantive content raises the following important questions: Is this a Christian tale? Is this a typical Jewish intellectual ruminating on the Christian tradition? And why would Mahler the Jew be so obsessed with Christian materials? Going back to his First Symphony, that work turns out to be an extended meditation on the search for the Holy Grail, the Grail of Wagner's Parsifal, an Easter pageant likewise dealing with the issue of Resurrection. [The climax of that Symphony is in fact on the same notes as Wagner's motive.] (I feel I must report here the almost unbelievable misreadings constantly attached to Mahler's First Symphony -- the Grail motive is followed by the Parsifal Bell Motive, which bears a superficial relationship to a phrase from Handel's Messiah: "the Lord shall reign for ever and ever", but given Mahler's devotion to Nietzsche, that interpretation seems particularly absurd.)

Mahler was a Jew living in 19th-century Vienna, an environment filled with Jewish intellectuals within a dominant Catholic culture beginning to turn the corner away from an inclusive liberalism and into the path that would lead to the Second World War and its Holocaust. Anti-Semitism was common, as it was all over Europe, not to mention the world in general. It was impossible for a Jew in this culture not to feel resistance at some level. As was not uncommon, Mahler felt it necessary to convert to Catholicism in 1897 so he could conduct at the Vienna State Opera. How much this decision was strictly for professional reasons and how much may have been part of a genuine spiritual crisis is fertile ground for speculation. For example, Mahler himself called the action of conversion "self-preservation", while his wife Alma referred to him as "a Christian Jew", which at the very least presupposes some intimate domestic conversation on the topic. Such speculations cannot be reasonably made without careful consideration of Mahler's music itself, which is his chosen communicative language. That language, however, is filled with symbology, and begs for interpretation. Although Mahler did not leave note by note analyses of his work -- and I must stress that he, like any other composer, was under no obligation to do so -- he did tend to use musical symbols that carry text, and it becomes the task of the interpreter to identify these symbols and their associated texts. We have already seen a number of these in the opening of this Symphony: the Mozart Requiem, the death fourths associated with Frere Jacques (and its associated death marches in the First Symphony), the Cross symbol, the eternal life reference from Urlicht. Regarding the latter, note that that motive (that is, the climax of the song with its verbal content attached) takes three quarters of the Symphony to appear in its literal form, but it is hinted at from the very beginning of this work's first movement exposition. Wagner called this procedure "Foreboding" in an essay describing his new system of leitmotives: musical fragments used in his operas to depict his characters' subconscious, as well as elements of past and future events, and the mental life of his characters as events unfold or are recalled over the course of the narratives of these vast works. Wagner felt that this procedure was essentially "symphonic", in that this was a procedure used by the great classical composers in their abstract instrumental works, their symphonies, string quartets, and sonatas. Wagner applied this procedure to musical theater (Opera). Mahler, however, applied Wagner's operatic procedure to the Symphony, essentially returning the favor, as it were. In Leonard Bernstein's words, Mahler was "the operatic symphonist who never wrote an opera" (Bernstein 255). Since so much in this music depends on what is going to happen next in a linear sense, it would seem reasonable to skip all the way to the end of the Second Symphony to see where the narrative is going, so I will commit the unpardonable aesthetic sin of moving directly to the end of this work so we can see exactly what is being foretold. The beginning of the text of Mahler's last movement, an extended work for chorus and orchestra, was written by 18th-century German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (his poem "Resurrection"), with the last 20 lines added by Mahler himself, so he had no qualms of borrowing from this new material to build up the drama of his titanic Symphony. The content of this combined text follows:

[Klopstock:] "Arise! Yes, Arise, my dust, after a short rest.
Undying life! Undying life will be granted by He who called [us].
What you have sown [that is, created] will bloom again.
The Lord of Harvests goes forth
And binds the sheaves of those who have died!"

[Mahler:] "Oh, believe, my heart, oh believe: you have lost nothing!
What is yours, yours, yes yours is what you have longed for!
Yours, what you have loved, what you have struggled for!
Oh, believe: you were not born in vain!
You have not lived, suffered in vain!
What is past must be forgotten!
What has gone will rise again!
Hear (auf zu beben)! Prepare to live!
Oh pain! All-pervasive one!
I have escaped you!
Oh death! All-conquering one!
Now you are conquered!
With wings I have won for myself with fervent love I will soar to the light which no eyes have ever seen!
I will die in order to live!
Arise, yes you will arise, my heart, in a moment!
What you have fought for will be borne up to God, to God, to God!!!"

This text makes abundantly clear what Mahler's topic is: Himself. A Song of Himself as Artist and a searing statement on the ultimate transcendent value of Great Works. "Art is Long": Life Is Short and relatively irrelevant -- a Great Work is immortal, and if history sees fit, its author will live for as long as there will be ears to hear and eyes to see such a work. [This is hardly a new idea. The fourth century poet Juvencus put it this way: "the Creator has established an irrevocable time when the world will be swept away by a torrential flame. Yet, innumerable high deeds of men and their honorable virtue shall endure forever." There is no evidence that Mahler knew that poem -- nor that he didn't -- but it is clear that Mahler was determined to contribute such high (indeed, Christian) deeds and virtue.] Only radical interventions may subvert this process: natural disasters, political disasters, or human ignorance or disinterest. It is the latter that brings forth the ultimate demise of most artistic products. Their author (their Creator, in a most theological sense) does achieve a Godlike status in that he, the mortal, enlightened one, the Human, is the ultimate blessed source for the very existence of the capital-W Work. One essential goal of the artist is to achieve Immortality, which the artist can unfortunately never know in his or her lifetime. One must die to achieve it ("I will die in order to live!"). All of this may lend some light to Mahler's career-long obsession with the Death topos, which is omnipresent throughout the entirety of his work. Death is both the end and the beginning ("my end is my beginning", to quote Mary Queen of Scots). The beginning must be a new beginning, a Resurrection, and thus we may understand the presence of the renewing Christ within this very Jewish context of homelessness and despair -- unlike the Old Testament, Christ promises a New and Better Life.

Indeed, man lies in greatest need. Returning to "Urlicht", we find the following crucial phrase ("Man lies in greatest need; Man lies in greatest pain; if only I could be in heaven!")

[IV mm. 14-35, with soprano]
[IV mm. 14-17, piano only] [repeat] [repeat in major]
[II mm.1-4 with pickup]

"Oh man lies in greatest pain, two, three". Mahler sets this sober line in the character of a Ländler, a gentle, pastoral Viennese song that can only carry this grim sentiment well below its dancing surface. Thus begins the Second Movement of this Resurrection Symphony. And Mahler is not through joking around (and some say Mahler has no sense of humor!). The next section in this movement begins with soft, mysterious triplets which we seem to have heard somewhere before.

[II mm. 39-41]
[Beethoven Sym. 9 II mm. transposed to G#m]

This is an obvious allusion to the Scherzo of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Why? As it happens, most 19th-century German symphonists had a habit of paying homage to Beethoven at some point in their own work, and in fact Mahler ended his previous Symphony (the last two notes, in fact) with a reference to this very movement, helping to give the two works continuity ("How many symphonies did Mahler write?", goes the question. The correct answer is: "One".) Beethoven's Ode to Joy required an arduous journey, as does Mahler's search for immortality, so both works strive for a transcendent payoff. Transcendence, though, can only be achieved through the agency of Man, should he be suitably enlightened. At this point in Mahler's journey, Mahler follows Nietzsche in the privileging of Enlightened Man over supernatural powers like God in achieving goals like Joy and Immortality. Beethoven was the ultimate guru for such projects, as he was for Mahler's other guru, Wagner.

Mahler presents himself as such a guru in this Symphony's third movement, a song from Des Knaben Wunderhorn depicting St. Anthony attempting to give a sermon to the local fish, who listen interestedly but nevertheless remain blissfully unaffected ("Die Predigt hat g'fallen, Sie bleiben wie Allen" -- the sermon has ended, they stay as they always are), a typical plaint for all misunderstood artists. Mahler does not even bother vocalizing this text -- the song is presented completely instrumentally, unsung. Without previous knowledge of the song itself in its original form, the message of this movement will remain obscure, so in a sense Mahler's abstract use of texted musical excerpts (as we saw in the opening phrase of the Symphony) remains a fundamental technique.

Why St. Anthony? St. Anthony was the patron saint of the poor and of travelers -- a perfect Catholic saint for Jews, who are chronically homeless and must concentrate on attaining and sustaining financial stability (in Mahler's famous words about his Jewishness: "thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, as a Jew throughout the world -- always an intruder, never welcomed".) The fish are stonily unaffected by the saint's holy words: "the pike remain thieves, the eels remain lechers... the crabs still go backwards, the cod stay stupid, the carp still gorge themselves...". And man still lies in greatest need (two, three...). St. Anthony has no success talking to nature. For that sort of success we need to invoke the character of Wagner's Siegfried, who has no problems talking to the birds and bears. Mahler again finds himself ironically entering the world of the brazenly anti-Semitic Wagner with the appearance of his version of Siegfried's magic horn which awakens all of nature in the episode in the Symphony beginning at m. 447. Here is the relevant passage from the Wagner opera. Here Siegfried is in the forest, hears a bird who seems to be trying to tell him something, conversation is impossible, but he picks up his magic horn and tries that. It's impossible to summarize this famous, magical scene and its meaning in just a couple of minutes, but I hope this will help you make a connection between the Wagner and the Mahler episodes:

[Wagner Solti CD 3, track 2, to 2: 23, fade]
[Bernstein Mahler 2 CD 3, track 4, 16: 44-18: 16 V: mm. 447-463 fade ]

As for St. Anthony, his fish simply swim away and go about their business, but Man will not be able to get away so easily. Mahler pulls out the Dies Irae chant from the Catholic Requiem Mass to exact a hopeful revenge against the army of slow witted ignoramuses that constituted Mahler's world. This chant has been a 19th-century favorite since Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, and later was bludgeoned to the point of parody by Rachmaninoff (his Paganini Rhapsody perhaps the most excessive example, but there are many others). I have personally called for in print a worldwide compositional moratorium on the use of this chant, but no one to my knowledge has listened: it just keeps popping up even to this day). Mahler at least had the good sense to use only the head of the tune for this extended episode in the last movement of the Symphony.

[play Dies Irae chant] Here is Mahler's version:
[V: mm. 62-68] The text, in poetic English translation:

"Day of wrath and doom impending,
Heaven and Earth in ashes ending!
David's words with Sybil's blending!
Oh, what fear man's bosom rendeth
when from heaven the judge descendeth
on whose sentence all dependeth!
Wondrous sound the trumpet flingeth
Through Earth's sepulchres it ringeth,
all before the throne it bringeth.
Death is struck and nature quaking,
all creation is awaking,
to its judge an answer making."

19th-century composers in particular love the clangorous musical references in the Latin text, which give ample opportunity for musical fire and brimstone, which Mahler supplies with enthusiasm. The God of the Dies Irae text sounds more like the Old Testament God than a relative of Jesus's. Immediately following Mahler's brief reference to the chant in the last movement of his Symphony, a new phrase appears:

[V: mm. 70-78]

This is a foreboding of the music for Mahler's own portion of the text, which encourages the protagonist to boldly rise up and, so to speak, "face the music". As the piece surges relentlessly to its climax, the choral mass sings mightily as one voice: "Auferstehn! Stand up! Arise, my heart! What you have created will be borne up to God, to God, to Go-o-o-d!!!" -- the portals open, all organ stops are pulled out, the bells ring, the motive of Eternal Life radiates outwards and upwards. Mahler's personal immortality is assured.

A Jew has found Christian redemption on the oppressor's terms. This effort requires transcendent force, which Mahler supplies to the hilt in this vast and overbearing work. I sometimes wonder if the crowds in their delirious standing ovations (which are obligatory for this piece) really grasp the troubling issues and conflicts that underlie this extremely personal vision. Mahler is not begging for immortality -- he is demanding it: "Resurrect Me!", roars this Enlightened Man from the wrong side of the tracks who many still love to hate. "I will wrap my soul around your vulnerable throats and make you Feel, and Weep, and sweat like you never have before!". Thus spoke, in Christian, Wagnerian, and explicitly Viennese musical terms, this conflicted, very Jewish Zarathustra. Thank you.

Notes:
Steinberg 16: "the overdetermined dialectic of Jew/Catholic, outsider/insider, silence/expressivity, austerity/decoration, fragmentation/totality [modernism/classicism -- Schoenberg also converted].

Franklin 38: "Pan-Germanism"-called for "a unification of all German peoples currently scattered across two empires, the German and Austrian-Hungarian.... The marginalization of non-Germanic races [was a central goal] of Pan-German politics. Given Mahler's developing perception of himself as a theoretically stateless Jew (in pan-Germanic terms), standard formulations about universalism or supranationalism seem seem predictably not to have worked for him. For Mahler 'Assimilation' would come increasingly to mean assimilation into German culture." [See 40-41 for explanation of politics of the time.] On 1: (Franklin) "As a totality, the symphony appears to depict a conflict in which the alienated expressive subject struggles towards Wagnerian redemption..." (91).

What Hanslick was trying to do (and why Wagner and Mahler fought it): the "characteristically twentieth-century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda” (John Fowles, The Magus, 366).

Copyright © Allen Gimbel,  2005-2012  All Rights Reserved


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