Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony: Answering Nihilism

The Philadelphia Orchestra premiered Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony just five years after his death, in 1916. Public Domain

Why should you, a busy person with many important items on your time-crunched agenda, take 90 minutes of your life to listen to Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2?

Same question, different words: Why should you stop to experience vibrant testimony of a journey from nihilism to faith?

During his half-century on earth, Austrian musician Mahler (1860–1911) composed nine finished symphonies (a 10th was left incomplete) and dozens of lieder—songs for solo voice and piano or orchestral accompaniment. Regarded in his lifetime as a conductor of international renown, Mahler composed in the off-season yet managed to produce a symphonic catalog that easily surpasses most others. From the mid-20th century, Mahler the composer has occupied the top shelf of symphonists alongside Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms.

An 1892 photograph of composer Gustav Mahler. Public Domain

On a recently published list of the 20 greatest symphonies ever composed (based on a polling of 151 prominent conductors), BBC Music placed two Mahler symphonies in the top five: His No. 9 in fourth place and No. 2 in fifth.  (The others are third: Mozart’s Symphony No. 41; second: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, and first: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3.)

Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 is his valedictory work, while his No. 2, which concerns us here, was a turning point, both artistically and spiritually. If he had not scaled the musical heights he scaled in his Symphony No. 2, Mahler might well have been a footnote in the history of the form instead of a volume unto himself.

Music and Tragedy

Mahler was born the second of 14 children to a tavern owner in a small Austrian town. The family was not particularly musical, but a grandmother played some piano, and when little Gustav discovered the instrument, he took to it immediately. The music surrounding him in childhood was made of folk songs, dance tunes, and military bands. This music of everyday life, “street music,” played an important role in Mahler’s symphonies.

Masarykovo Square with the Church of Saint Ignatius and Jihlava’s city hall in view. Jihlava, now in the Czech Republic, played a formative role in Gustav Mahler's development. He's considered one of the most creative composers in the Western pantheon. SchiDD/ CC BY-SA 4.0

So did the music of funerals. Seven of young Gustav’s siblings died in infancy and childhood. Family funerals were a nearly annual event. When one listens to Mahler’s symphonies, it is impossible not to notice an uncanny juxtaposition of joviality and grief, paralleling the strange contrast young Gustav experienced of his father’s tavern side by side with the almost constant presence of death.

Mahler composed his Symphony No. 1 between 1887 and 1888. An exaltation of nature, it reflects Mahler’s lifelong devotion to the divine as it is revealed through forests, mountains, skies, and flowers. Although born to a Jewish family, Mahler never received bar mitzvah, and though he later converted to Catholicism, he never took communion. Nature was his religion, as he expressed in a well-known quote: “Those who, in the face of nature, are not overwhelmed with awe at its infinite mystery, its divinity ... these people have not come close to it. ... And in every work of art, which should be a reflection of Nature, there must be a trace of this infinity.”

Nature Is Not Enough

But there was a problem with Mahler’s view. It’s all well and good to exalt nature, yet everything in nature dies, as Mahler knew in the most direct and tragic way. There had been a funeral march in his First Symphony, presented as a comic parody. Now, Mahler turned with brutal artistic honesty to the horror and senselessness of death in funeral music unequaled for its power.

Immediately after completing the First Symphony, Mahler composed an uncompromisingly aggressive, even frightening symphonic poem he called “Totenfeier” (“Funeral Rites”). Unrelentingly oppressive, it avers a nihilism that seems unconquerable. While there’s no indication that Mahler at first intended it as the first movement of a new symphony, over the next few years, he added subsequent musical statements that slowly took symphonic shape. The seven years between the premiere of Symphony No. 1 in 1888 and the completion of Symphony No. 2 in 1895 is the longest stretch between symphonies in the composer’s career, and for one very good reason: The finale eluded him.

Mahler placed a slim movement of gentle, happy musical thoughts after the “Totenfeier.” It is a landler—a simple Austrian dance—that has the momentary effect of detracting from the unremitting horror of the funeral music. But it does nothing overall to erase the consciousness of death and is interrupted twice by darker measures.

How to Answer a Cry of Despair?

If the second movement seeks release from death through domestic pleasure, the third movement, nominally a scherzo, is a wild evocation of drunken dancing in the character of klezmer, a Jewish folk-music form. This detraction, less successful than the first, is stopped in its tracks by a savage chord that Mahler called “a cry of despair.” (For musicians, it’s a B-flat minor chord over a bass “C.”)

As the young Gustav had witnessed at his father’s tavern while half his siblings died, revelry is no escape from man’s mortal fate; in fact, it only brings you closer to it. Vexed as what could follow the scherzo, Mahler attached his vocal setting of a German folk poem from “Das Knaben Wunderhorn” called “Primal Light.” It concludes: “I am of God, and to God I shall return./ God will grant me a small light,/ Will light my way to eternal, blissful light.” This naive little song, sweet though it was, was insufficient to balance the heavy despair of the first three movements. The symphony sat unfinished for two years.

Then, in 1894, Mahler attended the funeral of his friend and mentor, the conductor Hans von Bülow. The service included a simple choral setting of a poem by Friedrich Klopstock called “Resurrection,” which included the words: “Arise, yes, you will arise from the dead,/ My dust, after a short rest!” Mahler knew immediately that he had found his finale. He would set Klopstock’s poem for full chorus and soloists, adding text of his own, ending with the glorious words: “I will die, so as to live! ... What you have conquered will bear you to God.”

The finale, nearly 30 minutes long, begins with the “cry of despair” but at length gives way to offstage brass announcing The Last Judgement. The ensuing choral proclamation of the resurrection is an astonishing ecstasy of spiritual joy that erases the nihilism of the “Totenfeier.” After hearing it, you won’t let anyone tell you the positivist lie that music is “just notes” that lack meaning beyond harmonic and rhythmic constructs. Music is a venue for expression that transcends the merely verbal.

The Resurrection

Mahler subtitled his Second Symphony “The Resurrection,” and to this day, no other musical work comes close in its affirmation of life’s deeper meaning.

There is more to this great artistic achievement, much more. Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony is the musical equivalent of “Hamlet” or “King Lear.” Layers of meaning unfold after each time it’s heard. There is much to hear, given the unprecedented size of the forces Mahler employed. The symphony comprises 16 woodwinds, 10 horns, 10 trumpets, three sets of timpani, two vocal soloists, a large mixed choir, and a body of strings capable of balancing the enormous woodwind and brass contingent.

A concert program for Mahler's farewell concert, which featured a performance of his Second Symphony. Public Domain

In 1895, Mahler had only 16 years left to live, yet in that time, he completed seven more symphonies and the sprawling song cycle, “Das Lied von der Erde” (“The Song of the Earth”). His canon might be compared to an imposing mountain range, of which the “Resurrection” Symphony is perhaps the highest peak.

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