Life, death, and the search for meaning in music

In one sense, death is the most familiar thing in the world. It comes at us sidelong almost every day in the news: the deaths of public figures, the victims of crime, the numbered casualties of war. More rarely, it makes a full frontal assault in the form of the death of someone we love. And finally, of course, it comes for us. 

We know all of this. Death and taxes, as the old quip goes: the only certainties in life. And yet for all its familiarity, there is something so monstrous, so wrong about death as to render it almost unthinkable. The moment when a loved one dies—when they go from being there to not being there; when their body suddenly becomes just that, a mere thing among things; when their belongings, previously given meaning and unity by the life at their centre, are abruptly revealed as so much random junk—is felt as a rupture in the fabric of your world. And your own death: well. It’s hard to know how to even begin to think about that. So many of us don’t. To have the knowledge break over you like a fever that not just you, nor just the ones you love, but almost everyone currently living on Earth will be in the ground a hundred years from now is to realise that most of the time, we live as though we were immortal.

Not Gustav Mahler, though. Mahler was never allowed to forget either his own mortality, or that of those closest to him. He was the second of fourteen children; the first, a boy named Isidor, died in infancy. When Mahler was not yet 15, his younger brother Ernst died of a long illness, a loss that marked Mahler deeply. (In the end, only five of his thirteen siblings would live past childhood.) Mahler, who was already something of a musical wunderkind at this point, set about expressing the weight of his grief through music. Though the opera he began drafting in memory of his brother has not survived, music would remain for Mahler a mirror in which he could confront the horrors of death. In his colossal Second Symphony, Mahler presents a feature-length musical depiction (the work spans 90 minutes or so) of the paradoxes of living in the shadow of mortality. In the music, we encounter death now as scourge, now as salvation: as both the source of our deepest pain, and the ultimate relief from it. We see death as an unstoppable, ungovernable force; we see too the rituals by means of which we seek to domesticate that force. We see the unfairness of a world in which the best of us perish and the worst survive; and at the same time, we see death as the supreme democratic power, the one playing-field where beggar and king can meet as equals.

Mahler began what would become the first movement of his Second Symphony in 1888. He initially conceived this as a single-movement symphonic poem called Totenfeier (Funeral Rites) illustrating the funeral of the hero of his first symphony. From the beginning, Mahler appears to have considered that Totenfeier might in fact be destined to be first movement of a symphony—the early sketches of the second movement also date from 1888—but he wavered on this for five years, eventually composing most of the material for the remaining movements in 1893. But even then, Mahler was unsure about the symphony project. His mentor Hans von Bulow had hated Totenfeier, for one thing: when Mahler played the piano reduction to him in 1891, von Bulow reportedly covered his ears in protest, saying, “If what I have just heard is music, I understand nothing about music.” And for another, Mahler couldn’t come up with a suitable finale. It wasn’t until von Bulow’s funeral in 1894 that inspiration suddenly struck. (That the dislodging of Mahler’s creative block should have coincided with the demise of a revered but critical advisor would, one suspects, not be surprising to a psychoanalyst.) Describing this moment, Mahler wrote: “Then the choir, up in the organ-loft, intoned Klopstock’s Resurrection chorale. It flashed on me like lightning, and everything became plain and clear in my mind! It was the flash that all creative artists wait for—‘conceiving by the Holy Ghost!’” He got to work immediately. The symphony premiered the following year (1895), with Mahler himself at the podium of the Berlin Philharmonic.

Mahler was deeply ambivalent about the value of programs that describe music in terms of a story that it purportedly tells. In a program that he wrote for a performance of the Second Symphony, he himself gave such a narrative description of the music, before dismissing what he’d just written as ‘a crutch for a cripple.’ He went on: “It gives only a superficial indication, all that any program can do for a musical work, let alone this one, which is so much all of a piece that it can no more be explained than the world itself.” At most, he thought, programs should seek precisely to describe not the narrative content supposedly possessed by the music, but the feeling being expressed by it. And yet, Mahler was again and again compelled to set out in words the story of the Second Symphony in particular. Of the first movement, he wrote, “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. And now in this moment of gravity and emotion which convulses our deepest being… our heart is gripped by a dreadfully serious voice… 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?” We must, thought Mahler, attempt to answer this question if we are to live on—and the Symphony itself presents an answer to it, in the form of the massive finale the outlines of which Mahler had glimpsed at von Bulow’s funeral. This is a vivid, and frankly terrifying, musical depiction of the Last Judgment: a titanic struggle against death itself that culminates in an ecstatic, exhilarating moment of transcendence. We can all be redeemed, Mahler is saying: all of us, not just the rich, nor just the powerful, nor even just those who dedicate themselves to virtue and sobriety. Every one of us can get to heaven. But we have to go through hell first.

The first movement (Allegro maestoso) bristles to life with a fearful shudder on tremolo strings. Almost immediately, the cellos and basses erupt. The ensuing stampede is eventually quelled by the oboe, entering with the movement’s first theme. Mahler sets this melody low in the oboe’s register, which gives it a muted, constricted quality. The fragility of the oboe’s composure is further highlighted by the rumblings of the lower strings which, one feels (and soon discovers), have been only temporarily tamed. When the second theme eventually arrives on high strings, we are transported to an entirely different place—here is bliss, peace, reconciliation—but it’s a false dawn, because the low strings burst once more into frenzied life, and the initial themes return in extended and developed form. The story of this movement is, in a sense, the funeral procession of the hero—but more than that, it’s the story of grief itself. For Mahler articulates, in precise and heartbreaking musical detail, the emotional turbulence of losing someone you love: the despair, the dread, the unquenchable longing; the merciful spells of serenity that arrive unbidden, and the hope that tentatively dawns in such moments; and inevitably, the resurgence of agonies that are all the more paralyzing for the stirrings of optimism that they quench.

The second movement (Andante Moderato), a delicate, sweet Ländler that rarely raises its voice above a whisper, could hardly be more dissimilar to the first. Mahler described this movement as an intermezzo, ‘like an echo of long past days from the life of him whom we carried to the grave in the first movement, while the sun still smiled at him.’ He was aware, however, that it might appear incongruous given the tumult of the first movement. And so, he stipulated that conductors should take a pause of five minutes between the end of the first movement and the beginning of the second, so that the audience should have time to adjust. Five minutes is a very long time in a silent concert hall—so much so that the pause Mahler requested is rarely observed in full today. Still, in a world where cinematic ‘jump cuts’ between scenes of wildly contrasting character and mood are second nature to us, the need for the pause is arguably less stark than it was in Mahler’s day. And besides, the abrupt mood swing between first and second movements is in itself apt given the subject matter. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the suddenness and unpredictability with which such memories can assail one are part of what makes grief so destabilizing.

At the beginning of the third movement (In ruhig fließender Bewegung), the scene changes yet again, and we are at the edge of a river where St. Anthony of Padua is preaching Christianity to the fish. There is a religious seriousness here, but a note of comedy, too, or even of farce. Mahler once joked that if the sinuous character of the music could express the movement of the river and the creatures it contained, it could also imply that St. Anthony was drunk, bobbing and weaving on the riverbank as he sermonized to the unheeding fish. It’s tempting to read this movement as a wry acknowledgment of the doubts that may plague even the most fervent religious believer. (After all, the religious are those that have faith—but having faith is in part a matter of acknowledging, however inchoately, that decisive proof is not on the cards.) And more particularly, one may well wonder what significance this note of religious doubt has, in light of what is to follow in the rest of the Symphony. Perhaps Mahler is suggesting (however unconsciously) that the triumphant vision of universal redemption he will present in the finale may itself be a mere fantasy, borne of an inability to accept the finality of death.

However, the mood of ironic detachment is soon dispelled by the fourth movement (Urlicht), a solemn and heartfelt song in which the alto soloist pleads for relief from the suffering of life. The music leads without pause into the final movement (Im Tempo des Scherzos), in which the alto’s plea finds an answer. Echoes of themes presented in the previous movement recur, before the immense mass of the orchestra gathers itself for what Mahler described as the ‘march of the dead’, a vision of resurrected bodies advancing together in pursuit of eternal life. The choir enters, hushed at first but soon gaining in force and dramatic power; the alto and soprano soloists sing of the desire that suffering should not be in vain. An almost unbearable tension builds, which only finds complete resolution in the final moments of the symphony, as the tolling of church bells gives way to one last fortissimo flourish. The cumulative dramatic weight of this massive finale overwhelmed even Mahler himself. He wrote, “The increasing tension, working up to the final climax, is so tremendous that I don’t know myself, now that it is over, how I ever came to write it.”