Gustav Mahler Cycle • Mahler VIII

Gustav Mahler
The Nine Symphonies

“To me, symphony means: building a world, using all the means of existing technique.” This widely quoted statement by Gustav Mahler about his Symphony No. 3 could also stand as a motto for his entire oeuvre. His world was the Danube Monarchy, which had long become hopelessly disparate in its variety and all its contradictions and contrasts – and this also gave rise to the stylistic oppositions, extreme contrasts and astounding simultaneities typical of Mahler: he incorporated not only natural sounds and folk songs, but also military marches, brass band fanfares and dance music into his works for the bourgeois concert hall, giving them equal standing next to honourable “high art” – for which one of his critics suggested sticking the composer in jail for a few years. His approach was too daring and novel to remain uncontested, or to find broad and spontaneous acclaim. Marches leading to death, like in the finale of the Sixth, or accompanying a funeral procession that starts out measured, but then explodes into madness, as in the first movement of the Fifth; the fact that time and again, death seems to be fiddling ghostly waltzes, polkas cover up desperation, and Klezmer strains manage to laugh amidst tears – all these things were realized in music by Mahler “first of all, and in this form, only by him” (H. H. Eggebrecht). What we hear is reflected multiple times: music about music. Mahler’s œuvre points beyond the character of illustration, of mere amassing and inventory-taking, but it also formulates an utopia which he called a “longing beyond the things of this world” and which made him intervene in his own music, in the double sense – for example in the famous “breakthrough” of Symphony No. 1. “I tell you, at times some passages seem eerie even to me, and it seems to me as if I hadn’t written them myself. One is merely an instrument, so to speak, upon which the universe plays.”