The Tragedy of Gustav Mahler

Reflections Started by the Performances of Mahler9s Third Symphony and His "Lied von der Erde99

PAUL ROSENFELD

IT is somewhat as Dante and his guide stood before certain damned in Hell that we stand before the failed endeavours of Gustav Mahler. We cannot pass these hulking haggard symphonies and songs as we pass by other failures offered us by the concert seasons. Stale and tired and scarce living as these musics are, they nevertheless, each time we encounter any one of them, make us to stop still and turn distressedly about them. For they are monuments of anguished aborted life, like indeed to torture-masses devised by the imagination of a ferocious mediaeval god for the punishment of transgressors against him. They call before the vision the blocks of ice in the circle of-traitors in the Inferno that contain each its wretched congealed soul.

They, too, these dusty and feeble instrumental piles, are in some strange terrible way part living. Underneath the heaped banalities, beneath false Beethoven and conscious naivetes and unfresh lyricism, there writhes a vein of lndng green, and struggles piteously for release. We sense a caked and buried face; hear parched lips and cracked laryngal chords straining to form speech. The hoarse and infinitely fatigued voice is seeking to sob, to pray, to bless, but its tone breaks and rasps and faints in the dust. It seems to be begging something of us, entreating us to do something. But what it is it demands of us we do not know, or, if we guess, do not know at all how to meet and gratify it.

The Two Souls

THE fact that the composer of Mahler's nine symphonies and many songs was a Prospero among conductors, a profound and magical interpreter of Beethoven and of Wagner, a poet who made other orchestral leaders seem pedestrian, is not what makes his efforts at creation appear torture-blocks in our eyes. It is not pity that stirs us. We are neither stirred nor wrung by the scores of Weingartner, also a great conductor and an unsuccessful composer, for instance. What hurts us when Mahler's works are performed is, that his miscarriages refer always to a living impulse behind them, to an inventive power not unrelated to his interpretation; that each gargantuan symphony and song-cycle, bears evidence to the failure of a creative surge to realize itself in any solid form. Something did go down in battle in Mahler's compositions that was noble and high, and that we would gladly have seen triumphant. Even in the pompous kapellmeistermusik of his fifth, sixth and seventh symphonies, sharp vestiges of originality pierce through the billowing rubble. Sometimes, it is nothing more than the man's miraculous gift of instrumentation that is green among the charred ruins; and all that reconciles us in all the world to the man, are the moments when the music permits us to observe his usage of the modern orchestra, so much more resented and sharp than Strauss'; grants us the pleasure of hearing the cutting razor edge of a band in which brass and reeds predominate, of feeling the nasal, astringent, brilliant quality of his favourite daring combinations of wood and trumps.

Sometimes, to this salvaged joy another adds itself. Mahler manages at times, despite second-handedness, suspiciousness of thematic material, to establish well a definite mood. Even if we blush a little at his themes, we feel, say, the excitement of the nightly, deathhaunted bacchanal, in the first section of Das Lied von der Erde. At intervals, the atmosphere of a landscape is fixed; the world darkens visibly as a solitary oboe executes its repeated quaver; and for a brief while, we taste something of the food the composer intended setting before us, know his sick yearning for life, his loneliness, the bitter savour of ashes on his lips as he waits alone for death. Or, a shimmer of the living world is caught in a splinter of mirror, and we feel in Mahler's music the nerve-weariness of men in our time, or get a naturalistic picture of shrilling workpeople on holiday parade to the parks, or whiff old-world charm while a horn sings as sings the posthom in German forests. Or, a passage of sustained music suddenly makes its appearance: the interlude of the last section of Das Lied von der Erde, with its harshly croaking clarinets and horns, its groaning, mordant polyphony; or one of the galloAvshumorous scherzi, half scurrilous, half fantastic, so original with Mahler; and for an instant, we are half-reconciled with the legend that the man was a great composer. Indeed, not a work of the man but lets us, at some moment, know well the spark of creative life latent in him.

The Inner Discord

BUT the living stuff is lost in the great unfilled voids of the canvases. A small power is wrecked in the attempt to develop a space entirely beyond the strength oi the undertaker. As forms, things, these symphonies crumble and do not live. The living breath does not run through the instrumental masses and make them with each tone they give, sculpt some great reality that was in the heart of the composer, and that he had to discover to the world. The great embracing feeling that descended from the head of a Beethoven or a Wagner into their fingertips and through these into the cohorts of instruments, we know, did not succeed in leaving Mahler's cranium. We guess his intentions from his programs and his reported conversations. We guess them from certain associations revealed by the themes and instruments themselves.

But while there is always in Mahler something there for the eye; there is most often nothing for the ear. His works are like vast spineless ships that look majestical enough while they lie high on the beach, but that break in two or capsize or sink as soon as one attempts to float them on the sea. Mahler is helpless on nearly every page; with all his prodigious orchestral technique he cannot touch. There is ahvays the beginning of something in his scores; his vast and Briickner-like themes heave on with terrific stride, then break down suddenly, and there is a void, while the band makes certain developments or roundings-out that have no existence for the sense. A song begins; a few notes are sweet; then, suddenly, there is a banal, stale turn, from which one turns as from a sour breath. Such are the turns in the Chorus Mysticus of the Eighth Symphony, on the words "Das unbeschreibliche, hier wird es getan"; in the twelfth and thirteenth bars of the last movement of the Third, where Mahler attempts to round out his pseudo-Beethovenish adagio theme; in the second section of Das Lied von der Erde, where the singer gives "Ich hab' Erquickung not"; in innumerable other spots of die score. Certainly, Mahler's turns go well with the words "the indescribable"; show he was in need indeed of refreshment. Could impotence represent impotence, he were a master.

Or, he begins a broad flowing movement as in the finale of the Third Symphony, and loses momentum. He begins endless recapitulations. He repeats over and over again sweet cadences or harmonies on which he has happened; lingers over them, fond and exhibionistic as a mother over the antics of a spoiled child. When he has to conclude, under pain of becoming a bore even to his Own patient self, his ending is quite arbitrary, a suddenly stitched-on close, with much brilliant brass and percussion. And, so, the positive achievements of his talent are counterbalanced and made naught overwhelmingly by his banalities. The gallows-humorous scherzi are followed by the sort of trumpet-tunes which are very nice for the servant girl when she goes out Sunday afternoons. A fine bit of scenepainting, a passage of poignant music right off the wheel of modem life, is suddenly dragged doivn by a "consoling" theme of organ-grinder beauty. Whole movements palpably "faked," written without sincere feeling, as the third, fourth and fifth of Das Lied, spoil what pleasure one can extract from those sincerely felt. And even where there is some success i^representation, the testimony of haggard senses and tired pulses, that exists in everything Mahler brought forth, leaves one with a painful sense of failed life. Not even the energy and affection lavished by Conductor Mengelberg on every one of Mahler's scores he essays, the unflagging effort to relieve the intention and make the hollow music communicate what Mahler wanted to say, can lift these sinking bulks.

The Egocentrist

IT went to parch in the wilderness, Mahler's vine of life, because whether or not he was aware fully of his intention, his work was built about his Own person. Mahler's center was not in his composition, much as he thought it there. It remained always within himself; and although a vivid impulse drove him to selfless'expression, a far stronger wrenched the impulse into service to an arid egoism. The man was slave, more than ever he guesses, to a desire of setting his Own figure amid the symbols and panoply of greatness. He needed the public to feel certain glorious things about him, untoward him; to take him and place him by its reverence and love and admiration among the immortals, among the serene figures grouped in the Walhalla of musicians about Beethoven. It was, in spite of his belief, Beethoven that he wanted to be more than Gustav Mahler; for he needed bitterly that the public perceive in him the benign symphonist, the great heartwhole lover of men; he wanted the love of men to come out to him, he wanted to give them something that would force from them toward himself a glowing stream of affection, and this motive was always uppermost in his breast when he approached his worktable.

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For Mahler was, there cannot be question, one of those unfortunate persons who cannot center their interest in another human breast, and give themselves completely in love. He was, surely, one of those unfortunates for whom life inevitably must represent a struggle toward an ambitiously conceived goal, must have a definite egocentric purpose, because the living of life itself is so devoid of deep satisfactoriness to them. It was easy enough for Goethe to declare "Es kommt ofienbar in Leben aufs Leben, und nicht auf ein Resultat desselben an." For things in themselves were nourishing to him. But for poor Gustav Mahler, life was a waste, a procession of disappointments, a garden whose smouldering fruits turned ashen in his mouth. Precisely what it was that kept him from properly slaking his thirst at the brook that runs right through the front dooryard of all the world, we cannot more than guess about. The man's confession that of the impressions which he tried to realize in his music the greater portion was received during the first five years of his existence, turns one's guesses in the direction of a hurt done him in infancy.

The Wound

IT is not to be entertained, however, that he, any more than any other normally intelligent child, entered the world incapacitated to fulfill himself toward his fellows. His yearning, so perpetually green in him, for the days when he was a nursling on the Bohemian plain; the hearkening back to the impressions of infancy that might have come to the bright little boy of the poor tavern-keepers; his visions of death, all his hours, as a return homeward, an entrance into the secret inner life of the universe, are not, we suspect, merely the fantastic thinking of a man who, having never possessed a capacity for living, consoles himself by glorifying the state closest to pre-natal existence. In their sincerity, their earnestness, they seem rather more indications of the fact that the bliss of this time had been so very intense, so inordinately sensitizing that the attachment to his own infantile nature became overstrong in the man, displaced zest for adventure, and made the pain of maturity too unbearable for hearty acceptance. It seems strange to consider that the man whom one knew as a harried, bitterly compressed mouthed conductor, a tortured head cut loose from the body should once have been an infant clutched too hard to the breast of a woman. But such we are forced to see him; it is only in this fashion that we are able to explain his crippledness. All children meet the world, death and the devil as they grow. Only, some inherent, unbroken toughness which nature gave them at birth asserts itself, and closes the wounds inflicted by the grisly companions. But in Mahler, the ability to find the way to men had been enfeebled by spoiling; and the wounds inflicted on him became fatal.

And it would, indeed, have required in the inner column of young Mahler's spirit that he could meet and triumph over the foes in wait for him, an almost inordinately stalky toughness. For Mahler was born a Jew; and to be born a Jew, particularly in the Austria of the 1860's, was not intensely conducive to the sustainment of the fresh faith in life, the relaxed love of men, from which great song springs. It was, on the contrary, to have every fear of the world, because of the deep repressed hostility sensed in the alien population about his home, augmented manifoldly. It was to have additional weights piled on the wavering column of confidence and courage and faith in self; to have heavier chains hung on the arms when they moved of instinct in the great embracing movement toward mankind; for there was always the sentiment of inner unworth, of tribal inferiority, communicated by the environing peoples, to further lame the already inhibited spontaneous gesture of the heart. For whatever in the growing lad wanted cause for not projecting his interest into the. objective world, there waited, as it waits for every Jewish child, the difficulty of adjusting to such a special situation, and gave it reason aplenty.

And then, the atmosphere of the Jewish community itself does not make free, healthy living, easy. Generation had bequeathed to generation, in a sort of convulsive laying on of hands, a nervous tension, a sort of clamp and suspension, in the entrails, a strain all over the body, legacy of centuries of uncertain, difficult existence. Even in the Austria of the 60's, as in the America of the new century, where fear of physical persecution does not always press, the necessities of life still forced and do force a sort of unhealthful wakefulness in the Jew, a fear of the sense, a distrust of relaxation, a lurid sort of consciousness. The Germans and Czechs about Mahler's home, for example, could let go their wakefulness; could let themselves down into the landscape as cattle let themselves down upon the sward to munch. They, the farm-people, could accept the moment, drain it fearlessly and irresponsibly as they drained their steins; Mahler, the unrooted, the inheritor of trading-wits, could never.

The Gesture of Greatness

BESIDES, the world into which Mahler issued in career, had little power to make good the wrong. It is possible that, had Mahler's age been one in which a great spiritual current was seething, he might have been healed. But there was little opportunity for the soul to grow strong in a time so violently given over to material aggrandizement. The sudden industrialization of Germany and of Austria, the strongly "Americanizing" tendency of society, had taken the accent from the quality of things and placed them on the quantity of them. The artist has to do with the preservation of the quality of life; and the artist was not invited by a time that had no spiritual values, or was, rathermore, invited only to stimulate nerves wearied by a harried, empty existence, to give sensations to folk incapable of procuring them for themselves. Had Mahler been strong, it is possible he might have resisted the world, as other men have done. But he was weak, and so he could not help being weakened further by the vulgar atmosphere in which he had to share. All about him was a frenzied Bismarckianization of music; a St. Vitus dance of concerts, operas, festivals, premieres, Lower Rhenish music-debauches, Napoleonic careers modelled on misconceptions of the life of Wagner and of Nietzsche, newspaper-advertisements by music-publishers, Richard Strauss, a great externalized music life. Poison must have come into the man with every breath, much as he would have avoided it. So the harm was completed; the fate sealed.

And thus the writing of "great" music became the end of Mahler's days. Since he had not within him the power to satisfy himself in living, he turned to composition, and turned more and more as he aged, to render him that power. Since he had the rudiments of creativity in him, and could feel the immensity of the emotional release which Beethoven and which Wagner had gotten from their art; since he himself got an enormous release in presenting their works; he commenced, with logical illogicality, aping the external attributes of their art in hopes of gaining the power of self-expression that has been theirs. He set out to become "great"; for being sterile, he supposed that their ability to love, to create, had come to them through a power over musical means; and supposed that if he made the gesture of grandeur, and if the public responded to that gesture as it responded to the music of the masters, he would achieve what a kinder nature had given them and not him. So he took his talent, and began forcing it to flesh arbitrarily conceived schemes. Perceiving the philosophical weight of Beethoven and Wagner, he began searching for philosophic attitudes which would stimulate him. It was a literary composer, in the bad sense, that he became; one sees immediately that with Mahler music is not a conception. His material entered his head first as abstract idea and not as musical shapes and lines; and that only after, with the aid of a prodigious musical erudition and technique, and with the stimulus of composers whom he adored and wanted to rival, he tried to turn them into music. One feels always that, though he had emotions, and very bitter ones, too, there was always something in him watching him under the influence of emotion; prodding him on to feel something that might be of use in composition; pouncing on every little quiver of the nerves with the cry: "Now, at last, you have given me something with which I can achieve work." Everything was a good deal of an attitude with him, especially naivete the Glockenbimbam blumchen style. He too, was one of those who turn and ask themselves from time to time whether what they are accomplishing is "three-dimensional." Any musical idea was good enough for him; for with Mahler, it was never so much a question of doing justice to his own experience as achieving an effect, as knocking the public "cold". We have his own word for it. For in a moment of confidence he informed a critic that he planned the opening theme of the Eighth Symphony in order that there might be no single opponent left in the audience.

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It was not life of which he was thinking when he wrote, as it was his own creativity. He had all the non-artist's obsession with technical processes. His scores seem written with a view to the work of the pedantic analyzer; he was making a bid to the pedants to crown his magister. Since he could not feel, he took to making music by brute force; drove his orchestras to climaxes with sadistic vehemence, as though he would ravish an aesthetic emotion from the hearers. He called for immense apparatus, reaching a ridiculous apotheosis in the Symphonie der Tausend, in the effort to achieve greatness through enormity of means. He dragged by the hair into his works poems of Goethe and Nietzsche, of Klopstock and Rhabanus Maurus, as well as lyrics from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, in the hope of making giants labour for him. One of his commentators marvels at the daring with which Mahler, in his Third Symphony, goes from a setting of Nietzsche's Drunken Song to a setting of a folk-lyric. Sancta Simplicitasl Poor Mahler would have gone from a setting of St. Francis' Hymn to the Sun to a setting of the Pennsylvania Timetable, had he thought it effective! He would have written a solo for the Saint Esprit, had he thought it possible to persuade that potentate to participate in the performance of one of his symphonies. His was indeed a piling of many suffering Pelions on many indignant Ossas.

And still, we cannot dismiss the man with a wave of the hand. Sentimentalist though he was, there was too much intensity, too much heartfelt yearning in him to make his case a ludicrous one. There is something not unnoble in the longing for the power to know the human lot when it is passionately felt, and Mahler's cry for life was the cry of a great ruptured heart for health. There are too many genial moments in his compositions; there is too much marvelously piercing colour in his instrumentation, to let us forget how great a potentiality lay in him awaiting redemption. It is with a profound pity that we watch this poor sick Jew, years since his decease, still wring his hands in the sere mounds of his music, and call to the universe to give unto him a thing which the universe cannot give, and that is found either in the human heart itself, or nowhere at all.