classical music - andante

Introduction | Chronology | Filmography

SYMPHONY NO. 2

Composition

It is hard to imagine that a work as unified and as powerfully structured as Mahler's Second Symphony could have had such a long and painful birth, yet more than six years were to pass between his jotting down the initial sketches and his completion of the vast final movement. He was still only twenty-eight when he completed his First Symphony in 1888 at the height of the opera season in Leipzig, where he had held the position of chief conductor for the last two years. The ink was barely dry on the score when he began to toy with the idea of a second symphony, this time in C minor. The opening movement was soon completed but for the next five years existed independently under the heading of Todtenfeier [Funeral Ceremony], a title borrowed from the German translation by his boyhood friend Siegfried Lipiner of an epic poem by the leading Polish writer Adam Mickiewicz. Completed in Prague in August 1888, the full score of the Todtenfeier languished among Mahler's papers because, after his appointment as director of the Budapest Opera at the end of the year, he was far too busy with his artistic and administrative responsibilities to return to composition.

Three years later, in 1891, Mahler left the Budapest Opera for the Hamburg Stadt-Theater where, as a conductor, he soon attracted the attention of Hans von Bülow, the doyen of German music and a lifelong champion of new music: having conducted the first performances of Tristan und Isolde, Bülow became Brahms's preferred interpreter and, shortly before the events related here, had discovered in Richard Strauss the rising star of the German musical firmament. Mahler hoped that Bülow would similarly support him as a composer, and he called on Bülow in order to play him the Todtenfeier on the piano. After playing for a few minutes, he turned around. Bülow had a long face and was covering his ears, and he later summed up his disapproval in two brief phrases: 'If what I have heard is music, I understand nothing about music. [...] Compared with this, Tristan is a Haydn symphony.'

Anyone other than Mahler would have felt discouraged. But, with his break with the past now complete, he decided to strike out on his own on a journey fraught with difficulties that only the courage and obstinacy inherent to genius would allow him to complete. Meanwhile, the purgatory of the Hamburg Opera consumed all his time and energy, and it was not until February 1892 that he was able to return to composition, writing and orchestrating five large-scale Wunderhorn songs, the fourth of which would later have the singular honour of becoming the final movement of the Fourth Symphony.

Unfortunately, Mahler—who was later to describe himself as a 'summer composer'—had not yet found the peaceful and secluded place that he needed for his work. The summer of 1892 was spent, therefore, at Berchtesgaden in Southern Bavaria, without a single note being written. Wiser for the experience, Mahler took care that the following summer (1893) he and his family were installed at a tiny inn on the shores of the Attersee, not far from Salzburg, where he quickly decided to have a Komponierhäuschen built on a small peninsula jutting into the lake. Here he later spent most of his summer months engrossed in creative work. And it was here, too, that he returned to his initial project of a symphony in C minor and soon completed the Andante in A-flat on the basis of sketches jotted down on loose sheets in 1888. Immediately afterwards he wrote the song Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt and the symphony's Scherzo, both of which draw on more or less identical musical material. Work progressed at a dizzying speed, with the ever-faithful Natalie Bauer-Lechner on hand to receive daily progress reports. Mahler felt that he was 'in the grip of a command outside' himself, a musical instrument played by the spirit of the world, the source of all existence. It was in this frame of mind that he completed the second and third movements between 21 June and 16 July. But the end of the summer and, with it, his return to Hamburg were already close at hand, and he had still not embarked on the final movement that was to provide the monumental structure with its culminating cornerstone. To the three existing movements he had merely added the Wunderhorn song, Urlicht, which was to serve as an introduction to the final movement.

Already envisioning a powerful apotheosis with which to end the work, Mahler thought of following the illustrious example of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and introducing a chorus. He had already begun working his way through the whole of world literature, starting with the Bible, in his search for the 'redemptive word' but had still not found anything suitable when, in February 1894, Hans von Bülow died. Mahler attended his memorial service and later described the sense of shock that he felt there: 'Then the choir, in the organ-loft, sang Klopstock's Resurrection chorale. It was like a flash of lightning, and everything became plain and clear in my mind! [...] It is always the same with me: only when I experience something do I "compose", and only when composing do I experience anything!'

Thus Mahler explained the genesis of this vast final movement to the critic Arthur Seidl three years after its completion. The initial sketches were written down immediately on his return home from the service. The actual composition was completed the following summer at Steinbach within the space of three weeks. Mahler added a number of lines to Klopstock's ode, not only amplifying the poet's ideas but also altering their message. The key passage is as follows:

Mit Flügeln, die ich mir errungen,
in heissem Leibesstreben
werd' ich entschweben
zum Licht, zu dem kein Aug' gedrungen!
Sterben werd' ich, um zu leben!
[On hard-won wings, in love's ardent aspiration I shall soar
aloft to the light that no eye has seen. I shall die in order to live!]

Early performances

Unlike his First Symphony, which, in Mahler's own words, always remained his 'child of sorrow', the Second took only a few years to earn a place for itself in the concert hall as his most representative and accomplished work. Admittedly, this was not the case when Strauss arranged the first performance the first three movements at a Philharmonic concert in Berlin in March 1895. Mahler himself conducted, but the hall was half empty and the critics outdid themselves the following morning. The composer was accused of shattering his listeners' eardrums with his 'noisy and bombastic pathos' and 'atrocious, tormenting dissonances', and was granted only the most modest talent. But it took much more than this to discourage the young composer. Nine months later, with the help of two rich patrons from Hamburg, he organised the first performance of the complete work, again in Berlin, but this time with soloists and chorus. Hardly any tickets having been sold in advance, it was necessary to give away large numbers of tickets on the day of the performance. By the end of the evening, the audience's enthusiastic response seemed reassuring, but the next morning's newspapers brought renewed attacks. On this occasion Mahler complained with some bitterness: 'I cannot suppress a deep sigh when I realise that the solid phalanx of the daily press will now, as always, block my way as soon as I appear on the scene with these poor children of mine.' Fortunately, his disappointment was tempered by the enthusiasm of a number of distinguished admirers, such as the conductors Arthur Nikisch and Felix Weingartner and the composer Engelbert Humperdinck. Moreover, his two stout-hearted patrons added to their existing generosity by promising to subsidise the publication of a transcription of the symphony for two pianos.

Be that as it may, Mahler still had a long way to go before he was finally recognised as an important composer. The Second Symphony was the first of his works to be heard outside the German-speaking countries, when Sylvain Dupuis invited Mahler to conduct it at one of his Nouveaux Concerts in Liège. The Munich première, during the winter of 1900/01, created something of a stir, so that Mahler's name was already beginning to become better known by the date of the first performance of the Third Symphony in Krefeld in 1902, a performance which, an almost unequivocal triumph, made him famous overnight. In his capacity as president of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, Strauss now decided to perform the Second Symphony at the society's annual festival, choosing a jewel of Gothic architecture, the Basel Cathedral, as the venue for the performance. Once again both work and composer were ecstatically received. Later on, the Second became something of a talisman for its creator, with Mahler choosing it to bid farewell to Vienna in 1907 and to introduce himself to New York and Paris in 1908 and 1910 respectively.

Programmes

For Mahler, writing a symphony was tantamount to expressing 'the inner aspect' of his 'whole life', of 'constructing a world with all the technical means at my disposal'. As a result, it was necessary to facilitate access to this world for unprepared listeners. It was in this spirit that he once again drew up several different, but essentially similar, programmes for the Second Symphony. In the first movement, the 'hero' of the symphony is buried after a long struggle with 'life and destiny'. He casts a backward glance at his life, first at a moment of happiness (depicted in the second movement) and then at the cruel hurly-burly of existence, the 'bustle of appearances' and the 'spirit of disbelief and negation' that had seized hold of him (Scherzo). 'He despairs of himself and of God. [...] Utter disgust for every form of existence and evolution seizes him in an iron grip, tormenting him until he utters a cry of despair.'

In the fourth movement, 'the stirring words of simple faith sound' in the hero's ears and hold out the promise of light. As for the final movement: 'The horror of the day of days has come upon us. The earth trembles, the graves burst open, the dead arise and march forth in endless procession. The great and the small of this earth, the kings and the beggars, the just and the godless, all press forward. The cry for mercy and forgiveness sounds fearful in our ears. The wailing becomes gradually more terrible. Our senses desert us, all consciousness dies as the Eternal Judge approaches. The Last Trump sounds; the trumpets of the Apocalypse ring out. In the eerie silence that follows, we can just barely make out a distant nightingale, a last tremulous echo of earthly life. The gentle sound of a chorus of saints and heavenly hosts is then heard: "Rise again, yes, rise again thou wilt!" Then God in all His glory comes into sight. A wondrous light strikes us to the heart. All is quiet and blissful. Behold: there is no judgement, no sinners, no just men, no great and no small; there is no punishment and no reward. A feeling of overwhelming love fills us with blissful knowledge and illuminates our existence.'

Analysis

1. Allegro maestoso. Mit durchaus ernstem und feierlichem Ausdruck [With deeply serious and solemn expression]. For the first time in his career, Mahler here assumes the full stature of a symphonist in the great German tradition—the tradition of Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner. With the eloquence of its thematic material, the power of its architectural structures, the emotional thrust of its inspiration and its concision of thought, this funeral march can stand comparison with those in Beethoven's Eroica and Wagner's Götterdämmerung. The shadow of Bruckner hovers over the opening bars with their long initial tremolando and over the forty-three-bar first subject on the lower strings. Yet Mahler's distinctive voice asserts itself in numerous features already present in his first score of 1880, Das klagende Lied: note in particular the dominant-tonic melodic progressions and the alternation between major and minor. The structure is still entirely Classical, with two main subject groups, the second of which, in E major, already hints at the work's optimistic conclusion and the final movement's Resurrection theme. Transposed to C major, this same subject also launches the development section with a long and tranquil episode in which the cor anglais underscores the pastoral mood with a gentle ranz des vaches. Following a dramatic and agitated reworking of the initial theme, the sense of calm reasserts itself with a second pastoral episode. On this occasion, however, it is brutally interrupted by a furious return of the scalic beginning of the first subject in the 'wrong' key of E-flat minor, punctuated by violent strokes on timpani and tam-tam. This tempestuous episode is soon interrupted in turn by a slow descending scale that ends pianissimo in the instruments' lowest register. Against a tremolando accompaniment, a second development section that is as long as the first is set in motion. A new element enters on six horns, a solemn chorale related to the Dies irae, that will later play a crucial role in the final movement. The following tutti grows increasingly violent until the return of the initial theme in its original form. The foreshortened recapitulation is followed by a majestic coda in which the various themes gradually disintegrate before the movement ends with a descending scale in rapid triplets, a striking example of the Einsturz or collapse that the philosopher Theodor Adorno regarded as typically Mahlerian.

2. Andante moderato. Sehr gemächlich. Nie eilen [Very leisurely. Never hurry]. The idyllic second movement is so different in style and atmosphere from the epic scale of the first that Mahler initially demanded a pause of several minutes between them, but he later abandoned this idea that no modern conductor would dream of adopting. Two sections alternate, the first a graceful ländler in the major, the second a triplet theme in the minor. Mahler was particularly proud of the cellos' countermelody that accompanies the second exposition of the principal theme.

3. In ruhig fliessender Bewegung [With a gently flowing movement]. The tragic, or at least pessimistic, attitude of this symphonic Scherzo seems worlds apart from the humour of the Wunderhorn song in which St Anthony preaches to the fish, which understand nothing of his sermon and look on with a glazed expression, yet both draw on the same musical material. Well versed as he was in the writings of the early German Romantics, Mahler no doubt discovered here an underlying congruity between the tragic and the grotesque. At all events, the comic tale had a deeper meaning for him, inasmuch as he saw in it a reflection of the artist's fate on this earth, perpetually misunderstood by the mass of his fellow humans. It is also worth mentioning that the movement is invariably invested with a negative meaning in the various programmes that Mahler drew up.

Two timpani strokes on the dominant and tonic unleash the Scherzo's 'ceaseless agitation', an uninterrupted and intentionally monotonous double ostinato of semiquavers in the treble and quavers in the bass. Mahler uses deliberately shrill and somewhat grotesque-sounding timbres such as those the E-flat clarinet and piccolo. The bulk of the material the Trio in C major is likewise borrowed from the song, the main exception being the great trumpet solo, an example of 'banality' for which Mahler has often been reproached but which delights us today by dint of its very simplicity. At the end of the movement, the 'cry of despair' alluded to in the symphony's programme is heard on full orchestra in a vast B-flat minor climactic tutti.

4. Urlicht. Sehr feierlich aber schlicht (Choralmässig) [Primeval Light. Very solemn but simple (In the manner of a chorale)]. After the 'tormenting' questions of the opening movement and the grotesque dance of the Scherzo, mankind returns to a childlike state and is finally freed from uncertainty and doubt. This Wunderhorn song brings with it the first ray of light and opens the way to the final movement, while at the same time allowing the human voice to be heard for the first time. The initial ascending motif, in the singer's lowest register, is already a harbinger of hope and is followed by a solemn chorale which, gently stated on the brass, affirms the calm and innocent faith of childhood. Later, an expanded version of this same ascending theme will become the final movement's Resurrection theme. In the central episode ('Da kam ich auf einen breiten Weg': 'Then I came upon a broad path'), hope is confirmed and doubt vanquished, and the song ends on a note of certainty and tranquil ecstasy.

4. Im Tempo des Scherzo. Wild herausfahrend. [At the same speed as the Scherzo. In a wild outburst]. Inspired by one of the most original features of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Mahler, too, recalls an earlier episode—the Scherzo's 'cry of despair'—at the start of the final movement. The reply comes very quickly (Sehr zurückhaltend [Very restrained]) in the form of an as yet hesitant statement on the horns of the future Resurrection theme. There follows a 'voice calling in the wilderness', again on the horns this time off-stage, but the contours are once again blurred by a descending triplet figure that works its way down through the orchestra. The wind chorale that is heard against pizzicato quavers on the strings announces some of the characteristic intervals of the Resurrection theme, while at the same time recalling the Dies irae theme from the opening movement. But the time for certainty has not yet come. A long orchestral recitative elaborates the theme of human frailty and the anxiety of God's creatures as the much-feared hour approaches. (This theme is later taken up in the coda by the two soloists.) The reply comes in the form of the chorale to which the lower brass add a note of new solemnity. The heavens brighten and the return of the brass fanfare prepares for a new statement of the theme, only this time much more assertive. This whole series of episodes is linked together in a way that follows dramatic, rather than musical, rules and constitutes a vast prelude almost two hundred bars in length. As such, it may be compared to the operatic overtures that present the work's chief themes before the curtain rises.

An arresting crescendo on the percussion (timpani, side drum, bass drum and tam-tams) that Alban Berg would later recall in Wozzeck introduces the Allegro energico, a vast symphonic free-for-all based on most of the themes already heard. A return of the 'cry of despair' produces a startling effect that is one of the first instances in the history of music of what might be termed 'spatialisation'. The off-stage brass repeatedly superimpose fanfare motifs on the impassioned recitative that pursues its tireless course, first in the cellos and then in the violins. The gnawing sense of anguish grows more and more insistent until the brass enter with another triumphant fanfare. Now at last, in an atmosphere of mystery and hope, the complete Resurrection theme appears in the pianissimo cellos. This marks the beginning of the radiant coda in which chorus, soloists and full orchestra come together in a great cry of jubilation.

All that follows—the Gosser Appell or Last Trump on the off-stage brass and what Mahler described in his programme as the sound of the nightingale singing over the graves like some 'last tremulous echo of earthly life', followed by the choral entry, marked ppp, on the word 'Aufersteh'n' (Rise again) from Klopstock's ode—all this counts among the most memorable moments in the whole symphonic repertory. With the final mezzo-soprano solo ('O glaube, mein Herz, o glaube' [Believe, my heart, o believe]), the last remaining doubt is laid to rest and a sense of exalted certainty gradually takes possession of all the performers. The Resurrection theme is heard first in imitation, then in stretto and finally in unison, as the liberating words are taken up by the whole of the chorus. One final time soloists and chorus combine to intone the Resurrection theme on a fervent triple forte before leaving the last word to the orchestra, which tirelessly repeats the theme's initial notes in a triumphant peroration on which organ, tam-tams and bells confer an unforgettable splendour.

In this vast finale, one would of course search in vain for the infallible organisation and formal mastery of Mahler's other symphonies. Yet it is hard to imagine a more eloquent conclusion, nor one better suited to one of the most ambitious works ever planned and realised by a composer. The Second Symphony's final apotheosis recalls those radiant glories that can be seen shining above Baroque altars in imperial Austrian churches. It overwhelms and enthralls us, and puts all our doubts to rest.