Mahler: An Inner Symphony

Schoenberg once said that listening to Mahler’s Third Symphony was like seeing the composer’s “soul naked, stark naked… I saw the forces of good and evil wrestling with each other; I saw a man in torment struggling towards inward harmony”.

This feels like an apt précis of a composer who gives an especially strong insight into the psychology of a creative. One’s introspective highs and lows, the romantic implications and complications, the juggling of various “portfolio” roles, the single-minded commitment to art and the impact of upbringing and mindset. Perhaps above all, Mahler represents the struggle inherent in creativity and inspiration: the beautiful paradox that freedom is found in conflict, release in tension, and light in darkness…

A hurdy-gurdy childhood 

It’s no surprise that Mahler was friends with Sigmund Freud; the composer sought his advice and analysis late in life, leading Freud to link the musician’s infamous neuroticism to a turbulent childhood. 

By all accounts, Mahler’s parents did not love each other. Bernard Mahler owned a drink shop and married Marie when she was just twenty; he was coarse and aggressive, described as “a brutal man” who was often aggressive towards her. Despite this, the couple somehow found it in them to have FOURTEEN children. Maybe they found some inspiring music…

Mahler shared with Freud how this tempestuous domestic backdrop led to a seminal musical impression. As a child, one day he sprinted out of the house to escape a heated parental row and found himself running straight into a musician outside, playing a popular song on a hurdy-gurdy: as Freud recounted in 1925, “in Mahler’s opinion the conjunction of high tragedy and light amusement was from then on inextricably fixed in his mind, and the one mood inevitably brought the other with it.” To Mahler, contrasts were embedded; there was no one-sided coin. Sudden stylistic and emotional gear shifts are a signature of his later writing.

Indeed, his works are epic surveys of what can feel like every emotion under the sun: one symphony can contain military fanfares, soaring love themes, nursery rhymes like Frère Jacques, a funeral march and ironically referenced popular songs. Hence, one of the most common adjectives used to describe his work is “eclectic”.

Sample the first movement of his Fifth Symphony, which despite a quiet funereal march opening is frequently interrupted by passionate emotive outbursts; the music switches gear almost without warning, in a way that anticipates similar jolts in Shostakovich symphonies to come. 

From diary accounts, we get a sense that Mahler was like this as a man: capable of fits of rage then childlike calm. He was once labelled “a man of sudden moods” (how delightfully euphemistic), and elsewhere, “a fidgeting bundle of nerves”. In fact, as a young piano teacher he was once so distressed by the mistakes his pupil made that he ran out of the room crying (to be fair, I’ve known the feeling…). 

What holds such emotional extremes and eclectic references together, then? Perhaps it is Mahler’s strong insistence on extra-musical elements, with texts and philosophies strongly embedded. Many of his symphonies feature choirs, literary texts are often at least referenced if not sung, and he regularly provides extra-musical subtitles to individual movements. This means every Mahler piece feels like programme music, everything leaden with story and message. This is not music for music’s sake. 

Grief and loss 

This need for meaning might be linked to the fact Mahler was surrounded by death throughout his life. Of his fourteen siblings, seven died of disease in infancy. Little wonder the first piece he ever wrote was a polka at the age of six – in which he included an introductory funeral march (again, what a Mahlerian contrast).

You can often sense this shadow in Mahler’s writing, a well of deep feeling and melancholia. It could be said he was obsessed with death. His Second Symphony, “Resurrection”, was originally conceived as a symphonic poem titled “Funeral Rites” which would tell the story of how the “hero” of his First Symphony – likely Mahler himself – came to die. Thankfully for the optimists among us, Mahler reworked this as a first movement to a symphony that would express the hope and triumph of rebirth through faith and perseverance. Even so, it was a real-life funeral that helped inspire his finale; it was only on attending the funeral of Hans von Bülow in 1904 – where he heard sung the words of German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, “Rise again, yes rise again you will” – that he thought this would prove an ideal text to set for the ending. 

Mahler’s own poor health – including a defective heart valve and persistent throat infections – underlined his neuroticism and fierce superstitions. With this looming shadow of death came a fixation on fate. This is a man who started writing Songs on the Death of Children just as he became a father… Elsewhere, a brutal depiction of the hammer blows of fate ends his Sixth Symphony, three huge crashes played by a sledgehammer; when his young daughter died and he was diagnosed with his heart condition, Mahler suspected such trauma had been anticipated by this cynical symphonic ending. In later revisions, he scratched the final hammer blows; yet it remains one of the canon’s bleakest works. Mahler very much saw art as an expression of life – and thus, death.

Love and infidelity 

If loss proved a vital influence, so did love. Alma Mahler – and the complex vagaries of human romance – shaped some of his most familiar work. He had written “If You Love for Beauty” in his Rückert–Lieder as an engagement gift. Then came the Adagietto of his Fifth Symphony, written as a love letter at the time of their wedding in 1902. Its scoring has a remarkable transparency, a sense of beauty tinged with fragility.

Their relationship was delicate, to say the least. Mahler had effectively banned Alma from composing herself, having sent her a twenty-two-page letter before their marriage demanding she stop her own creative pursuits: “the role of composer, the worker’s role, falls to me; yours is that of a loving companion”. 

This destined their relationship to difficulty. At the time of their meeting, young Alma was madly in love with Alexander Zemlinsky. She wrote: “could I ever love Mahler as he deserves?… I don’t know my own heart… would Mahler encourage me to work? Would he stand by my art? Would he love me for it, as Alex does?” Not a promising start, then…

She was nineteen years younger than him but clearly idolised her husband. Alma said she married Mahler because she saw him as “the purest, the greatest genius” – but to marry him meant she had to give up everything. Nothing could disturb his almost priestly commitment to music. She agreed, at least at first, but soon came to confide: “work, exaltation, self-denial and the never-ending quest were his whole life… he noticed nothing of what it cost me… his work was all.”

Despite their undoubted closeness – Mahler would write long letters to his wife when away and expressed frustration at any brevity in her responses – there was always a looming sense of “the other”. If Mahler’s mistress was music, Alma was certainly at risk of straying; even during their engagement, he reproached her for constant flirtation with other men. In her two books, she makes many false claims and certainly advances an image of Mahler as a maniacal, impatient egocentric on the brink of nervous collapse. 

Though theirs was a romance of tension and release, love and loss, it can be heard in the vagaries and contradictions of his writing.

The conductor 

It’s amazing Mahler had time for marriage or for composition. In his own lifetime, Mahler was best known as a conductor. He was a trailblazer, preparing for each performance meticulously at a time when standards were notoriously slapdash; Mahler helped professionalise classical performance and in elevating the importance of a managerial maestro, he anticipated the cult of the conductor. 

But some people – as they would with Mahler’s later champion, Leonard Bernstein – felt that conducting made him a poorer composer. Mahler’s writing was accused of plagiarism and structural sloppiness. No one appears to have felt this stronger than Romain Rolland, who wrote: “his emotions and his ideas… reach us through a cloud of reminiscences… I cannot help thinking that Mahler’s position as Director of the Opera, and his consequent saturation in the music that his calling condemns him to study, is the cause… [he] is forced to absorb an excessive amount… in vain may Mahler try to defend the sanctuary of his mind: it is violated by foreign ideas coming from all parts, and instead of being able to drive them away, his conscience, as conductor of the orchestra, obliges him to receive them and almost embrace them.”

Yet I would argue his conducting role surely helped his composing, chiefly his attitude to orchestration. His writing is famed for its sheer scale, both emotionally and literally. Mahler’s Eighth Symphony – “The Symphony of a Thousand” – calls on eight soloists, a children’s chorus, two SATB choirs… and an orchestra that includes eight horns and seven trombones (three offstage). But the masterful thing about Mahler’s orchestration is how sparing he can be when using such a vast ensemble. It’s not one sustained tutti, a constant fortissimo; instead, he demands a huge ensemble to enable a wider range of potential smaller combinations. His is a large canvas for a broader range of colour and contrast, rather than for mere explosions of sound.

The natural world 

When you’re busy travelling the world as a conductor, the natural world becomes a much-needed refuge; for Mahler, it was part of his creative process. His packed conducting schedule meant that the only real time to focus on writing was during the summer, and so holidays to Austria’s Carinthian Lakes would host many a writing retreat. 

At his summer retreat in Maiernigg, he woke at 5.30 A.M. daily to swim alone, before heading to a composing hut nestled deep in the woodland; he would write for seven hours straight, while afternoon country walks continued his compositional process. He was known to fall behind or push ahead, with a little notebook in which to sketch new ideas; he once sang to himself for five hours straight on a rain-soaked excursion. On another walk, the cawing of two crows is said to have inspired a rhythmic motif in the finale of his Second Symphony. Even in a crow’s screech, he found music!

Mahler’s Third Symphony is a tribute to nature, with original sketches giving movements names like “Summer Marches In” and “What The Meadow Flowers Tell Me”. On one of his famous mountain walks, Mahler told his companion not to look at the view as he had ‘already composed it’. When his protégé Schoenberg complained about loud church bells intruding on his composing space, Mahler suggested he “just compose the bells in”! For Mahler, music was a direct expression of the world around him, hence his famous saying: “a symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything”.

Perhaps his most monumental tribute to the natural world was Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), an hour-long, six-movement song cycle on a symphonic scale. Having opened with words that include “Dark is life, is death”, he draws on (his own) more positive sentiments at its conclusion: “The dear Earth everywhere / Blossoms in spring and grows green again”. As ever in Mahler, the brightness comes all the richer for the darkness.

Conclusion: re-evaluation

Every summer, I compile Gramophone Magazine’s global Season Preview, surveying what ensembles are planning for the upcoming concert season. Mahler is among today’s most frequently programmed names (I’d say number one or two, with Beethoven). Yet in his own lifetime, Mahler was best known as a conductor and for about fifty years after his death, his compositions were viewed with suspicion; they were seen as “decadent”, “neurotic”, “self-indulgent”, plagiarising and structurally diffuse.  

It is surely no coincidence that his sound world came into the zeitgeist after the Second World War. Perhaps audiences could sense the lingering shadows of fear and loss, the striving and the struggle, the pain mixed with pleasure that defines the human heart. By the end we’re not quite sure if we have reached or remain reaching. Thus, the saying that where Bruckner found God, Mahler was always looking.

Struggle was the heart of his work. Being a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian among Germans, and Jewish at a time of mounting anti-Semitism, he said: “everywhere I am an intruder”. His music, then, tells its own story of inspiring determination and triumph that resonates in us all regardless of the era. As Mahler commented: “only through the fearful battles I have to fight to create my music do I receive God’s blessing in the end”.  This is ultimately why his and any creativity speaks to us: because in hearing another person’s struggle, we recognise our own. In Mahler, we hear us all.