Program Notes: Mahler Resurrection

GUSTAV MAHLER  
Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, “Resurrection” 
BORN: July 7, 1860, in Kalište, Bohemia 
DIED: May 18, 1911, in Vienna 
WORK COMPOSED: 1888–1894 
WORLD PREMIERE: December 13, 1895, in Berlin. Mahler, a renowned conductor, directed.  

What to Listen For:  

• The arc of the composition takes us through death to rebirth. The first movement pits a riveting first subject against a consoling second one in an intense musical drama. 

• The final movement’s scene of universal resurrection centers on a long and fantastic orchestral march that suggests all of humanity, since the beginning of time, proceeding toward rebirth. Finally, we hear a comforting motif, symbolic of resurrection, rising in the strings and preparing the symphony’s concluding hymn to resurrection.  

Among the great composers, Beethoven and Mahler most consistently and compellingly articulated existential themes in their work. With Beethoven, the theme was human struggle and triumph. With Mahler, it was the inevitability of death. The consideration of mortality runs through Mahler’s output like a leitmotif and marks each of his major compositions. Beginning with his First Symphony, and continuing in each of the nine that followed, we find funeral marches, Totentanzen (macabre “dances of death”) or other intimations of life’s impermanence. Several of the symphonies contain settings of texts that contemplate mortality and its implications. This same theme runs through Mahler’s song cycles, which parallel and complement his symphonies. And his great song-symphony, Das Lied von der Erde, is a poignant farewell to life.  

Within this body of music, Mahler’s Second Symphony occupies a unique position. Nowhere else did the composer adopt such an optimistic view of death. Nowhere else did he make a spiritual declaration that accords so closely to established religious doctrine. A Jew who converted to Roman Catholicism (though he was never secure in his faith), Mahler gives us here a vision of divine compassion and eternal life that is largely consonant with Christian theology. Yet this work is hardly doctrinaire in any sense. Rather, like all of Mahler’s compositions, it is deeply personal, and the great image of universal resurrection presented at its conclusion is preceded by nearly an hour of wide-ranging, richly textured and emotionally complex music. 

The inspiration for much of that music lay in what seems an unlikely source. Mahler composed this symphony over a period of some six years, completing it in 1894. During this time, he was much under the spell of a folk poetry anthology known as Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”), which he discovered in 1886. This volume struck a responsive chord in the composer’s imagination. Almost immediately, he began to fashion songs to verses from the Wunderhorn collection, and he continued to do so intermittently for the next decade-and-a-half. 

The songs-to-poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn form the creative core of Mahler’s early maturity. In striving to capture the particular qualities of the verses — their alternately earthy and delicate tone, their intimations of magic, eroticism and death, their wise innocence — the composer found his own musical voice. It was a voice of nostalgic longing and macabre humor, of shimmering textures and shrill outcries; it spoke the most refined musical language as well as the vernacular dialects of marches, folk fiddling and dance tunes. Far from remaining the sole property of the songs, those stylistic traits found their way into Mahler’s orchestral works. The same qualities that ring so clearly throughout his songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn are heard in Mahler’s Second, Third and Fourth symphonies as well. 

But the Second Symphony derives more than just spirit and general style from the composer’s Wunderhorn songs. Its third movement is a symphonic fantasy on music from one of them, while the fourth movement presents another in a version for alto soloist and orchestra. During the early stage of his work on the Second Symphony, Mahler had this song, Urlicht, in mind as the composition’s finale. In time, however, he came to feel that it failed to convey a vision of eternal life with the power his symphony required.  

The solution came to Mahler by chance. Early in 1894, at the funeral of a colleague, the composer heard a hymn sung to the words of Auferstehung (“Resurrection”), an ode by the German poet Friedrich Klopstock (1724–1803). Klopstock’s verses concern the same theme — the soul’s survival after physical death — addressed in the Wunderhorn song Urlicht, though in quite different terms and on a far grander scale. Mahler immediately realized that it provided exactly the strong affirmation of faith he desired for his symphony. It also suggested a choral finale, a conclusion with its precedent in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.  

By adopting Klopstock’s Auferstehung as the text for the symphony’s conclusion, Mahler found a dramatic focus for the entire composition. He retained the song setting of Urlicht, however, and added a choral finale based on Auferstehung, thereby expanding the symphony to five movements. Mahler correctly calculated that musical settings of these two poems could complement each other, creating a deeper effect than either might have produced alone. 

When he initially premiered his Second Symphony at a concert in December 1895, Mahler offered no verbal account of the composition’s meaning. Asked to do so by an admirer, he replied that the music spoke for itself and that he would consider it as having failed if any description was required. And echoing Beethoven’s caveat that his “Pastoral” Symphony was “more an expression of emotion than tone painting,” Mahler added: “I was in no way concerned with the detailed setting forth of an event, but, rather, of a feeling.”  

Yet Mahler must have felt some concern about the public’s ability to grasp his work, for he later drew up an elaborate written program commenting on each of the five movements. We can accept these accounts as well as the composer’s earlier reticence concerning the music’s meaning. No doubt written programs are useful in providing a general guide to the thoughts and intentions embodied in a complex dramatic work like Mahler’s Second Symphony. But also, no doubt, they can only take us to the point where active listening must begin. 

The opening movement is, by Mahler’s own account, a Todtenfeier, or a funeral rite. But this characterization hardly conveys the tremendous drama of the music, which presents, in imaginative terms, a desperate struggle with mortality. Mahler’s spine-chilling first subject, made up of several related motifs, is opposed by a second theme rising comfortingly through bright harmonies in the strings. The development of these contrasting materials is such that the outcome of their apparent struggle is uncertain until the final bars, when a hopeful major triad is pushed downward to its darker minor form by a pitiless trumpet. As the symphony’s initial chapter closes, death seems triumphant. 

The next two movements feature what we might think of as flashbacks to a recently ended life. First comes an Andante conjuring, Mahler declared, memories of happiness and innocence from the days of the lately deceased. The composer evokes this state in music reminiscent of the classical style of the 18th century.  

The scherzo-like third movement regards life with a cynical eye for its pleasures. Its flowing melodies have undeniable charm, like the glittering things of this world, but at the same time convey a hint of decadence and even the grotesque. A suggestion of a more noble kind of existence, embodied in the stirring fanfare that appears suddenly midway through the movement, fails to alter the course of events. At last, there is a great cry of protest. The composer adapted the music for this movement from his Wunderhorn song recounting Saint Anthony’s futile sermon to the fish, who, like the pleasure-seekers of Mahler’s imagination, hear but do not heed the call to virtue. 

The final parts of the symphony offer contrasting visions of resurrection. The Urlicht song of the fourth movement, sung by a solo alto, expresses the faith of a child, simple and serene. This is a far cry from the apocalyptic vision of the finale, which opens with a tumultuous outburst followed by recollections of earlier movements (a device derived from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony). In broadly arching fanfares whose terrible majesty rivals those that similarly rouse the dead in Verdi’s Requiem, and with a sounding of the centuries-old melody of Dies irae, the traditional Latin chant for the deceased, all those who have perished are called to life again. Now they stream forth, as Mahler described, “in endless procession. The great and the small, kings and beggars, righteous and godless,” during the long orchestral march that follows. It is an awe-inspiring and at times, terrifying parade. 

But there is no Biblical judgment. The march music gives way at last to a consoling motif, symbolic of resurrection, rising sweetly in the strings. Once again there are fanfares — not only for brass offstage but also using the more dulcet tones of flute and piccolo. As the chorus commences the assuring verses of Klopstock’s ode, we understand that forgiveness, love and eternal life are to be mankind’s final reward.  

The “resurrection” motif swells in the orchestra, leading to another vocal episode, here featuring alto and soprano soloists. The latter sings lines from Mahler’s own pen, which he interpolated into Klopstock’s text: “Oh believe, you were not born in vain, / Not for nothing have you lived and suffered.” Slowly the hymn grows in power until it reaches its climactic affirmation: “Rise again, my heart. / What you have conquered will bear you to God.” 

Paul Schiavo © 2023