Issue Three

“My time will come,” stated Gustav Mahler to an audience bewildered by his music and and hostile to it. “My time will come,” exclaimed the genius whose troubled spirit reached out not to the mystified listeners of the turn of the last century but to us instead, the audience at the turn of our century. A musical prophet, Mahler seemed to recognize us from a hundred years away, to predict a world too frightening to contemplate in 1896 but all too familiar to us.

 Mahler to use the words of composer Erik Satie, “came into a very young world in a very old time.” His voice - innocent, cynical, heartbreaking and consoling - is a voice of contradictions, as he was himself. Mahler once said that he was thrice homeless: as a Bohemian among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew everywhere in the world. His sense of homelessness, of restlessness, created an environment of conflict that informs his entire art. He was a man of dualistic vision: Mahler the conductor struggling with Mahler the composer; Mahler the Jew at odds with the Catholicism he adopted; Mahler the believer warring with the doubter who at times embraced the Nietzschian philosophy of man as god. He was at once a naïf and a sophisticate, a country Bohemian and an urbane Viennese man of society. A world of antitheses inhabits Mahler’s music, creating a complexity of experience that proved unendurable to the people of his time.

How can music be so unsettling as to be rejected by almost an entire generation? Mahler’s vision of the Austrian world was deeply disturbing. He saw a society teetering on the brink of extinction - a world crumbling beneath its smug surface, prosperous and hypocritical; certain of its earthly infallibility yet empty at its spiritual core. The music is startling in its revelations, almost like a snapshot of a world at the moment in which it begins to decay. None of this was clear to Mahler’s listeners, however. They heard only exaggeration, excess, bombast and untenable length, and were unable to recognize themselves in music they labeled grotesque. The German-Austrian tradition they loved seemed shamefully distorted and ironic in Mahler’s hands. Marches changed from charming diversions to brutal portents of a horrifying future. Harmonic digressions were pushed to the edge of the abyss of tonal disintegration. Love songs ended in tears, innocent laendler turned maniacal, dreams metamorphosed into nightmares. To the Viennese of 1896, such a vision was unacceptable and horrifying. Without knowing exactly why, they fled from Mahler’s music, labeling it incomprehensible and even deranged. Vienna’s most influential music critic, Eduard Hanslick, summed up this attitude succinctly in his assessment of Mahler: “One of us must be crazy and it isn’t me.”

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that only after many decades were audiences able to begin to come to terms with Mahler’s intensely personal vision of life. Only after life was forever changed - with the assassinations of the archduke and duchess in Sarajevo, the advent of the world war and the subsequent conflicts, terrors and staggering changes of the twentieth century - can it be perceived what Mahler foretold in music: the end of the world as he knew it. Could he have known specifics of the years to follow his death? Certainly not. But as a prophet, he had an uncanny sense of the beauty and horror that exist side by side in all mankind - indeed, in all of life. It is this juxtaposition–his stunning ability to entwine the frightening and the sublime–that makes his music uniquely compelling.

For all of his angst-ridden images and feverish dreams, Mahler’s true soul is really one that extols the beauty of life. Music for him was vision, intoxication, fulfillment: “a mysterious language from beyond.” In his symphonies resound the themes of an age in transition, a time drawing to its close: nature, folklore, poetry, love of man, faith in God, the sorrow of human destiny and the loneliness of death. He creates for us a tonal description of how perfect life could be, and then places this sonic landscape of wonder always just beyond our reach. He enables us to look back at his Vienna, albeit through a disturbing mirror of a century’s distortion. His music resurrects for us not the shipwreck of a civilization but a Vienna tinged with grace and nostalgia, a city beyond the looking glass, shining, lilting and lost. His cynicism is coupled with an unquenchable hope, violence with indescribable sweetness, vulgarity with profundity, anguish with joy, weariness with innocence. He is refined and rough-hewn, subtle and blatant, objective, maudlin, brash, shy, grandiose, insecure, confident, sinister, serene, terrifying and endlessly comforting - all at the same time, within the space of a symphony that, as he expressed it, “should encompass the world.”

Gustav Mahler was the last heir to an incomparable legacy, the last symphonist in the long and illustrious tradition begun by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He received this Austro-Germanic heritage and pushed it to its ultimate limit, stretching and exaggerating until the refined eighteenth century world of his musical forefathers had been transformed into a vortex of heightened sensibility. In his hands, elegance and restraint were reborn as passion, terror and aching tenderness. Yet, in the final analysis, the hearts of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert still beat firmly within this extraordinary music. Mahler summed up and laid to rest the treasure of that noble heritage, singing the last poignant song of nineteenth century romanticism. On this tormented genius was bestowed the honor of saying goodbye: to life and nature and music as he knew it and cherished it; to a world that would never come again.