The listener inevitably has great difficulty in grasping the structure of the first movement. It is essential, then, that we allow ourselves to experience Mahler’s Ninth in emotional terms – not merely as a self-indulgence, but because it is precisely in emotional terms that work unfolds structurally. It is hardly surprising that this particular man at this particular time should have written music wrung out of the deepest recesses of his complex personality and concerned with the great issues of life and death. The years before the First War were years of profound unrest in which a sense of dread and exhaustion permeated Europe, eliciting the paintings of Klimt, Beckmann, and Kokoschka, the writing of Kraus, Wedekind, and Hofmannsthal – works of art that reflected an obsession with analysis and transformation. We must recall that Mahler lived at a time when art was manifestly personal. Roman Catholic – with notions of spiritual salvation that for him the likelihood that life was a grotesque and bitter struggle (or even a meaningless joke) was always in conflict with a deep sense of hope, piety, joy, and love. We also know that he struggled all his life – first as a Jew, then as a Moreover, we know that he wrote the Ninth aware that he himself might die very soon. When an artist like Berg speaks in this way, who can question the appropriateness of at least attempting to make such observations? After all, a few pages after the section that Berg describes, Mahler himself writes in the score, over one of the most devastating and ominous passages in all music, the words “Wie ein schwerer Kondukt” – ie, like a grim funeral procession.Ĭertainly we have some sense that this is autobiographical music – Mahler himself said as much – and indeed, could it have been otherwise? After all, seven of his siblings died in childhood, and his own beloved four-year-old daughter Maria died of scarlet fever. Yet here is what Alban Berg wrote about Mahler’s Ninth: “The whole movement is permeated with the premonition of death …Again and again it crops up all the elements of terrestrial dreaming culminate in it …most potently, of course, in the colossal passage where premonition becomes certainty – where in the midst of the highest power of almost painful joy in life, death itself is announced ‘with greatest force.’” Words, as Mendelssohn said, are far less precise than music, and so the words one uses to describe a piece will always express the emotions conveyed by the piece less precisely than the piece itself. Mahler understood this, and although he wrestled with the idea of writing “programmes” for his symphonies he came to deplore programme notes – not only as a distraction but also as a disruption of the listener’s experience. Whatever is said in the effort to describe any great musical work, one has the feeling that one is talking around the music rather than about it.
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