More love-related shenanigans for the next Culture Club session. The works we will be absorbing and discussing between now and the next meeting are as follows:
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It takes a lot of work on the listener’s part to understand Wagner. I’ve been trying in vain for years, but I’ve recently made a kind of breakthrough.
The catalyst was a few intense listening sessions with Tristan and Isolde. With its mythological setting, ambiguous themes, overwhelming length and dense musical chromaticism it’s not an easy task. Perseverance paid off, though, and I feel Wagner’s masterwork is now fully under my skin. I highly recommend putting some time into it.
It also helps to have some guidance (is it possible to properly understand Wagner without some sort of guide?), and for this I can’t recommend enough Roger Scruton’s Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.
One of the many insights is a fascinating discussion on Wagner’s attitude to mythology - a stumbling block for many frustrated Wagnerians. Here’s a key passage:
A myth, for Wagner, is not a fable or a religious doctrine but a vehicle for human knowledge. The myth acquaints us with ourselves and our condition, using symbols and characters that give objective form to our inner compulsions. Myths are set in the hazy past, in a vanished world of chthonic forces and magniloquent deeds. But this obligatory ‘pastness’ is a heuristic device. It places the myth and its characters before recorded time and therefore in an era that is purged of history. It lifts the story out of the stream of human life and endows it with a meaning that is timeless.
Scruton claims Wagner’s use of mythology is one of the great intellectual advances of modern times, and the inspiration for Freud’s idea of mythology as ‘a dramatization of deep and hidden truths about the human psyche’.
For me this helps to explain a lot of art that incorporates aspects of mythology in this way, from WB Yeats to JRR Tolkien.
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The best witticisms in musical criticism are invariably about Wagner. Here are some choice quotes:
On the other hand, there are many great men who rate him very highly indeed:
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I’ve written here before on meaning in poetry and it’s a subject that continues to fascinate me. Many of our discussions at Culture Club meetings concern meaning (particularly the heated debates around meaning in Bob Dylan’s Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts), and I still suspect that this is not necessarily the question we should be asking.
Rather than ask the question ‘what does this mean?’ when faced with art of any kind, I’m more and more drawn to the view that the real question should be ‘what is this?’
Here’s a quote by C.G. Jung, from his lecture ‘On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry’, 1922 (published in The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature):
We have talked so much about the meaning of works of art that one can hardly suppress a doubt as to whether art really ‘means’ anything at all. Perhaps art has no ‘meaning’, at least not as we understand meaning. Perhaps it is like nature, which simply is and ‘means’ nothing beyond that. Is ‘meaning’ necessarily more than mere interpretation - an interpretation secreted into something by an intellect hungry for meaning? Art, it has been said, is beauty, and ‘a thing of beauty is a joy for ever’. It needs no meaning, for meaning has nothing to do with art.
Where does that leave the appreciation of art? Perhaps in trying to understand how a piece of art works, how it achieves its effects, its structure, form, etc. Meaning comes into that, but not as the primary focus of our attention.
What do you think - does it matter what art ‘means’?
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One of Thomas Hardy’s most powerful themes is, as Joanna Cullen Brown puts it, that ‘one awakes to understanding too late’. Many of his poems cover this territory, but take the Self Unseeing as an example:
Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day;
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!
This is a picture of Hardy’s childhood home, where the ‘he’ and ’she’ are his father and mother. There is a finely poised balance here between happiness and remorse, between life and bereavement. As C. Day Lewis says in his essay The Lyrical Poetry (1951), published in Thomas Hardy: Poems, the Casebook Series: ‘It shows his delicate skill in suffusing pathos with gaiety, his sense of the transient haunting all scenes of present happiness’.
For Hardy the great tragedy of life lies in this unconscious ‘turning away’ from its most important aspects. The last stanza of his poem Overlooking the River Stour offers a poignant self-revelation:
And never I turned my head, alack,
While these things met my gaze
Through the pane’s drop-drenched glaze,
To see the more behind my back . . .
O never I turned, but let, alack,
These less things hold my gaze!
Hardy doesn’t offer this as merely his own personal tragedy; we are meant to understand that it afflicts all of us. This is clear from the opening of Beyond the Last Lamp, for example, where the lovers might represent all lovers:
Two linked loiterers, wan, downcast:
Some heavy thought constrained each face,
And blinded them to time and place.
This is characteristic of the aspect of Hardy’s work that Lytton Strachey referred to when he said: ‘A flashlight is turned for a moment upon some scene or upon some character, and in that moment the tragedies of whole lives and the long fatalities of human relationships seem to stand revealed’ (from his essay of 1914, published in Thomas Hardy: Poems).
The poems of 1912-13, written for his late wife, who died suddenly and unexpectedly, appear to represent a crisis point for Hardy. Finally this theme of regret enters his life in a stark realisation, and Hardy immediately responds to this with poetry that desperately tries to find meaning in the lost opportunities and the events of the past. One can detect, though, a new and more positive note in one of the best poems of this collection, After a Journey. The phantom of his dead wife has brought him in the night to a place they used to visit when they first fell in love. But as the sun rises the poem ends with an affirmation:
Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,
For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.
Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,
The bringing of me here; nay, bring me here again!
I am just the same as when
Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.
This is new; Hardy has found a relationship to the past that is beyond regret.
Joanna Cullen Brown summarises the critical transformation in Hardy that is expressed through these poems in her book A Journey into Thomas Hardy’s Poetry:
With Emma’s death, and his strenuous attempts to understand it and to re-orientate himself, he came to see exemplified in himself the tragic themes he had already identified in his novels and earlier poems: the too-late awakening, and the human consciousness at odds with the world around it. He also saw how, working out his memories in his poems, articulating in them the final understanding of the experience, this could rivet human life and poetry together, making the one grow out of the other.
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Tagged: thomas hardy poems poetry
Throughout Thomas Hardy’s Poems of 1912-13, written after the sudden death of his first wife and originally published in the volume Satires of Circumastance, there’s a dominant theme of ‘haunting’, in both the supernatural and the psychological sense. Often this is a direct allusion, such as in the poem The Haunter, where the ghost of his dead wife describes herself as a phantom, who hovers nearby, and follows her living husband ‘where the night rooks go’. Similarly in the poem The Phantom Horsewoman, we see the ‘ghost-girl-rider’, a ‘phantom of his own figuring’.
But these are only the most explicit examples of the supernatural in this poetry. Almost every poem in the series alludes to it. Think of the extraordinary image of the dead woman’s shade creeping underground in the poem I Found Her Out There. Or the eeriness of The Voice, with the ‘Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward/And the woman calling’. Or its opposite, a ‘voiceless ghost’, presented in After A Journey. Or the contrast between the brightly dressed living woman and ‘Her who before last year ebbed out/Was costumed in a shroud’ from A Circular. Or the image of ‘one phantom figure’ remaining on the slope in At Castle Boterel. Or the atmosphere of Your Last Drive where ‘… the borough lights ahead/That lit your face - all undiscerned/To be in a week the face of the dead’. Or the ’strange necromancy’ that ‘charmed me to fancy’ in A Dream or No.
The theme is driven home; elsewhere the word ‘haunts’ is used in its other sense, as a pun: ‘Yes I have re-entered your olden haunts at last’ and ‘You are leading on/To the spots we knew when we haunted here together’ (both from After a Journey). Similarly, ‘So she does not sleep by those haunted heights’ in I Found Here Out There. The line ‘wholly possessed/By an infinite rest’ from Lament also perhaps suggests more supernatural meanings.
So what is the poet haunted by? With an eye on the biographical details behind these poems (Hardy and Emma had been estranged for some time, and there is evidence that he perhaps cruelly neglected her), it is tempting to suggest that ‘guilt’ is the answer. However, whatever the actualities of the relationship between the couple at the time of her sudden death, a close reading of the poetry itself reveals very little in the way of guilt on Hardy’s part.
If an expression of guilt were the intention, or even an unconscious compulsion, we would have the ghost of the recently deceased haunting the poet. But the most powerful poetry here reflects on the happier times, the times when the two met and fell in love.
From the first poem, The Going, there is the presence of their first encounter:
You were she who abode
By those red-veined rocks far West,
You were the swan-necked one who rode
Along the beetling Beeny Crest,
And, reining nigh me,
Would muse and eye me,
While Life unrolled us its very best.
Over the course of the ensuing poems the reflections on the distant past predominate. I Found Her Out There is a rumination on the location of their first meeting, and in The Voice the ghost explicitly states that it is her younger self, the self that the poet fell in love with, who is doing the haunting:
Woman much missed how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you have changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
The poet conjures vivid images of the object of his love ‘as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue gown!’ In A Dream or No we get more distinct pictures: ‘Fair-eyed and white-shouldered, broad-browed and brown-tressed.’ This intensifies in After a Journey, where a lost and bemused poet is compelled to visit his lover’s ‘olden haunts’, and is surrounded by a vivid but evasive presence:
Where you will next be there’s no knowing,
Facing round about me everywhere,
With your nut-coloured hair,
And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.
The references to the past are concentrated in specific memories. The motif of the woman riding that we saw in The Going is based on a specific incident in the couple’s courtship, and is picked up in the poem Beeny Cliff: ‘The woman now is - elsewhere - whom the ambling pony bore’. This memory then becomes the subject of The Phantom Horsewoman, where the poet becomes obsessed by the ‘ghost-girl-rider’ (the poet is here referred to in the third person, a masterful way of remaining objective while disclosing the obsessiveness of the vision that he sees ‘everywhere in his brain - day, night’.)
The best example of this ‘presence of the past’ is reached in one of the very best of the poems here, and indeed in Hardy’s entire output, At Castle Boterel. Once again the poet views the past from a firmly rooted present. The distinction between past and present is dramatised by the contrasting weather between the two scenes, which also symbolises the differences between the two states of mind described by the poet:
As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And the drizzle bedrenches the wagonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet
Distinctly yetMyself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather.
This powerful comparison of past and present events suggests some new insight into the poet’s life. Joanna Cullen Brown, in her book A Journey into Thomas Hardy’s Poetry, has this to say about the poem:
At Castle Boterel is a perfect imitation of life. The poem’s journey to an understanding and assessment of his love - substance and phantom - is the pattern of his life’s journey of forty years to that same assessment. Like a photographer sorting his negatives, he has superimposed over the picture of the first journey the experience of the second. Out of that experience he has created a final, new, whole understanding of the life’s long pursuit; and when we achieve such an understanding of experience, we no longer need to worry at it - it can lie down in peace. In the poem, as in his life, Hardy reaches the final sharp clarity of that moment before it fades away.
It is clear that the imagery of ghosts and haunting plays a part in something that is distinct in Hardy’s poetry throughout his work - something that can best be described as the collapsing of time. So often the subject of his poetry is a specific moment in the past, which is viewed from the perspective of the present as if both existed at the same instance. The distance between the two events is removed, in order to highlight the two events, just like in the Beatles’ song, when ‘Yesterday came suddenly’.
Take, for example, the lines from I Found Her Out There, where the intervening years between the couple meeting by the sea and Emma dying inland, are completely removed from the picture, collapsing the distance between them and suggesting a new attitude to the events of the past: ‘I brought her here/And have laid her to rest/In a noiseless nest/No sea beats near.’
Through the use of the ‘haunted’ imagery, distinct moments of the past are made more than ‘mere’ memories. They become something close to an actual re-living of the events. They also dramatise the relationship between a specific moment in the present and a specific moment in the past, revealing profound truths about the poet’s life. J. Middleton M Murry summarises this element of Hardy’s verse in his essay ‘The Poetry of Mr Hardy’ (1919), published in Thomas Hardy: Poems (Casebook Series):
In a ‘moment of vision’ the poet recognises in a single separate incident of life, life’s essential quality.
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January-March 2008
For our next session we’re taking ‘love’ as our theme. The works we will be absorbing and discussing between now and the next meeting on the 18th March 2008 are as follows:
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As a non-religious person, I’ve always struggled with the concept of ‘faith’. It’s not that I disagree with it or oppose it, it’s just that I’ve never been able to fully understand it. Whenever religious people talk of their ‘belief’ and their ‘faith’, they seem to mean it in a different sense to the way that I usually understand these words.
Recently, however, I had a breakthrough. It was while listening to the Beatles’ classic song Yesterday, from which the line ‘I believe in yesterday’ stands out.
The song Yesterday basically describes the contrast between a previous time, when the singer’s ‘troubles seemed so far away’, and his current state, in which his troubles are back, possibly here to stay, and he needs ‘a place to hide away’. This in itself is an unremarkable sentiment, and one that’s been described in many songs about heartbreak and the loss of a loved one. What lifts the song to a higher level is the singer’s statement that he still ‘believes’ in yesterday. If we reflect on the context of this belief, there can be no basis for it. There’s nothing in the song that suggests he will get his lover back, or that he has the prospect of new love in sight. The belief declared is an affirmation - a statement to the effect that ‘I will continue to put my faith in love, even though this love has ended and I’m not half the man I used to be.’
It seems to me that here the word ‘believe’ is being used in the same way as the religious mean it with regards to their faith. In fact the song Yesterday has a spiritual tone. The loss of the loved one is not mentioned until the bridge, almost in passing, as if to imply that this may not even be the source of the troubles, and that something darker is responsible for the ’shadow falling over me’. The lyrics predominantly talk of disintegration, fragmentation, disruption:
Suddenly,
I’m not half the man I used to be,
There’s a shadow hanging over me,
Oh, yesterday came suddenly.
Here the symbol ‘yesterday’ is transformed. In the previous verse it had stood for the state of stability, radiance, love and carefree times (’yesterday, love was such an easy game to play’). It now appears that it stands for the disruption itself, which ‘came suddenly’. This ambiguity and transformation is crucial to the spiritual rupturing that the song describes, and suggests that the ‘belief in yesterday’ is more complex than a naive faith in sunnier times.
The form, melody and harmonies also demonstrate profound ambiguities and disruptions. The melodic movement on the word ‘yes-terday’ that starts the song is an appoggiatura on the 9th degree of the scale, which then leads down to the tonic (G to F over an F chord). This is an uncomfortably dissonant start to a melody, and is a melodic movement one would normally expect to end a phrase, not begin it. Conversely, the melodic cadence on the word ‘yesterday’ that closes the verse rises by an optimistic major 3rd (F to A over an F chord), just as the lyric asserts its faith in ‘yesterday’.
There is further complexity expressed through the song’s persistent chromaticism; #5ths, 13ths over minor 7th chords, added 9ths, all shade and darken the melodic and harmonic movement. The melody note A over the Em7 chord on the word ‘why’ in the phrase ‘why she had to go’ is particularly discomforting (the Beatles used this unusual harmonisation in two other songs: Help! and I’ll Be Back, and both times at a point of personal crisis in the lyric).
The verse also takes an unusual 7-bar form, rather than the more common 8-bar song form, which disorientates us further. It’s as if the song constantly refuses to stabilise or rationalise: ‘why she had to go, I don’t know she wouldn’t say’. The singer is alienated; he did ’something wrong’, but exactly what is unclear, even to himself.
The overall impression is that the love break-up is a metaphor for something more fundamental, a breakdown in the protagonist’s psyche, a darkness encroaching on a previously sunny or stable disposition.
It seems to me that there are two meanings of the word ‘believe’ that can get confused.
It’s clear that in the song Yesterday, and in religious thinking (whether consciously or not), the word is being used in the second sense. The concept of faith here is not one that can be rationally explained. It’s not as if we could disprove Paul McCartney’s belief in ‘yesterday’, or demonstrate that ‘today’ is more worthy of his belief. Trying to persuade the singer of the song Yesterday to give up his faith in love would be pointless and entirely negative. Opponents of religious faith fail to grasp this; ‘belief’ in a spiritual sense isn’t meant in the same way that they understand it. This is why a rationalist approach can never dissuade believers. Here’s C.G. Jung in his essay ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ (October 1939):
If our critical reason tells us that in certain respects we are irrational and infantile, or that all religious beliefs are illusions, what are we to do about our irrationality, what are we to put in place of our exploded illusions? Our naive childishness has in it the seeds of creativity, and illusion is a natural component of life, and neither of them can ever be suppressed or replaced by the rationalities and practicalities of convention.
These insights haven’t changed my fundamental outlook - I’m not persuaded into a religious belief or attitude because of them. But it does lead me to a greater understanding of the religious ‘position’. After all, there are times when we all need to put our faith in something or someone.
Paul McCartney performs Yesterday with the Beatles.
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The Guardian Media reports that Tasmin Little will be offering her next recording as a free download: Top violinist’s free digital download targets classical elitism.
Little also hopes her recording, The Naked Violin, will be educative as well as enjoyable, and has recorded spoken introductions to the pieces to give technical and musical insights. It will consist of three very different unaccompanied works: Bach’s mesmerising Partita No 3 in E Major; a Polish folk music-inspired piece from 1984 by the British composer Paul Patterson, Luslawice Variations; and Sonata No 3 “Ballade” written in 1924 by the Belgian violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe.
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Mahler’s spirituality was defined by his personal inner demons and psychological struggles. He was a typical late Romantic in this respect. With Mahler’s music there is none of the objective contemplation of God that we see in the music of J.S. Bach, for example; everything Mahler wrote was highly subjective. His contemporary, one-time friend and the music critic of the Hamburger Nachrichten, Ferdinand Pfohl, wrote this of him:
Mahler was a mystic, a God-seeker. His imagination circled incessantly around these matters, around God and the world, around life and death, around spiritual matters and nature. Eternity and immortality were at the centre of his thoughts. Death and eternity are the great theme of his art. He wanted to believe, belief at any price.
But why the struggle, why the incessant questioning? A clue to Mahler’s spiritual intensity can be glimpsed in his remark to Richard Strauss; that it was through his art that he sought redemption. Strauss reported this to the conductor Otto Klemperer, adding his own baffled comment: ‘I’m not sure what it is I’m supposed to be redeemed from’.
Strauss wasn’t the only one perplexed by Mahler’s deep spiritual angst. It’s this very issue that made his music so difficult to understand during his lifetime. It’s also what made him such a relevant composer to a later generation, and may explain the extraordinary growth of popularity in Mahler’s music from the 1950s to the present day, after being virtually ignored for over 40 years after his death. At the heart of Mahler’s spiritual struggle is a deep-seated alienation from the world as he experienced it. Burnett James, in his book The Music of Gustav Mahler, puts this into a broader perspective:
Baudelaire’s remark that when we are moved by poetry or music, and tears come to the eyes, it is not a sign of profound joy but of ‘an irritated melancholy, a nervous postulation, a nature exiled in an imperfect world which would like to take possession at once on this very earth of a revealed paradise,’ is very near to Mahler’s intense longing and sense of alienation. It is of course true to a greater or lesser extent of all major art, in one form or another: it is also, perhaps primarily, true of Mozart (which is the major reason why the Romantics tended to regard Mozart as ‘the Christ of music’). In Mozart the very spiritualization of form, the inward ideality, all but breaks the heart that beholds it. It is simply that, with Mahler, as with all the Romantics, early or late, the nerves are nearer the surface, more exposed.
Mahler’s pain would appear to be a result of this intense alienation. As a Bohemian Jew he was an outsider racially and geographically until his death, and this was at the root of his ongoing spiritual crisis. Leonard Bernstein was a great champion of Mahler’s music, and he played a major part in the re-evaluation of Mahler that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s (he was the first conductor to record the complete cycle of Mahler’s symphonies, in 1967). Bernstein was also Jewish, as well as a world-renowned conductor, composer and pianist in his own right, so he was uniquely placed to empathise with Mahler.
In his televised documentary, The Little Drummer Boy, Bernstein locates Mahler’s spiritual alienation within the struggle between his suppressed Jewish identity and a yearning for the salvation offered by Christianity:
It’s very difficult to be a Jew. Judaism is the hardest of all religions, because there are no ultimate rewards except on earth. No promises about the hereafter, no guaranteed kingdom of heaven, only the conviction that God will love you if you do his works. Judaism is not primarily a consolation, it is a system of ethics, with not ten but hundreds of commandments about how man should live with man. Therefore the great attraction of Christianity for Mahler was the great concept of resurrection of the soul, the promise of life hereafter.
Mahler himself claimed that his first and second symphonies were the spiritual autobiography of his early years. He called his first symphony a ‘flaming indictment of the Creator’. Ferdinand Pfohl, a friend and colleague, even suggests that this affected his physical appearance: ‘He looked like one who had questioned God and had accordingly been cast out of the Light and into the Darkness, one whose crime was knowledge and who now sought with desperate urgency the way back to the lost paradise… seeking to reach God and the angels on the sounding bridge of music which joins the present world with the hereafter.’ It was this aspect of his personality that was at the root of the hostility he attracted from the conservative musical elite, as Peter Franklin explains in his study of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3:
The revolutionary, critical aspect of Mahler’s music, which then, as now, could upset Brahmsian conservatives, consisted not least in the way in which it articulated Faustian questioning as much as it embodied the harmonious reconciliation that even Romantic classicism had tended to consider the primary function and purpose of the art.
In his Second Symphony, known as the ‘Resurrection’, Mahler presents his passionate and urgent quest for salvation and the afterlife, in which, as Burnett James says, ‘Faith had, for Mahler, to be created out of tragic awareness.’ The first movement is a funeral march, depicting the ‘death of the hero of my first symphony’, and from there on in it’s a struggle for faith that doesn’t come easy. As he said in a letter to a friend about the thoughts behind this work: ‘Why did you live, why suffer? Is it all nothing but a terrible joke?’
The ‘terrible joke’ aspect of life reveals itself in the Scherzo, Mahler’s first example of what has been called his ’spectral scherzos’. Scherzo literally means ‘a joke’, and it was largely used to describe playful music, but in Mahler’s hands the joke becomes black humour (and in later symphonies at times grotesque). Bernstein argues that in this Second Symphony Scherzo Mahler portrays most conspicuously the conflicts between his Jewish and Christian identities; between, for example, ‘oriental’ melodies and Bachian contrapuntal exercises.
Claudio Abbado conducts the third movement Scherzo from Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 ‘Resurrection’
Much of the struggle and pain is expressed through one of the aspects of his style that was uniquely Mahlerian and at the time revolutionary; a style where the tragic and the commonplace sit side by side, where elevated classical themes are followed by popular street music, where a heavenly adagio might be suddenly interrupted by a hurdy-gurdy tune. Stephen Johnson provides an example of the effect in his essay on Mahler in A Guide To The Symphony: ‘The clarinet’s Ländler tune 13 bars before fig. 30 in the Scherzo of the Second Symphony is innocuous in itself, but after the haunted opening one can read all manner of sinister possibilities into it.’
This ‘inclusive’ style is very evident in the finale of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the final struggle towards salvation. Here he displays what David R. Murray called ‘a whole web of thematic cross-references, with anticipations of things to come as well as reminders of what has gone by’ (from the sleeve notes to the recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 by Simon Rattle and the CBSO, 1987). There are horn calls, marches, brass band tunes, plaintive melodies, vehement outbursts, birdsong, and much else, all brought together in one extensive movement, as if the whole world itself were being paraded by us. In the end, however, salvation does come, in a triumphant affirmation, ‘a final plateau of spiritual exultation’ (David R. Murray). This is one of Mahler’s most transcendental musical moments.
Leonard Bernstein conducts the LPO in the finale of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 ‘Resurrection’
It is easy, in retrospect, to see why Mahler was a man out of time, and why his music was resurrected and championed so passionately long after his death. The alienation that it depicts is something that many more people, certainly in the West, have come to experience in the modern and post-modern world, creating a powerfully receptive audience for Mahler’s message. As Burnett James puts it:
Mahler’s own sense of isolation and alienation - his sense of being ‘thrice homeless’ and his situation as a Jew in a hostile world - was reflected in the general sense of the individual’s loss of identity and the consequent loss of security in a world from which the firm centre had dropped under the pressures of the new knowledge and its concomitant faithlessness.
The Second Symphony is one of Mahler’s earliest solutions to the struggles with his inner demons, but he continued to search for answers throughout his life. At the last, however, he reached a calmer spiritual understanding, best conveyed in one of his last works, Das Lied von der Erde, the Song of the Earth. Bernstein discovers in this work an ‘almost zen-like contemplation of death’:
This stunning quietude and sparsness… is the musical equivalent of what Zarathustra, Buddha, Wagner and Nietzsche called variously the all, the nothing, the élan vital, the cosmic ‘om’. What has happened is that Mahler’s music, at its greatest and most mature, has become a synthesis of his lifelong conflict between Judaism on the one hand and Christianity on the other. Which makes it clear to us why Mahler chose for his final song texts ancient Chinese poetry which concerns itself with youth, beauty, wine, the brevity of life and the mystical embrace of death.
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