"Dancing On The Rim Of A Volcano"

One of the associations many people have with Mahler’s music is his supposed obsession with death. Certainly Mahler had ample reason to be preoccupied with death. Remember that death, or at least what we think of as premature death, was more common in the early 19th century than it is today. Mahler himself was the second of 14 children, but the first of the only six who would live to maturity. In 1895 Mahler’s 22-year-old brother Otto, another aspiring composer, committed suicide. Gustav’s beloved first daughter, Anna Maria, died of scarlet fever in 1907, the same year that Mahler himself was diagnosed with a serious heart condition and one year before the composition of his Eighth Symphony.

The Vienna in which Mahler lived was similarly preoccupied with death. The Viennese—and the rest of Austria by extension—at the start of the 20th century has been described as a society “dancing on the rim of a volcano” with that unique type of giddiness and frenzy that compensates for an underlying sense of dread. It was said that the one thing Vienna knew how to stage well was a good funeral—they even had a term for it, “Eine schöne Leich,” or “a beautiful corpse”—and suicides were becoming more and more commonplace. Mahler had even set a group of poems by Rückert called Kindertotenlieder, or “Songs on the Deaths of Children,” in the early 1900s. In this, Mahler was in step with the Viennese Zeitgeist of his time. In his insightful and fascinating book The Rest Is Noise, critic Alex Ross compares the development of the early 20th-century avant-garde in Paris and Vienna: “The Parisians were moving into the brightly lit world of daily life. The Viennese went in the opposite direction, illuminating the terrible depths with their holy torches.”

But this long-held association of Mahler with death is another one that is defied by the Eighth Symphony. Here we find no mourning, no dread, no Weltschmerz. Here we find a celebration of spirit and of redemption. Even the genesis of the Eighth Symphony differed from that of Mahler’s other symphonies, which often evolved over a period of years, with movements being added, subtracted, expanded or contracted until the work reached its final form. By contrast, the Eighth Symphony was suddenly sketched out over a period of eight weeks. As Mahler explained, it was during the summer of 1906, when he planned to revise the orchestration of his Seventh Symphony, that “the Spiritus creator took hold of me.” The spirit that he refers to is that of the Christian story of Pentecost, at which the Holy Ghost descended upon the disciples of the recently resurrected Christ.

Mahler, who was born a Jew, had converted to Catholicism in 1897, but his conversion seems to have been motivated primarily by his shrewd career concerns—he was applying for the position of Kapellmeister of the Imperial Court of Austria, a staunchly Catholic country, and he made a point of mentioning his conversion in his formal application—so we have no idea how seriously he actually took the Christian concept of Pentecost. But we do know that his Eighth Symphony was written in a white-hot burst of creativity, similar to the stories one hears about the composition of Handel’s oratorio Messiah, which he wrote in approximately three weeks of intense creative frenzy, or when Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan as if he were merely taking down some demonic dictation. Like the Holy Ghost, Mahler’s setting of the text “Veni, creator spiritus” seemed to descend upon him like a ray of divine inspiration, and it celebrates the coming of that very creative force.

Mahler lived less than a year after the triumphant premiere of his “Symphony of a Thousand,” dying before the 1912 premiere of his last completed symphony, the ninth, before the Austro-Hungarian empire would dissolve in World War I, before tonality would be torn apart by Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. As Leonard Bernstein put it, “In his position of Amen-sayer to symphonic music, through exaggeration and distortion, through squeezing the last drops of juice out of that glorious fruit, through his desperate and insistent reexamination and reevaluation of his materials, through pushing tonal music to its uttermost boundaries, Mahler was granted the honor of having the last word, uttering the final sigh, letting fall the last living tear, saying the final good-bye.”