Review Summary: The Mahler-haters have understood correctly that the falling hammer of the Sixth Symphony is meant for them.
Heart that cannot hold itself
Tear that holds the light
Downfall – thou exaltation –
Burst the stone and the world
Why Mahler, following those poems by Rückert, wrote the
Kindertotenlieder, I understood the first time in my life when someone I loved died. The feeling in them, bent to the breaking point in a powerful bow, out of tenderness for what we hold closest and loss into the greatest distance, does not find its measure in individual misfortune of the sort that consigns children to the dead. Yet the dead may well be our children. The aura of what has not become that encircles those who died young like a halo of apparent happiness does not fade for adults either. But it is not able to enclose their distracted and abandoned life otherwise than by making it smaller. This happens to the dead through memory. It strokes the hair of the helpless, gives sustenance to the destroyed mouth, watches over the sleep of those who will never again awake. As they are defenseless, at the mercy of our memory, so our memory is the only help that is left to them. They pass away into it, and if every deceased person is like someone who was murdered by the living, so he is also like someone whose life they must save, without knowing whether the effort will succeed. The rescue of what is possible, but has not yet been – this is the aim of remembrance. It is the law that is given to the
Lied von der Erde. When the bars of music of the fourth movement looks back on beauty with a few bars of the clarinets, it is as if through remembrance all the happiness that never was has been preserved in miniature in these measures. The dead are transfigured into children, for whom the possible would still be possible, because they have not been. In the
Kindertotenlieder, this transfiguration is notated in full. “Often I think they have only gone out.” Not because they were children, but because uncomprehending love can only comprehend death as if the last farewell were that of children who will come home again. We can hope for the dead only as if for children.
If we were to risk the attempt to state in a single word the formal law of Mahler’s music – that extensive totality which eludes the spell of formula more thoroughly than any other – one would like to call this law the variant. It is as fundamentally different from the variation in the sense of Beethoven, Brahms, or even Schönberg as Mahler’s conjuring gestures are different from every kind of formal immanence. For his variant, unlike the variation, knows no established and formally binding model against which it could test itself by dialectical incursions. Rather, his attempt to break out of the bourgeois musical space is realized technically when he refuses to recognize the theme as objectification, as a musical thing, as it were. It is shattered into fragments, into those banalities that are so aggravating to moderate taste; but the fragments of the object world are hurled into the lava flow of intention, so that they lose whatever form has congealed within. Mahler draws on a musical never-never land – a time when there were not yet any themes as firm possessions. Hence he himself knows no fixed themes; the variant as small divergence and prosaic irregularity lets them all emerge flexibly from each other, disappear into each other. Music as immediacy, prior to any canon of objectification, seeks to produce itself spontaneously. For this reason, it is irresponsible to assign him, stylistically and self-righteously, to the nineteenth century, just because he wrote horn movements and gave some of his earlier pieces explanations with which the works themselves have no more in common than Bach has with Brockes. Admittedly, this historical tendency has its good, i.e., its bad side. For the despised romantic was sufficiently unromantic to undertake the return to immediacy not in the name of the restitution of some long-lost states of being, but with the force of his own state of consciousness. His critique of musical reification is not one that forgets the reality of reification and sallies forth against it like a Don Quixote in musical costume. His dealings with reified music are strictly spoken, with such strictness that the music bursts asunder. Its fragments and the fragments of the emotions that accompany it are his material, over which symphonic reason rules in a planned and powerful way. To transpose the exploded world of objects, by means of its own productive tendencies, into one that is humanly immediate – that is his will, and the improvisational variant that comes closer to an action that is informed by reality, yet ready for change, than the neo-classically total stylistic purpose, which finds it easy enough to negate the whole of existence in order to maintain it more conveniently in its present state. Mahler leaves it where it is, but burns it out from within. Now the old formal walls stand as an allegory not so much of what has been as of what is to come. The Mahler-haters have understood correctly that the falling hammer of the Sixth Symphony is meant for them.
“And sing until the moon shines bright in the black firmament.” This is the landscape of the late Mahler. For this firmament has the blackness of lacquered Japanese boxes, with their painted golden moon; a precious, but at the same time an imitated, already all-too-familiar, outworn thing. He brings it close to his eye – now the sky has the blackness of the end of the world, and the moon shines down like the torch of judgment, close enough to touch, as close as ordinary things used to be. The stumbling singer stretches the goblet of his music toward it. Is this the satanic gesture of a person who has lost hope, is no longer moved by any Spring, and with a final gulp sacrifices all the joys of existence to his own destruction? Or is it the draught of reconciliation, offered by the dying Earth herself, who no longer has need of any Spring because her true, winterless time is finally at hand? No one could know the answer. But in Mahler’s music both may be implicit: that as a brittle allegory that overreaches itself, the gesture of final, satanic defiance may signify reconciliation; that for the person who has lost hope, the nearby blaze of destruction may shine like a faraway light of redemption. The fine flakes at the end of
Lied von der Erde are equally ambiguous. A lonely soul can freeze to death in them, in a panic, dissolved into pure being; and they can equally well be the blessed whiteness of rapture – snow as the ultimate good that remains of existence, linking the redeemed to Being, while striking the window as a starry hope for the living. The elective affinity with Dostoevskii goes to the heart of it. In Mahler, Ivan Karamasov found his music. But it alone is his true language.
An early poem by Werfel contains the word
entlächelnd (smiling away from). It could have been a fugitive from Mahler’s music. For just as here, for once, subjectivity implicitly expects of language something the latter is incapable of giving: as the body of the word is stretched too far and torn, but its tears stand as signs of an intention toward the real that is hostile to language – this is how Mahler’s music behaves at every instant. Its banal aspect, from the point of view of content, appears as fragments of the world of musical things. Yet at the same time it is produced by the ego, whose drive to express itself immediately, indeed to reproduce Being, whose documentary will is oblivious to choice and, weary of moderate musical articulation, dares to expect of it so much humane expression that it dissolves and, in the process, becomes something banal. But Mahler is “smiling away” from something in a more precise sense of the word, as well – that of a bafflingly false transcendence. That a worldly gesture like smiling can be intensified to such a degree of infinitude that it seems more than worldly; that with a blasphemous shout it steals the appearance of the supernatural, but that this appearance nevertheless elicits the response “It is accomplished,” in which the Eighth Symphony exults with such childlike force – this happens in Mahler’s profane sacred music. But when a smile nevertheless flits across a face like a cloud, only to disappear in the distance, leaving clarity behind; then Mahler’s music greets the world in passing, airily, as a cloud. “Smiling away” is the gesture of farewell. Every work of Mahler’s, from the
Gesselenlieder to the Ninth Symphony, is saying farewell. Thus, in the theme of its adagio, the violin climbs higher into its cloud-heaven with a secondary motif in four steps, each one bigger than a man, in his weakness, could ascend – the greeting of someone who is disappearing. Of someone who is destroyed? Alive? In lieu of an answer, the gesture remains behind, as speechless as a legend. One would need to have the most disbelieving and believing ears to interpret it.
Mahler the ambiguous – above the banal themes he sometimes wrote “with parody” and sometimes “without any parody.” Where the indication is lacking, exalted reason struggles with the embarrassing question, Did he mean it seriously or not? It is embarrassing because reason thinks it has to worry about remaining serious in the wrong place, while, at the same time, its humor is out of place even where there is actually something to be laughed at. But Mahler’s music refuses to answer this question. This means that its banality is parody and seriousness at one and the same time. In banality, the world of things that behaves as if it is eternal, natural, and confirmed succumbs to laughter, and the visible rupture makes it recognizable as artificial, damaged, and shabby. But the rupture, for its part, is quite serious – legible as the trace of a man who, in his vain strivings, has made all this and for whom it has now disintegrated. It is legible as the trace of the damage that can be repaired if only you have pierced the fragments together the right way; of everything that is impoverished and discarded, that has everything to gain and hence, perhaps, will one day inherit everything. Exalted reason is accustomed to call this “literary.” But this we have said as much about Mahler as if we were to call “literary” the grenades that once invaded the secure structure of the cathedral of Reims. Except that Mahler’s music serves a different purpose than they did.
Isn’t it striking that the people who have so much to say about new “links” of music to the collective, to customary practice, refuse to give their blessing to Mahler’s music and in its presence turn into implacable advocates of the very
art pour l’art that they are otherwise so eager to ignore, as they hasten to advance their daily agenda?– While Mahler, to this very day, has remained the only exemplary composer who realistically stands outside the space of aesthetic autonomy, and – what is more – whose music could be used truthfully and by living human beings, not ideological
Wandervögel? Don’t those link-lovers care more about the link
per se than about the contents on whose behalf the collective is mobilized? Indeed, in their eyes, do not
any contents appear fundamentally suspect that are any more than a fetishization of the link itself? The future fate of Mahler’s music will tell us a thing or two about this.
His music is the first to substantiate the recognition that the fate of the world is no longer dependent on the fate of the individual; and at the same time it substantiates this as individual recognition and in the emotional categories of the individual human being. This is why it is so easy to insult it by calling it brittle. But its brittleness is “correct false consciousness”; no aesthetic form that is concerned with true humanity and not the fiction of the individual would be able to deny the individual as a stage in history, and any aesthetic form that does so becomes a lie in the process. Mahler’s brittleness, however, defines his truth as a historical-philosophical line of demarcation. In the words of the profoundly similar Frank Wedekind, he was not an “art-artist.” Rather, the movement of society presented itself to his music in its true sacrifice and concrete measure – the individual drive and its conflicts. The valid evidence for this is the conception of the Mahlerian march, as it already appears, compellingly, in the movements of the Third Symphony, for example. The march is meant for the collective and for moving in solidarity – but heard from the perspective of the individual. It does not give orders so much as it carries you along; and if it carries along even the meanest things and those that are the most mutilated, it does not itself mutilate. The individual who is carried along is not eliminated. The community of lovers is made available to him. The human being survives in the march on the strength of the variant, the determining asymmetry – this is what makes it so completely impossible to misuse Mahler’s music. The men who otherwise were simply forced to die when they fell out of line, the line above Strasbourg’s trenches; the nighttime sentry, the soldier who is laid to rest in the beauty of the cornets, and poor little drummer boy – Mahler forms them out of freedom. He promises victory to the vanquished. All his symphonic music is a reveille. Its hero is the deserter.
