Symphony No. 2, The "Resurrection Symphony"

Mahler's symphonies are conceived on a grand scale in all respects. Even though they call for a huge instrumentation, many of the individual players in the orchestra must play difficult exposed passages that provide a stem test of endurance, nerve and musical skill. Very few people seem to be neutral in their attitude toward his music. It seems that people either love it or hate it!

Gustav Mahler was born on July 7th, 1860 in Kalist, Bohemia, the region now known as the Czech Republic. He was the second in a family of twelve children! Even as a boy he showed the intense personality that would always be his trademark. He treated his first pupil to a slap on the cheek for every mistake, until the unfortunate boy found another teacher!

When he was at the peak of his powers Mahler was almost certainly the finest conductor alive, but he struggled with limited success for recognition as a composer.

He worked his way up through a series of conducting posts until 1897, when he was named the music director of the Vienna Royal Opera at the age of 37. This was the most important conducting position in the world at the time, and Mahler would probably have achieved it much earlier except for the opposition of virulent anti-Semites who continued to badger him throughout his tenure in Vienna.

The ten years of Mahler's leadership at the Royal Opera were a golden age. The opera was revitalized and freed of debt, and his conducting triumphs were legendary. After he was forced from his post in Vienna, Mahler served for two years as the conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1908 he was also named conductor of the New York Philharmonic. His tenure there was stormy and contentious. He fell seriously ill near the end of the season in 1911 and journeyed back to Vienna, where he died on May 11.

Mahler was always a complex, difficult, fascinating figure. He was a doting father and a passionate but strangely aloof husband. The eminent conductor Bruno Walter, one of several Mahler proteges, described him as "thin, fidgety, short, with a high, steep forehead, long dark hair and deeply penetrating bespeckled eyes."

On the podium Mahler was an absolute dictator, and he was always very outspoken in his opinions. "There are frightful habits, or rather inadequacies," he once wrote, "which I have encountered in every orchestra." And he went on to elaborate his complaints in vivid detail! Magnificent orchestration is a hallmark of Mahler's music. He probably understood the inner workings of the orchestra better than anyone else alive, but he also had the luxury of conducting exhaustive rehearsals of his pieces and doing thorough revisions if he felt they were needed.

He didn't hesitate to make rewrites in the most hallowed of compositions. There is a fascinating document in which he has to defend himself publicly for making changes in the orchestration of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony!

Mahler wrote many Lieder (art songs) with orchestral accompaniment and nine symphonies. He was always superstitious and had a morbid fear that he would die if he finished nine symphonies, as Beethoven and several other composers had. Perhaps it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mahler completed several sketches for a tenth symphony before he died. The sketches have been completed by others and "Mahler's Tenth" is currently in the repertoire.

It may seem strange that the famous opera conductor wrote no operas, but he preferred expressing himself in symphonies that allowed him to express deep inner passions. In the words of Harold Schonberg "Mahler evokes a moral, psychic, mystic Freudian (response]. Mahler's admirers find themselves talking about soul states, inner crises, ecstasy, apotheoses, transfiguration, fate, Nature with a capital N, spirit, the all-in-one and the one-in-all."

The first movement was originally a tone poem called Totenfeier (Funeral Rite). Mahler wrote: "It is the hero of my D-major symphony [his first symphony, "The Titan"] whom I bear to the grave there, and upon the clear reflection of whose life I gaze from a higher vantage point. Why hast thou lived? Why hast thou suffered? Is this all a ghastly joke?"

These comments should only be seen as a starting point for understanding. Mahler gave several programmatic explanations of his symphonies, but he always felt they fell far short of his expressive intentions.

The second, third and fourth movements provide relief from the tragic spirit of the first. The light-hearted second movement even includes a lilting Austrian dance in the style of a Laendler The third movement is an instrumental version of a song Mahler's had earlier written based on Das Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn). The fourth movement, Urlicht (Primal Light) is a magnificent little gem of invention based on another Wunderhorn poem.

The finale begins with "wildly charging" dynamic energy." Mahler is clear that this represents the day of judgement: "terror unleashed the shuddering earth opens its graves and releases the endless, ghostly stream of the pious and the tortured, the once rich and poor"

Mahler later said that he had a choral finale in mind but had been unable to find a suitable text. Then, on March 28, 1894 he attended a memorial service for another famous conductor, his friend Hans von Bulow. "Then the chorus near the organ intoned the Klopstock chorale, Atiferstelt'n! (Resurrection)." He said. "It struck me like a thunderbolt, and everything stood clear and vivid before my soul." Mahler added several lines of his own to the Klopstock text, and he had the poetry for his electrifying finale.

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