Death loomed. Darwin bludgeoned nature, Einstein assaulted physics and Nietzsche killed God. Trapped by time, a gaunt man sat in the south of the Habsburg Empire, unaware of the coming continental baptism of hell. In eight years, the Great War would bathe Europe in the greatest bloodletting known to mankind. The dense trees and pearlescent waters of Maiernigg blockaded nascent modernity for Gustav Mahler. Joy exploded from his cabin in ignorant defiance of death. As his diaries attest, a profound burst of inspiration led to an exuberant, rapid outpouring of happiness. A final dialogue with the Charites, perhaps, before three hammer blows of fate would end Mahler’s spiritual, social and physical life. The result of capturing this fleeting moment of joy: Mahler’s Eighth Symphony.
Aiding Mahler’s vision number 858 singers and 171 instrumentalists, among the largest orchestration of any standard symphonic repertoire. A literal army of songs heralds the grace of God in the Latin of “Veni Creator Spiritus” and argues the power of love in the German of Goethe’s “Faust.” A piece known only on record for many listeners due to the impracticality of programming a live performance, the Boston Symphony Orchestra offered the classical event of the season by programming the Eighth Symphony alongside the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, St. Paul’s Boys Choir, and eight renowned vocalists from Oct. 4–6 for the first time in Symphony Hall in 20 years.
Mahler’s immortalization of joy staunchly departed from his preceding tortured symphonies. Stephen Johnson, author of “The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910,” notes in his landmark study of Mahler’s symphony: “The first seven symphonies were all, in their very different ways, acts of private confession, the unburdening of a hypersensitive soul, struggling to make sense of its own existence and of the thrilling and terrifying world in which it found itself.” “The Eighth” strove for something new, to become a bringer of joy. In the foreword, Johnson writes, “Like a religious rite it was about collective experience, a sense of belonging to something higher than self, something that both absorbed and transformed the personal.”
Griffen Collins, Tufts sophomore and baritone in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, relates to this “religious rite.” “[The Eighth] is just so enveloping. It takes you off of this planet more than any other piece I’ve sung,” Collins said. “I marvel at his ability to express something so pure with something that’s so complex. There’s never a stable key center. It’s definitely quite new for me, for something that’s so chromatic to be truly happy.”
A collective realization of joy influences the interpretation of James Burton, the conductor of the Chorus. “He wants us to make the vowels quite bright,” Collins said. “Like in the German word: Kraft … he wants to make it more bright and blendable. You can hear it so much clearer if it’s a wider vowel, which I thought was interesting because many choir directors say, ‘make it tall and dark.’” This brightness of the Eighth, however, hides the four years between the piece’s inception in 1906 and its premiere in 1910 that recontextualized the Eighth. What had been a declaration of joy corroded into a plea frozen by time.
Three hammer blows of fate struck Mahler between 1907 and 1910 according to the diaries of his wife, Alma. An anti-semitic ousting of him from the Vienna Court Opera, the fatal diagnosis of his weak heart and the death of his daughter Maria only months before the premiere of the Eighth. The gods punished the hubristic joy he dared capture in 1906 with the same “mighty blows of fate” prophesied in his Sixth. Mahler himself wrote, “the third of which fells him like a tree.” Manic jubilation overcame Mahler in the flash of the summer of 1906, but the stench of death lingered in the long years that followed. How ironic that writing a symphony proclaiming the goddess of love against the forces of death would plague Mahler with the unwashable stench of death. The death of his career, his marriage, his daughter and himself.
If the gods felled Mahler with hammer blows of fate, then Alma willfully stabbed him in the heart. Fiercely intelligent and individualistic, Alma found herself trapped in a controlling marriage by an insecure man who refused to allow her to use her intellect. After her daughter’s death, she found consolation in the younger Walter Gropius with whom she began an affair that would destroy Mahler’s world. The double irony and emasculation of Mahler’s own goddess of love purposefully killing their marriage in the aftermath of finishing his Eighth was not lost on Mahler and contributed to his pitifulness.
The Eighth, which remained largely unedited despite the four years of tragedy, became recontextualized for Mahler. A plea trapped in time. A need to return to the jubilant ignorance of its inception. “If I were to premiere this joyful piece that I wrote after not having a great year, I think I would find comfort in the fact that I was once joyful enough to write this,” Collins said.
Far from the perfectionist authority of a great ‘German’ composer, where the score takes a biblical quality, Mahler reveals insecurities. At a rehearsal, Mahler instructed a young Otto Klemperer, “If, after my death, something doesn’t sound right, then change it.” The importance of ensuring everything sounds ‘right’, and the lack of faith placed in his own score, despite affirming this as his “best,” shows the importance to Mahler of realizing the original 1906 intention of happiness.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s October performance sat amidst a similarly socially fraught world to that of Mahler’s. Multiple global conflicts have continued the bloodletting. Modern-day institutions of neoliberalism bear a fragility similar to the collapsing world order of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Perhaps, however, one of the largest critiques of classical music can also be its greatest benefit—its insistence on looking backward. The beauty of music is its ability to capture emotions in time. Mahler immortalized his joy in the summer of 1906 when he translated his divine communion to ink on paper. Every successive reanimation of the Eighth lets this joy live in the souls of thousands for one more fleeting moment. A sojourn in the cabin at Maiernigg defended from the drone of modernity. An army for once fighting not against life, but for the living. In short, as Mahler said of the Eighth, it’s a gift.
Collins, unfamiliar with anything Mahler had written or said about the piece, still understood this gift. “If I wrote a piece that I thought embodied joy, and then my life was completely destroyed, and then I got to premiere that piece after that happened, I think that would be kind of a gift,” he said.
Mahler’s immortalized pleading is not simply desperate pity. It is an affirmation of happiness in spite of the tragedies that might follow. Tragedy does not destroy past experiences of joy, no matter how fleeting they may be. That the Boston Symphony Orchestra offered both a portal into Mahler’s emotions and allowed thousands to escape to joy 114 years after the premiere, proves that Gustav’s plea has been heard.
