*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Symphony No. 8 was named by the stagehands of its Munich premier as “The Symphony of a Thousand,” for it mobilises a full chorus, a children’s chorus, a post-Wagnerian sized orchestra, four on-stage female voices, three on-stage male voices, one off-stage female voice, and one off-stage brass band. Such obsession of size, at first glance, seems to be a “product” out of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. Nonetheless, Mahler has a much more ambitious model in mind: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525/26-94), the great master of polyphony, for whom the Pope was always willing to empty his treasury in order to be surrounded by the composer’s stereophonic magic: a four-dimensional fabric of human voices and trumpets, an assemblage of mathematical relationships that only the Devil Himself can reason, which offers the Pope the very illusion of reaching his ultimate transcendence.
Until today, no existing recording can truly capture the four dimensionality of Symphony No. 8, an experience to which one can only surrender, via the imperfection of one’s sensorium, as an image in time about time. The closest mimesis of this time about time, is the description of this symphony, in its fictional disguise, by Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus (1947). In Mann’s description, language is used to re-construct the score in order to allow its readers to behold and contemplate this piece of art.
As Mann suggests, one underlying purpose of Mahler’s 8th is to “undo” Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, and the very curse that it imposed upon Mahler himself (for Mahler believed that no great symphonic composer in the Germanic tradition would be able to surpass Beethoven’s number of symphonies, though Mahler managed to sketch his Symphony No. 10, with an almost finished first movement). At first glance, the gesture almost appeared to be childish, for it seems like Mahler has merely put Symphony No. 9 in reverse by opening his own Symphony No. 8 with a magnified and majestic choral Part 1, and allows this glory to sink into a “distended,” almost “unformed” continuity of gestures in Part 2 (Faust, Part II, Act V, Scene 7), played by chamber ensembles within the orchestra, a seated chorus, and solo voices, as though the symphonic form collapsed, once and for all, and yielded itself to the mimetic art of drama.
Yes, the symphonic form did collapse, but in a much more primal and violent way than a mere reversal. Symphony No. 8 begins with a fully harmonised and magnificent invocation: “Veni, veni, creator spiritus,/mentes tuorum visita;/Imple superna gratia,/quae tu creasti pectora.” At first glance, this invocation, emphasised by a deep tonic chord played by the pipe organ and echoed by the majestic trumpets, seems to be an obscene call for God. Nevertheless, what this gesture asks for is gratia (grace/liberation) of the Artist from the “hearts which Thou didst create,” i.e. to free the Artist from all God’s creations in order for him to be free to create.
In other words, the sacred text that constitutes the invocative message in Part 1 is anything but sacred: it begs God to release the Artist from His constraints, from the chain that forever ties human beings to the burden of imitation. This “daemonic” gesture is then developed, through the obsessive fabric of polyphony (as opposed to harmony), a pure materialisation of mathematical possibilities (an act that simulates God’s creation, in Leibniz’s sense). This fabric of monstrosity, as I mentioned before, still defies the mechanical and digital technology of recording. Once flattened as pure aural event, the polyphonic and stereophonic voices of these mathematical relationships are merely assaults to the senses. However, experienced as a four-dimensional time about time, it simply pulls one out of the chronological spacetime continuum, and allows one to behold and contemplate this magnificent micro-cosmos that is germinated from the one single gesture of the beginning invocation.
“Infirma nostri corporis,/virtute firmans perpeti./Accende lumen sensibus,/Infunde amorem cordibus.” In polyphony, the composer is merely an instrument that succumbs to a series of possibilities, one opening to a finite set of others. Each passing relationship opens up a different set of senses, of affections, of longing, of hesitation, consonance, and dissonance, preparation and resolution. It is in polyphony that the composer feels closest to being the Creator, being liberated from all pre-existing creations, by holding onto the very principles of creation that pour light into the senses.
Part 2 stages the last scene of Goethe’s Faust, the triumph of the eternal feminine (eternal bliss) over the eternal masculine (eternal goal). In Mahler’s letter to his wife, Alma, written in June 1909, he finds the gendered metaphor merely an imperfect expression of what remains impossible for human beings to comprehend, and it was out of this very impossibility to comprehend that Goethe staged his final struggle. Musically, Mahler returns to the pre-classical form of the oratorio, an imperfect, two-dimensional imitation of the Passion narrative, the ultimate vulgarisation of the vulgarising trajectory of Christ, beautified by music. Nevertheless, Mahler’s music here is almost repetitive, trivial, and cyclical; in other words, it lacks the very objective (the “male” desire/drive) to reach any form of transcendence (in itself an anti-Wagnerian gesture). In fact, it is precisely because of the impossibility of transcendence, and the human incapability of reaching it, that the hetero-normative male body has to invent the feminine in order to “deliver” him from the meaninglessness of life.
Mahler parodies this human invention by materialising the Mater gloriosa as a female voice offstage (in the New York Philharmonic performance, she is put on the second tier above the left wing of the stage): “Komm! Hebe dich zu höhern Sphären! Wenn er dich ahnet, folgt er nach” (Come, rise up to higher spheres!/If he is aware of you, he will follow). Here, the Artist (Faust), “post-mortem” and absent, has long receded from this imagined struggle. In the final stanza, the orchestra suddenly bursts into an outcry, when the chorus sings: “Alles Vergängliche/Ist nur ein Gleichnis” (All that is transitory/Is but an image). On the surface of the text, the ineffable triumphs, and the Virgin delivers Faust’s soul to eternity. What the glorious trumpets (staged around the concert hall, and in the case of last night, on the right-winged second tier of the concert hall), and the seething chorus celebrate (another tribute to Palestrina), however, is the ultimate triumph of the transitory image over eternity, repeated over and over again as the symphony reaches its dazzling coda: the ultimate triumph of Art over God.
Mahler did believe that he had already been dead by the time he was finishing his 8th. In fact, in his 9th, Mahler borrows the motif from Beethoven’s “Farewell” Sonata, and refuses to resolve it not as a gesture to defy death, but a resignation to the fact that the composer had to die before he finished his last note. Perhaps Mann is “right on” when he overlaps the creative trajectories of Mahler and Schönberg together, for the glimpses of Mahler’s 10th would show, after the end of symphony, the only way for music to calve out a new path on its own is the final collapse of classical harmony and consonance, in a form that both recalls the pre-classical complexity of polyphony, and the modernist obsession with the dissonance, two poles that have already been staged and played out as an artist’s eternal struggle in the 8th Symphony—what a grand finale chosen by Lorin Maazel!
*This weekend's concerts are the final appearances of Loren Maazel as the director of the New York Philharmonic. Because of the scale of the production, Mahler's Symphony No. 8 is certainly not a frequently staged symphony. It was last performed by the New York Philharmonic (before last night) on 9 October 1976.
Printculture members can review, edit, and delete their comments, create a member page, and don't have to fill in the silly form below. Sign up or log in.
