Symphony No. 5

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

As is often the case with music criticism, the most appealing thing about Mahler was often used most to damn him.   What he achieves and delivers to the listener is everyone’s dream.   The pinnacle of Everest, the Gordian knot unraveled, the boundless ocean, the power of God, the heat of hell, the silent night, the helpless child – he delivers it all in understandable language so that we might enjoy the fringe benefit of the experience.   What happened?   All those things require deep, profound understanding that comes from years of quiet contemplation and rectitude, with the understanding that we may not achieve the knowledge at all.

The mood of criticism was that he must therefore have cheapened all those things, to bring them to us so readily.   Are we happy to see the peak of the mountain even if it seems to be a facsimile image?   This seems an excessively Victorian view point, that should by rights have died with Mahler in 1911.   

 “Mahler had not much to say in his Fifth Symphony and occupied a wondrous time in saying it.  His manner is ponderous, his matter imponderable.”   (New York Sun, December 5, 1913).   Here is a view that some how discounts the colossal vision, the colossal orchestra, the chromatic pull and the alternating delicacy or fury that is so raw in its delivery that it is occasionally disconcerting.    The emotion is not in question.    The critics ability to register and receive the emotion is in question.   This symphony provides just such moments where emotions are raw and real,  but delivered with such poise and portent that the journey is not one for the faint of heart.    It is this titanic human involvement in the divine arena that most characterizes Mahler’s music.    Whereas with Bruckner’s work, for instance, we are privileged to walk the length of a cathedral, enjoying the vignettes afforded by the lady chapels, - with Mahler we are taken by force or trance from A to B and thrown down a disheveled mess,  only then realizing that the rest of the alphabet is still to go.

A life that started with a traumatic childhood, some vital sensations of which would permeate his work, blossomed into a career that was laden with honors.   As early as his studies in Vienna, that lasted all of one year, he had distinguished himself as a unique musician.   The same man who led the Vienna State Opera and the New York Philharmonic was to lead musical thought in the minds of those who were part of the natural progression, like Schoenberg.   In addition his music would also craft a new international taste in music that comfortably brought us into the 20^th century.    The Mahler revival of the 1950’s, on the hindsight of two bloody world wars, arrives at just the right moment of historical acceptance, valuing the very essence of his music ‘front and center’ in ordinary life.