In 1983 physician and etymologist Lewis Thomas’ essay “Late Night Thoughts on Listening To Mahler’s Ninth Symphony” was published as the concluding, title chapter of a small book that came to make a big impact. It was the third of six collections of Thomas’ essays insightfully examining scientific and geopolitical topics. This publication came when President Reagan’s military budget counter-offensive confronted an aggressive Soviet Union, and the threat of nuclear war hung over the world like a dark premonition.
Thomas’ opening two paragraphs begin with somber reflection:
“I cannot listen to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with anything like the old melancholy mixed with the high pleasure I used to take from this music . . . .
“Now I hear it differently. I cannot listen to the last movement of the Mahler Ninth without the door-smashing intrusion of a new thought: death everywhere, the dying of everything, the end of humanity . . . .”
This essay of only about 1,200 words resonated and echoed as an expression of nuclear anxiety, impressing on a widening circle of readers the existential gravity of the Cold War. Personal as it was, Thomas’ association of the Mahler Ninth, composed early in the 20th century, with the late 20th century prospect of Armageddon, powerfully bridged art and reality, beauty and dread. This symphony was written by a composer who changed the course of musical history, in part by bringing the highest seriousness — also, sometimes, artistic irony — to his search for the elusive understanding of life and death.
While composing this work, Mahler faced an early death himself.
Gustav Mahler finished his Ninth Symphony in the small Tyrolean village of Toblach (then Austro-Hungarian) in the summer of 1909, when he knew that a defective heart condition could make that summer his last. The symphony’s first major theme is a reference to Beethoven’s “Farewell” sonata, but the wide-ranging work is not a simple valediction. Its first movement can be heard as a tumultuous journey through life’s challenges, the second a fond look back at sentimental experience, the third a powerful defiance of malicious attacks (perhaps also malicious fate), the last a moving rumination on leave-taking.
In the symphony’s closing bars, Mahler directs the strings to play very slowly and softly, finally ersterbend (dying away).
The monumental Ninth Symphony is widely heard as Mahler’s final observation on a finality-focused subject. But from a further perspective on the composer’s legacy, it was not.
That’s not to discount Thomas’ view. He lived for ten years after the publication of his most influential essay, his death coming two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the short-lived semblance of Armageddon’s disappearance. As our world’s political and military history marched on, new and hardly predictable threats of mass calamity developed. (Early in the post-Soviet era, did anyone imagine such a threat would come from . . . North Korea?)
While the composition of Mahler’s Ninth was accomplished in difficult circumstances, the composer’s dangerously progressive health problem might not have been the most painful for Mahler to deal with. He was living in the shadow of the loss of his beloved five-year-old daughter to scarlet fever, as well as his professional assault at the hands of adversaries in Europe’s music capital.
Mahler had brilliantly directed the Vienna Court Opera from 1897 to 1907, also conducting the Vienna Philharmonic until a bitter forced resignation in 1901. Now, personally devastated and hounded by institutional factionalism and anti-Semitism, Mahler resigned his Court Opera post and left Vienna.
The concert seasons of Mahler’s last three years were spent in New York, conducting to great acclaim the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. But the success of the 1909 – 1910 season came at a steep price: further aggravation of his heart condition, coinciding with the heartache of a crisis in his marriage to a beautiful young woman whose gifts also included intense searching — of a character different than his own.
After Mahler crossed back to Europe for his final summer, he began composing his final work, the Tenth Symphony. It was actually his Eleventh. Mahler’s last three towering symphonies have some dark roots, both in numeration and in the lonely melancholy that he never heard any of them performed. But the scores survived, to the world’s enrichment.
In the summer of 1910 Mahler did complete a four-stave score of the five-movement Tenth, a foundation whose conceptual certainty varied little through all his works. His health still declining, he then began — with truly heroic artistic energy — to complete the work’s full orchestration. He substantially completed orchestrating the first movement, much of the second movement, and 24 entire bars of the third movement. (Reading Derrick Cooke’s reconstruction of the score, it’s poignant to see the oboe scored through bar 30.)
Lifelong an extremely hard worker, Mahler crossed the Atlantic back to New York in the fall of 1910, trying to resume his demanding life as a conductor. He struggled to complete an unreasonably heavy travel schedule and work load, conducting his final concert against his doctors orders on February 21, 1911, then putting down his baton for the last time.
Mahler insisted on returning to Vienna, which he did on May 12th, dying there on May 18th. The draft of the Tenth survived complete only in concept, not in latter-movement orchestration.
As in his Ninth, Mahler’s Tenth also musically explores mortality and life purpose, but the perspective of this work could be described as more cosmic than worldly. Consistent with Mahler’s always-searching nature, The Tenth engages the end-of-life subject differently than the Ninth, including remarkably modern dissonance and a chilling, loud but muffled beat on a military drum. The drumbeat echoes one Mahler heard solemnly sounded as he and wife Alma watched the 1908 funeral procession of a fallen fireman from his 11th story New York apartment.
Yet, as Mahler’s last symphonic movement, titled “Finale,” whispers and soars, it can be heard voicing a lyrical acceptance, something more hopeful than mournful, a musical testament to the deeper riches of life on Earth, even perhaps in tragic circumstances.
A fog of mixed opinion hangs over Mahler’s Tenth. Like Schubert’s Eighth Symphony and Mozart’s Requiem, any performing version of Mahler’s Tenth necessarily involves some conjectural orchestration, in this case especially most of the third movement and all of the last two movements. The essential Mahler pioneer Leonard Bernstein refused to perform any but the first of the five movements, as have other conductors.
Endings are often difficult, and the performing versions of the Mahler Tenth involve challenges that could be compared to ones we all experience in our brief lives on our work-in-progress Earth. But if you listen to Derrick Cooke’s revised “performing version” (a landmark, though there are other fine ones) of this symphony, filling out the latter-movement orchestration of Mahler’s final composition, you might hear something extraordinary — a work whose transcendentally profound and beautiful music nobody but Mahler ever could have created.
In another essay, “Seven Wonders,” Thomas wrote this about something else magnificent and inspiring, the Earth itself:
“It is the strangest of all places, and there is everything in the world to learn about it. It can keep us awake and jubilant with questions for millennia ahead, if we can learn not to meddle and not to destroy.”