Ugo Duse: The Toblach "trilogy"

When he was forced to resign from the Imperial Royal Opera Theatre of Vienna, Mahler entered into a four-month agreement with Heinrich Conried as a guest conductor for the New York Metropolitan Theatre. It was back in the early days of June 1907 and one of the greatest times of the Viennese Theatre was turning to an end. In those days, his eldest daughter fell ill, then died on July 5. On July 6 his wife had a heart failure and a doctor was summoned to Maiernigg, in Carinthia, where they were spending their holidays, indeed their holiday resort for many years by then. While doctor Blumenthal did not find anything serious in Mrs. Mahler, Mahler asked him wittingly to examine him and was found affected by a congenital bilateral valvular failure. There had been many heart patients in his family, and therefore inheritability was probably involved. Although the valvular disorder was compensated, a change in life was clearly called for, also with respect to the sports activities that the composer used to practise, namely swimming and mountain climbing. He was instructed, instead, to take longer and longer walks, but always with an even pace.

A superstitious neurotic, his daughter’s death and his heart disease made him leave Maiernigg hastily. Thus he went to Altschluderbach, less than a couple of miles from Toblach, in the Pustertal, and settled at the Trenkers’ house, a big isolated building across the Franzensfeste – Lienz – Vienna railway line. His disease was obviously not very serious if he could stand the over 1,200-mt altitude (he would, in fact, die from heart disease, but due to a slow progressive endocarditis caused by streptococcus viridians, which had nothing to do with the congenital valvular failure disorder). But he had always been a hypochondriac; his daughter’s death rekindled some family-related feelings of guilt, and he probably felt like the tree felled by the third stroke of axe in the last part of his Sixth symphony. A defeated and resigned hero. His resignation appears in Das Lied von der Erde, one of the masterpieces he composed while living between the Trenkers’ house and the small wooden “Hütte”, two-hundred metres away from the house, right in the middle of the forest. Today, every now and then, sad-looking roedeers strolling in the neighbourhood still wander around this hut.

In late summer 1907 he started writing music for the texts by Chinese poets that he had received one day as a gift from his friend Theobald Pollack. He went on with this job while staying in the US, without considering in which order they would be finally arranged, and the following summer he completed the interludes that pervade the six Lieder here and there and that significantly contribute to the greatness of this work. This is especially true for the one introducing the chorus in Der Abschied.

At the same time he started composing his Ninth symphony. In summer 1909 he went back to what he by then considered as his last shelter and ended his last completed symphony; there and during his last trip to his native land Moravia, he completed the instrumentation of Das Lied von der Erde.

The texts of this cycle that, not only by his will but also for structural reasons, make up a true “Lieder symphony”, are taken from an anthology of Chinese lyrics compiled by Hans Bethge, spanning over several centuries of Chinese literature. With respect to Die chinesische Flöte he was particularly struck by the lyrics of the T’ang age, as shown by the fact that he only wrote music for poems written under that dynasty: four by Li-Tai-Po, namely Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde, Von der Jugend, Von der Schönheit, Der Trunkene Frühling; one by Tschang-Tsi, Der Einsame im Herbst; one by Mong-Kao-Jen, In Erwartung des Freundes, and one by Wang-Wei, Der Abschied des Freundes. The last two were combined together into one.

With this work Mahler resumed his text manipulation technique after the Rückert break and he did with the same spirit that had guided his often drastic action on the songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. It may be appropriate, to support this statement, to stress the three-fold action on Der Abschied, the Lied that results from the combination of two poems by Mong-Kao-Jen and by Wang-Wei. The combination, in fact, is not the one most interesting outcome of the musician’s work: in this Lied, changes have an unprecedented depth and reach. Here is how the 6 verses of Mon-Kao-Jen’s poem were transformed:

Original version
O sieh, wie eine Silberbarke schwebt
Der Mond herauf hinter den dunklen Fichten,
Ich spüre eines feinen Windes Wehn.
Der Bach singt voller Wohllaut durch das Dunkel
Von Ruh und Schlaf. Die arbeitsamen Menschen
Gehen heimwärts, voller Sehnsucht nach dem Schlaf.

Mahler’s version
O sieh! Wie eine Silberbarke schwebt der Mond
am blauen Himmelssee herauf.
Ich spüre eines feinen Windes Weh’n
Hinter den dunklen Fichten!
Der Bach singt voller Wohllaut durch das Dunkel.
Die Blummen blassen im Dämmerschein.
Die Erde atmet voll von Ruh‘ und Schlaf.
Alle Sehnsucht will nun träumen,
die müden Menschen geh’n heimwärts,
um im Schlaf vergess’nes Glück
und Jugend neu zu lernen!

Mahler expanded these two strophes using verses he had composed in Kassel in 1884. The three final verses in particular are almost exactly reproduced.

What is more, he changed the closing of the original text transforming the final triplet as follows:

Original version
Ich wandle auf und nieder mit der Laute
Auf Wegen, die von weichem Grase schwellen,
O kämst du, kämst du, ungetreuer Freund!

Mahler’s version

Ich wandle auf und nieder mit meiner Laute
auf Wegen, die von weichem Grase schwellen.
O Schönheit, o ewigen Liebens, Lebens trunk’ne Welt!

Cutting the last verse of the original triplet obviously changes the whole meaning of the poem. Cutting the ungetreuer prevents the ultimate opportunity for self-determination. Thus Mahler substituted the Ich in the first strophe of the other poem - by Wang-Wei - with Er and, in a continuum, transformed the expectation into the expectation for a departure. And the deep sense of this departure is to be found in the final change that Mahler made at the end of the poem by Wang-Wei, which was the last he ever made during his life:

Original version
Wohin ich geh? Ich wandre in die Berge,
Ich suche Ruhe für mein einsam Herz.
Ich werde nie mehr in die Ferne schweifen-
Müd ist mein Fuß, und müd ist meine Seele,
Die Erde ist die gleiche überall,
Und ewig, ewig sind die weißen Wolken...

Mahler’s version
Wohin ich geh‘? Ich geh‘, ich wandre in die Berge.
Ich suche Ruhe, Ruhe für mein einsam Herz!
Ich wandle nach der Heimat, meiner Stätte!
Ich werde niemals in die Ferne schweifen.
Still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde!
Die liebe Erde allüberall
Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt aufs neu!
Allüberall und ewig,
ewig blauen licht die Fernen,
ewig, ewig...

As becomes a cyclic symphony, although so revolutionary in kind, the first Lied has a sonata style, and so has the fifth, although in this case Lied-sonata is more appropriate. Von der Jugend and Von der Schönheit are conceived as rondeaus. Der Einsame im Herbst and Der Abschied belong to that special, intellectually more romantic domain of the Lied, where the form has by now a relative importance and the balance of relations between voice and instruments is founded on new, clearly non-musical aesthetic criteria, however not so much in the literary as in the philosophical sense, considering sometimes possible, for inner expression needs, to change roles, and to make voice complement and enhance the instruments, or even to characterize it as a tone. Here the durchkomponiert dominates, by now released from the few rules by which it was considered a form.

In summer 1910, Mahler returned for the last time to that valley where his beloved “sounds of nature” were already fading in the lights of sunsets stained by the colours of the high rocks, stifled by the dark green of the surrounding woods. And there he started writing his Tenth symphony, of which the only completed part – the adagio - bears evidence, in my opinion, of the consolidation of Mahler’s new counterpoint style.

H. F. Redlich called the Ninth symphony Das Lied von der Erde, and the fragments of the Tenth "the death trilogy”. He explained, in fact, the huge quality improvement represented by these works, taken as a whole, and at the same time the enhancement of certain flaws that had already emerged in the Seventh symphony, based on the circumstance in which the author had started drafting these three compositions (he had just become aware of his heart disease).

Almost as if following its fatal course, in his music he met with the ghosts that were getting closer and closer to him, down to the last note on the margin of the Scherzo in the Tenth symphony: "the devil is dancing with me”, under this feeling of perdition and under this banner, his inspiration and his life would come to an end.

Redlich’s assumption is based on the diagnosis of his disease as an undisputable fact, although this, made in the summer of 1907, was indeed not too severe. But, as stated, his inborn morbid sensitivity promptly pushed Mahler along the sad alleys of a most painful hypochondria. Such assumption is also based on matching themes that would demonstrate the continuity of the talk, its progressive deepening and simultaneous dissolution, similar or, rather, in tuning with the progression of the patient’s psychic and biological events, of the concentration and dispersion, in an inevitable alternation, of his coenaesthetic conditions. The assumption is suggestive as much as it is disarmingly obvious. It tries to put on a practical basis what Bekker had thought, earlier, to notice on an ideal level and what Adorno and the Adornians would then bring to a definitely idealistic level. Because after all Redlich has the merit of sticking to facts in proposing the thesis of the “trilogy” and the courage of treating as facts some musical elements, a number of constant styles observed, but also emphasized, in the three compositions. He expressed forever and reinterpreted in his “trilogy” the thesis of Bekker, to which after all also Adorno refers.

Objective circumstances allow to talk about a “trilogy”: the break between these compositions and the rhetorical confusion of the Eighth, only worthy of its author in its first part, is at least as wide as the one that distinguishes the Eighth from the central set of symphonies. In an analysis of the last works, it ends up with making a clear distinction between what was composed before the Eighth and what came after it. Two symphonies were composed after it – one Lieder symphony, Das Lied von der Erde, and a D-major symphony, the Ninth – and two parts of another symphony that should somehow refer to the assumption of the Divine Comedy: three works then, the third of which unfinished. All the elements are in place for anyone to see these as a “trilogy”. Since a trilogy was also made of Trovatore, Traviata, and Rigoletto, nothing prevents from making a similar interpretation. But to avoid misunderstandings, based on such reasoning we certainly cannot talk about a tetralogy with respect to the Nibelung’s Ring, where the poetic, dramatic, and musical continuum is expressed all but univocally. If unity itself, with its different parameters and appearances, determines the triple or quadruple form of the talk, then it is equally inappropriate to talk about Verdi’s trilogy as it is to talk about Mahler’s trilogy.

This obviously does not deny a fact that is common to both cases, and quite important at that: the existence of a clearly defined chronological cycle. It only stresses that the same maximum biographic or autobiographic relevance of a given composition, or anyway of an artistic cycle, may not act as a talk with a well-defined formal unity, but may at best be legitimately presented as a set of special, multiple personal experiences that, as such, may not be referred to a unity that would, in itself, exclude their multiplicity.

Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth symphony were composed in the midst of a feverish activity that saw Mahler frequently travel from Europe to the United States and vice versa, with short breaks in southern Tyrol; the Tenth symphony was also started under such frantic and somewhat routinary circumstances. Now, since the first composition of what we consider as a cycle, i.e. Das Lied von der Erde, was started after Mahler broke his relations with the Vienna Opera Theatre, why can’t we talk about a “trilogy from the new world” in Dvorák’s style? Why shouldn’t we even talk about a “Toblach trilogy” in the style of Haydn’s London Symphonies? It would not make less sense, nor be less objective than a “death trilogy”.

What is then the basic reason why death – and nothing but death – gives unity to objectively different works? Why do men like Bekker, Redlich, Adorno, smart and passionate exegetes of Mahler’s work, are joined together in this evaluation? Could it be true, fully or partly, or aren’t we falling victims to misunderstanding?

It should first be noted that discussions about the Tenth symphony should be suspended, and that the Adagio that is left confirms at best a trend, but is after all a fragment that does not go beyond the Ninth symphony from the point of view of composition language and techniques. The problem is then limited to Das Lied von der Erde and to the Ninth. Second, let us try to track and see how the discussion on death develops. Bekker explicitly states that the Ninth symphony ideally continues the Third, in that after What the country flowers tell me, What the wood’s animals tell me, What the night tells me, What the morning bells tell me, and what love tells me – i.e. the theme pervading the second part of the Third symphony and its second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth tempos respectively – Mahler, with this last completed symphony, wanted to tell us “what death told him”. Thus the poetic idea of the Ninth is, for Bekker, the idea of death. There is a non-musical inspiration – death – that drags with it secondary but necessary ideas: reminiscence, regret, resignation, Mahler's note on the main theme of part one when the chorus “oh fading days, oh lost love..." is repeated by the main horn, an image from Das Lied von der Erde; more self-quotations would confirm the ideas of reminiscence and regret, while the final Adagio would fully express resignation.

Without going further in-depth, we can see how Bekker’s poetic idea, after all still bound to an outside inspiration – death is inside us, but we are almost always unable to experience it, and therefore it comes, it meets us, it grabs at  us, and so on – changes into a cold chronicle in Redlich’s prose and turns, in Adorno, into a reflection of the death of a time or even its anticipation, the death of a world, of a vision of the world, supported by secondary but necessary ideas, including decadence, destruction, self-annihilation. These ideas, for Adorno, are finally expressed in Hegel’s style in Das Lied von der Erde and, particularly, in the Ninth symphony.

Adorno’s effort, worthy of the utmost respect, risks, however undisputable his conclusions, to be fully frustrated by clumsy disciples. After turning the extension into a principle, after creating the category of extensionality, they exaggerate, like modern Adamo da Piccolo Ponte, the contradictions by which basically, by the positiveness that is concealed in that very absoluteness, the conditions are created in the Ninth, as a thorough denial, for all the music that came afterwards, from the sneers and screams of Expressionism to the constructivism of the serials, from multiple-parameter serials, to the musical aesthetics of uncertainty. With an analytical passion concealing a background iconoclasm, they take three notes here, ten notes there, paraphrasing the Merry Widow, the Radetzky-Marsch, fragments of the Flying Dutchman, setting them on the same level as accurate references to Beethoven, to Bruckner, and to certain self-quotations. All this, combined with unacceptable chronological distortions, like matching the Ninth symphony with the Pierrot Lunaire only because they were both performed for the first time in 1912 (which is tantamount to putting the Adagio of the Tenth on the same level as the twelve-tone compositions of 1924, since this is when it was performed for the first time) creates confusion and is the sign of deep bad faith. It may be even more secret than the equivocal aspect of the re-evaluation of Nietzsche as a philosopher of decadence.

The theme of death dominates the last compositions, however at different stages and with different evaluations. In short we could say that with Das Lied von der Erde the inevitability of death appears, and expectation becomes the fundamental element in the Ninth symphony.

Das Lied von der Erde marks restored peace. Peace or resignation? For he that lives, this distinction is unimportant. Peace is resignation and this summary falls outside the cause and effect links that make things too simple by now, while denying, out of convenience, the existence of static processes that are only sensed and from which, admitting a possible poor phenomenal description, a discussion should start. This symphony of Lieder, facing the certainty of deadly hope, restores man’s lost peace. With this song of the earth Mahler also exalts his negative experience in the great journey back home to a land where everything has been explained because there is nothing to explain. The infinite is a limit if we are concerned with the finite, but if this concern makes no more sense, the limit is only in the relation between man and other men. If this relation defines man in his constant mutability and, however, in the objective possibility to reduce him to a set of facts - always the same, always, after all, the rituals of the same life - then the infinite is promptly perceived and soothes, and prepares for death. The sense of life is here: knowing how to die in peace.

In the Ninth symphony, the achievement of Das Lied von der Erde is expressed in a sound that, as Alban Berg would later put it, “is as pure as the Semmering air”. This work has a whole wonderful symbolism to it, although it has nothing to do with an attempt to talk by symbols. It is rather close to the language of death, which from Die Kunst der Fuge to Beethoven’s op. 135 and to Bruckner’s Ninth symphony, characterized the last works of these masters. Alban Berg’s attempt to penetrate the cryptic language of the Ninth symphony is a poet’s, not a musician’s attempt. This was possible because this symphony by Mahler throws a violent poetic wave on listeners, and this poetry is the inevitable tribute to the ambiguity of any music language. But we should not go beyond any theme-specific investigations, however strengthened by this ambiguity. This may at best be formally investigated to appreciate the wonderful composition technique which the artist by then mastered through his unending struggle for clarity, through an unending self-criticism that he always had to set against the charge of outdatedness given to his music. But he finally became outdated, and projected his Ninth symphony into the future.

The Ninth symphony may only be correctly understood after forgetting, in spite of its tempting symbolism, about the idea that it is pure music, because the author, even after giving up the use of  clarifying words and condemning any programme for his symphonies, did not produce any absolute music with the purpose of conquering that beauty to which true music should fatally aim, according to Hanslick’s creed, but turned the contents of his life, experience, suffering, truth, and poetry into sounds. Not even in his worst inspirational crises did he resolve to abandon the criteria of his “inner programme”; on the contrary, this was indeed distorted, suggesting formal solutions. The composer’s old prompt to listen to his music as “an experience of his own that may not be expressed through words”, however, does not provide an appropriate key to the interpretation of the symbols and hints that create this complex structure. But can we clearly define what we should mean by deep understanding of any art fact, when the contents of this fact have been translated into extreme symbols through a discontinuous process? Difficulties here really seem impossible to overcome and the only possible help may come from those few words contained in a letter sent to Max Marschalk back in 1896: “My need to express myself in musical symphonies only starts when obscure feelings dominate, and they dominate on the threshold leading to the other world; the world where things are no longer broken down into time and space."

If we then found our hopes to understand Mahler’s music on  these statements, before his Ninth symphony we should first and foremost wonder what possible experiences and sorrows its author may have suffered, and what obscure feelings had come with them as causes or consequences: this, in practice, means venturing into an investigation to the limits of the psychology of the Master’s innermost feelings. This necessarily outrages the strong critics of aesthetic principles, but this venturing to the thresholds of the other world, that world that only falls within history as an object for discovery, is in our opinion the only way, not so much safe as less unsafe, to try and match the scattered fragments of individual experience with the artist’s need to express himself. Of course, any expression mode tends, also at a pathological level, towards a dual aim: to communicate with others and to better explain to oneself what is said and at the same time why the need is felt to express oneself. This dual objective expressive condition implies the need to use the form as a way for the framing, succession, concatenation, and presentation of contents, a peculiar style of that data content, which may never be avoided under penalty of a monologue style. Even the form through which expression is accomplished therefore helps better penetrate the feeling of the conveyed ideas.

In our opinion, however, this thinking is not exalted in death expressed in an art fact, nor does it focus on the inevitabily of death, either seen as a separation from sweet life, or felt as a way to get rid of suffering; in this case we would face a translation of literature into music, whether the accepted literature of Strauss’ Tod und Verklärung or the unaccepted literature of Rachmaninov’s op. 29 or of Reger’s op. 128.

The literary debate on death, whether poetic or philosophical, hardly ever implies a physical condition of precariousness in the concerned party;  but a patient who is about to die feels death, sees himself die, becomes physically and psychically conscious of his death and, at times of maximum closeness with this upcoming new condition, continuously experiences his death. The Ninth symphony is a rational experience of death, seen as a conquered certainty, as an experience that is very easy to explain after Das Lied von der Erde that, as we have seen, represents the first approach to separation from life’s miseries in the panic perspective of getting back to an ever-blooming earth. Like Das Lied von der Erde, and like it should have been for the Tenth symphony, the symphony in D major has a slow first and last parts - Andante in D major, the first, Adagio in D flat major, the last - constituting the essence of the special form that the artist deemed appropriate to explain to others and to himself the experience dominated by the obscure feelings in those special circumstances which, in common people, result from an accumulation of critical factors, from their dramatic explosion, from their exhaustion into a long-lasting suspension from anxiety. This symphony, in fact, like Das Lied von der Erde, and like it should have been with the Tenth, is divided into three parts, which do not match with the different tempos. On the other hand, from the Fifth symphony onwards, with the exception of the Eight, Mahler always divided his works into three parts. The peculiarity of his last three compositions compared to the others is that the first and last parts are constituted by slow tempos, while the central ones by animated tempos, as in the case of the Ninth, the Ländler, and the Rondeau Burleska; the first tempo also lasts as long as the Adagio, while the Scherzo and the Rondeau last together as long as the other two.

Das Lied von der Erde left us with a beautiful envoy, Der Abschied, full of resignation and trust in the great return to the earth, and the obscure feelings that dominated that death experience were all aimed at soothing the useless rebellions of man, directing him towards the demystification of tragedy, to the acquisition of those values that are thought to be beyond history and which alone seem to make death not so much a private, as a necessary event. The first part of the Ninth symphony experiences separation in the shift from a collective to an individual level, from participation to the ritual of giving up the ritual itself. No longer farewell to the earth for a return to the earth, but farewell to past days, to beautiful young dreams. As already mentioned, this first tempo contains plenty of quotations: the theme of death of the Bruckner’s Eight symphony, a reminiscence of the “Lebewohl” of Beethoven’s Sonata Les Adieux, as well as two self-quotations – the first, Das klagende Lied, the second from Das Lied von der Erde. These quotations do exist and fall within the literary debate about death, typical of Mahler’s early years, and within the experience of death as an eternal return or an eternal present and recently experienced in the great all, or now in conflict with the new inner experience. It is probably worth stressing frequent references to the first tempo of Tchaikovskij’s symphony in B minor, a deliberately distorted quotation that pushes upwards, to the high range, what in the original version at a given moment inevitably diverted towards the low range, almost an extreme revolt against the self-destructive process painfully celebrated by the Russian musician’s last symphony.

The two central tempos express this dramatic crisis. Vital, disordered elements, in an often inconsistent speech, characterize the Ländler, a clumsy move into the past, in its ingenuousness and rivalry; some elements of bright obsession connected to one’s recent artist’s life, to music itself, maybe to its close destinies, are even too clear in the Rondeau-Burleska, dedicated to his “brothers in Apollo”: here the pursued preservation and break continuously clash against one another in a balance that blocks all ways out in an organized disorder that turns forceful repetition into the only possible development, not so much of the individual as of society at large. Irony, and maybe this time “im Sinne des Plato eironeia”, is the climax of the crisis because it is an issue of regression towards the feeling of tragedy: the animal character of the Wunderhorn in its evil infinity in spite of Saint Anthony’s preaching; this is tempered by a chorus, which subsequently develops into the main theme of the final Adagio, almost as if man had finally understood he is no different from the forest and that behind those black firs he, too, a terrified animal, waits for dawn, because he only conceives life in blue. The final tempo that undoubtedly fights with Der Abschied, the first part of the Ninth symphony, and the Adagio of the Tenth for supremacy as Mahler’s most highly inspired work, dissolves into the reasons of pain, released from despair but made more acute by memory, a farewell to life sought in that Bruckner-like peace purified in time from its mystic ambiguities and sometimes recalling the clear, subtle atmospheres of the final Lied in the “Lieder symphony”.

By then Mahler knew he was about to die, his suffering heart reminded him at each pulse. With his Ninth symphony, which conveyed something higher than an ideal beauty or pure music perfection, he tried to reveal a long moment in which the meaning of death became clear to him. This feeling pushed to the limit goes beyond the music, which therefore may not be impure, like a feeling going beyond the narrow classes of earthly terminology may be neither pure nor impure. That feeling may be perceived as a match or sensation, a sensation or empathy, like the Ninth symphony, a mystery of our time whose penetration requires, ultimately, Goethe’s “struggling around the roaring frame of time to weave the living  body of divinity,” of the earth’s Spirit. Thus the musician himself specified a day at the foot of a questionnaire he had received from an anonymous sender, to state what he lived on and what he did while he wrote.

And in this mystery we find Mahler’s ultimate earthly consequentiality; because even in its hope, even in its certainty, death is always much more mysterious than life and those who always wanted to imitate nature, could only have past memories and obscure feelings.