introduction texts
Mahler,
Cantor of the "Crisis"
Giorgio
Boari Ortolani
Gustav
Mahler played a dominant role in the musical world of the XXth century
and as a composer he has to be considered an independent personality.
Aaron Copland remarked “... when on the work of this man everything is
said, something extraordinarily touching remains, because the music
resembles the person Mahler, in every detail...”, as if he wanted to
specify that the work of the composer is full of his character and of
his personal way of listening to the music. The creative production of
this composer consisted of more than only a pure and simple musical
phenomenon. It was extended by new impulses, which were unacceptable in
Mahler’s days, but were anticipating the great aesthetical-musical
innovations of modern times and were full of extra-musical and
introspective concepts. To study the historical profile of the Bohemian
composer is the key to attributing an evolutionary dimension to his work
— and this is no accident. With his explorations in harmony Mahler
followed in the footsteps of Wagner, particularly in his opera Tristan
und Isolde, and thus anticipated the breakdown of the tonal harmonic
system that would have in Schoenberg the great new voice. Mahler’s use
of the variation technique and its development forms a connection with
the later serial system. The same for his Romanticism — the
late-Romanticism of a restless composer who dug into the hidden world,
into the dark regions of unhappiness, with the desire to emphasize the
failure of human hope. Good examples are the Symphonies, from the Sixth
onwards, Das Lied von der Erde and the yearning Kindertotenlieder.
Mahler was the heir of Beethoven and Wagner, but his hypersensitivity,
his abandoning himself to the unconscious and his letting himself go in
the twists and turns of the psyche — introspection as much as
psychoanalysis — sharpen the distance that separates him from
classical Romanticism. The death of God, as interpreted by Nietzsche in
the heavy twilight of Late-Romanticism, is a metaphysical representation
of the death of Man, of the failure of Humanity to History, without hope
or heaven. The dilemma of life, the anxious, ambiguous emphasizing of a
cosmic and individual desperation, dominates the scores of Mahler, but
also those of Webern, of Schoenberg, even those of the Strauss of Ein
Heldenleben. It shows the uneasiness of the thrilling internal
virility of the composer that breaks up against the hostility of a world
that “denies the spirit” — Eros and Thanatos, like sublimation and
ecstasy of the suffering soul looking for [a] redemption through music,
or, better, through the breath of the music, “Ich atmet' einen
linden Duft, I
breathed a gentle fragrance,”
in a Vienna that was lying on the couch of Doctor Freud, fascinated by
the charm of psychoanalysis, as well as everything that followed. In
Mahler’s music the radicalism of the expressive media, which will soon
arise in Schoenberg, does not appear yet, nor do the violent linguistic
oppositions inspired by the principles of Wittgenstein. There is however
the fuse, the powder, the match — in short everything is ready for the
big bang of the twelve-tone serial system that will explode after his
death in 1911. Mahler marks the passage from Late-Romanticism to
Expressionism, while “the outward” beauty of classical sonorous
architectures is shattered under the blows of the hammer of existential
sadness and finally breaks down in the black holes of vulgarity, looking
for some peace. And also Mahler fights openly, without skipping any blow:
the man and the artist divided between experience and innocence, but
also between psychology and materialism, between total artwork and
expressive nothingness of life and art. Not intended in an oleographic
way, but lived instant after instant, to seal a culture that says
goodbye to happiness. As if the “I,” curbed in the eternal questions
on his or her own identification, desires passionately to stop the
self-pity to find himself in an objective “Me,” in a social “We,”
to be regenerated with exalting engagement in a new cosmos, which is
less afflicted by pain and more determined by genuine joy. But this will
not happen, because the Apocalypse is near; with the approach of the
first world conflict, with the atrocious pain that will bring Nazism,
with the end of freedom of existence.
The last conflict of Mahler — “three times without a home: Bohemian in Austria, Austrian among the Germans, Jew in the whole world, always an intruder, never welcome” — he will also lose in this conflict. Der Abschied represents not only the crepuscular leaving of the author through the dark atmospheres of the landscapes narrated in a deep darkness, but it is the sonorous image of the inevitable farewell of European civilization, of existential values that already started to belong to the symbolism of an epoch. It is the last moment of a historical period that predicts its end, but that already anticipates alarming questions on the inevitable future.
translated by Maria
Korporal,
revised by Stan Ruttenberg (president Colorado
MahlerFest) and Patricia Ruttenberg
Inspiration - Gerrit Van Oord
Marianne Korporal alias Mahlerianne - Ricardo de Mambro Santos
Mahler, Cantor of the "Crisis" - Giorgio Boari Ortolani
Gustav Mahler - biography
Maria Korporal - biography