Gustav Mahler was born Kalischt, near Iglau (Kaliště, Jihlava], Bohemia, May 7, 1860; and died in Vienna, May 18, 1911. His principal musical activity was that of a conductor and administrator, presiding over many important posts, including most significantly the Vienna Court Opera [Hofoper] (now the Vienna State Opera [Staatsoper]), the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Philharmonic. His compositional output centered almost exclusively on songs and symphonies, work on which was largely carried out during the summer months. The first three movements of Mahler’s Symphony no. 2 were first performed in Berlin on March 4, 1895, conducted by the composer (not Richard Strauss, as once believed). Mahler conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in the premiere of the entire work on December 13, 1895. The huge score calls for 4 flutes (all doubling on piccolo), 4 oboes (3rd and 4th doubling on English horn), 3 clarinets (3rd doubling on bass clarinet), 2 E-flat clarinets, 4 bassoons (3rd and 4th doubling on contrabassoon), 10 horns (4 off-stage in the finale), 8 trumpets (4 off-stage in the finale), 4 trombones, tuba, organ, 2 harps, 2 sets of timpani, bass drum, cymbals, tam-tams, triangle (more percussion off-stage), 2 snare drums, glockenspiel, bells, Rute (birch brush), strings, soprano and alto soloists, and large mixed choir.
Just as I find it banal to compose program-music, I regard it as unsatisfactory and unfruitful to try to make program notes for a piece of music. This remains so despite the fact that the reason why a composition comes into being at all is bound to be something the composer has experienced, something real, which might after all be considered sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
Gustav Mahler, writing to Max Marschalk
Hamburg, 26 March 1896
The great Austrian composer wrote these words as a preface to a “program” in which he explains his plan for his monumental Second Symphony (“Resurrection”). Mahler was too truthful an individual and musician to simply contrive a story that has no roots in reality, just to satisfy his critics. Rarely has there been a composer more self-aware about his detractors. Yet at the same time there rarely has been a composer willing to take on the kind of artistic risks that this work represented for Mahler. Before exploring the program that Mahler related to Marschalk later in this letter, some words of background concerning the composer and his Second Symphony are necessary.
Mahler had finished his First Symphony in 1888, at which time he immediately set to work on his new effort, beginning with the first movement, which he named Todtenfeier (“Death Ritual”). Some years later he explained that his conception was to bury “the hero of my D major symphony, who is being borne to his grave, his life being reflected, as in a clear mirror, from a vantage point.” Mahler ceased work on the remainder of the symphony, six painful years intervening before returning to it, years that witnessed the death of both parents and one of his sisters. By 1893 Mahler was able to complete the next two movements, one of which was the scherzo, an adaptation and expansion of one of his settings of a poem from the Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano collection, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn).The orchestral song in question was the cynical “St. Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fishes” (Des Antonius von Paduas Fischpredigt), in which the holy man, finding the church empty, preaches to the fish. Just like their human counterparts, the fish continue to behave just as wickedly after the sermon as before. Des Knaben Wunderhorn also provided material for the fourth movement of the Second Symphony, the song Urlicht (“Primal Light”), which was conceived independent of its subsequent role in the symphony. Mahler worked on these movements in the solitude of has composing hut on the banks of the Attersee in the picturesque Salzkammergut, far from the hubbub of his frantic conducting schedule in Vienna.
The death of the famous conductor, Hans von Bülow, in 1894 provided Mahler with the necessary inspiration for the stupendous final movement. By this time he knew that the finale would be choral, but he was reluctant to embark on its composition for several reasons. One of these was the immense shadow of Beethoven’s choral Ninth Symphony, to which Mahler’s own would surely be compared, another was the lack of a text commensurate with the grand vision that was emerging in his mind. Bülow was a person whom Mahler deeply respected, despite the fact that the conductor had made extremely unkind remarks about the first movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony when the composer played it for him at the piano in 1891, saying bluntly, “If that is still music then I do not understand a single thing about music.” Slighted or no, Mahler still saw fit to attend Bülow’s funeral, at which was sung a hymn to words penned by the eighteenth- century poet, Klopstock, entitled Der Auferstehung (“The Resurrection”). Mahler immediately seized upon the first two stanzas of the poem, adding words of his own to complete the long sought-after text for his finale. Once this compositional obstacle had been overcome, the final stages of the Second Symphony’s composition fell neatly into place, and the work could now be presented to the public in performance.
But achieving a performance would be no small task, as Mahler had created a huge eighty-minute composition that called for enormous performing forces. In addition to an immense orchestra with extra brass, winds, and percussion, the Second Symphony called for soprano and alto soloists and a large choir. The first three movements, which are purely instrumental, were performed on 4 March 1895 in Berlin as part of a concert conducted by the composer Richard Strauss. Mahler himself directed the torso of his new work. The premiere of the full work, again conducted by the composer, took place in the same city on 13 December 1895 after a highly intensive rehearsal period. When Mahler awoke on the day of the performance, he found himself suffering from a severe migraine headache, but after all he had been through, he was not about to let this prevent the premiere from taking place. After the concert, the composer collapsed from exhaustion in his dressing room. Despite the expected negative reviews from many critics hostile to Mahler’s muse, the event proved to be triumphant, winning many new disciples for the composer. Universal approbation for the Second Symphony would not come until the 1960s—long after the composer’s death, and largely thanks to the advocacy of the late Leonard Bernstein—at which time it could find an audience in sympathy with Mahler’s prophetic vision. Since that time, the work has been an inspiration to countless audiences. Although numerous recordings of the work are currently available, live performances of it are relatively rare because of its complexity and requisite large performing forces.
At this point we may again pick up the thread of Mahler’s reluctant “program” for the Second Symphony as related in his letter to Marschalk. The composer characterizes the first movement, Allegro maestoso, as a scenario in which we are standing by the coffin of a beloved person, whose “sufferings and his accomplishments on earth once more for the last time pass before us.” We are meant to contemplate no less a question than the meaning of one’s existence. “What next? What is life and what is death? Why did you live? Why did you suffer? Is it all nothing but a huge, frightful joke? Will we live on eternally? Do our life and death have a meaning?” The music of this movement is appropriately heroic and dramatic. Much of it is given over to a funeral march, but moments of tenderness also occur. The recapitulation is an event of particular high drama.
The composer’s explicit direction to the conductor mandates that a pause of “at least five minutes” should follow the first movement. While these instructions are rarely taken literally, a clear interval of time usually is permitted to pass before proceeding with the remainder of the work.
The second movement is a Ländler (an Austrian folk dance, akin to the waltz) in five parts. The final statement of the principal theme is especially piquant, as the string instruments all play it pizzicato, in imitation of a guitar. Mahler preferred that the violins and violas put down their bows and hold their instruments accordingly. His program for this movement reads as follows: “A memory, a ray of sunlight, pure and cloudless, out of the departed’s life. You must surely have had the experience of burying someone dear to you, and then, perhaps, on the way back, some long-forgotten hour of shared happiness suddenly rose before your inner eye, sending, as it were, a sunbeam into your soul—not overcast by any shadow—and you almost forgot what had just taken place.”
The third movement, In ruhig fliessender Bewegung (In gently flowing movement), begins with an arresting two-note timpani stroke that opens the way for an adaptation of the Wunderhornlied about St. Anthony mentioned above. An unusual percussion instrument, the branch (Rute) adds a special color to the broad palette of sounds that Mahler employs here. Irony and humor (Mahler even indicates “Mit Humor” in the score) hold sway through most of this scherzo, broken only by a sentimental trumpet melody that demarks the trio section. Near the end, Mahler introduces a foreshadowing of the apocalypse that will begin the finale. Luciano Berio gave this movement an interesting afterlife in 1968 when he used it as the canvas for the third movement of his Sinfonia. Mahler’s scherzo becomes the bearer of the entire history of music, as Berio pastes dozens of musical quotations, singing, and spoken words on it in a surreal, stream-of-consciousness collage. Returning to the program that Mahler sent to Marschalk, we read: “When you awaken from that blissful dream [the second movement] and are forced to return to this tangled life of ours, it may easily happen that this surge of life ceaselessly in motion, never resting, never comprehensible, suddenly seems eerie, like the billowing of dancing figures in a brightly lit ballroom that you gaze into from outside in the dark—and from a distance so great that you can no longer hear the music. Then the turning and twisting movement of the couples seems senseless. You must imagine that, to one who has lost his identity and his happiness, the world looks like this—distorted and crazy, as if reflected in a concave mirror. Life then becomes meaningless. Utter disgust for every form of existence and evolution seizes him in an iron grip, and he cries out in a scream of anguish.”
Mahler wrote of the fourth movement, Urlicht, that the “moving voice of naïve faith sounds in our ears.” The alto soloist, ceremoniously sings in child-like fashion the following poem from Des Knaben Wunderhorn:
O Röschen rot!
Der Mensch liegt in grösster Not!
Der Mensch liegt in grösster Pein!
Je lieber möcht’ ich im Himmel sein!
Da kam ich auf einen breiten Weg:
Da kam ein Englein und wollt’ mich abweisen.
Ach nein! Ich liess mich nicht abweisen!
Ich bin von Gott und will wieder zu Gott!
Der liebe Gott wird mir ein Lichtchen geben,
Wird leuchten mir bis in das ewig selig Leben!
O rosebud red!
Mankind lies in deepest need!
Mankind lies in deepest pain!
How dearer would I dwell in heaven!
I then came upon a wide road:
Then came a little angel who wished to send me back.
But no! I will not be sent back!
I am of God and will return to God!
The beloved God will give me a small lamp,
Will light my way to the eternal blessed life!
The complex finale begins by recalling the apocalyptic vision from the scherzo, now unleashed in its full fury. Horn and trumpet fanfares (Mahler labeled it the “Voice of the Caller”) announce the Day of Judgment, as the beginning of the Gregorian Dies irae is intoned. The trombone and trumpet then announce the “Resurrection” theme. A new section follows, probably inspired by a theme from Wagner’s Parisfal, in which an anxious theme is played by the woodwinds and cellos. The Dies irae is reintroduced, leading once again to the “Resurrection” theme, now triumphantly punctuated by brass and wind fanfares. The Parsifal atmosphere returns, as the trumpets pierce the air in a unison high note. A frightening percussion crescendo demarks the opening of the graves, as the dead now “march in a mighty procession: rich and poor, peasants and kings, the whole church with bishops and popes. All have the same fear, all cry and tremble alike because in the eyes of God, there are no just men.” A solo trombone begins to intone the Parsifal music, picked up once more by the cellos, but this time punctuated by a bizarre military music sounded off-stage by trumpets and percussion. The apocalyptic vision returns as the music reaches its terrifying climax, leading to an awe-inspiring passage, as off-stage horns and trumpets announce der grosse Appell (“the great call”), answered by the solo flute and piccolo (“like a bird’s voice”). As this dies away, the seated chorus softly intones the beginning of Klopstock’s “Resurrection,” followed by Mahler’s own interpolated text:
Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n wirst du,
Mein Staub, nach kurzer Ruh!
Unsterblich Leben! Unsterblich Leben
Wird der dich rief dir geben.
Wieder aufzublühn wirst du gesät!
Der Herr der Ernte geht
Und sammelt Garben
Uns ein, die starben!
Rise again, yes rise again you shall you
my dust, after short rest!
Eternal life! Eternal life
will be granted by he who calls you.
You were sown to bloom anew!
The Lord of Harvest goes
and gathers in [like] sheaves
us, who have died!
The Parsifal music now returns, sung this time by the alto and soprano soloists:
O glaube, mein Herz, O glaube:
Es geht dir nichts verloren!
Dein ist, was du gesehnt!
Dein, was du geliebt,
Was du gestritten!
O glaube,
Du wardst nicht umsonst geboren!
Hast nicht umsonst gelebt,
Gelitten!
Oh believe, my heart, oh believe:
Nothing has been lost for you!
What you desired is yours!
Your’s, what you loved,
For what you have striven!
Oh believe,
You were not born in vain!
Have not lived in vain,
[or] suffered!
The chorus, joined by the alto, sings:
Was entstanden ist
Das muss vergehen!
Was vergangen, auferstehen!
Hör’ auf zu beben!
Bereite dich zu leben!
What has come into being
must perish!
What has passed, rise again!
Cease trembling!
Prepare to live!
Assured of everlasting life, the vocal soloists continue with the following text, joined by the chorus, and leading to the triumphant reaffirmation of eternal life, supplemented by organ and church bells:
O Schmerz! Du Alldurchdringer!
Dir bin ich entrungen!
O Tod! du Allbezwinger!
Nun bist du bezwungen!
Mit Flügeln, die ich mir errungen,
In heissem Liebesstreben,
Werd’ ich entschweben
Zum Licht, zu dem kein Aug’ gedrungen!
Sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben!
Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n
Wirst du, mein Herz, in einem Nu!
Was du geschlagen
Zu Gott wird es dich tragen!
Oh pain! You all-penetrating!
From you have I been wrested!
Oh death! You all-masterer!
Now are you mastered!
With wings, won for myself,
In hot striving of love,
Will I soar upwards
To light, to which no eye has been drawn!
I died, so that I may live!
Rise again, yes rise again
will you, my heart, in a twinkling!
What you have conquered
Shall lead you to God!
(Klopstock/Mahler, transl. David B. Levy)
Notes by David B. Levy © 2006/2017/2025