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Can art foretell the future?
What was Mahler thinking? (1st comment)
Dan Rottenberg
What was Gustav Mahler thinking when he wrote his First Symphony?
Mahler never said, presumably on the theory that a great work of art needs no explanation and should be susceptible to multiple interpretations. Still, when his masterpiece was first performed at the turn of the 20th Century, critics were baffled by his juxtapositions of song and symphony, not to mention his insistence on pairing every sublime or exultant passage with parody or irony.
"What does it mean," wondered the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, himself a Mahler admirer, "when a cataclysmic finale suddenly beaks forth, or when a funeral march on the old student canon Frère Jacques is interrupted by a section entitled "'parody'?" (To hear the First, click here.)
In the past, whenever I disengaged my brain and simply let Mahler's music wash over me, the First Symphony struck me as a requiem for Europe— specifically the grand old civilization of apparent pomp and grace that collapsed with the advent of World War I. In Mahler's juxtapositions I sensed the rotting infrastructure beneath the surface grandeur— the parades on the grand boulevards of some middle-European capital city like Vienna, Prague or Budapest, even while, a few blocks away, dust was stirring, anger was festering and revolutionists were plotting. It struck me even more forcefully last weekend during the Philadelphia's Orchestra's fine rendering under Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
Of course I contemplate Mahler's First with the benefit of hindsight. Most of the symphony was composed in the spring of 1888; it was first performed in 1896. World War I didn't begin until 1914.
But I wonder: Did Mahler, in some subliminal manner, sense it coming? Am I giving him more credit for prescience than he deserves? Or is that one of the characteristics of great art— that it reflects not merely the past and present but the future as well?
"The lamps are going out all over Europe," the British statesmen Sir Edward Grey allegedly remarked on the eve of World War I. "We shall not see them lit again in our time." Close your eyes, listen to Mahler's First, and you can see those lamps gong out long before they actually did.♦
Mahler never said, presumably on the theory that a great work of art needs no explanation and should be susceptible to multiple interpretations. Still, when his masterpiece was first performed at the turn of the 20th Century, critics were baffled by his juxtapositions of song and symphony, not to mention his insistence on pairing every sublime or exultant passage with parody or irony.
"What does it mean," wondered the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, himself a Mahler admirer, "when a cataclysmic finale suddenly beaks forth, or when a funeral march on the old student canon Frère Jacques is interrupted by a section entitled "'parody'?" (To hear the First, click here.)
In the past, whenever I disengaged my brain and simply let Mahler's music wash over me, the First Symphony struck me as a requiem for Europe— specifically the grand old civilization of apparent pomp and grace that collapsed with the advent of World War I. In Mahler's juxtapositions I sensed the rotting infrastructure beneath the surface grandeur— the parades on the grand boulevards of some middle-European capital city like Vienna, Prague or Budapest, even while, a few blocks away, dust was stirring, anger was festering and revolutionists were plotting. It struck me even more forcefully last weekend during the Philadelphia's Orchestra's fine rendering under Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
Of course I contemplate Mahler's First with the benefit of hindsight. Most of the symphony was composed in the spring of 1888; it was first performed in 1896. World War I didn't begin until 1914.
But I wonder: Did Mahler, in some subliminal manner, sense it coming? Am I giving him more credit for prescience than he deserves? Or is that one of the characteristics of great art— that it reflects not merely the past and present but the future as well?
"The lamps are going out all over Europe," the British statesmen Sir Edward Grey allegedly remarked on the eve of World War I. "We shall not see them lit again in our time." Close your eyes, listen to Mahler's First, and you can see those lamps gong out long before they actually did.♦
What, When, Where
Philadelphia Orchestra: Mahler, Symphony No. 1; Korngold, Violin Concerto I D Major; Richard Strauss, Love Scene from Feuersnot. Hilary Hahn, violin; Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor. May 3-5 at Verizon Hall, Kimmel Center, Broad and Spruce Sts. (215) 893-1999 or www.philorch.org.
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