Almost simultaneously with the rise of Russian music and the new birth
of French music, that of Germany has deteriorated. The great line of
composers which descended from Bach and Haendel for two centuries has
wavered and diminished visibly during the last three decades. The proud
tradition seems to have reached a temporary halt in Wagner and Bruckner
and Brahms. It may be that modern Germany is a difficult terrain, that
the violent change in conditions of life, the furious acceleration, has
created, for the time being, a soil unusually inimical to the disclosure
of perfect works of art. The blight on the entire new generation of
composers would seem to point to some such common cause. There is, no
doubt, a curious coincidence in the fact that in each of the four chief
German musicians of the recent period there should be manifest in some
degree a failure of artistic instinct. The coarsening of the
craftsmanship, the spiritual bankruptcy, of the later Strauss, the
grotesque pedantry of Reger, the intellectualism with which the art of
Schoenberg has always been tainted, and by which it has been corrupted
of late, the banality of Mahler, dovetail suspiciously. And yet, it is
probable that the cause lies otherwhere, and that the conjunction of
these four men is accidental. There have been, after all, few
environments really friendly to the artist; most of the masters have had
to recover from a "something rotten in the state of Denmark," and many
of them have surmounted conditions worse than those of modern
Bismarckian Germany. The cause of the unsatisfactoriness of much of the
music of Strauss and Schoenberg, Reger and Mahler, is doubtless to be
found in the innate weakness of the men themselves rather more than in
the unhealthiness of the atmosphere in which they passed their lives.
Still, the case of Mahler makes one hesitate a while before passing
judgment. Whereas it is probable that Richard Strauss would have
deteriorated no matter how friendly the age in which he lived, that
Reger would have been just as much a pedant had he been born in Paris
instead of in Bavaria, that Schoenberg would have developed into his
mathematical frigidity wherever he resided, it is possible that Mahler's
fate might have been different had he not been born in the Austria of
the 1860's. For if Mahler's music is pre-eminently a reflection of
Beethoven's, if he never spoke in authentic accents, if out of his vast
dreams of a great modern popular symphonic art, out of his honesty, his
sincerity, his industry, his undeniably noble and magnificent traits,
there resulted only those unhappy boring colossi that are his nine
symphonies, it is indubitably, to a great extent, the consequence of
the fact that he, the Jew, was born in a society that made Judaism,
Jewish descent and Jewish traits, a curse to those that inherited them.
The destiny that had made him Jew decreed that, did he speak out fully,
he would have to employ an idiom that would recall the harsh accents of
the Hebrew language quite as much as that of any tongue spoken by the
peoples of Europe. It decreed that, whatever the history of the art he
practised, whatever the character of the age in which he lived, he could
not impress himself upon his medium without impregnating it with the
traits he inherited from his ancestors. It decreed that in speaking he
would have to suffuse musical art with the qualities and characteristics
engraved in the stock by the history and vicissitudes of his race, by
its age-long sojourn in the deserts of Arabia and on the barren hills of
Syria, by the constraint of its religion and folkways, by its titanic
and terrible struggle for survival against the fierce peoples of Asia,
by the marvelous vitality and self-consciousness and exclusiveness that
carried it whole across lands and times, out of the eternal Egypt
through the eternal Red Sea. But it was just the racial attributes, the
racial gesture and accent, that a man in Mahler's position found
inordinately difficult to register. For Austrian society put a great
price on his suppression of them. It permitted him to participate in its
activities only on the condition that he did not remind it continually
of his alienhood, of his racial consciousness. It permitted him the
sense of equality, of fraternity, of citizenship, only on the condition
that he should seek to suppress within himself all awareness of his
descent and character and peculiarities, and attempt to identify himself
with its members, and try to feel just as they felt and speak just as
they spoke.
For if Austro-German society had admitted the Jews to civil rights, it
had made them feel as never before the old hatred and malediction and
exclusion. The walls of the ghettos had, after all, prevented the Jew
from feeling the full force of the disability under which he labored,
insomuch as they had repressed in him all desire to mingle in the life
of the country in which he found himself. But in exciting his
gregariousness, in appearing to allow him to participate in the public
life, in both inviting and repelling him, a community like that of
Austria, still so near the Middle Ages, made him feel in all its
terrible might the handicap of race, the mad hatred and contempt with
which it punished his descent. And it is but natural that amongst those
very Jews best fitted to take part in affairs, and consequently most
sensitive to the ill-will that barred them from power and success, there
should be aroused, despite all conscious efforts neither to surrender
nor to shrink, an unconscious desire to escape the consequences of the
thing that stamped them in the eyes of the general as individuals of an
inferior sort; to inhibit any spiritual gesture that might arouse
hostility; and to ward off any subjective sense of personal inferiority
by convincing themselves and their fellows that they possessed the
traits generally esteemed.
So a ruinous conflict was introduced into the soul of Gustav Mahler. In
the place of the united self, there came to exist within him two men.
For while one part of him demanded the free complete expression
necessary to the artist, another sought to block it for fear that in the
free flow the hated racial traits would appear. For Mahler would have
been the first to have been repelled by the sound of his own harsh,
haughty, guttural, abrupt Hebrew inflection. He would have been the
first to turn in contempt from his own gestures. There was in him the
frenetic unconscious desire to rid himself of the thing he had come to
believe inferior. And rather than express it, rather than speak in his
proper idiom, he made, unaware to himself, perhaps, the choice of
speaking through the voices of other men, of the great German composers;
of imitating them instead of developing his own personality; of
accepting sterility and banality and impotence rather than achieving a
power of speech.
And so his work became the doubtful and bastard thing it is, a thing of
lofty and original intentions unrealized, of large powers misapplied, of
great and respectable creative efforts that did not succeed in bringing
into being anything really new, really whole. Of what Mahler might have
achieved had he not been the divided personality, his symphonies, even
as they stand, leave no doubt. If Mahler is not a great man, he is at
least the silhouette of one. The need of expression that drove him to
composition was indubitably mighty. The passion with which he addressed
himself to his labor despite all discouragement and lack of success, the
loftiness and nobleness of the task which he set for himself, the
splendor of the intentions, reveal how fierce a fire burnt in the man.
He was not one of those who come to music to form little jewels. On the
contrary, in gesture he was ever one of the eminently faithful. He came
to music to create a great, simple, popular symphonic art for these
latter days, a thing of broad lines and simple contours and spiritual
grandeur. He sought to express sincerely his deep, real sorrow, his
choking homesickness for the something which childhood seems to possess
and maturity to be without; to dream himself into childlike, paradisaic
joys and wake himself to faith and action once again. He attempted to
create a musical language that would be gigantic and crude and powerful
as Nature herself; tried to imbue the orchestra with the Dionysiac might
of sun and winds and teeming clay; wished to be able to say of his
symphonies, "Hier rörht die Natur." To a friend who visited him at his
country house in Toblach and commented upon the mountains surrounding
the spot, Mahler jestingly replied, "Ich hab' sie alle fortcomponiert."
And he had large and dramatic programs for his symphonies. The First
should have been a sort of Song of Youth, a farewell to the thing that
is alive in us before we meet the world, and is shattered in the
collision. The Second should have been the Song of Death, the music of
the knowledge of death. The Third was conceived as a Song of the Great
Pan--his "gaya scienza," Mahler would have liked to call it. In the
Fourth he sought to open the heart of a child; in the Sixth, to voice
his desolation and loneliness and hopelessness; in the Eighth, to
perform a great religious ceremony; in "Das Lied von der Erde" to write
his "Tempest," his epilogue.
And in general plan, his symphonies are original enough. Mahler was
completely emancipated of all the old prejudices concerning the nature
of the symphony. He conceived the form anew. "Mir heiszt Symphonic," he
is reported to have said, "mit allen mitteln der vorhändenen Technik mir
eine Welt aufbauen." He conceived the form particularly with reference
to the being, the exigencies, the frame, of the modern concert hall. He
realized that the shortness of the classic symphonies handicaps them
severely in the present day. For modern audiences require an hour and a
half or two hours of musical entertainment. In order to fill the concert
programs, the symphony has to be associated with other works. In
consequence it loses in effectiveness. So, taking hints from the Ninth
of Beethoven and the "Roméo" of Berlioz, Mahler boldly planned
symphonies that could stand alone and fill an evening. Beginning with
his Second, he increased the number of movements, dropping the
inevitable suite of allegro, andante, scherzo, rondo; prescribed
intermissions of a certain length; and added choruses and vocal solos to
give the necessary relief to the long orchestral passages. In the
Second, he placed between an allegretto and a scherzo a soprano setting
of one of the lyrics out of "Des Knaben Wunderhorn," and concluded the
work with a choral setting of one ode of Klopstock's. In the Third
Symphony, he preceded the orchestral finale with an alto solo composed
on "Das Trunkene Lied" of Nietzsche, and with a chorus employing the
words of another of the naïve poems in the anthology of Arnim and
Brentano. The Eighth is simply a choral setting of the "Veni, Creator"
and the closing scene of Goethe's "Faust." And in the Fifth Symphony,
one of those in which he called for no vocal performers, he nevertheless
managed to vary and expand the conventional suite by preceding the first
allegro with a march, and separating and relieving the gargantuan
scherzo and rondo with an adagietto for strings alone.
His material he organized fairly independently of the old rules. He was
one of those who seem to have learned from Liszt that the content of a
piece must condition its form. Mahler's symphonies resemble symphonic
poems. They are essentially dramatic in character. Although he strove
continually for classic form, his works nevertheless reveal their
programmatic origin. He was at heart one of the literary composers. But
he was a better craftsman than most of them are. He was a finer workman
than Strauss, for instance. His scores are much more bony. They are free
of the mass of insignificant detail that clutters so many of Strauss's.
He could asseverate with some justice, "I have never written an
insincere note." And although his orchestration is not revolutionary,
and is often commonplace enough, he nevertheless oftentimes employed an
instrumental palette distinctly his own. He utilized instead of the
violin the trumpet as premier instrument of the band; achieved all
manner of brilliant effects with it. He increased the variety and
usefulness of the instruments of percussion, forming out of them a new
family of instruments to balance the families of the strings, brass, and
wood-wind. In the score of the Second Symphony he calls for six timpani,
bass and snare-drums, a high and a low tam-tam, cymbals, a triangle,
glockenspiel, three deep-toned bells, in the chief orchestra; besides a
bass-drum, triangle and cymbals in the supplementary. In the Eighth
Symphony, the instruments of percussion form a little band by
themselves. And he utilized the common instruments in original fashion,
made the harps imitate bells, the wood-wind blow fanfares, the horns
hold organ-points; combined piccolos with bassoons and contrabasses,
wrote unisons for eight horns, let the trombones run scales----
But there is not one of poor Mahler's nine symphonies, honest and
dignified as some of them are, that exists as fresh, new-minted, vivid
music. His genius never took musical flesh. His scores are lamentably
weak, often arid and banal. There is surely not another case in musical
history in which indubitable genius, a mighty need of expression, a
distinctly personal manner of sensation, a respectable musical science,
a great and idealistic effort, achieved results so unsatisfactory. One
wonders whether Mahler the composer was not, after all, the greatest
failure in music. If there is any music that is eminently
Kapellmeistermusik, eminently a routine, reflective, dusty sort of
musical art, it is certainly Mahler's five latter symphonies. The
musical Desert of Sahara is surely to be found in these unhappy
compositions. They are monsters of ennui, and by their very
pretentiousness, their gargantuan dimensions, throw into cruelest relief
Mahler's essential sterility. They seek to be colossal and achieve
vacuity chiefly. They remind one of nothing so much as the huge, ugly,
misshapen "giants" that stand before the old Palace in Florence, work of
the obscure sculptor who thought to outdo Michelangelo by sheer bulk.
And the first four of his symphonies, though less utterly banal and
pedantic, are still amorphous and fundamentally second-hand. For Mahler
never spoke in his own idiom. His style is a mongrel affair. The
thematic material is almost entirely derivative and imitative, of an
unequaled mediocrity and depressingness. One wonders whether indeed
there has ever been a respectable composer who has utilized ideas as
platitudinous as the ones employed in the first movement of the First
Symphony, or the brassy, pompous theme that opens the Eighth, or the
tune to which in the latter work the mystic stanza beginning
"Alles vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnisz"
is intoned. One wonders whether any has used themes more saccharine and
characterless than those of the last movement of the Third Symphony, or
the adagio of the Fourth. Once in a while, no doubt, a vague personal
tone, a flavor of the Bohemian countryside where Mahler was born, does
manage to distinguish itself from the great inchoate masses of his
symphonies. The strolling musician plays on his clarinet; peasants sit
at tables covered with red cloths and drink beer; Hans and Gretel dance;
evening falls; the brooks run silvered; from the barracks resound the
Austrian bugle calls; old soldier songs, that may have been sung in the
Seven Years' War, arise; the watchman makes his sleepy rounds.
But, for the most part, it is precisely the personal tone that his music
completely lacks. For he was never himself. He was everybody and nobody.
He was forever seeking to be one composer or another, save only not
Gustav Mahler. The fatal assimilative power of the Jew is revealed
nowhere in music more sheerly than in the style of Mahler. Romain
Rolland discovers alone in the Fifth Symphony reminiscences of Beethoven
and Mendelssohn, Bach and Chabrier. Schubert flits persistently through
Mahler's scores, particularly through that of the Third Symphony, whose
introductory theme for eight horns recalls almost pointedly the opening
of the C-major of Schubert, without, however, in the least recapturing
its effectiveness. Bruckner, Mahler's teacher, is also incessantly
reflected by these works, by the choral themes which Mahler is so fond
of embodying in his compositions, and, more particularly, by the length
and involutions of so many of the themes of his later symphonies. For,
like Bruckner's, they appear chosen with an eye to their serviceability
for contrapuntal deformation and dissection. Wagner, Haydn, Schumann and
Brahms, the sentimental _Wienerwald_ Brahms, also pass incessantly
through these scores. But it was Beethoven whom Mahler sought chiefly to
emulate. Over his symphonies (and it is a curious fact that Mahler, like
the three men that he most frequently imitated, Schubert, Bruckner, and
Beethoven, wrote just nine symphonies), over his entire work, his songs
as well as his orchestral pieces, there lies the shadow of the Master of
Bonn. Mahler was undoubtedly Beethoven's most faithful disciple. All his
life he was seeking to write the "Tenth Symphony," the symphony that
Beethoven died before composing. He was continually attempting to
approximate the other's grand, pathetic tone, his broad and
self-righteous manner. His music is full of but slightly disguised
quotations. The trumpet-theme that ushers in Mahler's Fifth Symphony,
for instance, appears the result of an attempt to cross the theme of the
funeral march of the "Eroica Symphony" with the famous four raps of
Beethoven's Fifth. In the first movement of the Second Symphony, just
before the appearance on the oboe of the scarcely disguised "Sleep"
motif from "Die Walküre," a theme almost directly lifted out of
Beethoven's violin concerto is announced on the 'cellos and horns. And
the andante of the same symphony derives from both the allegretto of
Beethoven's Eighth and the andante of his "Pastoral Symphony"; might,
indeed, figure as a sort of "Szene am Bach" through which there flow the
yellowish tides of the Danube. Beethoven is recalled by some of Mahler's
triumphant finales, particularly by those of the Fifth and Seventh
Symphonies, and by many of Mahler's adagio passages. "Es sucht der
Bruder seinen Bruder," oh, how often and at what length through
Mahler's symphonies, and with what persistency on the tenor trumpet! And
how often in them does not the German family man take his children
walking in the woods of a Sunday afternoon and bid them worship their
Creator for having implanted the Love of Virtue in the Human Heart!
Just as it was inevitable that Mahler, instead of developing his own
artistic individuality, should seek all his life to identify himself
with certain other composers, so, too, it was inevitable that it should
be Beethoven whom he would most sedulously emulate. For not only was
Beethoven the great classic presence of the German concert hall, and
deemed, in the words of Lanier, the "dear living lord of tone," the
"sole hymner of the whole of life." He was also, of all the masters, the
one spiritually most akin to Mahler. For Beethoven was also one of those
who wish to endow their art with moral grandeur, give it power to rouse
the noblest human traits, to make it communicate ethical and
philosophical conceptions. He, too, came to his art with a magnanimous
hope of invigorating and consoling and redeeming his brothers, of
healing the wounds of life and binding all men in the bonds of
fraternity. Torn between desire of self-expression, and fear of
self-revelation, Mahler found the solution of his conflict in this
particular piece of self-identification.
And had Mahler been able really to be himself alone, to develop his own
individuality, he would no doubt have been the thing he most desired to
be, and given the world a new Beethoven. But, as imitator, he is far
from being Beethoven! Whatever Beethoven's limitations (and they were
many, for all that the worshiping crowd may say), he nevertheless had in
extraordinary degree two things which Mahler eminently lacked--inventive
genius and a giant peasant strength. He was able to cope vigorously with
the gigantic programs he set for himself. At moments, no doubt, as in
the C-minor Symphony and so many of his piano-sonatas, one is repelled
by a certain indefinable pompousness and self-righteousness and
exasperated by the obviousness and dullness and heaviness of his art.
The finale of the Ninth Symphony with its blare and crash, its chorus
screaming on high C, its Turkish March with cymbals and bass-drum, is
not entirely inspired, most folk will agree. And yet, for all his
shortcomings, the wonders of Beethoven are innumerable. There are the
many quartets with their masterly invention and composition, the First
and Sixth Symphonies with their immortal youth and freshness, their
hearty strength and simplicity, the deeply beautiful passages and
movements to be found in nearly every one of his works. There is all the
wonderful solidity that Mahler, for instance, never achieved. For in
poor Mahler's work we feel only the intention, rarely the achievement.
We feel him agonizedly straining, pushing and laboring, trying to
manufacture his banal thematic material into music by the application of
all the little contrapuntal formulas. We find him relying finally upon
physical apparatus, upon sheer brute force. His symphonies abound in
senseless repetitions, in all sorts of eye-music. And in the Eighth
Symphony, the apotheosis of his reliance on the physical, he calls for a
chorus of a thousand men, women and children, and at the end, I believe,
the descent of the Holy Ghost. But the ultimate effect is exactly the
reverse of what Mahler planned. The very size of the apparatus throws
into crudest relief his weariness and uncreativeness. For a moment, a
work like the Eighth Symphony stuns the auditor with its sheer physical
bulk. After all, one does not hear a thousand voices singing together
every day, and the brass and the percussion are very brilliant. Soon,
nevertheless, there insinuates itself the realization that there is in
this work neither the all-creating spirit the composer so magniloquently
invokes, nor the heaven he strives so ardently to attain. They are in
the music of a score of other composers. For these men had lived. And it
was to real life that Mahler never attained.
If his music expresses anything at all, it expresses just the
characteristics that Mahler was most anxious to have it conceal. Life is
the greatest of practical jokers, and Mahler, in seeking to escape his
racial traits, ended by representing nothing so much as the Jew. For if
there is anything visible behind the music of Mahler, it is the Jew as
Wagner, say, describes him in "Das Judentum in der Musik," the Jew who
through the superficial assimilation of the traits of the people among
whom he is condemned to live, and through the suppression of his own
nature, becomes sterile. It is the Jew consumed by malaise and
homesickness, by impotent yearning for the terrain which will permit him
free expression, and which he conceives as an otherwheres, or as a
dream-Palestine. It is the Jew unable to feel faith or joy or content
because he is unable to live out his own life. It is the Jew consumed by
bitterness because he is perpetually untrue to himself. It is the Jew
afraid to die because he has never really lived himself out. It is the
Jew as he is when he wants most to cease being a Jew. Mahler could have
seemed no more the Jew had he expressed himself in all his Hebraic
fervor instead of singing about Saint Peter in Heaven and seeking to
reconcile Rhabanus Maurus and Goethe in a "higher synthesis." Only, it
would have been good music instead of a nondescript and mongrel thing
that he composed. All that he really attained by hampering himself was
sterility.
And, in the end, we are forced to conclude that it was not solely the
environment, however much that favored it, that condemned Mahler to
sterility. Did we have no example of a Jewish musician attaining
creativity through the frank expression of his Semitic characteristics,
we might presume that no choice existed for Mahler, and that it is
inevitable that the Jew, whenever he essays the grand style, becomes
just what Wagner called him in his brilliant and brutal pamphlet, a
pretender. But, fortunately, such an example does exist. Geneva, "la
ville Protestante," that saw unclose the art of Ernest Bloch, was, after
all, not much more eager to welcome a Jewish renaissance than was the
Vienna of Gustav Mahler. But some inner might that the elder man lacked
gave the young Genevese composer the courage to speak out, and to attain
salvation. It was, after all, a sort of intelligence, a sense of
reality, a real overwhelming spiritual strength that Mahler lacked. For
all his immense capacities, he was a weak man. He permitted his
environment to ruin him.