Why Mahler can change, if not heal, the world
On a hill above Vienna, around the turn of the twentieth century, a musician was walking, and composing. He looked at the horizon, the distant chimneys and carriages of the waking city. He may have thought. ‘What direction is the world going in? How can I get it to realise what matters?’
The zeitgeist of liberal, circa-1900 Vienna was a climate of change. Yet climate change — the inkling that humanity’s exponential extraction of natural resources was affecting the atmosphere — was a concept that was entering into the conscience of contemporary society. Air pollution started to appear in the paintings of Monet and Turner. Decades earlier, the Romantic poets had chronicled the effects of industrialisation. In Nature and autobiography in the music of Gustav Mahler, David Carl Birchler argues that Gustav Mahler’s works are part of the same Romantic movement as the likes of Wordsworth, because they blend autobiography with imagination. They contained an added theme, however: a love for nature, and an awareness that nature was not to be taken for granted. The decades of Mahler’s life were the sunset of the Holocene period. The seed of ecocide had been planted.
“When gazing up into the foliage and the branches of a tree at sunset, I have suddenly perceived all the separate, transparent details of blossom and branch, down to the last leaf, in what usually appeared to be a wide-spreading, undifferentiated green covering. In like manner, every note, voice and rhythm of Mahler’s infinitely rich and complex work became totally transparent and clear to me.” — Violist Natalie Bauer-Lechner, in ‘Recollections of Gustav Mahler’
We who live today are perhaps accustomed to the climate emergency. Our predecessors would have scarcely believed the damage that would happen in future. And those who are yet to live will not believe that it was allowed to. Mahler would have been horrified at today’s climate and ecological emergency. He admired the ideas of Gustav Fechner, who wrote,“I believe that the oak could easily retort against us all the arguments we use against her soul. How freshly she puts branches on all sides, brings forth leaf upon leaf and adorns herself anew with what she herself generates. We put on only outward adornments which we have not generated.” These artists and scholars were environmentalists before environmentalism became a cause with a name and a necessity. What place and purpose, therefore, does Mahler’s music have in the Anthropocene?
Since the mid 2010s, an altogether new narrative is emerging, one that sees Mahler’s music as showing our responsibility for looking after the natural world. Norman Lebrecht hinted during a 2012 lecture that Mahler was aligning himself with an ‘environmental agenda’. To me, Mahler’s overt idealism alludes to ‘Tikkun olam’. This is a concept in Judaism, one concerned not so much with perfecting the world, but making it a little less imperfect. There is a crucial distinction between ‘fixing’ and ‘healing’, as physician Professor Rachel Remen has eloquently observed. Jewish tradition teaches the holiness of precious ecosystems, and celebrates trees through the annual holiday Tu Bishvat. As part of the festival of Shavuot, there is Yereq (greening), the decoration of homes and synagogues with greenery. In recent years, these festivals have become all the more relevant because of the climate emergency. They add historical perspective to the values-based arguments to avert ecological disaster.
The texts Mahler chooses to set to music most often contain common themes of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. From Das Knaben Wunderhorn, he chose ‘St. Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fish’, originally a real sermon by Portuguese priest Padre Vieira who tried to guarantee rights to native peoples of Brazil despite economic interests. In Das Lied Von Der Erde (The Song of the Earth), Mahler reaches further in time and place, using translations of ancient, Tang-dynasty Chinese poetry of Li Bai and Qian Qi. It is a homage to earthly beauty, and its literary origins make an important statement about the multiculturalism and universalism that Mahler aspired to achieve.
Das Leid von der Erde “may serve as a potent reminder of everything we stand to lose through complacency and inaction”, wrote Marina Mahler, granddaughter of Gustav and Alma (in the foreward to David Vernon’s book Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies). She advocates her grandfather’s work as having a purpose outside the silo of a public performance — more than a mere pleasant addition to the day (though this it may be) — but rather, a catalyst for social change beyond the concert hall. It is a call to arms and soul searching, a chance to re-evaluate and revisit the exploitative elements of humanity’s relationship with the Earth.
Mahler was someone who cared about how his work was heard, yet did not mind much how he was seen. He forged ahead, his self-belief not dampened by the vitriol of self-declared critics who were anti-sentimental, or anti-semitic, or both. He was someone who, by professional necessity, found himself moving amongst urban networks, but who, by personal disposition, was moved by the rural, the bucolic. As Morten Solvik observes in his essay Mahler’s Untimely Modernism, the composer distanced himself from the competition and “crass materialism” of modern society. It is similar to the story retold at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue during Shavuot. A guest tries to show off to another guest at a dinner: I met this person and that prime minister, reeling off a list. As it was Shavuot, the other guest, a person of Jewish faith, responds, ‘Well, you know what, I received Torah from God.’ Mahler was not impressed by or interested in celebrity or fame, as these are ephemeral currencies of perception. Instead, he was interested in the ethereal, the eternal.
This music was championed by those calling for us to take a step back and look at the uncomfortable, fundamental problems of the world. Conductor Leonard Berstein, who led the Mahler renaissance in the 1960s, suggested that after the atom bomb, the looming possibility of global destruction made the post-1945 generations “gravitate all the more toward instant gratification… Anything of a serious nature isn’t “instant” — you can’t “do” the Sistine Chapel in one hour. And who has time to listen to a Mahler symphony, for God’s sake?” In the twenty-first century, times or spaces to be still seem few and far between; modern life seems an infinite reservoir of ephemera, and muzak. To paraphrase Bernstein, it’s click this, buy that, ‘like’ this.
My chance to discover Mahler was during the global pause of the first lockdown. I found the open air walks, timed by the symphonies, deeply cathartic. Earlier this year, the first performances of Mahler I have participated in have proven to be elating experiences. In Young Musicians Symphony Orchestra, the middle Andante movement in the sixth symphony has a moment with distant cowbells, a meeting of the spheres of music and noise; the imagined, heavenly world and the real, rural world. Or with the London City Orchestra, the shimmering, glistening sunrise at the start of the first symphony, marked ‘Wie ein Naturlaut’, sounded so ethereal as to be in the far distance.
There are conceptual analogies between a performance of a Mahler symphony and the ecological transition. Both are marathons, not sprints, composed of many different decisions and turning points. Like a great performance, the ecological transition will require everyone, a diversity of talents: creativity, energy, science, and passion. A symphony orchestra is an interdependent entity, as it requires everyone to pull in the same direction. Like an ecosystem, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
If one person drops out, that is marginal, but if more people do, it becomes impossible to forge ahead. Inertia and myopia reinforce each other. Nobody wants to be part of a negative trajectory, making it easy to shirk responsibility. More people will want to participate in a positive trajectory.
I have no doubt that performances of Mahler will continue for centuries. I wish the same could be said for the survival of the sustainable, thriving natural world that inspired him. I’m not sure societies are pulling in the same direction. History is watching us.
Pan awakens. Summer marches in. When I listen to Mahler at this time of year, window open, a warm breeze filtering through, the birds outside singing beyond the headphones, they seem to be part of the music itself.
Further reading: ‘Mahler and His World’, ed. Karen Painter (2002)
