Gustav Mahler: His Time Has Come, and the Flame Still Burns

Gustav Mahler died at 11 p.m. on May 18, 1911. Back when men wore stiff collars and ladies wore corsets and long dresses, 75 years ago? Impossible!

For today’s Mahler fans--who listen to his music on records, compact discs and in concert halls--the Austrian-born composer still is vibrantly alive. Not two or three generations, not even a single moment, seem to separate him from us. How can this be?

Mahler sensed that the end of an era was approaching. He had been born in 1860 in a small and backward town in Bohemia. In his teens he made his way to Vienna, but before he abandoned small-town life he had come to know some simple, unsophisticated pleasures and fulfillments.

He had experienced piercing pain and grinding suffering. A mother with a bad heart and a limp, a brutal father, a series of brothers and sisters whisked away by illness: The world tasted good, but sweetness always turned sour, and a good meal had to be paid for by retching later.

Deryck Cooke, the English musicologist, maintained long ago that Mahler’s music really is about innocence, how innocence gives vitality to existence and must be maintained. Yet everyone in the modern world’s big cities knows that innocence cannot be preserved.

Guilelessness must yield to guile, the price of a bird’s song must be calculated for an environmental-impact statement, the increasing realism necessary to produce and maintain computers draws in its nerve-wracked wake an unending search for new ways of numbing.

Mahler’s symphonies and songs entice anxious, upset and unsure moderns into a new and freshly constructed universe. In the early symphonies St. Anthony preaches to the fishes, who know nothing of mercury poisoning; angels sing, and the dead will unquestionably arise.

Mahler was not a fool. The symphonies grow darker as the struggle to save innocence grows ever more intense. His Sixth Symphony ends with thudding blows crashing into--and annihilating--consciousness. In the Seventh the creative powers that had allowed Mahler to face and endure the world vanish into a sterile enclosing night. Then Mahler knew the actuality of resurrection. He felt himself lifted out of his own despair to write music about despair for his fellow desperate human beings. The Eighth and Ninth Symphonies and the song cycle “Das Lied von der Erde” (“The Song of the Earth”) are a loving and lingering farewell to this maddening world of the 20th Century.

What was left? Nothing but the assurance brought by the composer that men and women need not face the end like animals in a stockyard pen. The shadow of a terrible fate hangs over everyone, but it lifts in a concert hall when the singer makes the promise of eternity flow forth at the close of “The Song of the Earth.”

Mahler loved to say that his time would come. He meant that more and more humans would find solace and even a kind of joy in his message: Innocence must always confront, though it can never conquer. The flame that consumed his fevered body 75 years ago still burns for us.