At first glance, the pairing of the final scene of Faust’s second part and the medieval hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus” in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony seems illogical. It seems less so if one knows that Goethe translated the hymn and was fond of it. The two texts show very different sides of Goethe. The second part of Faust is a profoundly modern text, full of doubt and with no easy answers. “Veni Creator Spiritus” expresses the confidence of a naive religious faith — a predogmatic faith that believes in the existence of God without backing of religious doctrine — and it also expresses the idea that every human being deserves divine mercy.70 It is in fact tempting to see “Veni Creator Spiritus” and Faust II as the beginning and the end of the German cultural tradition. Around 1900 Faust II was, in form and content, without a doubt still one of the most advanced works in German; at least Lipiner saw it that way. Even though written in Latin, the “Veni Creator Spiritus” hymn is one of the first surviving documents from the German-speaking area. In Mahler’s time it was attributed to Hrabanus Maurus (ca. 780–856). Today this attribution is in doubt, although the text originated in Maurus’s immediate environment around 800. Hrabanus Maurus, the archbishop of Mainz, is commonly known as “praeceptor Germaniae” (teacher of Germany). At a time when Charlemagne’s empire was split in three parts and the territory of present-day Germany gained independence for the first time, Hrabanus Maurus was a figure who contributed to shaping an independent German cultural identity; at least, that is how one could see it around 1900.71
How did Mahler know about the hymn? One probable source is Goethe’s correspondence with Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832), a composer nowadays known mostly as Goethe’s friend and as the teacher of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Meyerbeer. A first edition of this correspondence was published in 1833 and 1834, shortly after the deaths of Goethe and Zelter in 1832. A second complete edition, with a commentary by Ludwig Geiger, was published by Reclam between 1902 and 1904.72 Mahler most likely knew of this correspondence, and Zelter’s background in music would have interested him. Natalie Bauer-Lechner, one of Mahler’s closest intellectual partners, with whom he discussed his literary interests in detail, mentions the correspondence in her Fragmente.73 Goethe added his translation of the hymn to a letter to Zelter, asking him to set the text to music, as he had done with other poems by Goethe, “so that it may be sung by a choir every Sunday in front of my house” (damit solche jeden Sonntags vor meinem Hause chormäßig möge gesungen werden).74 It is interesting that Mahler again picks up on a musical project of Goethe’s that did not materialize.
There is, however, a third and more complex reason why this hymn was attractive to Mahler. The literary scholar Mathias Mayer has pointed out that Goethe discussed the hymn with Zelter in the context of his plans to write a continuation to the West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan), a collection of poems published in 1819, one year before he requested a musical adaptation of the hymn from Zelter.75 The poems of the West-östlicher Divan are based on poems of the medieval Persian poet Hafiz (ca. 1326–90), which Goethe knew in translations, published in 1812–13, by the Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. Goethe was not interested in a more or less adequate translation of the Persian poems but rather in a renewal of his own poetic production, and he looked to the Orient for inspiration. Goethe’s view of the East is full of Orientalist clichés. What appealed to him was not only Hafiz’s focus on the here and now, on earthly love and the wisdom of the body, the role of nature, his light rather than dark view of life, but also the poetry’s tendency toward mysticism and the religious imagery accompanying it. The materials that Goethe used in his poems in the West-östlicher Divan were not all of Eastern origin. Rather, Hafiz’s work offered him a new way of looking at Western tradition and a chance to find a new vocabulary for his own philosophy of life. Hafiz clearly appealed to a cosmopolitan trend within Goethe’s thinking. The poems of the West-östlicher Divan are the product of an imagined dialogue between East and West, but they also tend toward cultural relativism.
What in the text of “Veni creator spiritus” points to the hymn’s relevance for the poems of the West-östlicher Divan? I would argue that it is the hymn’s revalidation of the body and of the senses that makes it a model for a reconciliation of Eastern and Western religious thought. In particular, the verses “Illuminate our senses, / Pour love into our hearts” (Accende lumen sensibus, / Infunde amorem cordibus) express this orientation toward the body as a site of mankind’s redemption. Like the introductory stanza, these lines are exclamations: they call for something, demand something, and yet they simultaneously also express doubt by emphasizing that something is being sought. One can understand them as a call for love, but also as asking for the activation of an aesthetic sensibility that will change the subject’s relation to the world fundamentally. The music of the Eighth Symphony accents the importance of these lines. Donald Mitchell writes of the “great aspiring cry of ‘Accende lumen sensibus’ that twice erupts in the [first] movement’s central section” and points out that the “Accende” theme returns repeatedly in the second movement of the symphony (SSLD, 525, 576, and 579).
The focus on the body as something positive, as the site of love, but also as the location of an aesthetic sensibility toward the world, is the most obvious similarity between the hymn and the final scene of Faust II, between the first and second movements of Mahler’s symphony. There are two further points of agreement. Both texts evoke a concept of redemption that includes all of mankind, as if there were a contract between God and his people.76 At least two passages point to this. At the beginning of the hymn, the author speaks of “the hearts of those you created” (quae tu creasti pectora), that is, of all those created by God, all living beings. Toward the end the hymn evokes a vision of world peace: “Untie the chains of discord, / Fasten the bonds of peace” (Dissolve litis vincula, / Adstringe pacis foedera). The third similarity consists of the central place reserved for the aesthetic act. The first line of the hymn, “Come, creator spirit” (Veni, creator spiritus), is highly ambiguous on a fundamental level. Who is the “creator spirit”? Is it God, creator of the world, or is it the source of the artist’s creative powers? It is exactly this ambiguity that attracted Goethe and, I would argue, Mahler. Goethe left us an intriguing aphorism about the text: “The enchanting church song ‘Veni creator spiritus’ is actually a call to Genius; for that reason it speaks forcefully to spirited and strong humans” (Der herrliche Kirchengesang: Veni creator Spiritus ist ganz eigentlich ein Appell ans Genie; deswegen er auch geist- und kraftreiche Menschen gewaltig anspricht).77 Goethe does not doubt that the “creator spirit” refers to his own aesthetic brilliance and not the figure of a conventional deity. The idea that aesthetic genius had taken the place of conventional religion certainly also appealed to fin-de-siècle Vienna with its adoration of the artist-hero as represented for instance by the knight in Klimt’s Beethoven frieze.
While I initially assumed many discontinuities between the texts of the first and second movements of the Eighth Symphony, a closer look revealed many continuities. The end of the second part of Goethe’s drama postulates the possibility of a global community characterized both by difference and sameness. The medieval hymn at the beginning of the symphony demonstrates the existence of a tradition within Christianity — one could say, in view of the popularity of the hymn in Pentecostal celebrations in particular, at the core of Christianity — that centers on the body and is close to Oriental wisdom. Viewed from this perspective, the end of Faust II may not be as heretical as much of the nineteenth century thought. Mahler’s primary interest though, I would argue, is not a renewal of the Christian tradition but a counter-reading of the German cultural tradition, a reading that emphasizes those moments within its history that showed openness toward other traditions. In its first and second movements Mahler’s symphony seeks to articulate a truly transcultural model, one that aims at a notion of community that is global and inclusive, not exclusive and national. “Veni creator spiritus” and the final scene of Faust II illustrate, in different ways, Spinoza’s insight that it is in the body, in the affects, and in human emotion that difference and sameness can be found. The above reference to the West-östlicher Divan is relevant also because continuity is established between the Eighth Symphony and Mahler’s next major musical project, Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), which incorporates “Oriental” elements in a manner not unlike Goethe’s approach in his West-östlicher Divan.
Even though the Eighth Symphony is one of Mahler’s more accessible works — or perhaps precisely because of this — it has remained controversial. Adorno describes the work as a “failed, objectively impossible resuscitation of the cultic” (MPE, 138, trans. modified; mißglückte, objektiv unmögliche Wiederbelebung des kultischen: MP, 283). After Nietzsche’s criticism of metaphysics, Adorno suggests, it is impossible to revive the metaphysical tradition, to act as if Nietzsche had never written (unless one wanted to make the same mistake as Wagner). While the Eighth Symphony suggests a traditional metaphysical frame, it is actually purely self-referential: “In reality it worships itself” (MPE, 138; In Wahrheit betet es sich selbst an: MP, 283). In other words, Adorno accuses Mahler of substituting an empty aesthetic act for traditional metaphysics, and of mistakenly thinking that the aesthetic act, the act of invention lauded at the beginning of the symphony’s first movement, can be a satisfactory substitute for a traditional model of metaphysics.
But if one follows the reading of Goethe’s text that I propose here, a very different picture emerges. The aesthetic act is no longer a semi-divine intervention but part of a search for knowledge that is a priori imperfect and incomplete. Tying the aesthetic gesture to a theory of affect makes it clear that this gesture is not privileged. The implied search for knowledge is instead an expression of a general anthropological drive, of something that characterizes the actions of every human being. In contrast to Adorno’s claim, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony does not search to establish a collective “under the sway of a false consciousness” (MPE, 139; im Bann eines falschen Bewußtseins: MP, 283). Mahler, in his revision of Goethe’s text, accepts the arbitrary and subjective nature of any attempt to make sense of life, while simultaneously acknowledging that mankind is driven by material needs and without a uniform metaphysical framework. In other words, the conceptual structure underlying this work accepts the limits of metaphysics, while all the while attempting to incorporate Nietzsche’s anthropological basis for Adorno’s criticism, by giving prevalence to the body over the mind. The proof of mankind’s desire for knowledge and meaning, for Spinoza, Goethe, Lipiner, and Mahler, resides precisely in that materiality of the body and its desires.
Adorno repeatedly suggests that the canonical status of Faust alone, its iconic position in German cultural history, fascinated Mahler rather than the content of Goethe’s text. But he misses the possibility of seeing Spinoza, Goethe, and Nietzsche as representing an alternative trajectory of German literary and cultural history. While it is true that Mahler was attracted to Goethe because of his legendary role in German culture, he certainly also was drawn to the specifics of the Faust text. A cultural reading of Mahler’s symphony proves that it is not just about creating community but also about fostering individuality within this community and about acknowledging what is different among individuals. The work communicates inclusiveness and tolerance rather than the exclusive and intolerant notion of society that the German nationalists among Mahler’s contemporaries had in mind. This is the meaning behind Mahler’s statement characterizing his symphony as a “gift to the nation.” Spinoza’s theory of affect makes it possible to conceptualize alterity while simultaneously acknowledging that there is an anthropologically uniform basis for this idea. In other words: human beings are different, but in some respects also the same. In the end, the artist’s desire and his search for knowledge or meaning are but one expression of the desire of all mankind.
This desire for a language that reflects humanity’s diversity while also acknowledging commonality is also at the roots of Mahler’s compositions based on texts by Rückert and, eventually, his Lied von der Erde.