To understand the importance of Nietzsche for Mahler and many of his contemporaries, it is crucial to realize that Nietzsche was seen not as just another figure in the history of Western philosophy but rather as someone who personified an endpoint and also the chance for a new beginning. Around 1900 Nietzsche’s name was synonymous with a fundamental crisis that indicated the end of Western metaphysics. One did not read Nietzsche; one “experienced” his thought.1 Nietzsche had come to be associated with “the death of God,” a maxim he first put forward in his 1882 book Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), the title of which Mahler would borrow for an early version of the program for his Third Symphony. While Nietzsche’s thinking was certainly directed against the church as an institution, his atheism was more comprehensive, in that it questioned the validity of any kind of normative claim, be it ethical, aesthetic, or cognitive. Nietzsche was a nihilist who dared to question not only the “truths” of Christianity but also the materialist and positivist foundations of mid-nineteenth-century science and philosophy, along with their ideals of scientific “objectivity.” Many also saw Nietzsche as a rebel against the middle class’s morals and lack of ingenuity2 who countered conventional bourgeois moralizing with a new vitalism.
Such radical ideas made Nietzsche into a cult figure for a new generation of artists and intellectuals, among them Siegfried Lipiner and his close friend Gustav Mahler. To understand Nietzsche’s significance for Mahler, it is necessary to reconstruct the critical impulses underlying the former’s works. But it is also important to realize that criticism represents a starting point for Nietzsche. While a critique of Western metaphysics underlies his philosophy, the fin-de-siècle generation of artists to which Mahler belonged was more interested in those aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy that articulated a new beginning, in his “sweeping visions of cultural and political redemption.”3 It is part of the paradoxical nature of Nietzsche’s thinking that despite all of the criticism they contain, Nietzsche’s works are “ideological” in the sense that they intend to prescribe a post-metaphysics way of life. It is important to take these critical and reconstructive impulses in Nietzsche seriously when looking at the texts in Mahler’s Second, Third, and Fourth symphonies. Underlying the following deliberations is the assumption that Mahler did not simply borrow a few ideas or images from Nietzsche, but rather that the worldview underlying the Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies is fundamentally Nietzschean.4
William McGrath has correctly pointed out that Nietzsche’s early texts and in particular his first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, 1872), had a great impact on Mahler, Lipiner, and their generation who were still in high school or were beginning their university studies in the 1870s.5 We encountered Die Geburt in the last chapter when I discussed the opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in order to understand Nietzsche’s interest in folk songs. Nietzsche developed this terminology as part of a critical agenda whose roots can be traced back to German Romanticism. He not only revitalized Romanticism’s critique of a world that had become too rational and scientific but also agreed with the foundational function it assigned to the work of art in order to counter such a worldview. It is in this context that the early Romantics developed the idea of a “new mythology.” Its central idea is that although it is no longer possible to legitimize political structures by referring to a divine order of nature, art might be able to take on some of the legitimizing functions formerly assigned to religion.6 In order to do so, the early Romantics believed, a new “general symbolism” was needed to create new forms of community.7
One of the key insights in Die Geburt der Tragödie that summarizes the function Nietzsche assigns to art is the statement that “only as aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified” (BT, 33; nur als aesthetisches Phänomen ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig gerechtfertigt: SW 1:47).8 This insight is a clear variation on the Romantics’ concept of a “new mythology.”9 It is also of fundamental importance for understanding turn-of-the-century aesthetic theory and practice, precisely because of the preeminent and yet highly ambiguous function it assigns to art. On the one hand, Nietzsche acknowledges that there is no traditional metaphysics in place that can make sense of life and the world. On the other hand, however, he clearly states that it is the task of art to find substitutes for the old metaphysical frameworks. Such substitutes, however, can never completely replace those frameworks, but rather function as surrogates. Art is a privileged medium through which the relativity of any metaphysical framework can be articulated. In his aesthetic theory too, Nietzsche shows himself to be a profoundly modern thinker.
For Nietzsche, the concept of ideal art — art that is not superficial, that does not make the mistakes of the past — is necessarily tragic, yet nevertheless becomes the source of what might be described as a new optimism or form of joy. This constellation — joy derived from the deepest pessimism — is highly interesting in the context of Mahler’s reception of Nietzsche. One of the more baffling features of Mahler’s music, and one that has long been viewed as one of its most controversial aspects, is his seemingly contradictory use of diverging emotions: the sometimes very sudden shifts from deep desolation to (ostensibly) uninhibited and unambiguous joy, in particular in the symphonies discussed in this chapter (for instance, the transition from the fourth to fifth movement in the Third Symphony or from the third to the fourth movement in the Fourth). These contradictory emotions are part of the Nietzschean agenda informing this music. Pessimism is one of the key concepts in Die Geburt der Tragödie. Tragedy is characterized by pessimism. Its epistemological function consists in a glum and yet truly “profound” (tiefsinnig) view of reality that acknowledges that individuality is not a useful concept and in fact is the “primal source of all evil” (BT, 52; Urgrund des Uebels: SW 1:73). Tragedy teaches humans to overcome their individuality — an important topic not just in Die Geburt der Tragödie but also, for instance, in a later text such as Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). Pessimism is not tragedy’s final word. At the end of tragedy there is the “joyous hope” (freudige Hoffnung) that accompanies the insight that humans are part of a larger whole (SW 1: 73; BT, 52). For Nietzsche, tragedy ideally has a cleansing, healing function (SW 1: 132; BT, 98) that manifests itself in the ability to find optimism or joy in spite of this tragic worldview — it is Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Aristotlean theory of catharsis in tragedy.10 While Nietzsche associates pessimism with individualism and therefore with the Apollonian heritage (SW 1:103; BT, 76), through “joyfulness” a Dionysian view of the world is reintroduced into tragedy. One could say that with Nietzsche Greek tragedy returns to its Dionysian roots. Such a return is associated with a specific insight, a vision of life, that Nietzsche describes in multiple ways in Die Geburt der Tragödie, often using nature imagery. At the core of tragedy, Dionysian joy functions as a form of consolation that is to be understood as an affirmation of life, since it articulates the idea “that eternal life flows on indestructibly beneath the turmoil of appearances” (BT, 85; dass unter dem Wirbel der Erscheinungen das ewige Leben unzerstörbar weiterfliesst: SW 1:115), even though, Nietzsche adds immediately thereafter, such an image can in turn only be an illusion.11
Music plays a key role in Die Geburt der Tragödie and in Nietzsche’s work in general because it alone can somewhat adequately represent the Dionysian element at the root of Greek tragedy. Nietzsche quotes Schopenhauer’s statement that music is like nature in that both express the same thing; music provides a general language that has not lost touch with the inner essence of things (SW 1:105; BT, 77–78). Music is, in the words of Schopenhauer, “directly a copy of the will itself” (BT, 78; unmittelbar Abbild des Willens selbst: SW 1:106), referring to the most elemental force underlying all of life in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, not unlike the Dionysian in Nietzsche’s philosophy. According to Nietzsche, German music in particular has succeeded in preserving the Dionysian element in Western culture, as Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner show (SW 1:127; BT, 94). The expressive power of (instrumental) music succeeds where word and image alone are bound to fail (SW 1:134; BT, 100). To illustrate these ideas Nietzsche adds a lengthy analysis of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, in particular its third act (SW 1:135–37; BT, 10–102). After his split with Wagner, Nietzsche would distance himself from endorsements like these, and he no longer believed that his musical ideals would be realized during his lifetime.12 In the new introduction for the 1886 edition of Die Geburt der Tragödie, Nietzsche alludes to a new form of “Dionysian” music that has no roots in German Romanticism and is still waiting to be invented (SW 1:20; BT, 11).
Many of Nietzsche’s ideas discussed here are constitutive elements for Mahler’s music making. And yet Mahler is not a dogmatic “Nietzschean” thinker. When discussing the impact of Nietzsche and Wagner on fin-de-siècle Viennese culture, it is important to realize that Nietzsche and Wagner were still alive when Mahler and Lipiner became interested in their works as members of the Pernerstorfer Kreis in the late 1870s. A serious literary reception of Nietzsche’s thinking, however, did not start until the early 1890s, when Nietzsche became the object of a cult-like following.13 Mahler, incidentally, did not publicly identify with Nietzsche’s thinking until he was composing his Third Symphony (1895–96), with its multiple Nietzschean references. The interest of the Pernerstorfer Kreis in Nietzsche therefore developed significantly earlier than that of other, “mainstream,” intellectuals.
Among the members of the Pernerstorfer Kreis, Mahler’s friend Siegfried Lipiner played a key role in sparking the circle’s interest in Nietzsche, and after Lipiner sent Nietzsche his epic poem Prometheus entfesselt (Prometheus Unbound), a brief correspondence between the two ensued.14 Nietzsche’s ideas and those of his followers and associates were still greatly in flux; they were very much part of an ongoing “conversation,” literally and figuratively speaking. In a letter that Lipiner, Pernerstorfer, and fellow members of the Circle wrote to Nietzsche marking his thirty-third birthday (18 October 1877), Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer als Erzieher (Schopenhauer as Educator) is mentioned specifically and the letter draws a parallel between Nietzsche’s admiration for Schopenhauer and that of the Circle for Nietzsche.15 This vision of a new form of cultural community that Mahler and his friends imagined would be gravely disturbed soon after they had sent their letter to Nietzsche. Nietzsche broke with Wagner — a fact that, for the larger public, first became clear upon the publication of the first volume of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All Too Human) in 1878.16 Nietzsche criticized the religious turn displayed in Wagner’s later works, and his capitulation to German nationalism. This souring of his relationship with Richard Wagner had profound consequences for Nietzsche’s thinking; it led, in fact, to a fundamental reconceptualizing of his intellectual priorities. From a critic of Western culture who had generally held a favorable view of German culture’s potential and Wagner’s operas, Nietzsche increasingly turned into a critic of German culture and of Richard Wagner.
Where did Mahler stand ideologically in the conflict between Nietzsche and Wagner? Scholars have frequently voiced doubts on Mahler’s intellectual commitment to Nietzsche’s philosophy, in particular in relation to the Third Symphony.17 An interest in Nietzsche’s thinking is particularly at odds with the religious agenda that many have wished to read into Mahler’s music, specifically with regard to the Second and Third Symphonies. On the other hand, if Nietzsche did have a significant impact on Mahler, such a link would connect Mahler’s music firmly to the agenda of fin-de-siècle Vienna modernism. To answer the question of Mahler’s philosophical and ideological alliances, we will need to look to his music, since there are no other records clarifying them. The fact that Nietzsche plays an important role in Mahler’s music is very clear, but how does this affect his attitudes toward the ideas Wagner stood for?
To what extent is the Second Symphony a Nietzschean symphony? The religious imagery used here and elsewhere in Mahler’s work seems to clash with Nietzsche’s anti-metaphysical — and more precisely, anti-Christian — agenda. To understand the function of religion in the Second Symphony (and other later compositions), it is useful to look at Siegfried Lipiner’s essay Über die Elemente einer Erneuerung religiöser Ideen in der Gegenwart (On the Elements of a Renewal of Religious Ideas in the Present), based on a talk given on 19 January 1878 at the Leseverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens (Reading Society of German Students in Vienna). Lipiner starts his essay by asserting that a crisis exists in humankind’s attitude toward religion. This crisis among his contemporaries, Lipiner claims, can take the shape of vulgar worship of certain images — religion as a naive and unreflective form of idolization — or as indifference toward religion.18 By way of solution, Lipiner proposes not a renewal of dogmatic forms of religion but rather an investigation of what the roots of religion exactly are. All humans are driven by a metaphysical need, defined as a longing for what is beyond the empirical realm of the here and now, that expresses itself as religion, art, or philosophy (4, 5). While this desire is common to humankind as a whole, artists play a privileged role because they are able to articulate this need for an alternate reality (4, 9). Lipiner sees the function of art, echoing with the early Romantics and Nietzsche, as being primarily “symbolic”: art is “a symbolic abbreviation of life” (eine symbolische Abbreviatur des Lebens; 9). The function of the artist is to create symbols that function as substitutes for a metaphysical framework. To be able to intuit “the world as a work of art” (die Welt als Kunstwerk; 9) is to experience not just a high point of art but also the recapturing through aesthetic means of a religious moment lost by humankind’s overly empirical worldview.
In his text Lipiner gives few concrete examples of such an intuitive aesthetic experience of the world, but it may be no coincidence that the passage just quoted is followed soon thereafter by a reflection on pantheism — a philosophical doctrine that rejects the belief in a conventional God and instead argues that only through nature can humankind become aware of a divine dimension. Pantheism according to Lipiner is often misunderstood as the external manifestation of God in nature. Instead, Lipiner argues for a more complex view of pantheism:
True and serious Pantheism we can only grasp if we see nature from inside, if in our interior the great transformation has taken place, if we have stopped to think and feel about ourselves as individuals: then we are Pan, all-and-one, and then we are Theos, the divine — and that great transformation is the tragic event, the tragedy; in it we suffer the most deeply, because only when he is bleeding does man tear himself away from his transient self, and in it we experience the joy of all joys, because in this tearing-ourselves-away-while-bleeding we experience the omnipotence and magnificence of a higher self, of our own divinity.
[Den wahren und ernsten Pantheismus erfassen wir nur, wenn wir diese Natur von innen sehen, wenn in unserm Innern die grosse Wandlung vorgegangen ist, wenn wir aufgehört haben, uns als Einzelwesen zu wissen und fühlen: dann sind wir Pan, das All-Eine, und dann sind wir Theos, das Göttliche, — und jene grosse Wandlung ist der tragische Vorgang, die Tragödie; in ihr leiden wir am tiefsten, denn nur blutend reisst der Mensch von seinem vergänglichen Selbst sich los, und in ihr durchströmt uns die Freude aller Freuden, denn in diesem blutenden Sich-Losreissen empfinden wir die Allmacht und Herrlichkeit des höhern Selbst, unserer eigenen Göttlichkeit. (11)
Lipiner is interested in pantheism because it acknowledges that nature can function as a source for our aesthetic sensitivity, provided that “nature” is not perceived merely as something entirely exterior or material but as an entity that engages our inner senses. Nature teaches us to see ourselves no longer as individuals (“Einzelwesen”), but as part of a larger whole. While Nietzsche — in contrast to Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Wagner — is nowhere mentioned by name in Lipiner’s essay, his influence is omnipresent. Lipiner’s call to conceive of the world as “a work of art” is of course reminiscent of Nietzsche’s statement in Die Geburt der Tragödie that humans can only make sense of the world and their lives as an “aesthetic phenomenon” (SW 1:47; BT, 33). Moreover, Lipiner’s references here and elsewhere in his essay to tragedy and the “tragic” (7, 12, and 17) are clearly influenced by Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, Lipiner is interested in the tragic as a moment of transformation. In tragedy, suffering turns into joy; humankind overcomes individuality and realizes that it is part of a larger whole. The central importance of this insight is also clear from the fact that Lipiner returns to it at the end of the essay, when he quotes a passage from the memoirs of Malwina von Meysenbug, a friend of both Wagner and Nietzsche whose name also goes unmentioned, in which she reports a semi-mystical experience on a sea coast, and earlier in the French Alps, that led her to realize the unity of all things in contrast to the loneliness of the individual.19 While the exact circumstances of these experiences remain vague, it is clear that nature plays a key role in articulating such experiences; at the very least it functions as a catalyst.
To understand the importance of Nietzsche and von Meysenbug for this text, in spite of the fact that both remain unnamed in it, it is important to realize that Lipiner’s essay was meant primarily as a way to attract the attention of Wagner, as Jens Malte Fischer has suggested,20 and was written when Nietzsche’s interest in Lipiner had already come to an end. Interestingly, Nietzsche had recommended von Meysenbug’s Memoiren einer Idealistin (Memoirs of an Idealist) to Lipiner and other intellectuals of his generation.21 By integrating Nietzsche and von Meysenbug’s thinking into his essay, Lipiner was attempting to mend the rift between Nietzsche and Wagner, at least intellectually speaking, but very much on Nietzsche’s terms. This agenda underlying Lipiner’s essay has thus far not been recognized, but is quite important for understanding not only Lipiner’s position on the growing division between Nietzsche and Wagner, but also that of Mahler.
Wagner did respond to Lipiner’s provocative essay in his own way. In 1880, two years after Lipiner’s essay had appeared in print, Richard Wagner published his seminal essay “Religion und Kunst” (Religion and Art). Wagner’s essay is certainly a response to Nietzsche, but also to Lipiner. From Cosima’s diaries we know that Wagner read Lipiner’s essay, which the author had sent to him, and discussed religious topics with Lipiner when he visited Wagner in Bayreuth in September 1878.22 Wagner’s starting point is very similar to that of Lipiner. Without using the term explicitly, Wagner too is interested in the Romantic idea of a “new mythology” according to which art takes on the metaphysical function lost by religion. In an exemplary way this is articulated in the essay’s first sentence:
One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit [core (CN)] of religion by recognizing the figurative value of the mythic symbols which the former would have us believe in their literal sense, and revealing their deep and hidden truth through an ideal presentation.
[Man könnte sagen, daß da, wo die Religion künstlich wird, der Kunst es vorbehalten sei den Kern der Religion zu retten, indem sie die mythischen Symbole, welche die erstere im eigentlichen Sinne als wahr geglaubt wissen will, ihrem sinnbildlichen Werthe nach erfaßt, um durch ideale Darstellung derselben die in ihnen verborgene tiefe Wahrheit erkennen zu lassen.]23
Like Lipiner, Wagner is interested in “symbolism” as a medium for resolving humankind’s metaphysical homelessness. But what does Wagner mean by “symbols” in this context? The classical definition of the symbol within German cultural history goes back to Goethe, who defines “symbolism” as the ability to transform phenomena into ideas, but in such a way that in the image the idea remains “indefinitely operative and unattainable” (unendlich wirksam und unerreichbar); true symbolism is a “momentary lively revelation of the unexplorable” (lebendig-augenblickliche Offenbarung des Unerforschlichen).24 The “mythic symbols” Wagner has in mind are the narrative manifestations of a truth that is “deep” and “hidden”: his own operas. Wagner in his essay quite explicitly seeks to save religion, or at least its “core.” While Lipiner is looking for alternatives to both conventional religion and atheism, Wagner is specifically interested in a renewal of Christianity. In the motto accompanying his essay he quotes Schiller who, in his correspondence with Goethe, wrote that he found in Christianity “the potential disposition for that which is highest and most noble” (virtualiter die Anlage zu dem Höchsten und Edelsten), and that any attempt to capture these later in one’s own life can only be “inadequate” (RA, 213, trans. modified; verfehlt: RK, 211).25
But why does religion need to be saved? Religion, according to Wagner, is in decline (RK, 223; RA, 224). This is particularly clear if one compares Christianity to Brahmanism — the term that Wagner, like many of his contemporaries, uses for Hinduism — and Buddhism. Wagner is interested in Brahmanism because of its belief that it is a sin to kill and eat animals. Like many of his contemporaries Wagner accepts Friedrich Schlegel’s thesis that there is a straight developmental link between ancient India, Europe in general, and Germany in particular (see chapter 6 for a detailed discussion of this idea). The history of this link is a history of decline. The decline of religion (and culture in general) Wagner attributes to the fact that Brahmanism’s original vegetarianism was replaced by the practice of eating meat. In this context he uses the term “degeneration” (in German: “Degeneration” and “Entartung”; for example, RK, 230; RA, 231). Eating meat means that humankind is abandoning its natural nourishment, resulting in disease and degeneration (RK, 230; RA, 231). Wagner interprets Christ’s sacrifice of his own flesh and blood as an attempt to remedy the unnecessary slaughter of animals (RK, 231; RA, 231). Later in his essay, he speaks repeatedly of “regeneration” in this context (“Regeneration”; RK, 241; RA, 239). While Christ, and therefore also Christianity, point toward such a “regeneration,” Wagner associates Judaism with animal sacrifices; to illustrate this point he refers to Abel’s sacrifice of the lamb (RK, 241; RA, 241).
One observation we can make is that Wagner’s use of symbolism in his essay is very different from Lipiner’s. While Lipiner emphasizes the creative potential of symbols and their openness, Wagner’s primary goal is to establish a direct and unambiguous link between symbol and what is symbolized, between signifier and signified. This is clear, for instance, toward the end of the first section of Wagner’s essay, in which symbolism is discussed most extensively, when Wagner discusses music vis-à-vis other forms of art. The difference between painting and music is that painting ultimately relies on concepts to assign meaning to its figures, while music gives presence to meaning and thus abolishes the difference between the sign and its meaning (RK, 222; RA, 224). It is music’s task to abolish the interpretative uncertainty that comes with the symbolic mode. Wagner returns to the issue of symbolism toward the end of his essay. He is looking for one central symbol to create a new form of community (RK, 249; RA, 248). What this symbol exactly is he has already told his readers; only a daily glance at the “Redeemer on the cross as last sublime refuge” (RA, 247, trans. modified; Erlöser am Kreuze als letzte erhabene Zuflucht: RK, 247) can convince us of the inherent “tragedy” (RA, 247; Tragik: RK, 247) of being in the world and thus bring humans together in a new community. In Lipiner’s essay, Christ is mentioned as the prototypical martyr in the section immediately following his discussion of pantheism. For Lipiner he exemplifies the moment of “tragic metamorphosis” (tragische Wandlung; 12), understood in accordance with Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie as the moment when a new attitude toward life originates (pantheism’s insight that man is part of nature). This is perhaps the clearest indication that Lipiner and Wagner have a fundamentally different understanding of symbolism. Wagner, by making Christ into the central symbol of (all) religion, and by making meat consumption into the central issue at stake within religious tradition, ignores the principal openness associated with symbols since Goethe. Lipiner, by contrast, in his search for a pantheistic aestheticization of nature defends precisely this open model of the “symbol.”
These different ways of understanding symbolism translate into fundamentally different views on the role of religion in society. Wagner advocates a return to Christianity or, to be more precise, to what he conceives of as a more authentic form of Christianity. Doubt about Christianity’s truth is merely a passing phase; it is a characteristic stage to be overcome. For Lipiner, doubt is a constitutive element for any religion, which is clear from a sentence such as “He who means well toward religion should protect and support the efforts of those critics who want to kill its dogmas” (Wer der Religion wohl will, schütze und stütze die Bestrebungen der dogmenmörderischen Kritik; 8). Any attempt to give a very specific content, material or ideological, to humankind’s metaphysical longing is futile. Humankind, in Lipiner’s view, is driven by a “dark intuition” (dunkle Ahnung) rather than by a longing for something more specific (6). Lipiner is not concerned about seeking an aesthetic foundation for a new community. It would be more accurate to say that his ideas mirror what has been called Nietzsche’s “aristocratic” skepticism toward creating forms of communality in this way.26 One can add to this that, from the perspective of intellectual history, both essays construct the heritage of Jewish thinking for German culture very differently. Wagner sees Judaism in “Religion und Kunst” as negative, because he associates it with the sacrifice of animals. Lipiner, by contrast, defends pantheism, a philosophical movement often associated with Jewishness because Baruch de Spinoza was seen as one of its intellectual founders; in German culture Lessing, Mendelssohn, Goethe, and Heine either subscribed to pantheist thinking themselves or were associated with pantheism by others.27
There is no doubt in my mind that when Mahler composed his Second Symphony he was not simply aware of the essays I just discussed and the debate they engendered, but also viewed his symphony as a contribution to this debate. Some of the key issues in this debate (nature’s symbolism; tragic denial versus affirmation of life; how to understand pantheism) reappear in different ways in materials related to this work. The religious setting of the Second Symphony can, at least in part, be explained by Mahler’s initial intention to use a funeral scene as its point of departure: At the outset of the symphony “we stand at the coffin of a beloved person” (wir stehen am Sarge eines geliebten Menschen), Mahler states in his programmatic deliberations of 1901 for a performance of this symphony in Dresden (GR, 87). In a letter of 6 March 1896 to Max Marschalk — another important source for Mahler’s thinking about this composition — Mahler interprets his Second Symphony as a commentary on his First: at the moment of his death, the life of the hero of the First Symphony is examined, and the central question is “Why did you live?” (Warum hast du gelebt?; Br, 172). The Second Symphony, in other words, seeks to think through the philosophical issues raised by the First. The question is very explicitly for Mahler whether life makes sense or whether it is nothing more than a “big abominable joke” (ein großer, furchtbarer Spaß; Br, 172). In such statements, regardless of their programmatic value, there is a fair amount of skepticism regarding any conventional understanding of religion, and it is important to keep this in mind when studying the Second Symphony.
In his letter to Marschalk (and elsewhere), Mahler refers to the first movement as “Todtenfeier” (Celebration of the Dead). This could be taken as a literary reference: in 1887 Siegfried Lipiner had published a German translation of the epic poem Dziady (Todtenfeier; a more accurate translation would be The Forefathers28) written by the Polish-Lithuanian author Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855). Mahler had read Mickiewicz’s text,29 and there are some interesting parallels between the text and topics that were preoccupying Mahler when he composed the Todtenfeier movement in 1888. This text too, like Jean Paul’s Titan and Mahler’s First Symphony, can be read as a response to Goethe’s Werther.30 Nevertheless, the Second Symphony’s first movement responds to Mickiewicz’s text in a fundamentally different way when compared, for instance, with the connection between Mahler’s First Symphony and Jean Paul’s Titan. The difference is that the references to Jean Paul were very much part of the program Mahler invented for the symphony’s audiences: they encouraged his listeners to explore what he saw as an important piece of German cultural history. Interestingly, Jean Paul’s Titan ends with a “Totenfeier” (for Albano’s predecessor on the throne, Luigi, also named Ludwig).31 As important as Mickiewicz’s text and Lipiner’s notes may have been for Mahler, he did not intend his audiences to follow in his footsteps here; the name “Mickiewicz” is, for instance, nowhere mentioned in relation to the Second Symphony (or to the original independent movement). The importance of Mahler’s reference to the first movement as a Todtenfeier, for an interpretation of the Second Symphony, lies in the suggestion that this symphony will be about a protagonist’s working through the past (as the programmatic notes discussed above also show). Mahler, in other words, is more interested in the ideas behind Mickiewicz’s text as they are explained in Lipiner’s foreword. Mickiewicz’s Todtenfeier is about the memory process: in three hours Gustav, one of the book’s protagonists, must “relive his life and come to a conclusion about it” (sein Leben nochmals erleben und das Facit desselben ziehen).32 Mickiewicz, as Lipiner puts it, is not so much interested in establishing a continuous narrative but rather presents “a series of snapshots” (eine Reihe von Momentbildern), or individual scenes, that allow the hero to reexperience meaningful but painful moments of his life.33 The religious theme of the Second Symphony is framed as a search, a highly personal quest that is simultaneously a working-through of one’s past.
The second movement does precisely this. It is designed, in Mahler’s words, to be a “memory” (Erinnerung) and evokes what seems to be an entirely unproblematic glance into the past, “A sunny view, pure and untarnished, from the life of this hero” (Ein Sonnenblick, rein und ungetrübt, aus dem Leben dieses Helden; Br, 173). It is followed by a movement that problematizes such a nostalgic view of the past and thereby shows that it is not possible to live solely through one’s memories. In his letter to Marschalk Mahler writes of the chaotic impression that the Second Symphony’s scherzo, the third movement, may have on its audiences: an impression that may lead us to experience it as incoherent and meaningless (Br, 173).34 It is as if one sees people dancing, but without being able to hear the music accompanying them. In this movement we hear again some of the humorous element of the scherzo (third movement) of the First Symphony (the same humor found in the Wunderhorn song “Des Antonia von Padua Fischpredigt,” on which it is based). Here too, however, the humor is highly ambiguous. The movement’s atmosphere is slightly threatening, as is expressed by the drum solo’s “call to attention” at the very beginning of the movement, which Mahler added at a relatively late stage35 and what Mahler, in Bauer-Lechner’s recollections, calls the “appalling shriek of this tortured soul” (RGM, 44; furchtbarer Aufschrei einer so gemarterten Seele: GME, 40) at the end. According to the Dresden program the movement is about a hero plagued by a “spirit of disbelief, of denial” (Geist des Unglaubens, der Verneinung; GR, 87). As such, it mirrors our interpretation of the “Fischpredigt” song: nature is chaotic and in movement; any attempt to read a moral message into it is futile (see chapter 2). Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht’s primarily musicological reading of the movement confirms its emphasis on art’s futility and the world’s banality.36
The symphony’s fourth movement stands in sharp contrast to the third. “Urlicht” (Primal Light), the text that Mahler uses for the fourth movement, is another Wunderhorn poem.37 The song is about the symphony’s protagonist’s confrontation with a naive form of religion: in his notes for the Dresden performance Mahler writes that “the moving voice of naive faith sounds in his [the protagonist’s] ear” (Die rührende Stimme des naiven Glaubens tönt an sein Ohr).38 This is important, because Mahler makes it clear with his remark that the text and music are not meant to preach a return to a naive form of belief but are to be understood as a reminder of innocence lost, of times in which the protagonist of Mahler’s symphony could still believe naively. Adolf Nowak has pointed out that “Urlicht” in an exemplary way illustrates Nietzsche’s anthropological explanation of the origins of religion: heaven is a figment of the imagination, a product of rather mundane, earthly desires meant to counter human suffering.39
Read in the context of the essays by Lipiner and Wagner discussed above, “Urlicht” illustrates and questions art’s symbolic function. The possibility of a return to a naive form of belief depends upon the symbolic function of nature. Only if we can read the rose — representing nature in general — as a symbol for a different order, another dimension, is it possible to believe in that order. The symphony’s hero’s reaching for the rose, for nature, describes humankind’s longing for this other dimension: it is the rose that leads the protagonist to the wish to be somewhere else, “to be in heaven” (im Himmel sein) beyond humankind’s “misery” (Not) and “torment” (Pein). Mahler, interestingly, breaks up the Wunderhorn poem into two parts: the first stanza articulates this longing for another dimension; the second stanza its fulfillment: the protagonist is confident that God will receive and redeem him. The two stanzas relate to each other as a symbol relates to what is symbolized, as signifier to signified. By breaking up the poem into two parts, Mahler constructs a rupture between them. With the second stanza he also introduces a new melody. It is unclear what the role of the second stanza is: does it articulate a premonition or vision, something the protagonist desires, or does it contain the realization of the desire articulated in the first stanza? In the second stanza, light — the other important symbol in the poem along with the rose — is associated with an act of revelation: through light the divine instance shows the way, reveals the road to blessed life. It is precisely this revelatory understanding of religion that Mahler questions in a comment on this work. In a letter to Alma, Mahler writes, in the context of discussing the Second Symphony, about his skepticism toward “all revelatory religions” (alle Offenbarungs-Religionen; GR, 102).40
How is it possible that the rose in “Urlicht” is symbolically associated with redemption? Within Western cultural history, the rose can be a symbol of love (Aphrodite), but, more specifically within Christianity, it can also be associated with Christ, his suffering, and the image of paradise.41 The fact that the poem, however, problematizes such symbolism as much as it evokes it is particularly clear if we follow some of the intertextual connections associated with the “Urlicht” movement. “Urlicht” is one of the Wunderhorn poems that inspired one of Clemens Brentano’s best-known novellas, the Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl (The Story of Brave Kasperl and Lovely Annerl), first published in 1817.42 In the story, it is through a red rose that one of the characters, the grandmother who also narrates most of the story, is recognized in church by her lover; she hopes the same will happen in the hereafter.43 The story explains how a rose can turn into a symbol of life after death (although it remains an open question whether the grandmother indeed encounters her former husband in the hereafter). However, the story in many ways illustrates the arbitrariness and unreliability of such symbolic readings. The rose, for instance, that the grandmother attaches to Annerl’s chest after she has been executed is not from her lover but rather from the man who seduced and impregnated her, using medications to make her forget her love for Kasperl (804, 806). The veil that was supposed to bring her pardon, instead ends up, the reader is told, symbolizing her honor — in a rather ambiguous way, one might add (804). Both Kasperl and Annerl strive to be honorable, but precisely in their striving both end up acting dishonorably (betraying father and stepbrother; suffocating a newborn child). This seems emblematic of the world of symbols in Brentano’s text in general: nothing is what it seems; nothing symbolizes what it is supposed to symbolize.
There is another intertextual link in “Urlicht” that points to the arbitrary nature of symbols. In the piano version of the fourth movement of the Second Symphony, in between the well-known lines “O Röschen roth!” (Oh little red rose!) and “Der Mensch liegt in grösster Noth” (Man lies in deepest need), Mahler had another text printed in parentheses under the piano part:
(Star and flower! Spirit and gown!)
(Love and suffering! Time! Eternity!)
[(Stern und Blume! Geist und Kleid!)
(Lieb und Leid! Zeit! Ewigkeit!)]44
Renate Stark-Voigt, who discovered this literary reference, which cannot be found in any other editions, has traced it to Clemens Brentano’s Märchen von Gockel, Hinkel und Gackeleia (Fairy Tale of Gockel, Hinkel, and Gackeleia, first published in 1838).45 The formula “O Stern und Blume, Geist und Kleid/ Lieb, Leid und Zeit und Ewigkeit!” is repeated many times in the fairy tale. Its origin is a maxim handed down to Hinkel, one of the fairy tale’s protagonists, by her ancestors, ostensibly as a source of inspiration and wisdom, while in reality only offering a nonsensical listing of objects and concepts arbitrarily associated with each other.46 The verses are meant to express a certain desire, and with it a philosophy of life. What the verses convey stands in diametrical opposition to the philosophy of the oriental seal makers — the antagonists in the story — whose deepest desires are also expressed in a maxim: “Youth and riches, all the goods of the world! — Money! — Money! — Money! — Money!” (Jugend und Reichtum, alle Güter der Welt! — Geld! — Geld! — Geld! — Geld!; 666). While Hinkel searches for spiritual values, the oriental seal makers, who embody an anti-Semitic stereotype, are looking for happiness in material things. Mahler’s knowledge of this text — we know that he read it to his daughter Anna47 — makes it perfectly clear that he was aware of the anti-Semitic dimension in Brentano’s writings.
Such intertextual references confirm a reading of the fourth movement as an expression of humankind’s longing for metaphysical orientation, but they also question the possibility of a return to a naive form of religious experience. After the third movement’s emphasis on nature’s chaos, the fourth movement articulates the impossibility of going back to a way of looking at nature as a symbolic representation of God’s order, offering a variety of entirely nonsensical symbols in its stead. It is, however, not just through questioning the symbolic function that Mahler’s movement debunks the functioning of religion. The text, as Martha Nussbaum has shown in her highly original reading of this movement, also points to the exclusive, restrictive nature of religious communities — personified by the angel who tries to reject the child attempting to enter heaven: “An angel came who wanted to reject me” (Da kam ein Engelein und wollte mich abweisen).48 Mahler’s ideal of community is, instead, inclusive in the sense that it is aware of and open to human diversity (see chapters 5 and 6).
Based on our interpretation of the Second Symphony thus far, the concept of religion underlying this symphony is closer to Lipiner’s questioning attitude toward all manifestations of religion than to Wagner’s attempt to reinstate an unambiguous form of religion (one that makes us forget about the arbitrary nature of all symbols) centered on the figure of Christ. And yet the fourth movement is not Mahler’s final word on how or whether nature can be the foundation for a religious experience. A number of scholars have read the symphony’s fifth and final movement as having something to do with Judaism. Martha Nussbaum, for instance, writes of the “distinctively Jewish picture of the afterlife” that the movement paints; it is a vision that mirrors what she describes as Judaism’s “insistence on finding the worth and meaning of a life within history, in its choices and striving in this life” (641). Nussbaum’s insight explains Leonard Bernstein’s musicological observation that in the symphony’s final movement Mahler mimics the sound of the shofar (ram’s horn) used in synagogue services, by using off-stage horns.49 Vladimir Karbusicky supports Bernstein, pointing out that the Jewish Museum in Prague houses about 500 shofars originally belonging to synagogues in Bohemia and Moravia.50 For him, the apocalyptic imagery of the Second Symphony’s final movement has roots in the Jewish world of the Old Testament, especially the Book of Daniel (198).
Such observations make it likely that Mahler had the Jewish cultural tradition in mind when he composed this music. In order to illustrate the idea that “worth and meaning” can only be found in the here and now, to use Nussbaum’s formulation, Mahler did not delve further into Jewish tradition but went back to German literary history to arrive at the same insight. Mahler chose the poem “Die Auferstehung” (The Resurrection) by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803) as the literary point of departure for this last movement. Although Klopstock belonged to the generation of the Enlightenment, his own sympathies were clearly with Pietism — a radical Protestant movement dating back to the seventeenth century, which sought a renewal of religion and defined religion primarily as an inward experience, independent of revelation, religious tradition (with the exception of reading the Bible), or the church as an institution. Even though there is a tension between the Enlightenment and Pietism, it is fair to say that Pietism aimed for a clearly modern form of religion and was therefore often at odds not only with institutionalized religion but also, to some extent, with society’s institutions in general. Klopstock’s importance for German literary history consists of his abandoning any system of poetological rules along with developing a subjective vocabulary that enabled an innovative way of interpreting the world, considered revolutionary by his contemporaries.51
Through its thematic focus on resurrection, Klopstock’s poem “Die Auferstehung” is associated with his most famous work, the epic poem Der Messias (The Messiah, first published between 1748 and 1773). What is unusual about Der Messias is that all creatures are forgiven and redeemed, also those suffering in hell, something that was a decisively anti-orthodox, progressive position within eighteenth-century theology.52 While Mahler, in his adaptation of Klopstock’s poem, refrains from explicit references to biblical accounts of the last judgment, his Dresden program for the symphony, and in particular the discussion of the fifth movement, quite explicitly adopts apocalyptical imagery: the last judgment is announced, the dead rise from their graves and are summoned before God. In sharp contrast to New Testament accounts, however (see Matthew 13: 40–43; 25: 31–34, 41, 46), there is no separation of the virtuous and the wicked, the pious and the sinners:
And look: there is no judgment — There is no sinner, no righteous man — no great and no small man — There is no punishment and no reward! An almighty feeling of love illumines us with blessed knowing and being!
[Und siehe da: Es ist kein Gericht — Es ist kein Sünder, kein Gerechter — kein Großer und kein Kleiner — Es ist nicht Strafe und nicht Lohn! Ein allmächtiges Liebesgefühl durchleuchtet uns mit seligem Wissen und Sein. (GR, 89)]53
In spite of Mahler’s use of religious imagery, one can say that in this programmatic statement he deconstructs as much as he constructs a religious framework. What Mahler presents in his program here alludes to the Nietzschean transformation of tragedy into joy (also articulated in the text of the poem itself, as we will see) that left its traces in Lipiner’s essay. But beyond that, the ideal world that Mahler portrays, in the end, is a world beyond good and evil — another leitmotif in Nietzsche’s thinking — and one in which human differences no longer matter. But how is it possible to arrive at such a philosophy of life?
While the first two stanzas of Klopstock’s “Die Auferstehung” and Mahler’s adaptation of this poem are more or less identical,54 the remainder of the text Mahler used for the last movement of the Second Symphony is written entirely by Mahler. In the first two stanzas, Klopstock compares the “dust” (Staub) that is left over from the human body after death (first stanza) to grain that is collected to be sown and to produce a new harvest (second stanza). In doing so, Klopstock’s poem offers a relatively conventional example of the symbolic use of nature imagery: one thing symbolizes another. It is at this point that Mahler breaks with Klopstock’s text. While Klopstock goes on, in the third stanza, to praise God — “Day of God!” (Du meines Gottes Tag!) — and mentions Jesus, Mahler avoids mentioning either one. This omission of the Jesus figure is one indication that Mahler’s priorities are quite different from those of Wagner, for whom Jesus was the pivotal symbol in “Religion und Kunst,” as discussed above. Mahler in fact does not mention God until the very last line of the last stanza of his adaptation. Instead he describes the effect of the second stanza’s image on his protagonist as a self-admonishment to believe in the continued existence of things: “Oh believe, my heart, oh believe: / Nothing will be lost for you” (O glaube, mein Herz! O glaube: / Es geht dir nichts verloren!). In other words, Mahler describes the process of symbolization: how something, in this case an image from nature, can mean something else. It describes this process as a dynamic act: the text is about the desire to read something into nature; but at the same moment it makes clear that any attempt to read something into nature is a subjective act and that nature does not provide any stable symbolic order. What Mahler alludes to here is a dynamic, cyclical understanding of nature: “What has come into existence must perish! / What has perished [must] rise again!” (Was entstanden ist, das muss vergehen! / Was vergangen, auferstehen!). As unlikely as it may seem, for those who read these lines in the context of fin-de-siècle Vienna, there is also an echo of a Nietzschean idea here. The “thought of eternal recurrence” (der Ewige-Wiederkunfts-Gedanke) is one of Nietzsche’s most foundational ideas, which also underlies his criticism of religion.55 Because nature is cyclical and chaotic instead of linear, it is not possible to use nature as evidence of a benevolent creator-God.
To attempt, after Nietzsche, to find in nature a basis for some form of existential orientation, one must acknowledge this insight in the cyclical, unstable essence of nature. It is precisely nature’s inability to signify anything, its lack of stability, that becomes the basis for a new relationship to nature. And, as Lipiner’s ideas on pantheism in his essay on the renewal of religious ideas show, the insight that we are all part of nature can be the foundation for a new, post-metaphysical ethics — one that acknowledges Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics while also picking up on the reconstructive component in his thinking. For Mahler, the image of nature’s cyclical quintessence, nature’s eternal back-and-forth movement between destruction and creation, turns into an image that can help us understand and explain human emotions: after death comes love; death is “defeated” (bezwungen) by love (“in love’s ardent pursuit / I will drift away”; in heißem Liebesstreben / werd’ ich entschweben). One misunderstands these lines, I believe, if one reads an opposition between the material and spiritual world into them. The message is rather that both pain (Schmerz) and love are emotional states, and that in their emotions humans find an anticipation of what is valuable in life. It is not a statement about life after death but rather a philosophy of how to lead one’s life that the symphony espouses: “Stop trembling! / Be prepared to live!” (Hör auf zu beben! / Bereite dich zu leben!). The fact that we find something positive in our negative emotions — the message behind the symphony’s most famous line, “I will die to live!” (Sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben!) — is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of catharsis. Tragedy can have a cleansing function; through awareness of life’s tragic essence, humankind can find a new optimism associated with the insight that humans are part of a larger whole. “Love,” here as in the second movement of Mahler’s Eighth (associated with striving), is the central emotion in the stanzas that Mahler added to Klopstock’s materials.
It is the awareness of nature’s perpetual back-and-forth between destruction (death) and creation (love) that makes it possible to overcome humankind’s solipsistic individualism. Emotions play a crucial role in the Second Symphony. It is through feelings that human beings can not only make sense of nature but also intuit a sense of communality and value. Mahler has very much the pantheistic vision of Lipiner’s essay in mind here that Lipiner saw illustrated in the Memoirs of Malwina von Meysenbug. Mahler’s text does not create new symbols — certainly not in the form of a hierarchical order of things that is normative and beyond history — but is rather interested in symbolic thinking as a modality, as a means of approaching nature and the world. Rather than establishing one central symbol to which all our perceptions of the world are to be subordinated, Lipiner’s text and Mahler’s Second Symphony point to an ongoing and infinite process of symbolization. In the context of her discussion of Mahler’s music, Martha Nussbaum speaks of musical works’ ability, on basis of their emotional core, “to embody the idea of our urgent need for and attachment to things outside ourselves that we do not control” (272). Interpreted in this way, the Second Symphony’s last movement offers not only a philosophy of life that finds in an aesthetic sensibility a substitute ethics for a postmetaphysical age, but implicitly also an aesthetic agenda that legitimizes the kind of work of art that lives off its emotional impact. In many respects, the finale of the Second Symphony with its religious imagery prefigures the second movement of the Eighth Symphony (see chapter 5). But it is in the Third Symphony that Mahler works out his ideas on nature in greater detail.
Nowhere in Mahler’s oeuvre is the importance of Nietzsche as clear as in his Third Symphony. The symphony was originally to have the title “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft” (The Gay Science), after Nietzsche’s 1882 book of the same title. For the symphony’s fourth movement Mahler set to music a poem from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (for the fifth movement he again used a Wunderhorn song). Mahler also left us an abundance of (anti-)programmatic statements for this work in which Nietzschean ideas figure prominently. These statements are important, even though Mahler eventually decided, as he did with the First Symphony, not to have performances accompanied by a “program.” Furthermore, William McGrath has pointed out that Mahler in the first movement of his Third Symphony used the melody of a student song, “Wir hatten gebauet ein stattliches Haus” (We had built a stately house) for the opening theme — a song that was sung on the occasion of the government’s suppression in 1878 of the Leseverein der deutschen Studenten, the conservative, pro-German nationalist organization in which members of the Pernerstorfer Circle played a leading role (and where Lipiner gave his talk on the necessity of a renewal of religion).56 Such an autobiographical reference is intriguing but somewhat speculative and its contribution to a better understanding of the symphony can only remain fragmentary, since it is not possible to read the entire symphony as an autobiographical narrative. What is significant, however, is that it links the symphony to the literary and philosophical interests of Mahler and his student friends in the late 1870s.
While working on the Third Symphony in the summer of 1895, when he composed all its movements except the first, Mahler repeatedly wrote to his friends about the program he intended to accompany his new symphony. The most comprehensive version of this program was outlined on a separate sheet accompanying a letter to Friedrich Löhr, one of the friends with whom he had stayed in touch since his student days:
Symphony No. III.
»THE GAY SCIENCE«
A SUMMER MORNING’S DREAM
| I. | Summer marches in. |
| II. | What the flowers in the meadow tell me. |
| III. | What the animals in the woods tell me. |
| IV. | What the night tells me. (Contralto solo). |
| V. | What the morning bells tell me. |
| (Women’s choir with contralto solo). | |
| VI. | What love tells me. |
| Motto: »Father, look at my wounds! | |
| Let no creature be lost«! | |
| (From The Youth’s Magic Horn) | |
| VII. | Heavenly life. |
| (Soprano solo, with humor). |
___________________________
[Symphonie Nro. III.
»DIE FRÖHLICHE WISSENSCHAFT«
EIN SOMMERMORGENTRAUM
| I. | Der Sommer marschiert ein. |
| II. | Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen. |
| III. | Was mir die Tiere im Walde erzählen. |
| IV. | Was mir die Nacht erzählt. (Altsolo). |
| V. | Was mir die Morgenglocken erzählen. |
| (Frauenchor mit Altsolo). | |
| VI. | Was mir die Liebe erzählt. |
| Motto: »Vater sieh an die Wunden mein! | |
| Kein Wesen laß verloren sein«! | |
| (Aus des Knaben Wunderhorn) | |
| VII. | Das himmlische Leben. |
| (Sopransolo, humoristisch).]57 |
At this stage Mahler was planning a seven-movement symphony. When he wrote this letter, he intended to include a seventh movement, “Das himmlische Leben,” which he later used for the Fourth Symphony. Mahler’s plans acknowledge Nietzsche’s importance for the symphony in a number of ways. Most importantly, there is the symphony’s title, “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft.” Furthermore, there is the fact that he used a text from Also sprach Zarathustra in the fourth movement. And finally, in a letter written a few months later to Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Mahler says he is still unsure about the first movement’s title; he is considering “Procession of Dionysos” (Zug des Dionysos) — a clear reference to Die Geburt der Tragödie — or “Summer marches in” (RGM, 41; Sommer marschiert ein: GME, 37–38).58 Without a doubt, this Nietzschean subtext is important to Mahler, but it seems strangely at odds with other elements of the symphony’s program, in particular its view of nature. Surprisingly, Nietzsche does not figure very prominently in scholarship on this work. One reason may be that it is hard to reconcile the Nietzschean references with other programmatic statements on it by Mahler, in particular those emphasizing the importance of nature for the symphony. But what concept of nature does Mahler advance here?
Here too, Mahler himself contributed to the confusion about his symphony. Twice in his letters, he talks about the Third Symphony as a comprehensive tableau of nature, understood in a hierarchical sense. In the above-mentioned letter to Friedrich Löhr, Mahler characterizes the second, third, fourth, and fifth movements as expressing a “chain of being” (Stufenreihe der Wesen; Br, 150). In a letter to Anna von Mildenburg that he wrote a year later, in the summer of 1896 while he was working on the first movement, Mahler speaks of “all stages of development in gradual progression” (alle Stufen der Entwicklung in schrittweiser Steigerung) — a thought he clarifies by pointing out that the symphony “starts with lifeless nature and builds up to the love of God” (Es beginnt bei der leblosen Natur und steigert sich bis zur Liebe Gottes! Br, 189–90; see also GME, 56; RGM, 58–59). In contrast to the earlier version of the program, now the first and last movements are included in the developmental hierarchy. Mahler’s concept of nature here is hierarchical, developmental, and linear. This idea of a hierarchical order of nature, a “chain of being,” has a long tradition in Western thinking and has always had a strong religious dimension: in the order of nature, God’s wisdom showed itself.59 Such thinking was by no means obsolete in the nineteenth century; the evolutionary patterns in nature that Darwin had described in On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) are still to some extent indebted to the model of a “chain of being,” even though, from the eighteenth century onward, the idea is given a scientific and chronological interpretation.60 And yet it is clearly not a rigorous exercise in natural history that Mahler presents here — “angels” or “God” as a category in nature’s hierarchy? — but rather a free-floating poetic improvisation on the question of what nature may mean to humankind.
If the Third Symphony’s message, a depiction of the hierarchical order of nature, was relatively straightforward, why is Mahler concerned about it being misunderstood? Mahler repeatedly expresses doubt that critics and the public will truly understand his intentions with the symphony, in particular its humor (Br, 190). From the outset, “humor” was an important element in its design.61 But what does Mahler mean when he refers to the symphony’s humorous side? Interestingly, when explaining the symphony’s humor to Bruno Walter, Mahler seems to have a very different concept of nature in mind: “Friends of a good joke will find the wanderings I am preparing for them very amusing” (Freunde eines gesunden Spaßes [werden] die Spaziergänge, die ich ihnen da bereite, sehr amüsant finden; Br, 190). To characterize the symphony as a series of “wanderings” (Spaziergänge) seems to preclude the kind of developmental and hierarchical reading proposed in the symphony’s programmatic notes. Here and elsewhere, Mahler alludes to a much less rational view of nature in relation to the symphony.
Mahler also deals with the question of the extent to which audiences and critics will understand this symphony correctly in a letter to musicologist Richard Batka. In it, he writes of his fear that the semi-evolutionary depiction of nature in the symphony might stand in the way of an appreciation of the symphony’s multi-layered message:
That this nature [in the Third Symphony] harbors everything, whether eerie, great or charming (exactly what I wanted to articulate in the entire work through a kind of evolutionary development) — nobody experiences that of course. It always strikes me as strange that most people, when they talk about “nature,” only think of flowers, birds, and the smell of the woods, etc. Nobody knows the god Dionysos or the great Pan. So there you have already a kind of program — that is, an example of how I make music. It is always and everywhere only the sound of nature!
[Daß diese Natur alles in sich birgt, was an Schauerlichem, Großem und auch Lieblichem ist (eben das wollte ich in dem ganzen Werk in einer Art evolutionistischer Entwicklung zum Aussprechen bringen), davon erfährt natürlich niemand etwas. Mich berührt es ja immer seltsam, daß die meisten, wenn sie von »Natur« sprechen, nur immer an Blumen, Vöglein, Waldesduft etc. denken. Den Gott Dionysos, den großen Pan kennt niemand. So: da haben Sie schon eine Art Programm — d.h. eine Probe, wie ich Musik mache. Sie ist immer und überall nur Naturlaut!]62
The fact that Mahler writes of “a kind of evolutionary development” is interesting, because it shows the impact that developments in natural history and biology (Darwin) had on Mahler’s thinking. His criticism in this fragment concerns not just the reception of his own music but, more broadly, how nature is seen by his contemporaries. Humankind has a tendency to objectify nature (flowers, birds, and so on), but that is not what should interest us about nature. Mahler wants to experience “nature as a whole” (Natur als Ganzes; Br, 203), and not just in fragments, as he states later in the same letter. Instead of an objective or a quasi-scientific view of nature, he is interested in nature as a source of subjective experiences that may assign both positive and negative characteristics to it. Such a subjective way of experiencing nature for Mahler does not necessarily contradict a developmental view of nature (hence the semi-evolutionary organization of the symphony), but it does contrast with a tendency to perceive nature only in the form of distinct entities. Dionysos is mentioned as an example for an alternative way of looking at nature; this is in line with Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie, in which Apollo stands for rational and scientific knowledge, but Dionysos is associated with intuitive, subjective modes of experiencing the world.
The other mythological figure mentioned in Mahler’s letter to Batka is Pan. Pan is brought up frequently in Mahler’s deliberations on this symphony from the summer of 1896 onward (and appears to assume the place Dionysos had held before that). For instance, Mahler considers the title “Pan awakening” (Pan erwacht) in combination with “der Sommer marschiert ein” as titles for a first movement of the symphony, consisting of two parts (Br, 191; see also 196). At one point he also thinks about naming the entire symphony “Pan,” whom he identifies as the “ancient Greek god who later would be identified with the universe” (die altgriechische Gottheit, die später zum Inbegriff des “Alls” geworden; Br, 192–93). Like Dionysos, to whom Mahler compares him in his letter to Batka, Pan stands for the subjective experience of nature in ancient Greek mythology. As a mythological figure he represents nature’s demonic and uncanny aspects; he is one of the “satyrs and other such rough children of nature” (Satyrn und derlei derbe Naturgesellen) mentioned by Mahler in a conversation about this work with Natalie Bauer-Lechner (GME, 56; RGM, 59). Mahler’s references to Pan are interesting for other reasons. Pan is associated with music through the “pan flute.” When Pan was thwarted in his attempt to seduce the nymph Syrinx, because the gods changed her into river reeds to protect her from him, Pan decided to make a flute out of these reeds after hearing the wind blow through them and produce a melody.63 Pan, in other words, stands for nature’s ability to produce music without human interference. This aspect may have interested Mahler, since in his description of the genesis of the Third Symphony he also tended to emphasize how small a role he himself played in it. In a letter to Anna von Mildenburg in which he writes about the composition of this work, for instance, he states, “one is oneself, as it were, only an instrument, on which the universe makes music” (man ist, sozusagen, selbst nur ein Instrument, auf dem das Universum spielt”; Br, 187; see also GME, 56; RGM, 59). It is also noteworthy in this context that “Pan” is etymologically associated with “pantheism,” as Lipiner notes in his essay on religion.64
Interestingly, the human perception of nature, and in particular the values we attribute to nature, are also a major topic in Nietzsche’s Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), the text that was originally to have provided the Third Symphony with a title. This programmatic reference has also been questioned.65 What does Nietzsche’s Fröhliche Wissenschaft tell us about nature? The core of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft consists of 383 numbered aphoristic fragments, loosely organized around certain topics. The book is best known for the phrase “God is dead” (GS, 109; Gott ist todt: SW 3:467). While, as in all texts by Nietzsche, in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft there is a fair amount of criticism of the church as an institution and its impact on the lives of citizens, the text’s main aim lies elsewhere: it wants to show how metaphysical principles have infiltrated Western thinking in unexpected areas, such as the sciences. In particular, nature has been used to provide humankind with a purpose; the first fragment is accordingly titled “The teachers of the purpose of existence” (GS, 27–29; Die Lehrer vom Zwecke der Menschheit: SW 3:369–72). In Nietzsche’s analysis, humankind’s attitude toward nature is driven by a desire to read something into nature that is fundamentally not there. This thought is developed in fragment no. 109, immediately following the famous fragment no. 108 announcing the death of God. In fragment no. 109, Nietzsche writes of the error in thinking that the world is like an organism: “The total character of the world . . . is for all eternity chaos” (Der Gesammt-Charakter der Welt ist . . . in alle Ewigkeit Chaos); any attempt to find order is aesthetic and anthropomorphic (SW 3:468; GS, 109).66 Nietzsche is very skeptical regarding attempts to read a teleology into nature. Humankind is not in any way associated with the purpose or endpoint of nature, even though it is very much part of the natural world.
And yet this insight into nature’s chaotic essence and lack of purpose, other than an elementary will to survive (SW 3:369; GS, 27), is not Nietzsche’s final answer. The title of Nietzsche’s text is indicative of its agenda. In Die fröhliche Wissenschaft Nietzsche is interested in recapturing a sense of humor: humankind needs to learn to “laugh at itself” (GS, 27; ueber sich selber lachen: SW 3:370). On the one hand, this laughter is to be understood as a criticism of the “serious” scientific search for truth; on the other hand, it is also the expression of a “sense of truth” (GS, 27; Wahrheitssinn: SW 3:370). In other words, while being aware of the futile and therefore tragic nature of our search for “truth,” since nature is chaotic, our own truthfulness paradoxically forces us to acknowledge the relativity of a search for meaning in nature. As in Die Geburt der Tragödie, comedy is born out of tragedy. In a number of fragments Nietzsche points to art as an antidote to science’s seriousness. By asserting its “freedom over things” (Freiheit über den Dingen), art can counteract the “delusion and error” (Unwahrheit und Verlogenheit) of science (fragment 107, SW 3:464–65; GS, 104). What is needed is a higher synthesis that unites art and the “practical wisdom of life” (praktische Weisheit des Lebens) with science (fragment 113, SW 3:474; GS, 114). Humans capable of contemplation — that is, artists and intellectuals, among whom Nietzsche also counts himself — distinguish themselves through their ability to see and hear more than others. More specifically, they are able to create order where it does not really exist. One of the examples Nietzsche mentions in this context is, interestingly, “scales” (GS, 171 Stufenleitern: SW 3:540). Contemplative humans conceive of value where nature intrinsically has no value, and thus they are able to create a world “that concerns human beings” (GS, 171; die den Menschen etwas angeht: fragment 301, SW 3:540). Unfortunately, such a world can only exist momentarily before it eludes the contemplative person, who is forced to realize the futility of making the effort.
Nietzsche’s attitude toward any attempt to interpret nature can therefore be described as highly skeptical, albeit not without ambiguity. Mahler’s use of “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft” as a title for the Third Symphony in its early version, the references to Dionysos in the early version of its program, and the reference to Pan in its later versions all seem to indicate that Mahler shared some of Nietzsche’s skepticism, and in this work was more interested in a chaotic, intuitive understanding of nature than in a rational, quasi-evolutionary view. But how does the symphony express this, if not through the program originally intended to accompany it? In this context, it is useful to look at the texts Mahler chose for the fourth and fifth movements, and also at some of the programmatic deliberations accompanying the final, sixth movement of the symphony.
For the fourth movement Mahler set to music a text from Also sprach Zarathustra (1883–85). Here, as in the Jean-Paul-inspired programs accompanying the First Symphony, Mahler promises to resolve one programmatic reference (the symphony’s projected title “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft”) by referring to another Nietzsche text (a poem from Also sprach Zarathustra). However, in this case there is a clear connection between the two texts. Nietzsche worked on both texts simultaneously and the figure of Zarathustra is even mentioned in Fragment 342 of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (SW 3:571; GS, 195), which was originally the last fragment of the book. This fragment is more or less identical to the first section of the “Prologue” in Also sprach Zarathustra (SW 4:11–12; TSZ, 3). Stylistically there are great differences between Also sprach Zarathustra and Nietzsche’s other works. It is Nietzsche’s most poetic text, characterized by an exuberant but largely hermetic imagery.67 The text is organized around the prophetic/messianic figure named Zarathustra, who is loosely based on the ancient Persian priest and prophet Zarathustra or Zoroaster, founder of Zoroastrianism, one of the oldest documented religions. More than in any other text, in Zarathustra Nietzsche is interested in translating his epistemology into a vision of how one should live one’s life without succumbing to outdated metaphysical certainties. I will argue that it was precisely this “ethical” vision in Nietzsche’s text that attracted Mahler and led him to use it for his Third Symphony.
In early versions of the program of the Third Symphony, for instance in the letter to Löhr discussed above, the fourth movement was entitled “What the night tells me” (Was mir die Nacht erzählt), although in his letter Mahler made it clear that this movement was meant to be about “man” (der Mensch; Br, 150). In later versions the movement is simply called “What man tells me” (Was mir der Mensch erzählt; see Br, 188 and 196). Thus the fourth movement introduces humankind into the symphony, but the text Mahler uses does not portray man as an integral, organic part of nature, as the earlier program accompanying the letter to Löhr would suggest, but rather as a creature at nature’s margins.68 The text that Mahler chose for the fourth movement is one of the key texts in Also sprach Zarathustra. It can be found in the penultimate chapter of book 3, where it is called “The Other Dance Song” (TSZ, 183–84; Das andere Tanzlied: SW 4:285–86) and again in the penultimate chapter of book 4, where it is called “The Sleepwalker Song” (TSZ, 264; Das Nachtwandler-Lied: SW 4:404). We find Zarathustra alone — illustrative of the fact that he is not the living example of the new way of life but only its prophet (SW 4:277; TSZ, 178) — at midnight. The fact that Mahler chose what is informally known as Zarathustra’s “midnight song” (Mitternachtslied) for this symphony is interesting in the context of other programmatic deliberation on it. It creates a marked contrast to the original subtitle for the symphony: “A Summer Morning’s Dream” (Ein Sommermorgentraum), later changed to “A Summer Noon’s dream” (Ein Sommermittagstraum; Br, 188 and 196). With the introduction of humankind, a fundamentally different way of looking at reality enters the symphony: day is replaced by night, consciousness by the irrational or intuitive. The fourth movement, it seems, is diametrically opposed to what the symphony as a whole wants.
In Nietzsche’s text too, Zarathustra’s song articulates a moment of transition; it indicates a shift in Zarathustra’s attitudes. It unites radically diverging impulses, characteristic of Zarathustra being torn between different worlds. Zarathustra in his dream-like state anticipates another, deeper way of experiencing reality, of which he himself cannot really be a part, but the (momentary) experience of which he can communicate to his followers. In “Das Nachtwandler-Lied,” we find Zarathustra soliloquizing. The first two lines of the poem address humankind in an imaginary conversation, while in the rest of the text Zarathustra engages into a conversation with the night-side of his personality. The song captures Zarathustra at a stage between sleep and wakefulness. Precisely because Zarathustra is between two states of consciousness, he is able to grasp a deeper truth and bring to the surface an insight that goes beyond what we think possible in broad daylight: “The world is deep! / And deeper than day thought possible!” (Die Welt ist tief! / Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht!). The wisdom that Zarathustra has found has something to do with the complexity of emotions: the deepest despair can turn into something positive; out of pessimism can come an affirmative attitude toward life. To be more precise, Nietzsche’s “Nachtwandler-Lied” articulates a moment of healing: a deeply negative experience of “pain” and “heartache” (Weh, Herzeleid), turns into something positive: “pleasure” and “eternity” (Lust, Ewigkeit) — very much like Nietzsche’s interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of catharsis in Die Geburt der Tragödie. Pleasure and pain are deeply intertwined; it is impossible to strive for pleasure without experiencing pain.69
Critics have been astonished by Mahler’s juxtaposition of Nietzsche’s rather dark and introverted text in the fourth movement with a seemingly innocuous and superficial Wunderhorn song, the “Armer Kinder Bettlerlied” (Poor Children’s Begging Song).70 The affirmative attitude, to which the Nietzsche text alluded, now seems fully articulated. A textual reading, however, should be skeptical of the song’s seemingly innocuous or optimistic message. For one thing, the song’s title, “Armer Kinder Bettlerlied,” should make us question the song’s religious message: is this what these children really believe, or does the song articulate what they think their audiences, those who are supposed to give them money, would like to hear? At moments, the song anticipates the joyful irreverence toward the Christian tradition that articulates itself fully in the final movement of the Fourth Symphony. And yet the song is perhaps less naive than one would believe at first glance. It is very much about isolation and the longing for community. Mahler created continuity between the Nietzsche text and the Wunderhorn setting by allowing the contralto who sang the “Nachtwandler-Lied” in the fourth movement to sing the part of Saint Peter in the “Armer Kinder Bettlerlied” in the fifth movement. It is, in other words, Nietzsche’s protagonist longing for community — he who has “broken the Ten Commandments”(übertreten die zehn Gebot) — whom we are facing here again. But how are we to understand the religious message at the end of the song, the promise of “heavenly joy” (himmlische Freud) and “beatitude” (Seligkeit)?
The promise of heaven is not necessarily the poem’s ideology or final answer, but rather part of an exchange. Through his setting of the Wunderhorn text, by assigning individual lines to either contralto or choir, Mahler makes explicit the dialogue that remained implicit in von Arnim and Brentano’s Wunderhorn text. The dialogue allows Mahler to stage a clash of emotions. St. Peter’s words articulate guilt and sadness, while the choir speaks of religious confidence and happiness. But does the song resolve this clash of convictions? I would argue that it does not. The contralto, for instance, does not join the choir in its last stanza; it is therefore not clear whether she has become part of the collective and shares its view of life. But the question of the function the boys’ choir’s “Bimm, bamm, bimm, bam . . .” has in relation to the dialogue should also be addressed.
Commenting on a friend’s criticism of the abrupt transition between the fourth and fifth movements, Mahler speaks about the fifth movement’s humor, which he was afraid would not be understood: “Humor must be put in here for what is highest, which can no longer be expressed in any other way” (RGM, 60; Der Humor hier [muß] nur für das Höchste einsetzen, das anders nicht mehr auszudrücken ist”: GME, 57, trans. modified). What intrigues me about this quote is Mahler’s statement that his ideal “can no longer” be articulated. This suggests to me that it should be read in the context of Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics. Understood in a negative way, humor points to the insight that the old metaphysical truths no longer hold. However, for Nietzsche humor can also be something positive; it can be indicative of a basic joy of life. Humor and laughter are important topics not just in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft but also in the fourth and last part of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. In a chapter entitled “The Welcome” (Die Begrüssung), Zarathustra is searching for “the higher human” (der höhere Mensch), whom Nietzsche defines in a number of ways, among them as “someone to make you laugh again” (TSZ, 226; Einer, der euch wieder lachen macht: SW 4:47, trans. modified). At the end of the chapter it becomes clear that for Zarathustra children best represent this ideal of higher human beings (SW 4:351; TSZ, 229–30). Zarathustra is driven by a longing not for his fellow human beings but for news about his children. Children find reasons to laugh where others don’t; the lack of laughter is equated with a lack of love (SW 4:365; TSZ, 238). In the same context, Zarathustra stresses that humans need to learn to laugh about themselves (SW 4:364, 367, and 387; TSZ, 238, 240, and 253).
The importance of the image of the child for Zarathustra’s intellectual cosmos is clear at the beginning of Also sprach Zarathustra. In the first chapter following the prologues, entitled “On the Three Metamorphoses” (Von den drei Verwandlungen), Zarathustra speaks of the “three metamorphoses of the spirit . . .: how the spirit becomes a camel, and the camel a lion, and finally the lion a child” (TSZ, 16; drei Verwandlungen . . .: wie der Geist zum Kameele wird, und zum Löwen das Kameel, und zum Kinde zuletzt der Löwe: SW 4:29). The camel stands as a symbol for human beings who have no trouble kneeling down and carrying the weight of others (SW 4:243; TSZ, 154). The lion represents the exact opposite of this attitude; he represents protest and is associated with assertiveness and the revival of humankind’s vital instincts (see SW 4:385, and 406–7; TSZ, 251, 265–66). By far the most complex symbol is that of the child. At the end of “On the Three Metamorphoses” Zarathustra seeks to clarify the complex associations one can have with children: “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, a sacred yes-saying” (TSZ, 17; Unschuld ist das Kind und Vergessen, ein Neubeginnen, ein Spiel, ein aus sich rollendes Rad, eine erste Bewegung, ein heiliges Ja-sagen: SW 4:31). The important thing, for Nietzsche, is that children represent an affirmative attitude toward life, an innocent beginning of something new that is simultaneously an act of forgetting, that is instinctive and not rationally planned; children are also associated with play.71
Scholars have been baffled by Mahler’s use of religious imagery in the fifth movement of the Third Symphony, because it seems to constitute a clear break with the Zarathustra text in the fourth movement and with Nietzsche’s anti-Christian philosophical agenda in general; in fact, this has been one reason to doubt Mahler’s Nietzschean agenda in this work.72 When returning to the symbol of the child at the end of book 4 of Also sprach Zarathustra, in the section just before the “Nachtwandler-Lied,” Nietzsche himself somewhat surprisingly uses religious imagery to express his thoughts. He wishes the people assembled around him to be “pious” (fromm) again, so “that at last you did again as children do, namely prayed, folded your hands and said ‘dear God!’” (TSZ, 257; dass ihr endlich wieder thatet wie Kinder thun, nämlich betetet, hände-faltetet und ‘lieber Gott’ sagtet!; SW 4:393). In reference to the Gospel of Matthew (18:3) Zarathustra preaches: “Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter that kingdom of Heaven” (TSZ, 257; So ihr nicht werdet wie die Kinderlein, so kommt ihr nicht in das Himmelreich; SW 4:393). How are we to understand this? Is this a possible example of irony in Nietzsche’s text? Does Zarathustra intentionally send his followers in the wrong direction?
What argues against an ironic interpretation is that prayer constitutes an example of what at the beginning of Also sprach Zarathustra was called children’s “sacred yes-saying” (TSZ, 17; heiliges Ja-sagen: SW 4:31), their affirmative attitude toward life — something Nietzsche clearly saw as positive. What makes an ironic interpretation even more unlikely is that, at the end of the fragment, Zarathustra adds something: he is not interested in heaven but in “the kingdom of the earth” (TSZ, 257; das Erdenreich: SW 4:393), indicating nothing less than a complete reversal of Christianity’s focus on the hereafter. Here, as in the Second Symphony, religious imagery is not meant to convert to a religious worldview but rather as cultural material expressive of worldly wisdom, for which language possesses very few alternative modes of communication (a problem that will return in the second movement of the Eighth Symphony). Through the image of the child, humankind can find its way back to a revitalized way of living. Tragic denial of life is turned into its opposite: the affirmation of life, as Nietzsche envisioned it. Children’s humor and their ability to laugh stand for the ability to see the relativity of things, to have a playful outlook on life combined with an affirmative attitude and a new sense of community. This is the meaning of the children’s choir’s “Bimm bamm” accompanying the text of the Third Symphony’s fifth movement.
The juxtaposition of Zarathustra’s “Nachtwandler-Lied” and the children’s song from Des Knaben Wunderhorn is not a random combination but the result of a deliberate decision by Mahler that follows the ideas underlying the last book of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. The importance of the child as a symbol of something is also clear from the fact that Mahler originally intended to end his Third Symphony with a seventh movement, which in some of the symphony’s intended programs carries the title “What the child tells me” (Was mir das Kind erzählt; Br, 150), after the Wunderhorn song on which it is based, “Heavenly Life” (Das himmlische Leben). This movement would eventually become the last movement of the Fourth Symphony.
Mahler decided to let the Third Symphony end with a movement about love. As in Nietzsche’s Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, humor is not the final answer in this work. Mahler wanted to offer a philosophy of life here, albeit one that is decisively post-metaphysical. Its final Adagio is a hymn to love, not to compassion, as Wagner had it in Parsifal; there “Mitleid” (compassion) plays a major role.73 In his Zarathustra, Nietzsche was highly critical of such an ethics. In fact, at the very end of the book, “Mitleid” is what threatens to endanger Zarathustra’s philosophy (see SW 3:323; GS, 210). Love functions as an alternative to compassion, which at one point is called Zarathustra’s final sin (SW 4:301; TSZ, 194). This polemic against compassion is characteristic of many of Nietzsche’s writings after his break with Wagner. In the last book of Zarathustra, love replaces compassion, or to be more precise, compassion has evolved into love. That is how I would understand Zarathustra’s statement: “All creators are hard, all great love is above pitying” (TSZ, 215; alle Schaffenden sind hart, alle grosse Liebe ist über ihrem Mitleiden: SW 4:330–31; see also TSZ, 69; SW 4:115).
Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra gives us some indication as to how Mahler may have understood “love” in his Third Symphony. But what kind of love does Mahler have in mind? In the manuscript score of 1896, the last movement has a somewhat enigmatic motto: “Father look upon my wounds! / Let no creature be lost!” (Vater sieh an die Wunden mein! Kein Wesen laß verloren sein!)74 — a motto that Mahler claims, in his letter to Löhr, was taken from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Br, 151). There is no exact match for these words in Des Knaben Wunderhorn; Mahler most likely adapted (or misremembered) a few lines from the poem “Redemption” (Erlösung).75 The same verses are mentioned in a different letter, wherein Mahler elaborates on them further:
It should be nothing less then the “Macrocosm”; the motto of the last movement: “What love tells me” is:
“Father, look upon my wounds
Let no creature be lost.”
It is the last stage of differentiation: God! Or, if you like, Overman.
[Es soll nichts weniger als der “Macrocosmos” sein; das Motto zum letzten Satz: “Was mir die Liebe erzählt” ist:
“Vater, sieh an die Wunden mein
Kein Wesen laß verloren sein.”
Es ist die letzte Stufe der Differenzierung: Gott! Oder wenn Sie wollen, der Übermensch.]76
What should surprise us is that Mahler speaks about God and “Overman” (der Übermensch) as if both stood for more or less the same thing. Such a comparison is very much against Nietzsche’s intentions. In fact, in texts that Nietzsche wrote after Also sprach Zarathustra he repeatedly warned against a Christian interpretation of the Zarathustra figure.77 As paradoxical as it may seem, attempts to reconcile Christianity with Nietzsche’s Zarathustra were not uncommon around 1900. The prevailing argument was that Nietzsche’s philosophy would allow humankind to return to a rejuvenated, more authentic, and more vital form of Christianity.78 To understand Mahler’s equation of God and “Übermensch,” however, it may be more productive to look into the latter term’s meaning in Nietzsche’s work. Nietzsche introduces the idea of the “Übermensch” in the prologue of Also sprach Zarathustra (SW 4:14; TSZ, 5). In explaining what he means by the concept, he uses imagery derived from Darwin’s theory of evolution: “Human being is something that must be overcome” (TSZ, 5; Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwunden werden soll: SW 4:14). “Overman” relates to “man,” he adds in the same context, as “man” does to “ape.” Our contemporary understanding of the “Übermensch” is tainted by National Socialism, which understood the concept biologically and racially.79 This is not in line with Nietzsche’s own conceptualization of the “Übermensch”; in this context, biological imagery is clearly meant metaphorically for Nietzsche. But how are we to understand this idea that humankind must “be overcome”?
To some extent Nietzsche leaves this question unanswered. It is clear that the “Übermensch,” like Dionysos in Die Geburt der Tragödie, is associated for Nietzsche with an affirmative attitude toward life on earth, a rediscovery of nature, optimism rather than pessimism, and joy rather than suffering. But how this transformation, the “overcoming of humankind” can exactly be achieved remains an open issue in Nietzsche’s text; he is not “describing a determinate goal we ought to achieve.”80 The very openness of the concept leaves the recipient ample space to (re)design the term, to fill in its semantic contours according to her/his own ideas. The fact that Mahler remembers the Wunderhorn line “let no sinner be lost” (Kein Sünder laß verloren sein) as “let no creature be lost” (Kein Wesen laß verloren sein) is somewhat indicative of the direction in which his thinking is taking him. While the first line, “Father, look upon my wounds,” stands for humankind’s alienation and isolation from nature — echoing the longing for community articulated in movements 4 and 5 — it is precisely this estrangement from nature that leads to a longing to be part of nature, to accept nature as she is. An emphasis on humankind’s relation to other living beings in the context of the last movement of the Third Symphony can also be seen in Mahler’s letter to Friedrich Löhr. Here Mahler speaks about this movement as “a summing up of all my feelings regarding all living beings” (ein Zusammenfassen meiner Empfindungen allen Wesen gegenüber; Br, 150). What needs to be overcome is humans’ individualism and their alienation from nature. “Nature” functions in this work, in other words, not as an objective or “divine” order of things but as the object of a subjective experience. It is highly interesting that Mahler, in a letter he wrote during the summer of 1902 — with a little more than half a decade between him and the creation of the Third Symphony — speaks of the symphony as an example of a “steadily more complex articulation of one’s feelings” (stetig sich steigernde Artikulation der Empfindung; Br, 297). Initially, in the fourth movement, it is about humankind’s alienation from nature. But the symphony is also, in its final Adagio, about humankind’s finding its way back to nature. The most perfect form of experiencing nature is through our emotions.
“Love” is the metaphor Mahler uses to describe a specific attitude toward creation. It is through our emotions that we find value. This involves the shedding of one’s individuality, but also the insight that all creatures matter and that humans are not privileged within nature and yet are part of it. The Third Symphony is about the perspective from which humankind watches nature, and how it is impossible for humankind not to see itself as part of nature. This is in line with Nietzsche’s thinking. In the words of John McCarthy, Nietzsche argues for a “repositioning of humanity within the total economy of nature as a constituent part, not as its teleological end.”81 At the end of the Third Symphony humankind finds its way back to nature. It is not a naive belief in nature, but an awareness of nature that knows of its chaotic essence. One could speak in this context of a “renaturalization” of humankind — a term sometimes used in Nietzsche scholarship.82 The fact that Mahler sometimes speaks about the symphony in cosmological terms — the symphony is to articulate the feeling that one leaves “earth and human destiny” (Erde und Menschenschicksal) far behind until they are but a “tiny dot” (RGM, 62; ein Pünktchen: GME, 59, trans. modified) — fits this image. Seen negatively, all existence on earth is relative. However, a positive interpretation of mankind’s dependence on nature is possible as well. The insight that all creatures matter makes it possible to enjoy nature’s diversity.
Scholarship has called the final movement a “celebration of transcendent reconciliation.”83 For William McGrath, the ending points to the “possibility of redemption” away from “Nietzsche’s tragic view” of reality.84 Both interpretations miss the point. Mahler’s music, even in the Adagio of the Third, belongs very much to the here and now. It is about the materiality and chaos of the natural world, not about a world beyond the here and now. Mahler’s view of the world is tragic, but Mahler — and in this he follows Nietzsche — is interested in finding joy in spite of his fundamental pessimism about life. If Nietzsche’s philosophy has something in common with Christianity, it is the insight that humans are more than just individuals, that they are part of a larger whole. One could say that Mahler, not unlike Nietzsche in Also sprach Zarathustra, seeks to return to the roots of religion, of all religions. And the origins of religion are humankind’s relationship with nature.
From the symphony’s earliest sketches onward, humor played a major role in Mahler’s ideas for the Fourth Symphony. One could see this work as a further development of the ideas first articulated in the fifth movement of the Third Symphony (which also shares some musical material with the Fourth). The Fourth further elaborates on the role of humor in this movement, in line with Nietzsche, who associated humor, as we have seen, not only with the ability to downplay humankind’s metaphysical homelessness through laughing at one’s own destiny, but also with the “joy of life” best expressed in the behavior of children. The kind of humor Nietzsche has in mind is the expression of very contradictory emotions; it can be constructive and destructive. This is how we should understand Nietzsche’s remark that Zarathustra “laughed with love and malice” (TSZ, 227; lachte vor Liebe und Bosheit: SW 4:348). Humor in Nietzsche can be the expression of an uncritical joining of the crowd or, in contrast, of an ability to laugh at one’s own predicament, to embrace the eternal return of things, and to create one’s own self and set one’s own values, an ability Nietzsche sees represented especially well in children.85 It is precisely this ambiguous character of humor that is at the core of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony.
Among Mahler’s first designs for the Fourth Symphony is a sheet of paper with a plan featuring the subtitle “Symphonie humoresque.”86 While this suggests a humorous piece of music, the term “Humoreske” also includes the meaning “a free, rather than a more formalized, expression” of “emotion.”87 Mahler used the same term for his first cycle of Wunderhorn settings (see chapter 2). A number of early programs for the symphony exist, but in the end Mahler decided against programmatic notes. Text is nevertheless important for an understanding of this work. It has been argued that the text of the final movement functions as a substitute program for the entire symphony.88 This last movement is a musical adaptation of “Das himmlische Leben” (Heavenly Life), a text originally published in von Arnim and Brentano’s Wunderhorn collection as “Der Himmel hängt voll Geigen” (Heaven is full of violins).89 Mahler initially composed this song in 1892 as part of the first orchestral Wunderhorn cycle, then for a time considered making it into the seventh movement of his Third Symphony, until he eventually settled on making it the final movement of the Fourth, when he was composing that symphony in 1900/1901. Musicologists have shown that the symphony’s first three movements all contain thematic material from the last movement.90 This confirms that the song functioned as a matrix for the other movements, but it also raises the question as to what the relationship between the four movements may be.
When Mahler, in his conversations with Natalie Bauer-Lechner, characterized the Fourth Symphony as a “symphonic Humoresque” (symphonische Humoreske) that (unexpectedly) turned into a symphony (GME, 162; RGM, 151), he was suggesting not only that humor plays an important role in the symphony but also that his original intention was to create a shorter piece more or less in one movement (perhaps not unlike Strauss’s symphonic poem Ein Heldenleben). The first piece of information that Mahler gives after mentioning this original design is that the symphony has one “basic tone” (Grundstimmung) which he compares to “the even-toned blue sky” (das ununterschiedene Himmelsblau); this basic tone sometimes darkens and may appear as “spookily eerie” (RGM, 152; spukhaft schauerlich: GME, 162, trans. modified) and yet becomes blue again once these momentary obstructions of our view have gone. The symphony has one basic tenor, but this basic mood can take very different shapes. One can interpret this to mean that Mahler’s intention was to experiment with different kinds of humor. It does appear as though the symphony’s last movement returns to the seemingly unclouded innocent atmosphere of the first movement. But is that really the case? And what kind of metamorphoses does the humoristic theme of the symphony undergo exactly? To answer these questions, it is useful to look at the imagery Mahler uses in explaining humor in the symphony’s four movements.
The idea of humor is already present at the very beginning of the symphony’s first movement. Mahler refers to the opening bells as belonging to a “jester’s cap” (RGM, 182; Schellenkappe: GME, 202); the importance of the motif of the jester’s cap is emphasized by its return in many different guises throughout the first movement and in the final movement. What does it mean that the movement’s humorous agenda is visualized by this cap? Again, Mahler chooses a very complex image to express the music’s intentions. What is interesting about Mahler mentioning the jester’s cap is that it links his symphony to a tradition of humor as a form of social critique (a tradition also present in “Das himmlische Leben” and, for instance, in most works by Jean Paul). The cap is part of the costume that the jester (“Narr”) wore either at court or in society in medieval and early modern times.91 The cap guaranteed the jester the freedom to say things otherwise not accepted from a subordinate or censored by society in general. It granted a special status to the person who wore it and thus functioned as a signifier of the temporary suspension of societal norms. One could say that the jester lives in the “eternal here and now” (ewige Jetztzeit);92 he does not have to worry about past or future. The price he pays, however, is that he stands outside society. The jester is thus a very ambiguous figure.
Some of this ambiguity can be found back in other statements about the first movement of this symphony. Bruno Walter, in an important letter outlining Mahler’s intentions to the musicologist Ludwig Schiedermaier, writes that the movement was meant to articulate “an unheard-of joy, an unearthly delight that attracts but also appears strange” (eine unerhörte Heiterkeit, eine unirdische Freude, die ebenso oft anzieht wie befremdet).93 In other words, the movement’s intended ideal audience should hesitate to embrace its humor wholeheartedly. It is interesting to link such a programmatic deliberation with an examination of the movement’s structure. One of the most striking formal features of the first movement is that the melodic organization seems very simple and yet upon closer examination turns out to be highly complex.94 These contradictory gestures inherent in the music also concern the symphony’s humor: is this humor really the result of a naive, unprejudiced way of looking at the world, or is it a highly artistic construct? Mahler used a classical sonata structure for the first movement.95 Throughout the symphony he employs what has been described by musicologists as a “classical idiom,” and the score asks for an archaic orchestra by 1900 standards (without trombones and with a conservative use of brass in general).96 This raises the question of the extent to which, for Mahler, humor and ambiguity were ways of relating to the musical past. The answer that the Fourth Symphony gives is clear: an unambiguous return to the past is impossible; a composer of Mahler’s generation can relate to compositions by Haydn and Mozart — Mahler’s Fourth is often linked to their music — only in a humorous and ambiguous way.97
In the second movement of the Fourth Symphony the listener is confronted with humor’s uncanny side. Mahler described the scherzo as being so “mystical, confused and uncanny that it will make your hair stand on end” (RGM, 152; mystisch, verworren und unheimlich, daß euch dabei die Haare zu Berge stehen werden: GME, 163). The movement is associated with death. According to Natalie Bauer-Lechner, the violin — tuned one note higher than the rest of the orchestra and thereby creating an effect of dissonance — should sound “as if Death were fiddling away” (RGM, 162; wie wenn der Tod aufspielt: MGE, 179). Bruno Walter writes in his letter to Schiedermaier that the movement is to sound as if “the Grim Reaper is striking up a dance” (Freund Hein spielt zum Tanz auf).98 Willem Mengelberg’s score of the symphony characterizes it as a “dance of the dead” (Totentanz) in the style of the woodcuts of Hans Holbein (1497–1543); it is also possible that a painting by Arnold Böckling (1827–1901) inspired Mahler.99 We have encountered the link between humor and death before in our analysis of the third movement, the funeral march based on Frère Jacques, in the First Symphony (originally its fourth movement). Nevertheless, there are considerable differences between that movement and the scherzo of this later work. In the First Symphony humor secured the affirmation of life in the face of death (see chapter 1); humor and death were antagonists. In the second movement of this work, however, humor allies itself with death and serves as a reminder of the transitory nature of all things. Death is the dissonant in life. And yet part of the uncanny nature of this movement — Mahler himself used the word “unheimlich,” as we have seen — is that the fiddle’s melody offers something fascinating and seductive as well. Keeping in mind that the movement was designed as a “Totentanz,” one could say that it wants us “to dance out of life into death.”100
Surprisingly, humor plays a role in the Fourth Symphony’s third movement as well, in spite of the fundamentally Brucknerian, tragic basic tenor of this Adagio. In a conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Mahler compared the movement’s mood to that expressed in “St. Ursula’s smile” (das Lächeln der heiligen Ursula); this smile reminded him in turn of his mother’s “face laughing through her tears” (RGM, 152–53; durch Tränen lachende Antlitz: GME, 163, trans. modified). This is, of course, a rare glance into the autobiographical meaning this music held for Mahler; the unhealthy relationship between his father and mother is well documented.101 Bruno Walter’s letter on this symphony, too, contains the reference to the smiling St. Ursula in relation to the third movement, describing her as “the most serious of all Saints” (die ernsteste der Heiligen); her smile is expressive of “solemn blessed rest; serious, gentle joy” (feierliche selige Ruhe, ernste, milde Heiterkeit); the movement is full of painful (schmerzliche) contrasts — “reminiscences of life on earth” (Reminiszenzen des Erdenlebens).102 If one follows these heuristic hints, the idea of humor in the third movement is diametrically opposed to that in the second movement (and also very different from the Trauermarsch of the First Symphony). St. Ursula’s smile here functions as a metaphor of acceptance and also of inner distance. It points to humor’s ability to transform sadness into something that is not sadness, although it is not exactly joy either (certainly not the joyfulness articulated in “Das himmlische Leben”). Such a conversion of tragedy into something that may be neither comedy nor joy, but at least presents an affirmative attitude toward life, connects this symphony not only to Mahler’s Second and Third Symphonies, but also to Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie. It is another reincarnation of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of catharsis. While the second movement illustrated Nietzsche’s laughter out of “malice” (Bosheit), in the third movement laughter is associated with love.
To what extent does the humor in the first three movements help us understand the fourth movement? “Das himmlische Leben,” I would argue, at once presupposes, synthesizes, and transgresses upon the different types of humor presented in the symphony’s first three movements. This is expressed by Mahler himself when he states that the child “in a chrysalis state” (im Puppenstand), whose perspective is presented in the last movement, explains what was meant by the “joy” (Heiterkeit) of the other, higher world in the earlier movements (GME, 198; RGM, 178, trans. modified103). The image of the child in the last movement replaces that of the jester in the first and somehow incorporates the attitudes articulated in the second and third movements. One could take this to mean that this symphony offers a chronologically organized narrative, something like a reverse Bildungsroman, culminating in the desire to return to one’s childhood, or to a state of mind associated with it, in the last movement. One of the questions this raises is how the symphony’s end, if understood in this way, relates to its (seemingly) innocent beginnings in the first movement. Summarizing his views on this last movement, Donald Mitchell speaks of “music that awaits us when Experience has been purged. Not paradise perhaps, but Innocence Regained.”104 This would suggest some form of cyclical model underlying the symphony. But how is it possible to regain innocence? And if something along those lines is possible, how is the humor of the fourth movement different from that of the first movement?
In particular, it is hard to reconcile the presence of death in “Das himmlische Leben” with an interpretation that emphasizes the last movement’s promotion of a childlike innocence. It is a rather bizarre sort of innocence that would embrace the sometimes very violent imagery in the poem. Rather than some sort of musical Bildungsroman, the Fourth Symphony is, I would argue, the equivalent of a philosophical essay on humor and represents within Mahler’s oeuvre a clear break with the temporally oriented narrative model informing Mahler’s first three symphonies. The experience to which Mitchell refers certainly includes the evocation of death in the symphony’s second movement (“Freund Hein spielt zum Tanz auf”) but may already have been thematized in the first movement as well.105 Death, however, is not absent from the final movement, either. While the first stanza of “Das himmlische Leben” seems unambiguous in its praise of heavenly life, this is not at all the case for the second stanza, which narrates how heaven’s inhabitants “lead a meek, / innocent, meek / a sweet little lamb to its death” (führen ein geduldig’s, / unschuldig’s, geduldig’s / ein liebliches Lämmlein zu Tod) and how, subsequently, St. Luke slaughters an ox. These contradictions are inherent to the text, and even though Mahler suppresses one of the references to dying — the few verses he suppresses in the fourth stanza include a reference to St. Lawrence’s death106 — one cannot say that Mahler downplays the text’s violent undertone. While in the second stanza, after the slaughter of the lamb and ox, the narrative goes on to describe how in heaven “wine does not cost a penny” (der Wein kost’ kein Heller) and angels are baking bread, the horns in the background (in one of Mahler’s more bizarre musical jokes) mimic the ox’s final moments at length. The music reminds the listener of the text’s conflicted message. According to the oldest programmatic sketch, Mahler originally intended “Das irdische Leben” — the tragic song about a child’s death from starvation, which broke with the lighthearted atmosphere of the first set of Wunderhorn songs (see chapter 2) — to be the symphony’s second movement.107 This is another indication that the symphony’s contradictions are not incidental but part of its design.
The message behind the humorous subtext vis-à-vis the reality of death is that only with the help of humor can we face life’s harsh realities. It is in essence a version of Nietzsche’s embracing of laughter in order to lighten the burden of human existence. To some extent, what happens to the animals in the second stanza is the key to understanding the polemical impetus contained in “Das himmlische Leben” and in the Fourth Symphony in general. The allusion to the ox in “Das himmlische Leben” can be taken to refer to St. Paul’s question “Doth God care for oxen?” (1 Cor. 9:9–10) — a rhetorical question that even today is quoted to argue that the Bible does not acknowledge animals’ suffering.108 Animals have to die to make the Fourth Symphony’s version of heaven possible. In this context it is hard not to be reminded of Wagner’s attempt to provide a Christian defense of vegetarianism in “Religion und Kunst,” the essay that inspired Mahler and some of his friends to become vegetarians, at least temporarily. In a highly implausible reading, Wagner had argued in his essay, as I showed above, that Christ’s sacrificing himself was meant as a reconciliation for all unnecessary slaughter of animals.
The image of Christianity that emerges from “Das himmlische Leben” is a very different one. It is not simply that this paradise is not one for animals, that animals there suffer the same fate as on earth. The image that the song sketches of human life in heaven is in many respects like that on earth. While the first two verses of the first stanza state that life in heaven is nothing like that on earth — “We enjoy the heavenly pleasures, / that is why we avoid earthly things” (Wir genießen die himmlischen Freuden, / drum tun wir das Irdische meiden) — life in heaven is far from perfect. This is expressed, for instance, two lines later in the first stanza: “We lead an angelic life! / And nevertheless we are quite merry in addition to that!” (Wir führen ein englisches Leben! / Sind dennoch ganz lustig daneben!). The expression “englisches Leben” is more ambiguous in German than my translation suggests: it could be translated both as “life of angels” or as “life of the English.” For citizens of still very provincial eighteenth-century Germany, when the song was first recorded,109 England was the prime example of an urban, luxurious life style with its advantages (prosperity) and disadvantages (those associated with an overabundant lifestyle). The ambiguity of this term is one indication that life in heaven is very much judged by earth’s standards, that it is about leading a materially good life and the joy that (perhaps) comes with it. But there is another subtle hint in these verses that points to ambiguity. The word “dennoch” (nevertheless) expresses unequivocally that life in heaven is usually not that much fun: it is in spite of the angelic (English) life that the inhabitants of heaven can enjoy themselves. The second and third stanzas in Mahler’s version — stanzas 2, 3, and 4 in the song’s original version in Des Knaben Wunderhorn — illustrate how this is done: they are above all about food and drink, the simple joys of life. Heaven is not about avoiding, but rather about embracing, “earthly things” (das Irdische).
Through such contradictions “Das himmlische Leben” simultaneously utilizes and deconstructs traditional Christian iconography. This is also clear from the portrayal of some of the saint figures in “Das himmlische Leben.” Regarding St. Ursula, who, as we saw, was also mentioned in Mahler’s comments on the symphony’s third movement, Mahler admitted in his conversation with Natalie regarding the Fourth Symphony that he knew nothing about her or the legend associated with her name (GME, 163; RGM, 152). He was therefore most likely not aware of the fact that the “eleven thousand” dancing “virgins” (Elftausend Jungfrauen / zu tanzen sich trauen!) of the song’s last stanza were the ones who were slaughtered by the Huns when they accompanied the fourth-century St. Ursula on a pilgrimage.110 The fact that St. Peter is in charge of catching fish, St. Martha is the cook, and St. Cecilia is in charge of music in heaven is in line with biblical accounts. But what does it mean that St. John, in tandem with King Herod, is at least complicit in slaughtering the lamb that is his attribute and symbolically represents his relationship with Jesus? And that St. Luke slaughters the attribute he is commonly associated with, the ox? These could be interpreted as acts of religious self-destruction, as forms of cultural masochism that radically call into question the values we associate with these figures. At stake here is the symbolic function that is sine qua non for the construction of a religious narrative. This symbolic function, here as in the Second Symphony, is questioned. It is as if the figures themselves protest against being made to function as symbols in the service of religion, against losing their freedom.
Some scholars have proposed the term “irony” to understand the contradictions underlying the text and music of “Das himmlische Leben.”111 Jean Paul, rightly in my view, observes that irony on the surface is always serious, even though that seriousness may only be a veil and not be supported by a text’s actual message.112 In this sense the Trauermarsch of Mahler’s First Symphony, which the critic Max Kalbeck called Mahler’s “Sinfonia Ironica,” basing his argument in particular on the funeral march,113 is an ironic piece: on the surface, it is serious and focused on death and suffering, below the surface, however, it is humorous and life-affirming, and thus articulates a very different message. “Das himmlische Leben” does not have such a serious surface. What speaks further against an ironic interpretation of the symphony’s final movement is the fact that irony, as a rhetorical device, is always highly constructed. Mahler, however, asserts a childlike attitude as the narrative attitude for this text. The perspective is that of a child spontaneously imagining a different world. This is also emphasized by a note that Mahler had printed in a relatively late stage with the score of the fourth movement: “Voice with childlike, joyful expression; throughout without parody” (Singstimme mit kindlich heiterem Ausdruck; durchaus ohne Parodie!).114 A final objection against irony is that it privileges one level of articulation over another: it seeks to identify the real message under the text’s surface. “Das himmlische Leben” instead explores the tension between two levels of articulation, the inconsistency of a Christian concept of heaven.
The key to understanding the Fourth’s final movement, and with it the entire symphony, is not irony but humor. But why does this movement come across as humorous? In the words of Jean Paul, humor “humiliates what is great, . . . in order to place what is small at its side, and it puts what is small on a pedestal . . . to place it alongside what is great, in order to destroy both” (erniedrigt das Große, . . . um ihm das Kleine, und erhöhet das Kleine, . . . um ihm das Große an die Seite zu setzen und so beide zu vernichten).115 At least in part, the humor in “Das himmlische Leben” has to do with the utter inappropriateness of the images it presents, in particular the insistence on the material world: we expect heaven to be a pious, spiritual, and restful place and not loud, playful, and focused on the kind of earthly pleasures that the song portrays. Humor is the result of an incongruity between what we expect and what we are offered.116 Such a discrepancy can very well function as a critique of society: “Jokes are anti-rites. They mock, parody or deride the ritual practices of a given society.”117 “Das himmlische Leben” is indeed critical of social rites — a form of criticism to which the first movement, with its use of the jester’s cap (which returns in the final movement), already alluded. As a medium of revolt the song uses the body. Humor’s affinity for the body is something many of its theorists have noted, among them Jean Paul.118 “Das himmlische Leben” insists on the materiality of life: heaven is primarily about eating and drinking. And yet such an embracing of earthly pleasures is only possible after recognizing that life is finite. This is what happens in the symphony’s second and third movements, in which humor is associated with death (second movement)119 and the ability to turn destruction into something life-affirming (third movement). In an exemplary way, “Das himmlische Leben” illustrates an understanding of humor as a back-and-forth between ideal and material reality, as the ability to be relativistic and yet also to embrace reality.
“Das himmlische Leben” shares with Nietzsche’s philosophical agenda a profound skepticism, not only toward Christianity’s normative claims, but also regarding the motives underlying religion in general. But in contrast to (moments in) the Second and Third Symphonies, it refuses to see humankind’s metaphysical homelessness as a tragic predicament. The Fourth Symphony’s final movement offers a rather playful version of Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity and a complete irreverence toward its professed norms and values. It draws the ultimate conclusion from Nietzsche’s insight that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon” can we make sense of the world and of our existence. If our values are nothing but imaginary constructions or wishful fantasies, then we may as well try to indulge in these fantasies while also embracing the materiality of life, instead of mourning certainties that we, in hindsight, never possessed. I would interpret the fact that Mahler attributes this attitude to a child as a statement that we are dealing not necessarily with “innocence” but rather with a more authentic attitude toward life: an attitude that intuitively understands the big questions of life better than after it has been indoctrinated by religious or philosophical doctrines, and that combines such an understanding with an ability to enjoy life in freedom in spite of its many vicissitudes.
At the end of his interpretation of the Fourth Symphony, Adolf Nowak signals similarities between the thoughts underlying “Das himmlische Leben” and Freud’s theories. In his view, the song articulates the kind of childish wishful thinking that is normally repressed.120 Interestingly, Mahler himself referred to Freud, albeit implicitly, in the immediate context of his work on this symphony. In a statement directly preceding Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s summary of her conversations with Mahler about this work, Mahler speaks about his creative powers as a dream-like force:
“We know,” said Mahler “that our second self is active while we sleep, that it grows and becomes and produces what the real self sought and wanted in vain. The creative artist, in particular, has countless proofs of this. But that this second self should have worked on my Fourth Symphony throughout ten months of winter sleep (with all the frightful nightmares of the theatre business) is unbelievable!”
[“Man weiß,” sagte Mahler, “daß unser zweites Ich im Schlafe tätig ist, das wächst und wird und hervorbringt, was das wahre Ich vergeblich suchte und wollte. Dafür hat besonders der Schaffende unzählige Beweise. Daß dieses zweite Ich aber über zehn Monate Winterschlafs (mit all den furchtbaren Träumen des Theatergetriebes) an meiner Vierten Symphonie gearbeitet hat, ist unglaublich!”] (GME, 161; RGM, 150)
The approximate date of the conversation (July or early August 1900) from which Natalie derived this information in her (chronologically organized) memoirs is interesting, because here Mahler is building on ideas that Freud introduced in his Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), which had been published in November 1899. Mahler clearly became familiar with some of the basic tenets of Freud’s book relatively shortly after its publication: he acknowledges that the unconscious functions differently from our conscious mental activity, that it is active during sleep, and that it produces or articulates what we consciously look for in vain (Freud’s notion of wish fulfillment121).
At least as important as recognizing Freud’s influence here is the turn that Mahler gives to his ideas: he uses Freud’s model of the conscious and unconscious levels of our psychic life in order to understand the creative process, a process not unlike that analyzed by Freud himself in 1908 in his essay “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren” (The Creative Writer and Day-Dreaming).122 Freud’s dream theory leads Mahler to ponder the existence of a creative drive diametrically opposed to everyday reality, not unlike the type of fantasy at work in “Das himmlische Leben.” Mahler’s comment to Natalie does make it clear how he is starting to conceive of his music’s ideas in a vocabulary that has roots among his contemporaries in Vienna around 1900. With this Freudian connection in mind, it is good to remember that “Das himmlische Leben,” in the end, is also about art: “no music exists on earth, / that can be compared to ours” (Kein Musik ist ja nicht auf Erden, / die uns’rer verglichen kann werden). The song pays homage to the imagination, to a form of free, aesthetic playing with tradition that imagines an ideal world while acknowledging that such a world can only be fantasy.
Using dream imagery to explain an aesthetic program was not uncommon in fin-de-siècle Vienna. In 1908 the 22-year-old Oskar Kokoschka published a book of poems entitled Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Boys), which was accompanied by eight color and two black-and-white lithographs. It is not clear how well Kokoschka knew Mahler’s works, although one may wonder whether the words “rattler of bells” (Schellenrassler) and “cymbalist” (Beckenschläger) in a stanza dedicated to music, refer to Mahler.123 In addition to introducing the “Narrenschelle” as a musical instrument, Mahler’s symphonies were also known for their innovative use of percussion. The poems of Die träumenden Knaben have been compared to those of Des Knaben Wunderhorn.124 The very first lines “red little fish / little fish red” (rot fischlein/fischlein rot)125 could be interpreted as referring to the first lines of the Wunderhorn poem “Urlicht,” which Mahler used for his Second Symphony. The imagery employed by Kokoschka in his collection shows a remarkable similarity to that of Mahler’s songs and symphonies: the poems are about nature (fish, birds), about dreaming and art, about love as a vague promise, about death, about the inability of language to express what matters, but also about the promise of other cultures, one of them being China. The world portrayed in these poems and lithographs is very much the product of a child’s fantasies — the original commission was to create an illustrated children’s book126 — but it is nevertheless also the product of a childhood that is endangered and marked by the knowledge that such a world cannot last. The individual episodes of the poem are organized as dream sequences: they consist of associations without a clear protagonist (or protagonists), without a clear location, and without a clear plot or narrative, very much like the world of “Das himmlische Leben.” At the root of their world is violence. The dream sequences are set in motion by a violent act: the killing of fish.127 Kokoschka dedicated his poems and lithographs to Gustav Klimt; this was no doubt because the penniless Kokoschka128 hoped to attract the attention of the more established artist, who at that point was far more famous than himself. But one could also read this as an effort to seek support for an aesthetic program of unlimited artistic freedom (not unlike the final movement of Mahler’s Fourth).
Mahler’s Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies all take issue, implicitly or explicitly, with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The Second Symphony tries to cast its Nietzschean message in a relatively conventional religious language — so conventional, in fact, that its underlying critical message was often not recognized. It seeks to answer the question of the conditions under which religion still has a function in a post-metaphysical age. The Third Symphony, by contrast, is much more explicit about its Nietzschean framework. Nietzsche’s name stands here for the transition to new ways of looking at the world, in particular through a rethinking of nature. One could say that the Third Symphony shows Nietzsche as the founding father of a new philosophy of life. Finally, the Fourth Symphony emphasizes the critical impulse in Nietzsche’s philosophy. In the end, Mahler prefers Nietzsche the skeptic to Nietzsche the ideology-builder. Mahler himself has called his Fourth Symphony a kind of “conclusion” (Abschluß) to his first three (GME, 164; RGM, 154). If one sees the Fourth as Mahler’s final word regarding his views of Nietzsche, then it is not just Nietzsche the critic of Western culture but also Nietzsche the humorist who triumphs. One could say that this symphony is conceived as an essay on humor, with the individual movements offering different insights into the functioning of humor. Nietzsche’s insight that existence and the world can be justified only aesthetically turns into an argument for art as a free form of aesthetic play that conceives of itself as highly critical of tradition.
Bruno Walter has written that Mahler was “outraged” (empört) by Nietzsche’s anti-Wagnerism and later in life rejected Nietzsche entirely.129 Alma Mahler in her memoirs supports Walter’s view, when she reports the (often-repeated) anecdote that Mahler, upon discovering her copy of Nietzsche’s works, recommended that she throw the books into the fire burning in the open fireplace.130 As unambiguous as such statements may seem, they do not necessarily mean that Mahler broke with Nietzsche (or with the Nietzschean agenda of his early symphonies). Regarding Alma’s comment, one may wonder whether, in Mahler’s idealized image of Alma, there was perhaps simply no place for the nihilist Nietzsche, whom he associated with his friend Lipiner and his fellow students from the Pernerstorfer circle.131 In a sometimes quite patronizing way, Mahler idealized Alma’s naiveté and spontaneity;132 an interest in Nietzsche on her part did not exactly fit into that picture. Concerning Bruno Walter’s comment, it would be interesting to know what exactly bothered Mahler about Nietzsche’s anti-Wagnerism: was it the fact that Nietzsche’s thinking had taken a different turn from Wagner’s while Mahler’s sympathies were with Wagner, or did Mahler reproach Nietzsche that the latter, in his anti-Wagnerian zeal, had produced an image of Wagner that was too simplistic and in particular ignored the innovative and critical dimensions of Wagner’s (earlier?) works, which Nietzsche himself had so idealized in the past? It is also worth noting that Walter makes his comment on Mahler’s break with Nietzsche over Wagner just after noting how Mahler in general thought through problems “independently” (selbständig)133 — that is, without worrying too much about possible ideological affiliations.
There is certainly a turn away from Nietzsche in Mahler’s later symphonies. These later works no longer evoke Nietzsche by name (although they do show parallels with Nietzsche’s thinking, as I will show in the following chapters). They also move away from diagnosing the kind of cultural crisis that is at the core of the early symphonies and the Wunderhorn songs. But does this mean that Mahler rejected the principles underlying Nietzsche’s philosophy? Not necessarily. When the Pernerstorfer circle was interested in Nietzsche in the late 1870s, Nietzsche was a little-known philosopher whose thinking was still in flux. Lipiner’s essay Über die Elemente einer Erneuerung religiöser Ideen in der Gegenwart is very much an attempt, as I have shown, to instigate and participate in a debate between his contemporaries Wagner and Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s breakthrough among the general public came in the 1890s134 (when Mahler, in 1895 and 1896, composed his Third Symphony and Richard Strauss almost simultaneously his symphonic poem Also sprach Zarathustra [1896]). By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Nietzsche had become an icon of popular culture and an emerging “kitsch industry.”135 Nietzsche had become the object of an at times rather uncritical form of idolization — the same kind of hero-worshipping that was at least one of the motives for Nietzsche to become rather skeptical of Wagner’s Bayreuth enterprise.136 This timeline is important for two reasons. Mahler’s mindset may very well have remained the same as before the breakup between Nietzsche and Wagner (or at least before the split became public knowledge), when both were thinking through similar problems in a close exchange of thoughts. Mahler’s dissociation from Nietzsche later in life (in the early 1900s) may have had more to do with the philosopher’s new iconic status in German culture than with an inner disagreement with his ideas.
But how, then, are we to reconcile Mahler’s clear endorsement of the thinking of Wagner’s antipode Friedrich Nietzsche in his symphonies with his unquestionable interest in Wagner, especially as a conductor? Nietzsche himself summarized the differences that led him to break with Wagner most succinctly in Nietzsche contra Wagner in a chapter with the title “Wie ich von Wagner loskam” (How I Broke Away from Wagner):
As early as the summer of 1876, right in the middle of the first Festspiele, I took leave of Wagner. I cannot stand ambiguities: since coming to Germany, Wagner had gradually given in to everything that I hate — even to anti-Semitism . . . At that time it was indeed high time to take my leave: and I immediately received a confirmation of the fact. Richard Wagner, seemingly the all-conquering, actually a decaying, despairing decadent, suddenly sank down helpless and shattered before the Christian cross . . .
[Schon im Sommer 1876, mitten in der Zeit der ersten Festspiele, nahm ich bei mir von Wagnern Abschied. Ich vertrage nichts Zweideutiges; seitdem Wagner in Deutschland war, condescendirte er Schritt für Schritt zu Allem, was ich verachte — selbst zum Antisemitismus . . . Es war in der That damals die höchste Zeit, Abschied zu nehmen: alsbald schon bekam ich den Beweis dafür. Richard Wagner, scheinbar der Siegreichste, in Wahrheit ein morsch gewordner verzweifelnder décadent, sank plötzlich, hülflos und zerbrochen, vor dem christlichen Kreuze nieder . . .] (SW 6:431–32; AC, 276, trans. modified)137
What is highly interesting about this statement is that Nietzsche mentions anti-Semitism here first when clarifying the reasons for his break with Wagner. It is important that Nietzsche puts the responsibility for succumbing to anti-Semitism squarely upon Wagner himself and not upon the Wagnerians surrounding him. The quote illustrates, in an exemplary way, Sander Gilman’s statement that Nietzsche was an “anti-anti-Semite”:138 Nietzsche’s critical statements about anti-Semitism are primarily motivated, not by a concern for the fate of Jews or by a love for Jewish culture, but rather by a disdain for those intellectuals and other public figures who tried to capitalize on anti-Semitic sentiments for political gain. Wagner’s anti-Semitism was by no means a secret in the late nineteenth century. The often reprinted “people’s edition” (Volksausgabe) of Wagner’s collected works included his “Das Judentum in der Musik” (Judaism in Music).139 Anti-Semitism is also openly discussed as a reason for Nietzsche’s distancing himself from Wagner in Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s biography of her brother.140 I mentioned in my introduction that Mahler, according to an anecdote reported by Natalie Bauer-Lechner, was well aware of the anti-Semitic subtext in the Ring des Nibelungen.
Nietzsche’s statement is about more than Wagner’s anti-Semitism alone. For Nietzsche, Wagner’s anti-Semitism ties into two other phenomena of which he is deeply skeptical: a turn to dogmatic religion, illustrated by the image of Wagner sinking down before the cross, and German nationalism. The preface of Nietzsche contra Wagner makes it clear that his diatribe against Wagner is to be understood with Germany’s 1871 unification in mind, of which Nietzsche did not approve.141 Here we may be at the core of what connects Mahler with Nietzsche and differentiates Mahler from Wagner. Mahler does not answer Wagner’s anti-Semitism by openly/publicly denouncing Wagner’s attitudes toward Jews — for the director of the Vienna Court Opera, that would have been highly problematic given the many documented anti-Semitic incidents surrounding his tenure — but rather by developing and promoting a view of German culture in his own works that was very different from Wagner’s. Jean Paul, Klopstock, Nietzsche, Mahler’s idiosyncratic choice of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and his adaptation of the end of the second part of Goethe’s Faust for the Eighth Symphony all stand for a trajectory of German literary and cultural history that was very different from Wagner’s conservative, nationalistic, and anti-Semitic appropriation of that same cultural heritage. Mahler embraced a highly eclectic style of appropriation toward German culture (both its music and literature), not unlike that of Jean Paul’s novels or the second part of Goethe’s Faust, but very different from that of Wagner, who saw such eclecticism as typical for Jewish music making.142
The texts of Mahler’s first four symphonies, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, and the Wunderhorn songs furthermore share a notion of “crisis” that resists any easy resolution. While these texts, on the surface, seem to tell us one thing, their actual message turns out to be far more complex. The narrative underlying the First Symphony resembles Jean Paul’s anti-Bildungsroman Titan more than it does the Bildungsroman that nineteenth-century scholars had sought to read into “classical” German literature. The texts he used in his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Wunderhorn songs, in their insistence on both the material realities of everyday life and the inability of art to compensate for material deficiencies, greatly resisted an ideological appropriation in favor of a nationalist and conservative ideology of the “Volk.” In his Second and Third Symphonies, Mahler ponders Nietzsche’s question of what it means to live in a post-metaphysical age. These symphonies are to be understood as critiques of a discourse that sought to evade modernity’s fundamental ambiguities in order to return to naive notions of religion, nature, and mankind; they insisted on rethinking these notions in line with Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the end of metaphysics. Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, with the often misunderstood Wunderhorn-text in its final movement, I would argue, represents an endpoint that is simultaneously the beginning of something new. It quite deliberately pokes fun at the questions asked in the Second and Third Symphonies. In the end, the symphony argues for a certain irreverence, indeed, an absolute freedom, vis-à-vis tradition.
The notion of crisis discussed in previous chapters is generally associated with fin-de-siècle Vienna modernism but in fact was rooted in German culture well before 1900. Mahler’s strategy of appropriating texts for a specific purpose and with a specific agenda in mind is not unlike that of Nietzsche, who at times mobilizes the big names of German literary history in his fight with Wagner. In Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner), for instance, Nietzsche seeks to answer the following question:
— What would Goethe have thought of Wagner? — Goethe once asked himself what danger was suspended over all Romantics: the fate awaiting Romanticism. His answer: “to suffocate on rehashed moral and religious absurdities.” In short: Parsifal —
[— Was Goethe über Wagner gedacht haben würde? — Goethe hat sich einmal die Frage vorgelegt, was die Gefahr sei, die über allen Romantikern schwebe: das Romantiker-Verhängnis. Seine Antwort ist: “am Wiederkäuen sittlicher und religiöser Absurditäten zu ersticken.” Kürzer: Parsifal —] (SW 6:19; AC, 239)
Nietzsche points here to the loss of a critical modern impulse in German intellectual history. The early Romantics, who could be characterized as a protest generation (see chapter 2), promoted a philosophical agenda that emphasized critical, ironic, humorous, eclectic, and fragmentary forms of thinking. While Jean Paul does not easily fit any standard periodizations of German literary history, he frames his theory of humor as a theory of Romanticism — very much in line with the agenda of the early Romantics.143 The central issue at stake in Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie — the legitimizing of life and the world by aesthetic means; the replacement of religion by art — has its roots in early Romantic thinking. The link is very clear, even though Nietzsche himself never commented on this archaeology of his own thinking and wrote very little about the early Romantics in general.144 Wagner represented, for Nietzsche, the prototypical late Romantic who cannot handle the challenges of modernity and feels the need to return to old moral certainties and a naive concept of religion. Anti-Semitism is a phenomenon that manifested itself with particular emphasis among the middle and late Romantics.145 Nietzsche provides Mahler with the philosophical basis for a counterreading of German cultural history that emphasizes its moments of openness and modern impulses. For Nietzsche and Mahler, Romanticism with all its contradictions — Romanticism’s association with both the creation of a new openness toward other cultures and the birth of German nationalism — is a key moment in this process of rereading German culture (see also chapter 2).
To some extent, Mahler’s relation to Wagner is also one of rewriting through appropriation. Of course Nietzsche overstated his case against Wagner, and it is also clear that after his break with Wagner Nietzsche did still feel ambivalent about his music.146 Wagner’s works, too, take as their point of departure the idea of a crisis of German culture that had already been diagnosed by the early Romantics, as his essay “Religion und Kunst” makes clear. But can Wagner’s operas, in spite of the anti-modern agenda of his later days, be read in a Nietzschean vein as a critique of Western culture? One thing that must be pointed out here is that Nietzsche’s criticism specifically concerned the older Wagner: the Wagner of the Bayreuther Festspiele of 1876 and of the “Stage-Consecrating Festival-Play” (Bühnenweihfestspiel) Parsifal, which had its premiere in 1882, could only be performed in Bayreuth, and was without a doubt the most public manifestation of Wagner’s turn to what Nietzsche had called “moral and religious absurdities.” In a conversation with the music critic Ernst Decsey, Mahler once described Parsifal as a work by a “Wagnerian” (eines Wagnerianers), not by Wagner.147 Such a comment is very much in line with Nietzsche’s criticism of the later Wagner, who had forsaken his (Nietzsche’s!) critical agenda and catered to the uncritical masses instead. But Nietzsche himself never lost his respect for Tristan and Isolde,148 the opera that was Wagner’s most daring experiment with dissonance and, coincidentally, the opera that Roller and Mahler staged in 1903 in their ground-breaking collaborative re-envisioning of Wagner’s work. Mahler and Roller’s staging of this work can be seen as modernist re-imagination that emphasized the symbolic nature of the events on the stage. Interestingly, while Mahler and Roller unquestionably created new images that clearly broke with Wagner’s directives and Bayreuth practice, they simultaneously sought to support their approach by referring to Wagner’s score in order to legitimize their new visual scenario.149 Precisely by resisting a naturalistic representation of events, Mahler and Roller produced a decidedly modernist version of Wagner’s opera: a version that pointed to the artificial, constructed nature of the events on the stage and in doing so asked its audiences to question the opera’s view of reality rather than accept it unconditionally.
Mahler profited a great deal from the fame that his reputation as the preeminent interpreter of Wagner’s works gave him. As he brought Wagner’s artistic and intellectual legacy into a debate about the nature of German culture, and in particular about the meaning of modernity and tradition within it, Mahler simultaneously tried to outsmart Wagner. Nietzsche offered him the tools to do so. Especially in his later phase, Nietzsche saw himself first and foremost as a cultural critic and a cosmopolitan, anti-nationalistic thinker. One could say that Nietzsche stood for the critical, modern, and emancipatory potential in German culture and for its internationalism; Wagner, by contrast, affiliated himself with its regressive, conservative, and nationalistic side. But there was something of Wagner in Nietzsche, and something of Nietzsche in Wagner. Wagner’s idea of a new cultural community is not entirely incongruent with Nietzsche’s reevaluation of all values, also in his late works. Starting in the 1890s, Nietzsche was at least as famous a cultural icon as Wagner had ever been. This is one reason why some intellectuals, in spite of their sympathy for Nietzsche’s ideas, started to distance themselves from his legacy in the early twentieth century.150 On the other hand, Nietzsche had correctly pointed not only to inconsistencies inherent in Wagner’s aesthetic framework but perhaps also to a dimension that was potentially still viable, or that could be redeveloped, in Wagner’s work. When Mahler in his Eighth Symphony set part of Goethe’s Faust to music, he picked up on a project that Wagner had considered in his early years but then abandoned.151 Here Mahler followed a trajectory that Wagner had considered but ultimately rejected.
I noted earlier that Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is an endpoint that is also a turning point in Mahler’s creative development. This work no longer lingers on the disappearance of old certainties but instead embraces this loss as an opportunity and as the realization of a newfound freedom. After this, Mahler initially composed a series of instrumental symphonies: symphonies that quite deliberately did not have programs but engaged the formal legacy of the symphony more explicitly and more radically than before. Eventually, however, he would return to text as a medium with which he could tackle some of the issues that occupied him and could position his own works within German cultural history. From deconstructing German culture and its normative assumptions in his early songs and symphonies, Mahler in his final works starts to embrace a rewriting of German culture that is actively interested in the margins of that tradition. In these later compositions Mahler aims for a concept of art that shows an increased awareness of the heterogeneity at the roots of German cultural history and also an interest in other cultures. In this, Mahler is very much a product of cosmopolitan Vienna and not of provincial Bayreuth: “compared with more recent political phenomena,” Ernst Křenek writes in 1941 in exile in the United States, “old Austria must appear as a paradise of peace and freedom, since Czechs and Poles, for instance, had permanent representatives in the cabinet and at times even prevailed in the government. How, if Austria had been what her foes pretended [a stronghold of sinister reaction and suppression], could a Bohemian Jew have ruled with absolute power for ten years over the foremost artistic institution of the Empire?”152