Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 2 in C minor “Resurrection” Gustav Mahler Symphony No. 2 in C minor “Resurrection”

The listener might be forgiven for thinking of serial novels: Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony begins exactly where the First ends – with the hero’s death. Having accompanied him in the finale of the First from the earthly vale of tears into heavenly paradise, Mahler now turns his gaze to those left behind. They gather around the deceased’s coffin: the mood is sombre, a funeral march is suggested, and Mahler adds massive blocks of sound representing inexorable fate. Yet there are also brief moments of brightening – the question whether life is truly already over, or whether it might somehow continue, hangs in the air. Under the title Totenfeier, Mahler composed the first movement of the Second in 1888, while he was still working on the First Symphony. But then he set the project aside for five years.

This break can be heard in the symphony itself. Mahler explicitly demanded in the score that the performance be interrupted for five minutes after the opening Allegro maestoso – and indeed, what follows is indeed something new. Like a funeral oration that recalls the life of the deceased, Mahler now embarks on a flashback. The Andante, as he himself explained in a programme note, represents a wistful memory of the dead man’s youth and lost innocence. Mahler illustrates this with an almost naïve ländler that is reminiscent of Franz Schubert and forms the greatest possible contrast to the opening Totenfeier. Now and then, the dangers to which human beings are exposed flash by.

The third movement, a venomously bitter Scherzo, shows what effect these threats had on the hero. Out of bitterness about the evil of the world, he is seized by the spirit of unbelief. “Disgust with all being and becoming grips him with an iron fist and drives him to the cry of despair,” Mahler describes the action, quoting in the symphony his Wunderhorn song Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt, a “satire on the human race”. In it, the fish flock cheerfully to the saint’s sermon, which they enjoy greatly – but it changes nothing; everything remains as it was. Mahler mirrors this stubborn incorrigibility with musical figures that whirr like a spinning wheel, until the orchestra finally utters a cry for help.

Perhaps simple folk faith can bring salvation? A further setting from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the collection of folk poems assembled by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, forms the fourth movement: Urlicht. The alto soloist solemnly and simply sings the words: “I come from God and I will return to God. Dear God will give me a little light, and it will shine for me into eternal blessed life!”

This prepares the ground for the great finale. At first it announces Judgement Day and the Last Judgement, poised between hope and fear. Mahler evokes the apocalyptic outcome with dissonant eruptions of sound, even placing an entire offstage ensemble behind the scenes to heighten the force of terror. But suddenly the trumpets and trombones no longer threaten hell. Instead, the choir enters mysteriously with the words of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock: “Rise again, yes, you will rise again.” Mahler had heard these lines at the funeral service for Hans von Bülow – the first chief conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker – at Hamburg’s “Michel”, and now he used their message for the happy and consoling close of his “Resurrection Symphony”: “I shall die, so as to live!”