“Is there life after death for us?”
Gustav Mahler and death “Is there life after death for us?” Gustav Mahler and death

Gustav Mahler was preoccupied with death throughout his life; you can hear it in his music. His compositions confront what many prefer to suppress: loss, grief, transience and the hope of something beyond death. His symphonies still speak to us today because they ask timeless, elemental questions.

“Even in the midst of life we are surrounded by death”: this mediaeval maxim had a more immediate truth for Gustav Mahler than it does for most of us today. Mahler was one of fourteen children, but only six survived their early years. Although the causes of death are not always known, several are documented as having died of heart disease. There may have been a genetic predisposition: his mother, Marie Mahler, also suffered from a congenital heart defect.

The 14-year-old Gustav was particularly hard hit by the death in April 1875 of his brother Ernst, two years his junior, who died of pericarditis. Gustav cared devotedly for him during his final days, sitting at his bedside and telling him stories. He composed the opera Herzog Ernst von Schwaben, whose title character shares his brother’s name and likewise dies young, to honour him. Sadly, the score has been lost.

Mahler himself lived to the age of fifty, but his life was overshadowed by illness. He regularly suffered from severe throat infections, several of which developed into abscesses requiring surgery. He also suffered repeatedly from haemorrhoids, which caused serious bleeding. Matters came to a head on 24 February 1901. Mahler faced an exhausting schedule that day: first he conducted a matinee of the Vienna Philharmonic featuring Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony; that evening he conducted Mozart’s The Magic Flute. When he arrived home around midnight, however, he suffered a massive haemorrhage – so severe that he would have bled to death had a doctor not been called immediately. Mahler was taken to hospital and underwent surgery. He later said that he had stood “at the dividing line between life and death”, adding: “The thought of returning to life was almost distasteful to me.”

Did Mahler harbour a secret longing for death? “My music is lived experience,” he liked to say, and nowhere is this more evident than in his First Symphony. It tells of a young man in love who, after a brief period of happiness, is abandoned by his beloved, despairs of the unfeeling world around him and ultimately takes his own life. Mahler drew on his own unhappy experiences in love; although he never attempted suicide, he may have contemplated it. The suspicion seems to find further support in the opening movement of the Second Symphony, the Totenfeier (“Funeral Rites”), in which Mahler takes up the narrative of the First. When he began composing the movement in January 1888, he had just conducted the première of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Die drei Pintos. His room was filled with the flowers he had received after the performance. Instead of enjoying them, Mahler imagined himself “lying dead, laid out amid wreaths and flowers”. It was this image that provided the inspiration he needed for the work.

At the same time, Mahler did everything he could to defy his frail constitution – and, by extension, death itself. He was a keen sportsman: a fast swimmer and accomplished diver, he rowed long distances, hiked for days through the mountains without apparent fatigue, undertook gruelling cycling tours and covered almost every journey through the city on foot, often at near-running pace. Mahler was not tall – probably around 1.60 metres – but he was anything but frail: lean, muscular and without an ounce of excess weight. His friend, the stage designer Alfred Roller, somewhat enviously described him as having “an impeccably proportioned, powerfully slender physique” and compared him to a “fit racehorse”. Perhaps it was this physical stamina that enabled Mahler to sustain his extraordinary workload: rehearsing and conducting opera productions in Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg and Vienna, often giving more than a hundred performances a season, while devoting his summer breaks to composition.

Music against mortality

Part of Mahler’s way of confronting mortality was not to turn away from the thought of death. What interested him above all was what might come afterwards. “What is this life – and this death? Is there some continued existence for us? Is all this nothing but a desolate dream, or do this life and this death have meaning?” he wrote in connection with his Second Symphony. The idea for its finale came to him on 29 March 1894, during the memorial service for the conductor Hans von Bülow, when the chorale “Aufersteh’n!” (“Rise again!”) rang out in Hamburg’s St Michael’s Church. “It struck me like lightning, and everything stood clear and vivid before my soul!” Mahler recalled. He went on to expand the chorale with six verses of his own, setting out his personal vision: “There is no judgement – there is no sinner, no righteous man, no great and no small. There is neither punishment nor reward! An all-powerful feeling of love illuminates us with blissful knowledge and being.”

Mahler returned repeatedly to similar ideas throughout his work: in the Third Symphony, whose finale elevates love to the highest and most enduring form of existence, and in the Fourth, which ends with a vision of paradise. His intense preoccupation with death and what might follow also meant that later events in his life could seem eerily foreshadowed in his music. Between 1901 and 1904 he composed the five Kindertotenlieder (“Songs on the Death of Children”) to poems by Friedrich Rückert, written after the deaths of two of the poet’s children. Three years after completing the cycle, Mahler himself lost his four-year-old daughter Maria. And there was another grim coincidence: the three hammer blows of fate that “fell” the hero of his Sixth Symphony of 1903/04 appeared to find counterparts in Mahler’s own life in 1907, when he lost his daughter, relinquished his post as director of the Vienna Court Opera and was diagnosed with the heart condition that would ultimately kill him.

“That I must die, I already knew,” Mahler remarked laconically on receiving the diagnosis, while acknowledging that “now, at the end of a life, I must learn again, like a beginner, to walk and to stand.” He had barely four years left. When Mahler fell ill with tonsillitis again in February 1911, the infection developed into endocarditis. With his heart already weakened, he never recovered, and died on 18 May.

Today, Mahler’s music is more widely performed than ever. This may not be the “continued existence” he had in mind, but through his music, Mahler does live on.