Mahler's Resurrection is one of those pieces that hooks you to classical music forever, and once you've heard it a hundred times, you dread hearing it another hundred. When i listen to earlier Mahler, when i listen to late Mahler, when i listen to works as diverse as the third, the fourth and the seventh, there is never a moment when I feel as though I'll get tired of it, because there is no getting to the bottom of emotional meanings that ambiguous. When you hear the funeral march from the Titan Symphony, when you hear the end of the 9th and Das Lied, the finale of 7, the opening of 3, there is no saying what music like this means. It's as though every emotion hurtles toward you all at once and you can't possibly feel them all every time you listen.
This piece practically got me through three years of high school, but at some point, Mahler's Resurrection gets retired from lots of music nuts' daily listening. There is no second guessing the meaning of poetry like this:
"O Sorrow, all-penetrating!
I have been wrested away from you!
O Death, all-conquering!
Now you are conquered!
With wings that I won
In the passionate strivings of love
I shall mount
To the light to which no sight has penetrated.
I shall die, so as to live!
Arise, yes, you will arise from the dead,
My heart, in an instant!
What you have conquered
Will bear you to God."
It's not quite as embarrassing in German, but even in English, it's no worse than Wagner, and next to Tippett or Ellington this is downright eloquent, but as poetry, it ain't great art. There's no need to ponder this to figure out what it means, and even if you pondered it, it's not like you'd come up with any brilliant new interpretation.
As with all great music, what makes it work is the music.... Mahler makes the listener earn that trip to E-flat Major heaven. Heaven for Mahler was in the key of E-flat just as E-flat was the key of heroism for Beethoven and the key of the deepest sublimity for Mozart. The Symphony of a Thousand begins where the Resurrection leaves off, and the moments of the sixth symphony's deepest happiness are in E-flat Major, the key most distant from that horrific work's home.
Indeed, Mahler sets up the whole musical argument of the symphony at the beginning by pre-figuring the final resurrection chorale, only for it to trip up into a moment of diminished chord fortissimo abyss that sounds to me like nothing so much as Satan falling from heaven through the Kingdom of Chaos (I never understood those small luftpausen there, it sounds so much better to me as one uninterrupted jumble). Just think of that quote from Paradise Lost: "Where eldest Night / And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold / Eternal anarchy amidst the noise / Of endless wars, and by confusion stand;" And then listen to this failed first attempt at Resurrection:
It's hard to believe that Mahler read Milton. He certainly wouldn't have read Milton in the original: he struggled with English even after living four years in America. But Milton was a formative influence on both Goethe, the Shakespeare of every German, and Klopstock, who, of course, wrote the Resurrection Ode intoned whisperingly by the choir upon their entrance.
The musical goal of resurrection, the very germ of the symphony's finale, was already in his head from the time he wrote Todtenfeier. It's entirely common in Mahler for material from one symphony to show up in the next, and he carries them forward from work to work like leitmotifs. People have often referred to Mahler as the most 'novelistic' composer, and you'd have to be deaf not to hear why. Like in Wagner's Ring, every theme so clearly represents an idea. We may not know what that idea is, but the theme itself is so emotionally resonant in such a specific way that there is often no mistaking the meaning of Mahler's themes, even if it is impossible to describe the contexts and permutations through which Mahler puts them. Think of how the major-minor modal shift at the end of the Resurrection's first movement shows up all through the sixth symphony. The Resurrection has a very brief quiet moment in the celli and basses, right at the moment before the choral entrance, that is present in the 'paradiso' section of the first symphony's finale. There are all kinds of moments like this all through it. Hell, if you squint your ears really hard, you could see the 'summer marches in' of Mahler 3's opening as the happy version of the horrifying 'march of the dead' in the finale of Mahler 2.
And that's just the intertextuality within Mahler's own work. If you look at the DNA of Mahler's resurrection and see it in the context of other music, the similarities are so striking that you have to at least wonder if Mahler intended a coded language of allusion that gives away the program. I doubt Mahler meant something so conscious, but I also doubt such associations were absent from his head.
Just think of the opening of the Resurrection Symphony and compare it to the evocation of a storm in the Prelude of Wagner's Die Walkure. The tremelos in the upper strings seem to sound like rain coming in sheets. In Wagner, the lower strings seem to be pulsing at running speed, as though to indicate Siegmund running through the woods. In Mahler, it's at a slow walking pace, like the 'notes inegales' at the beginning of a French Baroque Overture, figures so beloved of Handel. It seems to indicate some sort of state grandeur, and Mahler even writes in his program note that he's burying the hero of the first symphony.
It was when I heard Semyon Bychkov conduct it at Carnegie Hall in 2018 that I realized that the first movement sounds uncannily like a state funeral. Not a low class funeral like in the fifth symphony, but a dignified, solemn, ornate funeral of an absurdly pompous monarchy: precisely such a kingdom as the Austro-Hungarian Empire of Franz Josef which birthed Mahler and so much other classical music. If it's a state funeral, you can hear 21 gun salutes [https://youtu.be/tb1KISFyx7c?si=4OYBpif13TRF9zei&t=244](https://youtu.be/tb1KISFyx7c?si=4OYBpif13TRF9zei&t=244), you can hear the marching of troops and changing of guards (assuming they do it up to speed: [https://youtu.be/RkLIKptIqGo?si=U3L94iEDVz4h7q6C&t=618](https://youtu.be/RkLIKptIqGo?si=U3L94iEDVz4h7q6C&t=618), you can even hear the hearse driving by a public of onlookers https://youtu.be/Oi6ZjkXFlcU?si=F2E8KQVHSPC4_Doe&t=1260. And let's not forget: the whole thing is in C-minor: the key with which Beethoven buried the hero of the Eroica. To me, the whole movement has become about the burial of hope. I'm too young to know what it's like to lose the Kennedys and MLK, but I am old enough and Jewish enough to remember what it was like to lose Rabin. The whole thing had that feeling of knowing that all your hopes for what your life would be like were shot to shit. In that moment, most of us knew that suddenly, our lives were cast into a much bitterer lot than they would have been just a few days earlier. I doubt Mahler could experience all the political assassinations of his own day and not intuit something similar about his own generation. And let's go back to that 'kingdom of chaos' moment: as Richard Taruskin points out, the diminished chord on which it lands, however well concealed, is basically the exact chord as what Wagner termed the 'horror chord' at the beginning of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth.
Is the Resurrection a political work? No, of course not, but it isn't entirely removed from politics either. Think of the St. Anthony scherzo. Objectively it's the most elegantly composed movement of the work in an extremely inelegant work. No one ever wrote better scherzo's than Mahler: every scherzo of his is a masterpiece, but along with 9 and 5, this may be the masterpiece among them all. The story tells of how St. Anthony finds the church empty, so he goes and preaches to the fish in the stream. The fish are pleased by his sermon, and then they go on living exactly the same lives as before. Everything about this movement seems to be about the inability of Christians to live a virtuous life. And yet... Mahler sets it in what we Jews call the 'freygish' scale, the Jewish mode ('freygish', I guess, means Phrygian? I guess the two scales sound alike?). It is so clearly supposed to sound like Klezmer music. [https://youtu.be/s2_8oFNwZU0?si=OlmHlGk6Vn3UsOND&t=2228](https://youtu.be/s2_8oFNwZU0?si=OlmHlGk6Vn3UsOND&t=2228) Is Mahler trying to tell his audience something? Well, I don't know, but what I do know is that suddenly, amid all these gefilte fish, the music suddenly turns into a Christian hymn. [https://youtu.be/oUBx_Q-xw2M?si=UjmU-yuimiuNiuWo&t=2305](https://youtu.be/oUBx_Q-xw2M?si=UjmU-yuimiuNiuWo&t=2305) And then comes the inevitable moment when the Christian music turns violent and the cry of despair that accompanies it.... [https://youtu.be/tb1KISFyx7c?si=qGdOPCQ7tU8kI0Ua&t=2409](https://youtu.be/tb1KISFyx7c?si=qGdOPCQ7tU8kI0Ua&t=2409)
Once you hear the Jewish/Christian divide in this music, I don't think it's possible to get the image of a pogrom out of your head.
And then consider some of the words of the next movement, Urlicht:
Man lies in direst need,
Man lies in direst pain,
Is Mahler intuiting the future of Jews and Europe and war and oppression? Probably not, and yet somewhere it's there, in his head, in his nervous system, something is intuiting a world gone well off a path it was never firmly on to begin with. Somewhere it's also there in the heads of the listeners that rejected his music. And somewhere it's in our heads whose ancestors lived and died through all that soon came. And just in case we're unclear that there is something Jewish about this message comes these three lines of text:
I then came upon a broad path,
An angel came and sought to turn me back,
Ah no! I refused to be turned away.
I am from God and to God I will return,
This is so obviously referencing Jacob wrestling with the angel and renamed Israel. Those the angels would turn away, we too demand salvation. We too demand acceptance. We too demand all rights which you Christians take for granted.
And then comes the 'cry of despair' again, even more despairing, followed by... C-Major? It's as though the earthly cares of C-minor are dispelled.
....
I'd like to finish this but the last movement has enough material to cover that it needs to be its own post. If I don't get to it, remind me to tell you all about how Mahler might have been inspired by looking at Renaissance art:
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