Gustav Mahler (Dover Books on Music and Music History) by Bruno Walter & Ernst Krenek

Author:Bruno Walter & Ernst Krenek [Walter, Bruno]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2013-11-26T02:00:00+00:00

If you have sinned against God’s law

Go down on your knees in shame and awe—

Pray to God both night and day

And Heaven’s joys will be yours alway!

From out of the angelic message grew the solemn piece of music with the ringing bells, the joyful boys’ and women’s choruses, and the voice of sinful man who receives the blessed tidings. In the final movement, however, the word is hushed again—what language is there that could tell with greater force and stronger reason of Divine Love than that of pure music? The adagio, with its broad, solemn melodics, with occasional episodes of burning pain, but, on the whole, telling of solace and mercy, is one sound of fervently exalted emotion and, in a structural as well as in a musical sense, crowns the gigantic work. Mahler called the Third his Gay Science and, as a matter of fact, it is essentially an expression of the joys of life and of the world which his music communicates to us.

And, in the Fourth, it reaches even greater heights of a strangely exalted gaiety. “With wings that I have won I’ll soar away,” he had sung in his Second. He might have claimed the same, only in a more fantastic sense, for his soul’s experience when he wrote his Third. For now he felt himself carried on high as in a dream and no longer was there any ground under his feet. An account of such a floating condition is given in the Fourth. In its final movement it even represents, thematically, a sequel to the “Angel Movement” of the Third and, in its general tone, follows its spiritual direction. After the works of pathos, a yearning for gaiety or, rather, for serenity had sprung up in Mahler’s heart, and so he created the idyll of the Fourth in which a devout piety dreams its dream of Heaven. Dream-like and unreal, indeed, is the atmosphere of the work—a mysterious smile and a strange humor cover the solemnity which so clearly had been manifested in the Third. In the fairy-tale of the Fourth everything is floating and unburdened which, in his former works, had been mighty and pathetic—the mellow voice of an angel confirms what, in the Second and Third, a prophet had foreseen and pronounced in loud accents. The blissful feeling of exaltation and freedom from the world communicates itself to the character of the music—but, in contrast to the Third, from afar, as it were. The three orchestral movements take their course without a condensation of the peculiar moods out of which they grew into a definite idea. Not even the Little Recall in the first movement, mentioned before, is susceptible of a classification within a larger vision.

The first movement and the Heavenly Life are dominated by a droll humor which is in strange contrast to the beatific mood forming the key-note of the work. The scherzo is a sort of uncanny fairytale episode. Its demoniac violin solo and the graceful trio form an

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