What one makes music from is still the whole - that is the feeling, thinking, breathing, suffering, human being.
Gustav Mahler
On 26 June 1912, Gustav Mahler's 9th Symphony was given its posthumous premiere in Vienna with Bruno Walter leading the Philharmonic. This profoundly valedictory work - the last Mahler completed before he died - is considered by many Mahler devotees to be his greatest achievement.
Back in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a superstition developed in the classical music world that prophesied the Ninth would be a composer’s last symphony. Arnold Schoenberg summed it up in an eloquent fashion, stating that “he who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not ready. Those who have written a Ninth stood too close to the hereafter.”
To support this, history gives us Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorák, Bruckner, Mahler, and Vaughan Williams, who either died after completing the ninth (Dvorák waited ten years) or never made it through a tenth. We’ll overlook Shostakovich, who not only completed a ninth but went on to write and publish six more. He was Shostakovich, after all. Even death kept a wary, respectful distance.
Mahler, some say was superstitious about the matter, tried to sneak around it by calling his ninth symphonic-length work, “Das Lied von der Erde,” a song-cycle rather than a symphony. He bravely undertook his Ninth, rife with its intimations of death and the ache of the human condition, and published it (although he never heard it performed). A year later he began working on his Tenth, but, true to the curse, he died before finishing it. Although he’d sketched out the whole symphony, only the first movement, “Adagio,” and a brief third movement, “Purgatorio,” are complete.
I’m not sure I buy it that this was Mahler’s song song as he saw it. I think that’s just a convenient mythos that enveloped around the traumatic death of one of finest composers ever. Far from going gently into a sort of pre-deathly contemplation, Mahler was full of plans, action, and music in the years when he was writing the Ninth Symphony. He was taking up his post at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, writing Das Lied von der Erde, preparing for the premiere of the Eighth Symphony, and writing, but not completing, what would truly be his last symphony, the Tenth. That’s another danger of thinking about that last page of the Ninth Symphony as the end of Mahler’s compositional life. It’s not: for Mahler, and maybe for us, it should be an insight into life - albeit a life transformed after the intensity of what you’ll have been through after listening to any complete performance of his symphony - rather than a leaving of it.
Daniel Barenboim conducts Mahler's 9th Symphony with the Stasoper Berlin orchestra.
