Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony: Growth within Fulfillment

Abstract

Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony:Growth within Fulfillment David B. Greene (bio) Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), best known for his nine symphonies and works for voice and orchestra, was born in Kaliště, Bohemia. He moved to Vienna in 1875 to study piano and composition. Taking up opera conducting as a livelihood, he held posts in Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg, Vienna, and New York. During summers he wrote music in the serenity of Austrian lakes and mountains. Although his conducting was highly acclaimed, audiences found his own compositions difficult to understand. The orchestration, partly shaped by his experience as a conductor, was unusual, the works were too long, and he introduced ironic overstatements that audiences misunderstood as sincere expressions in poor taste. Moreover, each of his symphonies works toward a mode of coherence that is unique to itself, and audiences, expecting him to adhere to Beethoven's or Brahms's principles of consistency, simply couldn't follow them. Precisely these innovations have made his music highly influential for contemporary composers and refreshingly challenging for modern audiences. They are also intimately connected with his particular approach to spiritual life. Today, most conductors include at least one Mahler symphony in every season. The BBC poll of 151 conductors voted Mahler's Second, Third, and Ninth among the ten greatest symphonies of all time. More than most pieces in the symphonic canon, Mahler's Third prompts listeners to murmur as they leave the concert, "I didn't know music could do that." From its first note onward, Mahler's Third Symphony (1896) takes listeners to a strange place. The sound itself—eight boisterous horns in unison—doesn't belong in a concert hall, or anywhere indoors. Mahler calls it a "reveille." The sheer sound, together with its melody, issues a mysterious summons. Julian Johnson writes that the horns' massive call "summons a voice out of silence, a presence out of emptiness, a form out of formlessness."1 Contradictorily (and typical of Mahler's style), the tune is also familiar—reminiscent of a German student song calling friends to get up and move. The ordinary demystifies the silence, and the emptiness mystifies the ordinary. Five movements later, the slow last movement takes the same motif and transforms it into a hymn that answers the horn call and the summonses—and [End Page 250] struggles, contradictions, and anguish—of the four intervening movements. The sense of completion is, however, challenged by biting reminiscences of prior negativities. In the end, fulfillment transcends these by returning to and growing the fulfillment. But even then, the music presses ahead and grows further. This growth, however, is not to a new level of fulfillment but within fulfillment itself. It is as though the movement succeeded in miraculously and impossibly joining growth (which implies moving forward) with fulfillment (which connotes being at peace). Growth within fulfillment is central to the Third Symphony's unique mode of unity and is also at the heart of its bearing on both spiritual practice and understanding spirituality. This fulfillment is, of course, a musical fulfillment, and the growth is musical growth, but the temporal process it exemplifies can be compared and contrasted to other modes of temporality, including those involved in spiritual practices and insights.2 "Temporal process" refers to the way remembering the past and expecting a future affect our present experience. For example, Ezra Tyler, a character in Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, is feeling the past bearing down on the present when he says, "We've got to stick together; nobody else has the same past that we have." And when his brother, Cody, says to himself that "he would rather die than desert a child of his; he had promised himself when he was a boy: anything but that," he is feeling the weight of the future on the present.3 We experience the procession from past to present to future in many modes. It may be a matter of moral or mechanical necessity or of an individual's decision, or happenstance. Recalling the past may affect the present by evoking regret or gratitude, or by explaining the present, or hardly at all. Anticipating the future may qualify...