As the earth falls asleep, the orchestral texture simplifies: the singer, accompanied by flute and a pedal in the double bass, reflects on the chill of the evening. She waits—as the lonely one of the second song waited—for the arrival of a friend. This expected arrival is no longer for any renewal of love: where the second movement yearned for the “sun of love” to shine again, the finale has been clear, from the singer’s first words on the sun’s departure—it is to be a final farewell. The friend—in one guise, Death, but in another the compressed personification of all the singer has loved—is eagerly anticipated, so that there may be a last shared moment of joy, joy in the beauty of the evening. Protest is not entirely over, for anger surges momentarily in a cry of reproach: the singer has been left “so long alone.” Now, however, she has the resources to calm herself, as the orchestral accompaniment (winds, harps, and strings) prepares for her voice to sing in celebration of the beauties she perceives. Instead of the passionate outcry for love to return and for its sun to dry her bitter tears, she concludes this section with a line of elegiac adoration and affirmation, marked by emphatic cross-rhythms: “O Schönheit, o ewigen Liebens, Lebenstrunk’ne Welt!”, a farewell tribute (made in full consciousness that this is a moment of parting) to a world not artificially intoxicated but naturally overflowing with life and love.92
FIGURE 3.7. Das Lied von der Erde: extract from movement 6.
To end there would have been to affirm without providing any hint about how the affirmation is to be sustained or to be vindicated. A lesser composer—or a less philosophical composer—might have settled for that, but Mahler interpolates at this point an orchestral interlude based on themes that have previously been suited to the singer’s mood—reflective, serious, yet quietly affirmative as it has been—but now developing them to renew the challenge of the opening song. The singer’s line is echoed in the first violins before a quickening of the tempo introduces a short section (in A minor) that begins to unsettle phrases previously heard as peaceful. This intermezzo introduces far more intense development of several familiar motifs, in the section marked Schwer (heavy), running from [38] to [48] in the score, reminding us of the initial challenge, the anguish it expressed, anguish heard in more muted ways in the intervening movements. A counterpart to the opening juxtaposition of the beauties of the earth and the recognition of human finitude, symbolized in the cacophonous howling of the ape, the insistent phrases in horns and bassoons at the climax (around [47] in the score) deny the possibility of any easy affirmation.
After the climax of the orchestral interlude, there is a rapid reduction of the orchestral forces and a diminuendo, so that the voice reenters accompanied only by tamtam and a bass note held in the low strings. Mahler switches at this point to Bethge’s version of the WangWei text, immediately amended so that the original first person gives way to the third person (an important modification if the identification with the voice of the first poem is to be preserved). The long-awaited friend—to be understood, I suggest, both as Death and as the personification of all the voice has held most dear—arrives. In this encounter, the friend holds out the cup of farewell—the drink needed at this moment—asking why his comrade (the leave-taker whose perspective the singer has offered) must depart.93 Before the reply is given, Mahler sounds again in the orchestra an insistent theme from the orchestral interlude, first forte and then piano—as if the challenge must now be faced.94
The vocal reply, accompanied at first by winds, horns, harps, and strings, almost entirely piano or pianissimo, is marked “very gentle and full of expression” (“sehr weich und ausdrucksvoll”). The singer offers a concise summary of a human life, a life conceived as past: in this world, my fortunes were not good. The protagonist will leave to wander in the mountains, to find rest for her lonely heart. Against orchestral phrases heard restfully in the opening sections of the movement, given an anguished intensity in the interlude, and now restored to a consoling tenderness, the singer sees herself as going to her home (a line Mahler interpolates into Bethge’s derivation from Wang-Wei). She will no longer roam far and will quietly await her final hour.95
The orchestra prepares for an answer to the confessed harshness of human life and to the finitude of our existence with an extraordinary passage: there is an enormous reduction in tempo, winds give way to strings (with harps persisting), and the dynamic and tempo markings are emphasized: “Langsam! ppp! Ohne Steigerung. NB” (“Slow! Extremely soft! Without crescendo. NB”). In a soaring phrase of long-held notes, with great expressiveness, the voice sings words with which Mahler completely rewrote Bethge’s closing pair of lines. Instead of:
Die Erde ist die gleiche überall
The earth is the same everywhere
Und ewig, ewig sind die weisse … Wolken
And the white clouds endure forever, forever …
Mahler sets a poetic development of the thoughts that (presumably) attracted him to this poem:
Die liebe Erde allüberall
The lovely earth all over
Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt auf neu
Blooms in the spring and grows green anew
Allüberall und ewig blauen licht die Fernen,
Everywhere, and the distance forever shines blue,
Ewig, ewig …
Forever, forever …
The setting of these lines goes beyond the leave-taker’s apparent confession of resignation, the avowal that the heart will be quiet and await the last departure: the voice swells again, not this time in lament (as in the arching outburst of the last line of the second song) but with a sweeping serenity that dies down and away in a two-note phrase (Ewig), sung seven times,96 expressing complete acceptance. The movement closes not in defeat or even in sorrow but with a quiet solemnity in which protest and regret have been transcended.
Of the many commentaries on this remarkable passage, none strikes me as more insightful than that offered by Benjamin Britten:
FIGURE 3.8. Das Lied von der Erde: extract from movement 6.
It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength & freedom. The beauty of disappointment & never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.
… And there is nothing morbid about it … a serenity literally supernatural. I cannot understand it—it passes over me like a tidal wave—and that matters not a jot either, because it goes on forever, even if it is never performed again—that final chord is printed on the atmosphere.97
In the immediate context of the farewell song, it is as though the leave-taker can look back, in the fading light, at a world on which the shadows are encroaching and accept it as permanently beautiful and worthwhile.
If it should still seem fanciful to understand this ending as the response to a challenge issued in the first movement, it is only necessary to note that Mahler’s added words echo the first line of the verse that precedes the passionate outcry against human finitude. In the opening song, just before introducing the image of the ape, Mahler amends Bethge’s words in a way that connects the initial despair and the final affirmation. In Bethge’s version: “Das Firmament bleibt ewig, und die Erde / Wird lange feststehn auf den alten Füssen” (“The heavens endure forever, and the earth / Will long stand fast on its old foundations”); Mahler replaces this with “Das Firmament bleibt ewig, und die Erde / Wird lange feststehn und aufblühn im Lenz” (“The heavens endure forever, and the earth / Will long stand fast and blossom again in spring”). In the first movement, there is a contrast between this renewal of the earth and the brevity of human life (“But you, man, how long do you live?”), an anguished protest. In the finale, the leave-taker comes to the closing moment of serenity, restores the connection between the life that is ending and the indefinitely renewed earth, a connection denied as the ape in the graveyard is separated from the enduring heavens and the blossoming spring, a connection rejected in the drunkard’s response to the laughing bird—all that is condensed into those fading, consoling repetitions of “
Ewig” and into that chord “printed on the atmosphere.”
FIGURE 3.9. Das Lied von der Erde: closing measures.
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, philosophers who echo in Mahler’s thoughts as they do in Mann’s, might offer explanations. For one, it is a matter of finding a way to affirm life despite its finitude (the preoccupation I have attributed to Mahler); for the other, it is a matter of abnegating the will, perhaps expressed in the “quiet heart” that “awaits its hour.” Yet already, in the opening movement of Das Lied, these possibilities were considered and found wanting. The initial attempt at Nietzschean affirmation founders on the apprehension of a finite human subject, detached from the enduring earth, a miserable caricature of life howling at the moon. The closing refrain, with its acknowledgment of the darkness of our condition, cannot sustain Schopenhauer’s ideal state of silencing the will—the fortissimo on the final word, “To d,” announces the revival of resentful anger, the protest against the triumph of death, and the closing orchestral measures renew, vainly, the striving to affirm.
The interior movements only deepen the sense that the celebrated philosophical answers are inadequate. The lonely one of Song 2 anticipates a mood that will be completed in the finale, singing with intensity of the coming rest (in the measures after [13], “Ich komm’ zu dir, traute Ruhestätte”), but her mood cannot be maintained: the desire for life and love breaks out again in the closing lines. The apparently quiet pleasures of the beautiful young people of Song 3 are fragile, evanescent, even trivial (tea drinking, chatter), no more significant than their reflections in the water of the pool—these satisfactions constitute no basis on which a vindication of life’s joys could be constructed. Similarly, the romantic yearnings aroused in Song 4, even the beauty of the girls and the exuberant energy of the careless boys, are all transitory—they fade as the flowers do in autumn and are not renewed. Nor is it possible to seize the drink proffered in the opening song, to turn away completely from life into a world of artificial illusions, for spring breaks in on the drunkard’s sleep, offering its invitation and posing its demands. To venture back into life would raise all the unsolved problems, but, as the close of the fifth movement makes evident, to turn back to oblivion is no more than evasive bluster.
FIGURE 3.10. Das Lied von der Erde: close of movement 1.
How, then, are matters different in the finale? What has made it possible for the singer to depart with anything more than what the previous movements have accomplished? I suggest that the acceptance of the conclusion, the serenity Britten rightly heard but wrongly categorized as supernatural, is achieved by finding a sense of connection. That possibility was already hinted at in the opening movement, in the lovely paean to the renewal of the earth (beginning just before [31], “Das Firmament bleibt ewig”), but it was immediately withdrawn through the sundering of humanity from the rest of nature (“Du aber, Mensch”—“But you, o man”). The connections between ourselves and others are indeed transient, whatever impact we have on the cosmos or on the history of our own species will eventually wither into nothingness, yet that does not prevent human beings and human actions from being part of an enduring project—but not an infinite project, for the planet will eventually cease to support life, the sun will ultimately burn out. Our lives can connect us to something larger than our individual selves—and that is enough to lend them worth.
The singer’s closing lines point to the possibility of this connection and to its genuine worth. She will die; her individual existence will cease. That can be viewed, stably viewed, as a homecoming, and in its prospect the heart can remain still, quiet, and accepting. For beyond her own life will be the renewal of the earth, people who will love and work together as she has loved and worked, achieving, as she has achieved, hard-won and ephemeral ends. Beyond the human community the earth itself will be reborn, with its laughing birds and springtime blossoms, and with the blue of the far horizons. All that will continue, not forever, but indefinitely, and she can affirm her own part in the history of the whole with those final words—“Ewig, ewig”—and with the chord “printed on the atmosphere.”
Religious people may propose that for this to be convincing there must be a mind with a plan behind the entire show, giving it point and direction. In an important and suggestive essay, the eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel defends the centrality—to human life and to philosophy—of understanding the connection between our individual existences and some larger whole.98 Nagel maintains that the question cannot simply be rejected: “the question ‘What am I doing here?’ … doesn’t go away when science replaces religion.”99 In my judgment, he is completely right about the enduring hold of the question, although too generous in thinking religion could provide any adequate answer to it. Trouble does not merely lie in the fact that there is almost certainly no transcendent being with a Great Plan for the Universe.100 Even if there were, how could our being part of that Great Plan lend significance to what we do? Why would the mere fact that it expressed the will of some vaster, perhaps incomprehensible, being give our lives point and worth?101
Mahler’s own response to the central philosophical question lies in the close of Das Lied, in the words he wrote and the vocal and orchestral lines he composed for them. Listeners who know something of his philosophical reading and philosophical tastes may be tempted to venture a translation of his answer into discursive prose, to attribute to him a religious (or quasi-religious) resolution of the problem. Mahler scholars recognize the composer’s interest in the animistic (“panpsychic”) worldview of Gustav Theodor Fechner and see that view as inspiration for aspects of several of Mahler’s works.102 Of particular relevance is the proposal that the closing lines of Der Abschied embody Fechner’s odd cosmology (in which souls infuse all parts of the cosmos, from stones to plants and animals, to human beings and higher forms of existence).103 Were this perspective forced on us, the problem posed by Cooke in relation to the Second Symphony would arise in a more extreme form: Fechner’s radical animism enjoys rather less currency than the Christian doctrine of the resurrection.104 Yet the importation of Fechner into the closing moments of Das Lied arises, I believe, solely from the yearning for a discursive statement of Mahler’s intended solution to the problem. The power of the music—and the power of the answer expressed in the music—is grounded in something far more apprehensible than metaphysical speculation. Just as Schopenhauer’s deep questions about the possibility of worthwhile human lives do not grip us because we accept his philosophical system—and, in particular, his refiguring of Kant’s noumena as insatiable Will—but continue to challenge us, as they once challenged Wagner and Mahler and Mann, because of well-grounded reflections on the character of our existence, so too the answer offered by the Abschied-Lied is rooted in familiar and elementary features of our lives. The leave-taker has lived and loved, her joys and successes are transient, her life will have an effect for a while, its actions traceable in the enduring, indefinitely renewed, world from which she departs, but, like the ripples caused by a stone thrown into a pool, the impact will eventually, perhaps even quite soon, diminish to nothing. The connections, transitory as they are, are real, not to be argued away or to be embedded in conjectures about the ensoulment of everything. The philosophical question asks whether those connections are enough. Mahler’s singer affirms that they are—or, to be more exact, that they can be, that finitude is no obstacle to value—and the power of the answer lies in its moving listeners to a corresponding affirmation.
Mahler’s finale for Das Lied is a philosophical contribution, one that goes beyond Nietzsche and Schopenhauer (not to mention Fechner). The temptation to attempt a verbal translation is understandable—but it ought to be resisted. Instead, we should allow the music to show what cannot be directly stated. In the closing section, I shall try to defend this perspective against skeptical objections.
First, however, we should return to Aschenbach, for whose death we are now finally prepared.
7
We
may seem to have wandered some way from Mann’s novella and from Visconti’s film. Yet the analytic exploration of Das Lied von der Erde was no irrelevant excursion but rather important preparation for reading or seeing the ending. The coda—Aschenbach’s last visit to the lido—should be understood with the themes of the last section echoing in our ears. To continue the fantasy of a film that would fuse Mahler and Aschenbach, the music for the close of that film should be the final measures of Der Abschied, heard with the rest of Das Lied in the background.
The two-page coda to Mann’s novella begins with the suffering Aschenbach apparently beyond the bitterness of his anti-Socratic ruminations at the fountain. His “half-physical” indisposition leads him to begin his day rather later than usual, and, on his way to the lido, he learns of the imminent departure of the Polish family. He responds with a revival of his old discipline, taking up, for the last time, his station on the “inhospitable” beach, where an autumnal atmosphere reigns. He is, perhaps, “der Einsame im Herbst,” the singer of the second movement of Das Lied, one who hopes that the “sun of love” will shine on him again.105 It does not. Instead, what greets him is an undisciplined children’s game, unsupervised by the adults who are occupied with their packing. The game ends in a provocation and the ensuing wrestling match between Tadzio and Jaschu. The beautiful youth is defeated, but the struggle continues past the moment of conventional victory, as Jaschu takes his revenge for past subservience, perhaps for past humiliations. Tadzio’s face is thrust into the sand, his body jerks impotently in efforts to unseat his tormentor—it is the overthrow and defeat of beauty. Drawn into the conflict, Aschenbach readies himself to intervene, but at that moment Tadzio is released, and he walks into the sea.
Deaths in Venice Page 21