Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Roland Barthes asked if we are “condemned to the adjective” when speaking of music, when attempting to put into words music’s special way of pulling heartstrings and twisting guts; and in the case of Gustav Mahler one feels especially so condemned. It is difficult not to rhapsodize about Mahler. The descriptors accumulate on the tip of the tongue; a deluge of feeling engulfs us, and we can only in turn unleash our own deluge — of words. But words are pallid and limp before such beauty. Mahler induced even Arnold Schoenberg to rhapsody, a bit of purple prose to which I will return, while Daniel Barenboim lamented Mahler’s status as “the only composer who is discussed mostly in non-musical terms” (the “only” here is arguable). One associates Mahler with the discourse of sheer feeling, not with “musical terms,” for which we may have Visconti’s Death in Venice happily to blame. And there is worse. Namedropped in Woody Allen films, indexed in Sondheim’s “Ladies Who Lunch,” framed as the preoccupying obsession of a certain Lydia Tár — one further associates Mahler with the glib stuff of urbane conversation, his rough edges sandpapered off in the smoother interests of sophistication and “culture.” One can wearily sympathize perhaps with the anti-Wagnerian critic Eduard Hanslick: An intelligent musician will, therefore, get a much clearer notion of the character of a composition which he has not heard himself by being told that it contains, for instance, too many diminished sevenths, or too many tremolos, than by the most poetic description of the emotional crises through which the listener passed. And yet one doesn’t wish to dissect music like a cadaver. Bruno Walter, for his part, instructed that “no evaluation in strictly musical terms can be just” when approaching Mahler’s corpus, for “his work was the outcome of his entire inner life… human as well as aesthetic values must enter in.” Mahler himself seemed to invite such grandiose and holistic readings: in an exchange with Sibelius in 1907, he made his immortal remark that “the symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything” (countering the austerity of the Finnish composer, who had declared that “I admire the symphony’s style and severity of form”). It is a high-wire act, writing about music: to call up the aesthetic experience in all its aliveness, to analyze while avoiding death by analysis, one must tread carefully, barely grazing the edges of the thing to leave its integrity, its wholeness, and its separateness from ourselves intact. One must recognize it as an autonomous aesthetic reality even while attending to the overflowing subjectivity from which it sprung.  I want here to tread carefully over Das Lied von der Erde, “The Song of the Earth,” the penultimate symphony that Mahler composed. I aim to give a brief chronicle of it, to ask what it means, and to begin to traverse its aesthetic, conceptual, and historical significations. It is a symphony that bids farewell to existence, looks death in the eye, radiates outward in a thousand shades of feeling: therefore I wish also to ask after its correspondence with life. “Nothing beautiful is separable from life,” said Valéry, “and life is that which dies.”  Das Lied von der Erde is popularly associated with the sources of acute grief that occasioned it. There was the death of Mahler’s beloved daughter Maria; the revelation of his own congenital heart condition; the kindling of antisemitism in Vienna and the political maneuverings of his colleagues, culminating in his resignation from the Vienna Court Opera in 1907. Death in assorted guises had come knocking at the door. Completed in 1909, the orchestral song-cycle — whose full title reads Eine Symphonie für eine Tenor und eine Alt (oder Bariton) Stimme und Orchester (nach Hans Bethges Die chinesische Flöte, or “a symphony for tenor and alto (or baritone) voice and orchestra (after Hans Bethge’s The Chinese Flute)” — was conceived as a setting of Bethge’s collection of loosely translated and paraphrased Chinese poems, published in 1907, the beauty and clarity of which had cut through Mahler’s thick fog of grief at just the right moment.  Harmonically, Das Lied’s East Asian influence is clear, particularly in its frequent use of the pentatonic scale. But the piece absorbs disparate influences, opening for instance with a Trinklied or drinking song, in A minor, its repeated refrain more melancholy than raucous: Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod, “dark is life, is death.” The gloomy phrase is pitched, as in the “mein Vater” of Schubert’s Erlkönig, slightly higher in each iteration — steadily raising the stakes of its misery, like a beer-clutching drunkard growing more wretched and hollow-eyed as the party wears on. Yet with its horn fanfares and energetic cross-rhythms, establishing a jaunty mood of festivity, this opening movement is not as passive or bleak as its lyrics suggest. It is also richly chromatic, anchoring Das Lied in the sonic ambiguity for which Mahler’s late style would become renowned.  The piece’s middle ranges from the slow second movement to a spirited three-part scherzo, all occupying that same continuum between pleasure and despair, between celebration of life and grief at its evanescence. “The sweet fragrance of the flowers has fled; / A cold wind bends down their stems… My heart is weary” — with its suggestion that fading and fatigue are cruelly inevitable, as harsh winds lay waste to spring’s flowers — is redolent of Keats at his most doleful. We are located in a natural landscape both lovely and indifferent, both alive and withering into decay; we imbibe the sap of life and are face to face with death.  These movements alternate between the respective songs of the alto and tenor — the song-cycle form here is fully assimilated into that of the symphony — and coalesce into an orchestral song-cycle or “song-symphony,” as some call it (a form that Mahler did not invent but made his own, as in his Kindertotenlieder of 1904). A song-symphony is a flexible hybrid organism.