Gustav Mahler - (The Seventh Symphony)

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7 The Seventh Symphony
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4 F IT HAD not been for its final movement, Mahler’s Seventh Symphony might
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I have been the firm favourite among audiences and performers of his music.
He wrote it during two particularly happy summers in Maiernigg in 1904 and
7 1905, but by 1908 it had still not been performed, and so he turned to the
8 impresario Emil Gutmann to ask whether the work could be given as part of a
9 tour. Omitting to mention the cowbells and glockenspiel, he explained that it
20 was scored for modest forces, the only unusual instruments being the guitar
1 and mandolin in the fourth movement. ‘It is my best work,’ he concluded, ‘and
2 preponderantly cheerful in character.’1 The idea of making the work the main
3 draw on a tour came to nothing, and the symphony was finally premièred in
4 Prague on 19 September 1908. Mahler’s young supporters turned out in force
5 and included Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter and Artur Bodanzky, although,
6 contrary to Alma’s claim, Alban Berg was not among them. Mahler was in the
7 best of spirits and continued to make corrections to the orchestral parts
8 throughout the rehearsals. But the performance proved no more than a succès
9 d’estime. Echoing his remarks to Emil Gutmann, Mahler wrote to Henri
30 Hinrichsen, the head of Peters, to explain that ‘the work is predominantly
Copyright © 2011. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.
1 cheerful and humorous in character’.2 But such a description is difficult to

2 square with the heading of the symphony’s second and fourth movements,
3 ‘Nachtmusik I’ and ‘Nachtmusik II’. Night is not traditionally a time of humour
4 and cheerfulness, except possibly in the smoky atmosphere of a bar, and there
5 is certainly no hint of such an atmosphere in the case of the present move-
6 ments, both of which are nocturnes in the late eighteenth-century tradition.
7 First found in the serenades of the period, such forms were then taken over
8 into the piano pieces of composers like John Field and Frédéric Chopin, pieces
9 sicklied over with the pale cast of melancholy. In using the term, Mahler
40 will have thought of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik but also of Robert
41R Schumann’s four Nachtstücke op. 23. In turn, the expression will have been
Fischer, Jens Malte. Gustav Mahler, Yale University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/univunirsp/detail.action?docID=3420721.
Created from univunirsp on 2022-02-07 20:37:57.
THE SEVENTH SYMPHONY 459
associated in the minds of both Schumann and Mahler with the Nachtstücke of 1
E. T. A. Hoffmann. It is unclear whether Mahler was familiar at this date with 2
Claude Debussy’s Nocturnes, which he later conducted on two occasions, but 3
they have little in common with his own ‘Nachtmusiken’. 4
The second ‘Nachtmusik’ is serene in the spirit of a traditional serenade, 5
although there is no denying that the two solo instruments, the guitar and 6
mandolin, recall the popular Viennese idiom of Schrammelmusik and bring an 7
element of inappropriate drollery to the movement as a whole, quite apart 8
from the fact that the balance between these two plucked instruments and the 9
rest of the orchestra is scarcely ever correct in the concert hall – perhaps only 10
on a CD is it possible to hear the effect that Mahler intended. The first 1
‘Nachtmusik’ has something of a funeral march about it, and although Alma 2
argued that when her husband wrote this movement, ‘he was beset by 3
Eichendorff-ish visions – murmuring springs and German romanticism’,3 we 4
are reminded of an early Wunderhorn song like ‘Der Schildwache Nachtlied’ 5
rather than of Joseph von Eichendorff. Moreover, if we accept Michael Gielen’s 6
idea that the Seventh Symphony was written from the inside outwards, it is the 7
Scherzo which, framed by the two ‘Nachtmusiken’, is central to the work, 8
whose outermost shell is provided by its opening movement and rondo finale. 9
We know that the two ‘Nachtmusiken’ were written in 1904 and that the two 20
outer movements date from 1905. Unfortunately, we have no idea when the 1
central Scherzo was composed. If it was the first of the five movements to be 2
completed, Gielen’s hypothesis would receive confirmation, and yet the 3
hypothesis remains convincing whatever the true facts of the matter. A closer 4
look at this central movement reveals nothing cheerful or humorous but 5
only eeriness and ghostliness. The performance marking is ‘Schattenhaft’ 6
(‘Shadowy’), and ghostlike figures flit past like shadows in the muted or pizzi- 7
cato strings over timpani and horns. Here Mahler recalls the third movement 8
of his Second Symphony, and his explanation on that occasion could easily be 9
adapted and applied to this later Scherzo: it is as if the listener has arrived 30
outside a house in which a ball is taking place and can see the dancing couples 1
through the window without being able to hear the music to which they are 2
dancing. It is hard to think of Eichendorff ’s splashing fountains here, and even 3
the two framing ‘Nachtmusiken’ are worlds removed from the mood of the 4
poet’s Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts. Even so, the reference to Eichendorff 5
is not entirely wide of the mark, whether it stems from Mahler himself or from 6
his wife. It is not, however, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts or Ahnung und 7
Gegenwart that spring to mind here but a poem such as ‘Zwielicht’ (‘Twilight’): 8
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Dämmrung will die Flügel spreiten, 40
Schaurig rühren sich die Bäume, 41R
460 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Wolken ziehn wie schwere Träume –

2 Was will dieses Graun bedeuten?
3 Hast ein Reh du lieb vor andern,
4 Laß es nicht alleine grasen,
5 Jäger ziehn im Wald und blasen,
6 Stimmen hin und wieder wandern.
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8 [And twilight soon will spread its wings. The ghostly trees bestir themselves,
9 and clouds drift past like heavy dreams – who’ll rede the riddle of this dread?
10 The deer you love above the rest should not be left to graze alone, for
1 huntsmen’s horns are all around, and voices wander to and fro.]
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3 Schumann provided a wonderful setting of these lines, and Mahler was
4 responding to them, too, in the Scherzo of his Seventh Symphony. And even if
5 we may hear a serenade in the second ‘Nachtmusik’, it is no balmy summer
6 night of the kind evoked by Carl Spitzweg: no strolling players have been
7 invited by a young gentleman to perform at the foot of a lofty gable window.
8 Rather, it is the sort of serenade that Eichendorff had in mind when he ended
9 his poem ‘Nachts’ (‘At Night’) with the lines: ‘Mein irres Singen hier / Ist wie
20 ein Rufen nur aus Träumen’ (‘My wild-toned song is but a cry that comes from
1 the world of dreams’).
2 If we work our way outwards from the core of the symphony, then the
3 humorous and cheerful aspects of the work grow remarkably diffuse, but we
4 need to remind ourselves of Mahler’s comment on the first three movements
5 of his Fourth Symphony to the effect that we are dealing there with the
6 cheerful serenity of a higher world, a serenity that for us has something eerie
7 and frightening about it. These middle movements of the Seventh Symphony
8 bring us back to Jean Paul’s definition of humour. In other words, these osten-
9 sible nocturnal idylls are not played out in provincial towns of the Biedermeier
30 era but are set in landscapes that remind us, rather, of Arnold Böcklin’s more
1 sombre paintings such as The Ride of Death and Ruin by the Sea, while the
2 figures that flit past and peer out from behind the houses are those of James
3 Ensor rather than Spitzweg. The alternative title of Song of the Night that has
4 sometimes been adopted by concert promoters and record producers has not
5 caught on and not brought the work the popularity that they and Mahler
6 hoped for. Even today the Seventh Symphony remains Mahler’s least popular
7 symphony, a claim that would be confirmed by any performance statistics.
8 Even more puzzling than the middle movements are the outer movements.
9 Marked ‘Slow – Allegro’, the first movement begins with what sounds
40 suspiciously like a slow march played pianissimo by the full orchestra, from
41R which a melody on the tenor horn breaks free, effortful and threatening,
stretching itself until its very bones seem to crack. Various musical characters 1
encroach on each other’s territory, before becoming intertwined. Bright and 2
darker colours alternate in a demonstration of the composer’s supreme skill as 3
an orchestrator, producing a chiaroscuro effect that is abruptly displaced by 4
a furious, quicker march that develops a sense of tremendous forward 5
momentum. The movement’s manifold layers place extreme demands on 6
orchestras and conductors alike, giving the impression that in terms of the 7
multiple perspectives that it throws on our world of experience and emotion 8
Mahler wanted to include everything that he normally distributes over an 9
entire symphony. The movement culminates at bar 317 with a B major Adagio 10
of overwhelming beauty that owes its effectiveness to swirling arpeggios in the 1
harps and strings, suggesting the vision of a starry sky. We are no longer 2
concerned with a hero’s sufferings or happiness but with something higher and 3
greater. Alma would have been better advised to describe this theme as the 4
‘Alma theme’, but few people would have believed her. 5
Mahlerians in general continue to have difficulty with the rondo-finale, and 6
there are few movements in his output that have given rise to greater contro- 7
versy. Indeed, the resultant debate, which can be only briefly examined here, 8
has overshadowed the critical and practical reception of the piece in general. 9
The movement begins and ends in C major. Although unusual in Mahler’s 20
output, this would not in itself be bad if the movement’s overall character were 1
not a kind of Über-major, expressing an excessive and explosive positivity in the 2
form of a brilliant pyrotechnical display of all that is true and beautiful and 3
good, accompanied by cymbals and bass drum as if the Janissaries’ march from 4
Die Entführung aus dem Serail had been instrumented by Strauss. The key of C 5
major inevitably recalls Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and there is 6
indeed a hidden quotation from the opera. (Other commentators have even 7
discovered a quotation from Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow.) There is a feeling 8
here of strapping health and unbridled joviality that is hard to square with the 9
mood of the final movement of the Sixth Symphony of only a short time earlier. 30
As an indication of the extreme range of interpretative possibilities, it is 1

enough to cite only two. Writing in 1913, Richard Specht heard ‘a cheerful and 2
sunnily light-hearted joyousness in every note of this thunderous C major’.4 3
This view was echoed by Paul Bekker, who belonged to the same generation as 4
Specht and who, like him, took his hero at face value. His analysis of all of 5
Mahler’s symphonies was published in 1921 and remains a monumental 6
example of a writer’s ability to immerse himself wholly in a composer’s works. 7
He describes the final movement of the Seventh Symphony as a ‘revelation of 8
life transformed into music’, while in the final moments, ‘sun and earth, creator 9
and creature, the divine and the earthly resound at one and the same time in 40
a single great chord’.5 A wholly different response is that of Adorno, a writer 41R
462 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 who can normally be relied on to strike a note of impassioned enthusiasm.

2 Even as a young music critic in Frankfurt, he already had misgivings about
3 this movement, and in his monograph on Mahler he offers a summation of
4 those objections that is shocking in its negativity. Noting an egregious dispro-
5 portion between the movement’s resplendent form and its distinctly thin
6 content, he bases his argument on the relentlessness of its diatonic harmonies,
7 claiming that such sustained diatonicism inevitably results in a sense of
8 monotony:
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10 Mahler was a poor yea-sayer. His voice cracks, like Nietzsche’s, when he
1 proclaims values, speaks from mere conviction, when he himself puts into
2 practice the abhorrent notion of overcoming on which the thematic analyses
3 capitalize, and makes music as if joy were already in the world. His vainly
4 jubilant movements unmask jubilation, his subjective incapacity for the
5 happy end denounces itself.6
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7 Present-day interpretations of the Seventh Symphony are no longer satisfied
8 with these two extreme positions and wonder whether a composer who had
9 just completed the nihilistic finale of the Sixth Symphony could suddenly have
20 written so stridently and tritely life-enhancing a work. If we accept this incon-
1 gruity, we must conclude that the final movement of the Seventh Symphony
2 cannot be taken seriously and that it is an ‘ironic and in places even frivolous’
3 movement, to quote Mathias Hansen.7 Perhaps, then, the movement repre-
4 sents the recantation of a recantation. Or, alternatively, was Mahler trying
5 to say that the final movement of his Sixth Symphony is one possible
6 answer to life’s questions and that the equivalent movement of the Seventh is
7 another answer? If we add them together and divide them by two, is the result
8 the sum total of our artistic responses to the ultimate problems of humanity?
9 The question is unanswerable. At the start of the Seventh Symphony, the
30 listener appears to set foot on firm ground, but this is undermined by the
1 shadows of the night, and at the end, our night vision finely attuned, we
2 are blinded by a dazzling sun and deafened by the battery of noise unleashed
3 by the brass and percussion. Eichendorff ’s poem ‘Twilight’ ends with the
4 words:
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6 Hast du einen Freund hienieden,
7 Trau ihm nicht zu dieser Stunde,
8 Freundlich wohl mit Aug und Munde,
9 Sinnt er Krieg im tückschen Frieden.
40 Was heut müde gehet unter,
41R Hebt sich morgen neugeboren.
Manches bleibt in Nacht verloren – 1

Hüte dich, bleib wach und munter!8 2
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[If you have a friend on earth, do not trust him at this hour: words and 4
glances feign his friendship. The peace is sham: he thinks of war. Whatever 5
dies today, enfeebled, will rise newborn tomorrow. Much is lost at night – 6
beware, be watchful and alert!] 7
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1 cheerful and humorous in character’.2 But such a description is difﬁcult to

1 Wolken ziehn wie schwere Träume –

As an indication of the extreme range of interpretative possibilities, it is 1

1 who can normally be relied on to strike a note of impassioned enthusiasm.

Manches bleibt in Nacht verloren – 1

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