Mahler-Nietzsche
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
2010
Hello and welcome. You’re listening to a podcast from the Sydney Symphony. I’m David Garrett.
In 1901 when Gustav Mahler was about to marry Alma Schindler, he was shocked one day to find on her bookshelves an edition of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche. He ordered her to throw it in the fire. Mahler it seems, had a thing about Nietzsche. Against Nietzsche, apparently. This is intriguing, because it happened only five years after Mahler finished a symphony where one movement is a sung setting of words by that same Nietzsche. Let’s look into this further.
Nowadays, when people make a connection between Nietzsche and music, they most likely are hearing this:
PLAY, No.1 (Audio): R STRAUSS Also sprach Zarathustra – beginning
That is the awesome beginning of the tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, by Richard Strauss. The title tells us it was inspired by a famous book, a philosophical, poetic novel by Friedrich Nietzsche. In the same year as that music by Richard Strauss was first heard, 1896, Mahler finished composing his Third Symphony including a poem from Thus spake Zarathustra. Was Mahler’s attitude to Nietzsche in 1896 different from five years later, when he ordered Alma to throw her Nietzsche in the fire? Apparently. What Nietzsche wrote in the poem Mahler chose for his symphony voiced what the musician was thinking and feeling. In one of the programs Mahler wrote as a guide to the meaning of his Third Symphony, he heads this movement ‘What man tells me’. Up to then, the symphony has been about what Nature tells Mahler. Now for the first time in this symphony there’s a voice:
O man! Take heed!
What does the deep midnight say?
I slept! I slept!
I have awoken from deep dreaming!
The world is deep!
And deeper than the day conceives!
O man! O man!
Deep! Deep is its woe!
Joy, joy deeper still than heart-ache!
Woe says: be lost!
But all joy wills eternity! –
Wills deep, deep eternity!
PLAY, No.2 (Audio): MAHLER Symphony No.3, fourth movement (alto solo): ‘O Mensch...’
Most people, when singing in Mahler’s third symphony comes to mind, remember the next movement, immediately after this deeply serious setting of words by Nietzsche. A song, a humorous song, for the same deep female voice, but joined now by women’s chorus, and a boys’ choir – they begin with an imitation of bells
PLAY, No.3 (Audio): MAHLER, Symphony No.3, fifth movement beginning “Bimm-bamm…”
This poem is a morning song, to follow the night song on Nietzsche words. A cheerful vision of ordinary people enjoying themselves in heaven. The words come from the early 19th century collection of folk poetry, or ‘old German songs’, published under the title Youth’s Magic Horn. In Mahler’s first four symphonies, many of the words that are sung, and some tunes not sung but based on Mahler’s song settings, come from this collection of poetry. Sometimes humorous, sometimes sad, but not profoundly philosophical like the words from Nietzsche – the Nietzsche who called his Thus spake Zarathustra ‘the deepest [book] ever written’.
Yet Mahler directs the conductor of the Third Symphony to go straight on from the deep night song to the cheerful morning song, without any break. Has Mahler misunderstood Nietzsche? Is he rejecting the deep woe, deep eternity? In a sense, yes, but so was Nietzsche. Mahler quite possibly knew that Nietzsche came to believe that folksong, naïve folksong, was the most fundamental musical mirror of the world. And Nietzsche specifically referred to Youth's Magic Horn as a source of artistic insight. So Mahler knew what he was doing – by putting the two movements, so contrasted, side-by-side, Mahler was planting a clue to the meaning of the whole symphony. But if Mahler’s reading of Nietzsche affected the whole conception of his Third Symphony, we must assume that his attitude to Nietzsche had changed between composing it, and five years later commanding Alma to get rid of her Nietzsche.
We find that when Mahler was composing this symphony, he was reading Nietzsche, as he had been doing for some years. This is not at all surprising. Those years saw Nietzsche’s influence at its height, especially on youthful intellectuals with a modernist, counter-cultural leaning. Counter-cultural, because Nietzsche was a critic of the dominant ethos of his day. He believed that the separation of reason and science from understanding the totality of the human person would lead European civilisation to a crisis, one of loss of belief and self-hatred. Only a few free spirits would be strong enough to create their own values, without illusions – they would be the apostles of a ‘gay science’, whose basic pronouncement is that ‘God is dead’. In the years before he lapsed into insanity, Nietzsche developed the ideas of eternal recurrence, and the new human creature without illusions, the Superman.
‘The gay science’ - which to avoid misunderstanding perhaps we should call ‘the cheerful science’ - was a title Mahler gave, at one point, to his Third Symphony, as a whole – here is another sign of the influence of Nietzsche on Mahler.
There was a further reason why Nietzsche would appeal to young Mahler. He was a fellow musician. The relationship that meant most to Nietzsche was with Richard Wagner. The two men had a famous falling out, so Wagner came to be, for Nietzsche, a God that failed. But it was music that turned Nietzsche from a philological scholar into a profound philosopher, and largely through his encounter with Richard Wagner.
The son of a Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Nietzsche learnt to play the piano - well enough for Wagner to comment, with some irony ‘No, Nietzsche, you play much too well for a professor’. Nietzsche’s early musical enthusiasms were for Handel, Mozart Beethoven, and Schumann. Then he discovered Wagner’s music, and became a Wagnerite. Meeting Wagner, Nietzsche realised they were both interested in classical antiquity. The scholar Nietzsche was fascinated by the musician Wagner’s ideas about Greek tragedy and its relation to music.
During his intense friendship with Wagner Nietzsche began to write his first book, titled The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. Nietzsche put forward that tragedy was the supreme achievement of Greek culture, and argued that we can’t understand the serenity in Greek culture, related by Nietzsche to the God Apollo unless we feel the unrestrained energies the Greeks harnessed in tragedy, related to the god Dionysos. According to Nietzsche, and in his own words: ‘Music and tragic myth are equally expressions of the Dionysian capacity of a people, and they are inseparable’.
Nietzsche believed in 1871, when this book was completed, that Wagner, by making all music dramatic, had rediscovered the Greek achievement, and given it new, modern life.
Mention of Dionysos, the god of wine and the drama, the god the Romans called Bacchus, brings us back to how Nietzsche illuminates Mahler’s Third Symphony. Mahler’s programmatic heading for the first movement is: ‘Pan Awakens: Summer Marches in. Parade of Dionysos’.
PLAY, No.4 (Audio): MAHLER, Symphony No.3, first movement beginning
Mahler began composing his Third Symphony as a kind of a dream of a happy life, beginning with summer marching in. Then, as the composer read Nietzsche, the symphony evolved into a musical counterpart of Nietzsche’s own ‘gay science’, which was no less than a new theory of the Genesis of the universe. Here’s what Mahler wrote about nature at the time of composing the Third Symphony:
No one will hear, of course, that nature encompasses everything that is eerie, great, and even lovely (that is precisely what I wanted to express using the whole work as a kind of evolutionistic development). It always seems strange to me that most people, when they talk about nature, can think only of flowers, little birds, forest fragrance etc. No one mentions the god Dionysos or the great Pan.
Mahler didn’t evolve this idea, which comes from Nietzsche, on his own. As a student in Vienna in his late teens, Mahler belonged to a ‘Reading Society of Viennese German Students’ founded in 1871 just when Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy and dedicated it to Wagner. This reading society brought together intellectuals and creative artists who were enthusiasts for Wagner and Nietzsche. One of them, Siegfried Lipiner, was Mahler’s intimate friend, and greatly influenced him towards Nietzschean ideas. Lipiner himself wrote a poem called ‘Genesis’, a dream theory of the origins of the universe.
So to sum up what we learn from Mahler’s choosing Nietzsche’s words for the fourth movement of the Third Symphony – we learn how two sides of experience, the humorous and the philosophical are combined in Mahler’s symphony, as they are in the ‘Gay Science’ of Nietzsche. And once we understand that this symphony is no less than a philosophical reflection on nature and man, we can appreciate why Mahler felt he could dare to begin a symphony with a movement of such extremes, lasting over half an hour.
If, then, Mahler’s Third is a Nietzschean symphony, why did he ask Alma to throw her Nietzsche in the fire? Maybe he was thinking – I can hear the feminists groan – that his very young bride to be shouldn’t be exposing herself to such dangerous ideas. More likely, just as Nietzsche lost faith in Wagner’s ideas, Mahler lost faith in Nietzsche. But it was Nietzsche’s disillusionment with Wagner that had helped wean Mahler off too much dependence on Wagner’s music and ideas.
Maybe Mahler never swallowed Nietzsche whole anyway. In the Gay Science Nietzsche called himself ‘Godless and anti-metaphysical’. Mahler, on the other hand, believed in the transcendental, in God, whom he understood as love – this love is the crowning climax in the slow movement concluding the symphony – transcendental indeed.
And Mahler had become more conservative, perhaps out of prudence. In 1897, between the symphony and telling Alma to burn Nietzsche, Mahler had converted from Judaism to Catholicism.
Still, Mahler left the symphony as it was, containing the words pointing to the symphony’s association with Nietzsche’s daring ideas. Could it be that these ideas had affected him so powerfully, when he was composing the symphony, that he feared for Alma and wanted to shield her from a similar upheaval?
The Third symphony is a challenging work, not least for its radical confrontation of philosophy and humour. As we listen, Mahler tells us, we may well think of Nietzsche. Of his words. Nietzsche spoke to Mahler the musician, but not through his own music. Nietzsche was a composer too, but listening to one of his songs, a setting of another man’s poetry, we may well reflect that Mahler wouldn’t have forbidden Alma to listen to Nietzsche’s music – by comparison with his words, it’s harmless. But as we hear the song for which Nietzsche composed the music, with its words about leaving the world of pleasure and woe to find solitude in nature, we will be reminded how in romanticism philosophy, poetry, and music came together in new ways – but it was for the musical genius of a Mahler, not for Nietzsche, to find musical expression of Nietzsche’s vision.
PLAY, No.5 (Audio): NIETZSCHE Nachspiel (Alexander Petöfi) (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau - baritone/Aribert Reimann - piano)
This was a podcast prepared for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, 2010