Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): Symphony No 8 in E flat major ('Symphony of a Thousand')
1. Part I: Veni, creator spiritus
2. Part II: Closing scene of Goethe's Faust, Part II

 

The world premiere of Mahler of Mahler's colossal Eighth Symphony, in Munich in September 1910, was greatest success of his life. Ten years earlier, his then future wife, Alma, had received this blunt verdict from her stepfather, the painter Carl Moll: 'Mahler? Great conductor. Also composes - but it's no good.' Until 1910, many would have shared Moll's doubts about Mahler as composer; but with the premiere of the Eighth Symphony all that changed. Mahler's PR man, the wily and brilliantly theatrical impresario Emil Gutmann, did a superb job. It was Gutmann who coined the eye-catching nickname 'Symphony of a Thousand', to Mahler's initial horror - though he relented somewhat when he saw how much interest Gutmann had stirred up. Munich's colossal new Music Festival Hall was sold out, twice. (Gutmann insisted on two performances.) The audiences included a dazzling array of A-list names from the musical and literary worlds, and there were representatives of several European royal houses. The first performance, under Mahler's own direction, was, for once, well prepared, and the response was sensational, from the audience in the hall, and afterwards in the press.

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In a sense however, Mahler had done a lot of Gutmann's work for him. His first Symphony, originally named Titan, had proclaimed its composer as a 'Heaven-stormer' - like the hero of the Jean-Paul Richter novel from which Mahler had taken his title. Now, in the Eighth Symphony Mahler strained beyond even the language of romantic individualism. In Part Two of the Symphony, an almost complete setting of the closing scene of Goethe's verse drama Faust, Part II, Mahler sets one of the most famous utterances in German literature: 'Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, Den können wir erlosen' - 'The man who endlessly strives, him we can redeem.' Those words could stand as the Eighth Symphony's motto.

 

 

In fact, more that you look at Mahler’s Symphony No 8, the more the nickname ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ looks like a cautious understatement. 'The symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything', Mahler told Jean Sibelius when the two composers met in Helsinki in 1907, the year in which the Eighth Symphony was finished. The timing is telling. In Part One of the Symphony Mahler had painted a thrilling picture of massed humanity pleading for the descent of the Holy Spirit: the sense of scale in this music is awe-inspiring. 'O for a thousand tongues to sing, My great Redeemer's praise', sang Charles Wesley in his famous hymn. 'Only a thousand?' Mahler seems to say. 'I'll show you hundreds of thousands!'  Then in Part Two Mahler again places us amid multitudes - suppliant human beings and angelic choirs - nearing the eternal throne. Meanwhile, centre stage (though silent) the archetypal German striving hero, Faust himself, is presented to no less a person than the Queen of Heaven, the Virgin Mother of God herself. To underscore the immensity of his vision, Mahler employs immense, colour-enhanced forces: eight vocal soloists, expanded choirs, children’s choir, huge orchestra, offstage brass, harmonium as well as organ, piano, celesta, mandolins and plenty of harps.

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One thing does need to stressed here however. Mahler had at times felt moved by Catholic devotion, and in 1897 he had converted to Roman Catholicism, though whether there was anything more to that than political opportunism is hard to say - as a Jew Mahler would have been unable to take up the prestigious post of conductor at the Vienna Court Opera. Understandably some have taken the Eighth Symphony as proof that there was more to Mahler's conversion than a shrewd career move. But this is to misread him entirely. 'Veni, creator spiritus', the text of the Symphony's Part One, is indeed medieval Catholic hymn, composed by another iconic German figure, the medieval theologian Hrabanus Maurus; but the inspiration Mahler was invoking (so Alma tells us), was primarily artistic.  As for Part Two, Goethe was no Roman Catholic - in fact he made no secret of his distaste for Christianity in general. In Goethe's Paradise there is hardly any mention of God, or of Christ (who is never named). Goethe's central figure, bathed in celestial light, is his ‘Queen of Heaven’, and as the literary members of Mahler’s audience would have understood, she is really the Ewig-Weibliche, the eternal, ideal feminine. Ideal, but also erotic: she stands for the creative urge in the male mind, a creativity rooted in sexuality but at the same time rising above it - exactly as the philosopher Plato had described it, two-and-half millennia earlier, in his beautiful dialogue The Symposium. This is the real meaning of the Symphony’s final words: Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan, ‘The eternal feminine draws us onwards’ - not, as it’s often translated, ‘draws us upwards’. Goethe isn’t talking about a Heaven above, but here, now. There can be transcendence, but in this world, not an imaginary hereafter.

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That Mahler was keenly aware of Goethe's meaning and adopted it as his own is evident from this letter to Alma - to whom he dedicated the Eighth Symphony - written just before the 1910 premiere. The essence of Goethe's and Plato's teaching, he says, is that:

         

   'all love is founded not only in the body but also in the soul, and that the two together constitute an outlet for this "eros". In the closing scene of Faust this concept is represented symbolically. The surface attraction of [Plato's] Symposium lies in the vitality of its narrative and the dramatic fire of its "story"... only at the very end does one realise what this carefully planned rise in intensity is actually leading to... Eros as the creator of the world!'

 

As a quick summary of Plato's Symposium that's not a bad effort, but as Mahler talks about the 'vitality of its narration and the dramatic fire of its "story"', and about the 'carefully planned rise in intensity' leading to final revelation, it is clear that what he is really talking about is his own Eighth Symphony. In one fundamental element at least, Symphony No 8 is strikingly economical. Most of its 'narrative vitality' and 'dramatic fire' is fuelled by Mahler's use of a handful of striking motifs. At the beginning, the choruses shout out the words 'Veni, veni creator spiritus!', whose melodic shape the trombones immediately distil into a six-note figure. However rich, overflowing in detail, Part One may seem, so much of the music derives from this figure. Then at the beginning of Part Two, low strings pick out a theme that is to dominate this much longer section of the Symphony - its last five notes will eventually be identified with the final words 'zieht uns hinan' ('draw us onwards'). When the voices enter for the first time in Part Two, pianissimo, the motif they pick out may seem unpromising, but as Mahler's 'carefully planned rise in intensity' unfolds, this figure grows in stature, until it at last it is married to the words 'das Ewig-Wiebliche' ('the eternal feminine'), the inspirer of the male creative urge. Thus we are drawn, in the overwhelming final crescendo, to the climactic image: 'Eros as the creator of the world'; and here all the Symphony's leading motifs at last combine, with the Symphony's very opening motif, the three notes first sung to the words 'Veni, ve-' now straining even higher on offstage trumpets and trombones. Mahler has truly 'embraced everything', and rounded it all off with a masterly symphonic Q.E.D.