Do you know the contents of the creative psychology of the composer Gustav Mahler?

This year, three symphonies by Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) celebrate their anniversaries: the second was completed 130 years ago (1894), the Fourth was painstakingly written 125 years ago (1899 ), and the Sixth could look back on it. the 120th anniversary this year (1904). So, on average, Mahler released a new symphony every two and a half years.

Here, for comparison, is musicologist Ludvigs Kārkliņš’s view of Latvia’s greatest symphonist, Jānis Ivanovs (1906–1983), who is said to have spent an average of one year and ten months on each symphony in the period most beneficial of its activity. On the other hand, Finn Leif Segerstam (1944–2024) was extremely prolific pleasing the audience with an average of 20 new symphonies per year in the first decade of our century, although they are in the form of completely non-classical, usually aleatoric.

Gustav Mahler’s second, “Resurrection Symphony” is the longest of the composer’s work – it was written for six whole years, while solving other creative projects at the same time .

This is also the first of his symphonies in which the voices of singers are involved – just like in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth, and later Mahler used this effect very often. However, the path to the perfection of a hopeful, lyrical sublime work for the author himself has been long, winding and even full of long, almost non-stop uncertainty.

The symphony’s idea of ​​the soul’s search for immortality comes closely from Mahler’s personal experience.

Growing up in a large family as one of the oldest, he experienced the death of several siblings in his youth, followed by the death of both parents within one year, and the suicide of his younger brother Otto, a talented musician.

The promises of an afterlife offered to Mahler by his native Jewish faith seemed small compared to Christianity, to which the young man confidently converted when the Second Symphony was created.

First, shortly after completing the First Symphony, Mahler had created a new sketch – a one-part symphonic poem, which he described as “the funeral of the hero of the First Symphony”. It is only later that this music becomes the first part of the new symphony, Second, and the other structure of the grandiose cycle includes the tunes of several songs by Mahler.

However, the crowning of the final is missing for a long time due to the author’s uniqueness – when he composes ambitious, philosophical works full of generalizations (and even overflows), to especially their final parts, Mahler very much needs an oral concretization of the content, text, poetry.

Also, not putting it word for word right into the score to sing, but just to encourage you verbally. If there is no such text, it is a creative dead end…

The sure impulse comes unexpectedly. At the funeral of his senior colleague, the conductor and pianist Hans Guido von Bielow (1830–1894), Mahler hears a choir that is musically uncertain, but whose text is almost moving. The discovery, the ode “Augšămcelšanhas” (1758) by the 18th-century German poet Friedrich Klopštok (1724–1803) became the key word at the end of the Second Symphony, where Mahler lovingly adds the -ancient poetry with its pantheist-oriented verses.

The textual setting is exactly the opposite of Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. His finale, the song “Heavenly Life” with German folk poetry from the famous collection “The Boy’s Miracle Horn” (1808), was composed before the rest of the symphony. However, it is interesting that this song about how a child of poor people came to the joy of Paradise, which was created in a clear, naive way, was originally designed as the end of the previous Third Symphony, many -very voluminous part. a cycle that shows different forms of consciousness and the will to live in a philosophical ascending hierarchy – from the most primitive, crude instinctive to the most complex, purely intellectual.

When the third symphony was composed, due to the increasing dimensions, Mahler made the decision to end the cycle with one of the middle levels of the aforementioned hierarchy, the leaving “Heavenly Life” as the basis for the next new symphony. Just like a gardener who cuts off the top of a plant and successfully grafts it onto another stock. Therefore, these symphonies – the Third and the Fourth – actually form a diptych in terms of content, a single idea in terms of images. Unfortunately, in the practice of playing both opuses, such a diptych model is almost common, leaving an interesting idea neglected.

The scherzo-delicate connection between the Third and Fourth Symphony, which Mahler himself called funny, brings to mind another statement from the composer, which is surrounded by the usual self-irony:

“When I write every other symphony, I end up with a weird, vague composition that’s too long. But when I want to create a little symphony, I end up with a standard-sized symphony.”

Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony can already be taken as the result of another central creative period, when the poet won a long-term reputation as the leading conductor of the Vienna Court Opera. In the music of this period, he has overcome the previous need for a text and writes purely instrumental symphonies, and the tone of the message seems rather more subjective. The sad content of the sixth symphony is generally consistent with the later works of his late life, the use of an Alpine bell is pictorially imaginative, the strong hammer blows in the finale are folded in interesting fictional legends, but this time the attention. drawn by the row of the two central parts within a circle of four parts.

The laws of classical symphony construction created in the 18th century state that the second movement should be a slow movement, and the third movement should be moving and motor, a minuet or later than a scherzo. However, in a series of outstanding 19th-century works, beginning with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and continuing through the Romantics, the two middle parts confidently sound in the opposite order – first the scherzo , then the slow part.

Mahler, already making the Sixth Symphony, was hesitant about the order of the middle movements, and these doubts did not leave him until the end of his life.

The scherzo of the sixth symphony is very lively, with a wicked laugh, close to the dark tension of the outer parts of the cycle. The slow part – as a clear idealistic relief or an event of memories that strengthen the soul between the almost inevitable problems of life’s struggle.

Fate had decided the author to perform the Sixth Symphony three times, including the first scene, as well as to get to know the interpretations of some colleagues, and it seems, after each achievement, that there is a desire to rearrange the middle parts against what he just had. hear burning in the mind of the music. Evidence of this can be found in the memoirs of the author’s widow Alma Mäler (1879–1964) and other sources. As a result, the Sixth will be Mahler’s only symphony with a perpetually moving form – how wonderfully it fits the aleatory forms common in today’s postmodern music!

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