So a ruinous conflict was introduced into the soul of Gustav Mahler. In the place of the united self, there came to exist within him two men. For while one part of him demanded the free complete expression necessary to the artist, another sought to block it for fear that in the free flow the hated racial traits would appear. For Mahler would have been the first to have been repelled by the sound of his own harsh, haughty, guttural, abrupt Hebrew inflection. He would have been the first to turn in contempt from his own gestures. There was in him the frenetic unconscious desire to rid himself of the thing he had come to believe inferior. And rather than express it, rather than speak in his proper idiom, he made, unaware to himself, perhaps, the choice of speaking through the voices of other men, of the great German composers; of imitating them instead of developing his own personality; of accepting sterility and banality and impotence rather than achieving a power of speech.
And so his work became the doubtful and bastard thing it is, a thing of lofty and original intentions unrealized, of large powers misapplied, of great and respectable creative efforts that did not succeed in bringing into being anything really new, really whole. Of what Mahler might have achieved had he not been the divided personality, his symphonies, even as they stand, leave no doubt. If Mahler is not a great man, he is at least the silhouette of one. The need of expression that drove him to composition was indubitably mighty. The passion with which he addressed himself to his labor despite all discouragement and lack of success, the loftiness and nobleness of the task which he set for himself, the splendor of the intentions, reveal how fierce a fire burnt in the man. He was not one of those who come to music to form little jewels. On the contrary, in gesture he was ever one of the eminently faithful. He came to music to create a great, simple, popular symphonic art for these latter days, a thing of broad lines and simple contours and spiritual grandeur. He sought to express sincerely his deep, real sorrow, his choking homesickness for the something which childhood seems to possess and maturity to be without; to dream himself into childlike, paradisaic joys and wake himself to faith and action once again. He attempted to create a musical language that would be gigantic and crude and powerful as Nature herself; tried to imbue the orchestra with the Dionysiac might of sun and winds and teeming clay; wished to be able to say of his symphonies, "Hier rörht die Natur." To a friend who visited him at his country house in Toblach and commented upon the mountains surrounding the spot, Mahler jestingly replied, "Ich hab' sie alle fortcomponiert." And he had large and dramatic programs for his symphonies. The First should have been a sort of Song of Youth, a farewell to the thing that is alive in us before we meet the world, and is shattered in the collision. The Second should have been the Song of Death, the music of the knowledge of death. The Third was conceived as a Song of the Great Pan—his "gaya scienza," Mahler would have liked to call it. In the Fourth he sought to open the heart of a child; in the Sixth, to voice his desolation and loneliness and hopelessness; in the Eighth, to perform a great religious ceremony; in "Das Lied von der Erde" to write his "Tempest," his epilogue.
And in general plan, his symphonies are original enough. Mahler was completely emancipated of all the old prejudices concerning the nature of the symphony. He conceived the form anew. "Mir heiszt Symphonic," he is reported to have said, "mit allen mitteln der vorhändenen Technik mir eine Welt aufbauen." He conceived the form particularly with reference to the being, the exigencies, the frame, of the modern concert hall. He realized that the shortness of the classic symphonies handicaps them severely in the present day. For modern audiences require an hour and a half or two hours of musical entertainment. In order to fill the concert programs, the symphony has to be associated with other works. In consequence it loses in effectiveness. So, taking hints from the Ninth of Beethoven and the "Roméo" of Berlioz, Mahler boldly planned symphonies that could stand alone and fill an evening. Beginning with his Second, he increased the number of movements, dropping the inevitable suite of allegro, andante, scherzo, rondo; prescribed intermissions of a certain length; and added choruses and vocal solos to give the necessary relief to the long orchestral passages. In the Second, he placed between an allegretto and a scherzo a soprano setting of one of the lyrics out of "Des Knaben Wunderhorn," and concluded the work with a choral setting of one ode of Klopstock's. In the Third Symphony, he preceded the orchestral finale with an alto solo composed on "Das Trunkene Lied" of Nietzsche, and with a chorus employing the words of another of the naïve poems in the anthology of Arnim and Brentano. The Eighth is simply a choral setting of the "Veni, Creator" and the closing scene of Goethe's "Faust." And in the Fifth Symphony, one of those in which he called for no vocal performers, he nevertheless managed to vary and expand the conventional suite by preceding the first allegro with a march, and separating and relieving the gargantuan scherzo and rondo with an adagietto for strings alone.
His material he organized fairly independently of the old rules. He was one of those who seem to have learned from Liszt that the content of a piece must condition its form. Mahler's symphonies resemble symphonic poems. They are essentially dramatic in character. Although he strove continually for classic form, his works nevertheless reveal their programmatic origin. He was at heart one of the literary composers. But he was a better craftsman than most of them are. He was a finer workman than Strauss, for instance. His scores are much more bony. They are free of the mass of insignificant detail that clutters so many of Strauss's. He could asseverate with some justice, "I have never written an insincere note." And although his orchestration is not revolutionary, and is often commonplace enough, he nevertheless oftentimes employed an instrumental palette distinctly his own. He utilized instead of the violin the trumpet as premier instrument of the band; achieved all manner of brilliant effects with it. He increased the variety and usefulness of the instruments of percussion, forming out of them a new family of instruments to balance the families of the strings, brass, and wood-wind. In the score of the Second Symphony he calls for six timpani, bass and snare-drums, a high and a low tam-tam, cymbals, a triangle, glockenspiel, three deep-toned bells, in the chief orchestra; besides a bass-drum, triangle and cymbals in the supplementary. In the Eighth Symphony, the instruments of percussion form a little band by themselves. And he utilized the common instruments in original fashion, made the harps imitate bells, the wood-wind blow fanfares, the horns hold organ-points; combined piccolos with bassoons and contrabasses, wrote unisons for eight horns, let the trombones run scales——
But there is not one of poor Mahler's nine symphonies, honest and dignified as some of them are, that exists as fresh, new-minted, vivid music. His genius never took musical flesh. His scores are lamentably weak, often arid and banal. There is surely not another case in musical history in which indubitable genius, a mighty need of expression, a distinctly personal manner of sensation, a respectable musical science, a great and idealistic effort, achieved results so unsatisfactory. One wonders whether Mahler the composer was not, after all, the greatest failure in music. If there is any music that is eminently Kapellmeistermusik, eminently a routine, reflective, dusty sort of musical art, it is certainly Mahler's five latter symphonies. The musical Desert of Sahara is surely to be found in these unhappy compositions. They are monsters of ennui, and by their very pretentiousness, their gargantuan dimensions, throw into cruelest relief Mahler's essential sterility. They seek to be colossal and achieve vacuity chiefly. They remind one of nothing so much as the huge, ugly, misshapen "giants" that stand before the old Palace in Florence, work of the obscure sculptor who thought to outdo Michelangelo by sheer bulk. And the first four of his symphonies, though less utterly banal and pedantic, are still amorphous and fundamentally second-hand. For Mahler never spoke in his own idiom. His style is a mongrel affair. The thematic material is almost entirely derivative and imitative, of an unequaled mediocrity and depressingness. One wonders whether indeed there has ever been a respectable composer who has utilized ideas as platitudinous as the ones employed in the first movement of the First Symphony, or the brassy, pompous theme that opens the Eighth, or the tune to which in the latter work the mystic stanza beginning
"Alles vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnisz"
is intoned. One wonders whether any has used themes more saccharine and characterless than those of the last movement of the Third Symphony, or the adagio of the Fourth. Once in a while, no doubt, a vague personal tone, a flavor of the Bohemian countryside where Mahler was born, does manage to distinguish itself from the great inchoate masses of his symphonies. The strolling musician plays on his clarinet; peasants sit at tables covered with red cloths and drink beer; Hans and Gretel dance; evening falls; the brooks run silvered; from the barracks resound the Austrian bugle calls; old soldier songs, that may have been sung in the Seven Years' War, arise; the watchman makes his sleepy rounds.
But, for the most part, it is precisely the personal tone that his music completely lacks. For he was never himself. He was everybody and nobody. He was forever seeking to be one composer or another, save only not Gustav Mahler. The fatal assimilative power of the Jew is revealed nowhere in music more sheerly than in the style of Mahler. Romain Rolland discovers alone in the Fifth Symphony reminiscences of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, Bach and Chabrier. Schubert flits persistently through Mahler's scores, particularly through that of the Third Symphony, whose introductory theme for eight horns recalls almost pointedly the opening of the C-major of Schubert, without, however, in the least recapturing its effectiveness. Bruckner, Mahler's teacher, is also incessantly reflected by these works, by the choral themes which Mahler is so fond of embodying in his compositions, and, more particularly, by the length and involutions of so many of the themes of his later symphonies. For, like Bruckner's, they appear chosen with an eye to their serviceability for contrapuntal deformation and dissection. Wagner, Haydn, Schumann and Brahms, the sentimental Wienerwald Brahms, also pass incessantly through these scores. But it was Beethoven whom Mahler sought chiefly to emulate. Over his symphonies (and it is a curious fact that Mahler, like the three men that he most frequently imitated, Schubert, Bruckner, and Beethoven, wrote just nine symphonies), over his entire work, his songs as well as his orchestral pieces, there lies the shadow of the Master of Bonn. Mahler was undoubtedly Beethoven's most faithful disciple. All his life he was seeking to write the "Tenth Symphony," the symphony that Beethoven died before composing. He was continually attempting to approximate the other's grand, pathetic tone, his broad and self-righteous manner. His music is full of but slightly disguised quotations. The trumpet-theme that ushers in Mahler's Fifth Symphony, for instance, appears the result of an attempt to cross the theme of the funeral march of the "Eroica Symphony" with the famous four raps of Beethoven's Fifth. In the first movement of the Second Symphony, just before the appearance on the oboe of the scarcely disguised "Sleep" motif from "Die Walküre," a theme almost directly lifted out of Beethoven's violin concerto is announced on the 'cellos and horns. And the andante of the same symphony derives from both the allegretto of Beethoven's Eighth and the andante of his "Pastoral Symphony"; might, indeed, figure as a sort of "Szene am Bach" through which there flow the yellowish tides of the Danube. Beethoven is recalled by some of Mahler's triumphant finales, particularly by those of the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, and by many of Mahler's adagio passages. "Es sucht der Bruder seinen Bruder," oh, how often and at what length through Mahler's symphonies, and with what persistency on the tenor trumpet! And how often in them does not the German family man take his children walking in the woods of a Sunday afternoon and bid them worship their Creator for having implanted the Love of Virtue in the Human Heart!
Just as it was inevitable that Mahler, instead of developing his own artistic individuality, should seek all his life to identify himself with certain other composers, so, too, it was inevitable that it should be Beethoven whom he would most sedulously emulate. For not only was Beethoven the great classic presence of the German concert hall, and deemed, in the words of Lanier, the "dear living lord of tone," the "sole hymner of the whole of life." He was also, of all the masters, the one spiritually most akin to Mahler. For Beethoven was also one of those who wish to endow their art with moral grandeur, give it power to rouse the noblest human traits, to make it communicate ethical and philosophical conceptions. He, too, came to his art with a magnanimous hope of invigorating and consoling and redeeming his brothers, of healing the wounds of life and binding all men in the bonds of fraternity. Torn between desire of self-expression, and fear of self-revelation, Mahler found the solution of his conflict in this particular piece of self-identification.