Mahler's Fifth Symphony
performed by Libor Pesek and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra
Like the realist novel, it is full of characters who speak each from his or her own perspective, along with the author, who commiserates with, derides, and comments ambivalently on the fate of his characters, but he is not God. Unlike Bach's polyphony, Mahler's myriad voices do not add up to a coherent statement, but rather conveys a collective crisis of meaning. The Fifth Symphony can also be read as a narrative of the traumas of immigration. Mahler himself was a German Jew from an outlying province of the Austrian empire, who made it to Vienna, the center. As an outsider he was particularly in tune with the centrifugal forces within modern civilization. Near the end of his life he migrated again, this time away from Europe itself, and spent much of his last years in New York.
The curtain lifts on a village of bomb-cratered huts, smoldering metal and upturned earth, the villagers huddling motionless amid the rubble. This is the "old country," a place of both stifling rigidity and terrible uncertainty - The garish trumpet at the beginning announces, “Thus it has always been.” Above, the proud rulers represented by the brass; below, the suffering people represented by the strings. In the middle section, the threat of force is unleashed. Adorno calls it “pogrom music,” hearing the hetman's brutal commands in the trumpets and the terrified shrieks of victims in the violins.
The nightmare glimpsed in a few remote villages in the middle of the first movement fully expands as a storm that sweeps over the continent in the second. The motion of history drives us, as in Walter Benjamin's description of the “angel of history”, not forwards but backwards,:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Within this storm human agency appears as a counter-force, pushing against the blind momentum, at certain points almost seeming to arrest it, but always it is hurled back into the chaos. Near the end of the movement, the light breaks through the clouds; another world is glimpsed, another possibility for living – but maybe it is only wishful thinking on the narrator’s part. The triumphant fanfare dies out prematurely, and is swallowed up in the maelstrom once again. All that's left at the end is ruins, a few embers burning.
Whereas the first two movements are concerned with the dark past and the uncertain future, the third parachutes us into the sensuous fullness of the present – or, the present moment circa 1900, in the city of Vienna. The movement is structured as a a series of interlocking dances and dances-within-dances. We feel the blood pulsing through the veins and arteries of a great modern city, with its car horns, its clattering street trams, its swarming thoroughfares, its quiet tree-lined alleys, a thousand lighted windows at night with waltzes swooning and swishing under the chandeliers, and, above all this, just outside the city limits, the eternal snow and silence of the Alps.
In 1900, Vienna is a city surrounded by countryside, whose fresh air still blows through it from time to time. And so, the provincial Jew from the empire’s edge of has found his way to the center. He explores the tangle of streets, rides the trams until he knows all the routes by heart, and wanders lost in the mountains. From the crowded streets, we are transported far from the human world. Ghosts of the past peek through the mist at the lone figure straying into their realm. The city becomes an unreal mirage in the distance, and along with it all human history. But returning from the mountains, one is shocked by the frenetic pace of life that one had gotten used to. How murderously the cars hurl themselves down the street! How cold and ruthless the faces of drivers and passersby! – Each person bent on his or her private ends, without a thought for anyone else! The city now no longer seems exciting, but insane, a gigantic machine bursting at the seams, spinning out of control. How is a being of flesh and blood to survive amid the gnashing gears, in the hungry maw?
This world has not been innocent for a long time; neither has love, which gives birth to all these faces washing over streets and plazas, in and out of houses where the the dead are carried out, the living replacing them on couches, chairs and beds, among all these faces, which reflect yours in their decrepitude... to find one face you cherish, and that cherishes yours – is enough to keep you human. Where does this love come from? From you? From my own heart? A dirty river formed of many streams, whose weary meandering from the beginning of time, driven by some ancient, unquenchable thirst, the love depicted in the Adagietto is not a young love, but one that has gone through the sorrows and disappointments of a lifetime, and marvels at the fact that, after all, love is still possible. The wailing of countless ghosts, unloved at the time of death, turns to song in the resonance of two living hearts that is the Adagietto.
Then morning comes: a single note on the horn. The depths experienced in the Adagietto now flow from underground into the comic Rondo-Finale: a day of friends, working lunches, coffeehouse gatherings, dentist appointments, payday... It is all a bit silly, but the fervent Adagietto music reappears again and again, now integrated into the fabric of a full life, the warp thread around which the bewildering variety of the world makes sense again. Finding love, one finds one's rightful place in the world. The finale is crowned by the triumphal fanfare from the second movement, now restored to its full glory - a pledge to work for the betterment of humanity and an affirmation of faith in its future.
But, in spite of the fullness of life conveyed by the Rondo Finale, in spite of the sincere sentiment of personal happiness leading toward universal welfare – there is an undeniable sense of letdown, as is often the case with Mahler's triumphal endings, and, beneath the feverish invention, a monotony and melodic threadbareness, especially apparent upon repeated listening. The problem is that this multifarious world, once believed to possess an inherent divine harmony, is now being held together by the “I”. I am happy, but how fragile is that happiness, and how much of my worldview depends on maintaining that happiness?
To the disturbing question of collective destiny raised by the first two movements, the Rondo-Finale answers “At least I'm safe and happy.” It is a thoroughly bourgeois answer. I’m happily married now and own a house in the Berkeley hills. I drive our kids to school every morning in our Prius with politically progressive bumper stickers. Then I stop by the local coffee shop and drink fair trade organic coffee. But is this the pinnacle of human achievement – fair trade organic coffee? Is that all there is to life? But, my friend, you are really asking to much of a limited human being like yourself, one full of contradictory desires, haunted by the past and trying to do his best under the circumstances. Do you still remember what it was like in the old country? And isn't it enough that we have come thus far already? ...
