Symphony No. 2 (Mahler)

• 1. Introduction

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  Symphony No. 2 in C minor by Gustav Mahler carries a second name that tells you where it is heading: the Resurrection Symphony. It runs 80 to 90 minutes, ends with a chorus singing of rising from the dust, and was voted the fifth-greatest symphony of all time in a survey of conductors carried out by BBC Music Magazine. Mahler worked on it between 1888 and 1894, and it reached its first performance in 1895. This was his first major work to set down a conviction that would follow him for the rest of his life: a belief in the beauty of afterlife and resurrection. But the path to that ending was anything but straight. How does a single funeral piece become a symphony about everlasting renewal? What text could possibly carry a finale meant to rival Beethoven? And why would a composer purchase real church bells rather than accept any substitute? The answers run through a funeral, a flash of lightning, a manuscript that later sold for millions, and a low vocal note that sits at the very floor of what a human voice can sing.

• 2. From Funeral Rites To Symphony

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  In 1888 Mahler finished a single-movement symphonic poem he called Totenfeier, meaning Funeral Rites, which would later become the symphony's first movement. Some sketches for the second movement date from that same year. For five years he wavered over whether to make Totenfeier the opening of a full symphony, even though his manuscript already labelled it as one. In 1893 he composed the second and third movements, and the finale became the real obstacle. Mahler knew he wanted a vocal final movement, and he was fully aware this invited comparison with Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. Both works place a chorus at the heart of a final movement that opens by referring back to what came before, and both finales run far longer than the movements preceding them. Finding the right text for that finale proved long and perplexing, and the solution arrived from outside the music entirely.

• 3. Bülow And The Lightning

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  When Mahler took up his appointment at the Hamburg Opera in 1891, the other major conductor in the city was Hans von Bülow, who ran its symphony concerts. Bülow was not known for kindness, yet he was impressed by Mahler, and his support held even when he failed to like or understand Totenfeier. After Mahler played the piece for him on the piano, Bülow told him it made Tristan und Isolde sound like a Haydn symphony. As Bülow's health declined, Mahler stood in for him, and Bülow's death in 1894 affected Mahler deeply. At the funeral, Mahler heard a setting of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock's poem on resurrection, with its call to rise again. "It struck me like lightning, this thing," he wrote to the conductor Anton Seidl, "and everything was revealed to me clear and plain." He used the first two verses of Klopstock's hymn and then wrote his own additional verses, dealing more openly with redemption and resurrection. In 1894 he finished the finale and revised the orchestration of the first movement, then slipped in the song Urlicht, or Primal Light, as the penultimate movement, a song probably written in 1892 or 1893.

• 4. The Programme Mahler Withdrew

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  Mahler devised a narrative programme for the work, and in fact several variant versions, which he showed to friends including Natalie Bauer-Lechner. He even had one version printed in the program book for a premiere in Dresden on the 20th of December 1901. In that programme, the first movement is a funeral that asks whether there is life after death. The second movement remembers happy times in the life of the deceased. The third movement views life as meaningless activity, and the fourth is a wish for release from a life without meaning. The fifth movement, after the doubts of the third and the questions of the first return, ends in a fervent hope for everlasting renewal. That same hope is one Mahler would later transfigure into the music of Das Lied von der Erde. As usually happened with him, Mahler later withdrew every version of the programme from circulation.

• 5. Anatomy Of Five Movements

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  The first movement, marked Mit durchaus ernstem und feierlichem Ausdruck, asks for complete gravity and solemnity of expression. Written in C minor, it resembles a funeral march and uses a modified sonata form whose development introduces a theme based on the Dies irae plainchant. Mahler called in the score for a gap of five minutes before the second movement, a pause rarely observed today. The second movement, marked Sehr gemächlich, Nie eilen, meaning very leisurely, never rush, is a delicate Ländler in A major and one of the simplest movements in his entire output. The third movement is a scherzo in C minor that opens with two strong timpani strokes and carries references to Jewish folk music. It is built on Mahler's setting of Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and he joked in correspondence that his sinuous music could imply St. Anthony of Padua was drunk as he preached to the fish. Its climax, a triple-forte chord near the end, he called sometimes a "cry of despair" and sometimes a "death shriek". The fourth movement, Urlicht, marked Sehr feierlich, aber schlicht, is a Wunderhorn song sung by an alto in the remote key of D major, leading without a break into the finale.

• 6. Building The Finale

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  The finale is the longest movement, typically lasting over half an hour, and it divides into two large parts. Its first part is instrumental and very episodic, drawing much of its material from earlier movements while loosely following sonata principles. It opens with the "cry of despair" that climaxed the third movement, then a quiet theme that returns later as structural music in the choral section. Mahler called the development the "march of the dead", beginning with two long drum rolls. The orchestral recitative returns accompanied by offstage interruptions from a band of brass and percussion, which some have explained as the apocalypse's seven trumpets. Tonally the instrumental half is organized in F minor, and the score calls for a Fernorchester, a small extra orchestra placed outside the concert hall. The horn call expands into Mahler's "Great Summons", the transition into the choral section, after which the flute plays the Epiphany in a high register with trumpets sounding offstage. The chorus enters quietly a little past the movement's halfway point. Mahler wrote of this music: "The increasing tension, working up to the final climax, is so tremendous that I don't know myself, now that it is over, how I ever came to write it."

• 7. The Lowest Note And The Bells

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  At the chorus's hushed entrance, the bass part reaches the B below the bass clef, which the source calls the lowest vocal note in standard classical repertoire. It occurs four times in the choral bass part, three times at that entrance and once on the words Hör' auf zu beben. Mahler instructed any basses unable to sing it to remain silent rather than push it up an octave. The opening two verses sit in G major, with the solos and fourth verse in B minor, and the duet for the two soloists in A major. The symphony's goal, E major, the relative major of the opening C minor, arrives when the chorus picks up the words Mit Flügeln from the duet. A proper cadence finally lands on the downbeat of the final verse, where the silent organ enters marked volles Werk, full organ, and the choir is told to sing mit höchster Kraft, with highest power. The instrumental coda stays in that key and is accompanied by the tolling of deep bells. Mahler went so far as to purchase actual church bells for performances, finding every other means of producing the sound unsatisfactory.

• 8. Editions, Premieres, And A Record Sale

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  The first three movements were premiered on the 4th of March 1895 in Berlin, with Mahler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, and the complete work followed in Berlin on the 13th of December 1895. The first performance outside Germany came on the 6th of March 1898 in Liège, conducted by Sylvain Dupuis, and the United States premiere reached Carnegie Hall on the 8th of December 1908 with Mahler conducting the New York Philharmonic. The work was first published in 1897 by Friedrich Hofmeister, with rights eventually passing to Universal Edition, which issued later editions in 1910-1952, and a critical edition in 1970. A new critical edition produced with the Kaplan Foundation received its world premiere on the 18th of October 2005 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with Gilbert Kaplan conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Kaplan, an entrepreneur who specialised in conducting this symphony as an amateur, had bought the original manuscript from the Mengelberg Foundation in 1984. Mahler's widow had given that manuscript to conductor Willem Mengelberg at a Mahler festival in 1920. In 2016 it was auctioned at Sotheby's of London for £4.5 million, the highest price ever attained for an auctioned musical manuscript. The only known handwritten and autographed manuscript of the work, it was donated to the Cleveland Orchestra and now resides at the Cleveland Museum of Art.