“Think, in the last three weeks I have completed the sketches of an entirely new symphony, something in comparison with which all the rest of my works are no more than introductions. I have never written anything like it; it is quite different in both content and style from all my other works, and certainly the biggest thing I have ever done. Nor do I think I have ever worked under such a feeling of compulsion; it was like a lightning vision—I saw the whole piece immediately before my eyes and had only to write it down, as if it were being dictated to me.”
This is, yes, Gustav Mahler, in a conversation recalled by his future biographer, Richard Specht, and Gustav is talking about his Eighth Symphony, which he composed in 1906. The piece’s 1910 premiere, at Munich’s newly constructed Musik-Festhalle, took place before an audience of 3000 to 3500; it was the greatest success of Mahler’s career. Yet far from being the most popular of his symphonies, some 115 years later, the Eighth is by a long ways the least performed and the least appreciated. This weekend’s (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) three BSO Eighths under music director Andris Nelsons are the first he’s given with the orchestra, and the first BSO performances here since 2004.
One hint as to why the Eighth is the least performed comes from Munich impresario Emil Gutmann, who dubbed it the “Symphony of a Thousand.” Mahler wasn’t pleased, but the promotion had to be extravagant to match the event’s extravagant cost. And Gutmann’s claim was no hyperbole. For the premiere, Mahler had eight vocal soloists, two adult choirs of about 250 each, a children’s chorus of some 350, and an orchestra exceeding 150. Even if, as has been argued, some chorus members didn’t make it into the hall, Gutmann’s number was substantially correct.
Not only did the Musik-Festhalle accommodate some 850 choristers, it allowed Mahler to deploy his adult choirs antiphonally, achieving an effect inspired by Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli’s music for San Marco in Venice. Subsequent presentations of the Eighth have had to be more modest. For the Boston Philharmonic’s concerts in 1999 and 2000, Ben Zander and his music director, Jeffrey Rink, assembled a combined chorus of 250 for which they had to audition volunteers (of which I was one). Zander’s enlarged BPO numbered a mere 120; even so, there wasn’t room for all 190 adult choristers on the Symphony Hall stage, and a fair number of us were sent to the first balcony, from where we could see Zander on the podium but he couldn’t see all of us without looking over his shoulder. The children’s chorus wound up in the second balcony. There was no thought of antiphonal deployment.
The other reason Mahler’s Eighth has always struggled is its unusual form. The symphony is in two parts, and with the exception of the 10-minute orchestral segment that opens part two, it’s pretty much through-sung. Part one is set to the ninth-century Pentecostal hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus.” Part two is set to the final scene of Goethe’s monumental Faust. All told, the symphony runs close to 90 minutes. There hadn’t been anything like this before 1910. There hasn’t really been anything like it since.
“Veni Creator Spiritus” is often sung at Roman Catholic confirmations; Mahler may have heard it when he was baptized in 1897. In any event, he recalled that as soon as he entered his Maiernigg composing hut in June of 1906, “the Spiritus creator took hold of me.” He appears to have known the hymn well enough to set it without having the full text in front of him. The piece is hardly as accessible as the Knaben Wunderhorn material of his earlier symphonies, however, or even the Tang Dynasty poetry translations that would fuel Das Lied von der Erde.
As for Faust, Goethe’s sprawling masterpiece may be to German literature what Hamlet is to English literature, but at 12,000 lines (as against Hamlet’s 4000), it’s a challenge, sophisticated in both its philosophy and its theology. Faust, having breached the terms of his contract with Mephistopheles, dies before the last scene begins. As Mephistopheles is about to seize Faust’s soul, a host of angels arrives, and when he’s distracted by the hope of getting a look at their bare backsides, they make off with Faust’s “immortal essence.” Goethe’s final scene, just 270 lines, is headed “Mountain Gorges, Forests, Cliffs, Wilderness,” terrain that would have been familiar to Mahler from his Alpine walks, though he’s unlikely to have met the friendly lions that a chorus of holy anchorites introduces. Pater Ecstaticus and Pater Profundus give way to choruses of angels and then Doctor Marianus, who sings of the “Heavenly Queen”; he’s followed by a Magna Peccatix, a Mulier Samaritana, a Maria Aegyptica, and finally a Penitent identified as Gretchen who despite having been seduced by Faust pleads for his soul. The angels tell us, “Whoever busies himself with constant striving / Him can we save,” but it’s clear that if Faust’s striving is important, Gretchen’s intercession with the Mater Gloriosa is as essential as Beatrice’s is for Dante at the end of the Paradiso. Faust himself doesn’t appear, and neither does God the Father; the chorus concludes, “The Eternal Feminine / Draws us upward,” mocking Mephistopheles’s description of life as “Eternal Emptiness.” The relative simplicity of Symphony No. 2, where at the last trump there is no judgment and everyone is saved, seems a distant memory.
Mahler didn’t quite write his Eighth down from dictation, as he suggested to Richard Specht. He did sketch it out over eight weeks, which is remarkable considering that his other tasks for the summer of 1906 included reorchestrating his Seventh Symphony and revising his Sixth after the May premiere in Essen. “Veni Creator Spiritus” must surely have been the original inspiration; he knew parts of Faust by heart and had talked for some time about setting the final scene. Still, Mahler’s original outline describes something quite different, a symphony with four movements: I: “Veni Creator.” II: “Caritas. Adagio.” III: “Christmas Games with the Christ Child. Scherzo.” IV: “Creation through Eros. Hymn.” For III, he seems to have had in mind two Wunderhorn texts, songs for the infant Jesus that would serve as trios within the scherzo. For IV, Mahler’s original thought may have been the “Classical Walpurgisnacht” section of Faust, where the collision of fire and water births Eros, here the original creative force that produces light and life out of chaos. What is certain is that the sketch on which this outline appears also bears the dedication “8. Symphony / Aug. 1906 / the first inspiration / preserved for my Almschl / spiritus creator.” Even as he was revising the Sixth, which plausibly depicts not the death of a hero but the death of a marriage, Mahler turned to Alma as his spiritus creator.
The situation in 1910 was more complicated. Vienna rehearsals for the Eighth’s September premiere had begun in May. At the beginning of June, Mahler took Alma to Tobelbad, a spa south of Graz. Three days later she met the architect Walter Gropius and embarked on a passionate affair. Mahler continued with the rehearsals before going on to Toblach, where he began sketching out Symphony No. 10. Alma joined him there in mid July. At the end of that month, a letter from Gropius arrived, meant for Alma but addressed to Mahler, who naturally opened and read it. Now the affair was out in the open. Gropius arrived a week later, hoping in some way to salvage the situation. Alma decided to stay with her shattered husband; she had no intention of giving up Gropius, however, and Mahler perceived they were corresponding. He promised to peruse the lieder she had written before their marriage, and he did. But on the manuscript of the never-to-be-completed Tenth, in the brief “Purgatorio oder Inferno” movement, he made notations like “Have mercy” and “Thy will be done.” Further on, he wrote, “Annihilate me, that I may forget I exist, that I may cease to be,” and “Farewell, my lyre! Farewell, farewell, farewell,” and finally, “To live for you! To die for you, Almschi!” And at the end of August, he found time to take a four-hour walk with Sigmund Freud in the Dutch city of Leiden.
This is the state of mind Mahler was in when, on September 3, he arrived in Munich for the final week of rehearsals. Alma had seen him off at Toblach. Their parting was not auspicious: Alma’s hat blew off, her dress wrinkled, and she discovered a run in her stocking. Mahler commemorated the occasion with a humorous bit of doggerel verse that ended “There’s no doubt that I love her with joy and elation / But in future I’ll make my own way to the station.” That didn’t amuse Alma, and neither did his mid-journey telegram from Innsbruck: “after shattering catastrophe bearing my fate with manly resolve spent journey so far in restaurant in philosophical calm tenderly gustav.” Alma herself arrived in Munich on September 6th. Every room in their suite at the Hotel Continental was filled with roses, and on her dressing table lay the just published score of the Eighth with the public dedication “To my beloved wife Alma Maria.” The following day, Alma pretended to be unwell, and while Mahler was rehearsing the symphony he had dedicated to her, she enjoyed a rendezvous with Gropius at the Regina Palast.
Mahler was, one hopes, too busy to notice. He had Bruno Walter and Oskar Fried working to assess the acoustic balance from various spots in the hall. For the two performances, September 12th and 13th, he stationed the two adult choirs on either side of the orchestra and the soloists behind the orchestra. The choirs had been augmented to about 250 singers each at his insistence; the orchestral score called for six flutes, four oboes plus cor anglais, six clarinets minimum, four bassoons plus contrabassoon, eight French horns, four trumpets, four trombones, tuba, and percussion to include three timpani, bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, low-pitched bells, glockenspiel, celesta, piano, harmonium, organ, two harps minimum, and at least one mandolin. Plus an additional group of four trumpets and three trombones.
Five days before the premiere, all available reduced-price tickets had been taken. And despite what the Neues Münchner Tagblatt described as “very high prices,” the entire hall sold out. The premiere audience included Walter, Fried, Alfred Roller, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Alexander Zemlinsky, Anton Webern, Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Siegfried Wagner, Max Reinhardt, Lilli Lehmann, Thomas Mann, Paul Dukas, Camille Saint-Saëns, Leopold Stokowski, the heir to the Spanish throne, and several members of the Bavarian court. The concert was scheduled for 7:30; Mahler made his way to the podium at 7:45 sharp, the audience in the darkened hall rising as one and applauding him for several minutes. Part One, “Veni Creator Spiritus,” ran close to a half-hour. After a five-minute interval, Part Two commenced, running some 55 minutes.
Historian and critic Paul Stefan wrote of the conclusion: “The vast mass disappears; souls and angels remain. Uplift. An unparalleled creed. It becomes reality. All worlds and each power, every faith is affirmed by it. Is it the end? Behold, silence awaits. Another moment. Then the three thousand below break out. They are delirious. For a whole half-hour Mahler has to bow his thanks to them. Children, the children of the chorus who have long been so fond of him, rush over to him, seize his hands and refuse to release him. He has to shake hands with everyone. How can he find his way to his car? Even today, I can still see the radiant expression on his face.”
This was Mahler’s greatest triumph. Eight months later, subacute bacterial endocarditis would claim him. But the symphony lived on, enjoying by one account 20 further European performances over the next three years. Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the American premiere in 1916, some 30 years before America got to hear the Sixth. The BSO didn’t program the Eighth till 1972, and then only at Tanglewood, under Seiji Ozawa. Boston didn’t hear it till 1980, when the BSO did it twice with Ozawa. Zander and the BPO gave two Boston performances in 1999 and one the following year; the BSO did it three times under James Levine in 2004 and 2005. In 2015, Nelsons led the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra’s premiere performance. All told, the Eighth has been presented just seven times in Symphony Hall and four times at Tanglewood. This weekend’s three Eighths will be a welcome addition to the list.
Thank you for a brilliant discourse on the history of this remarkable piece of music. We were fortunate enough to attend the Saturday night performance. Given the infrequency of this piece being programmed, it should be understandable that this was the first time I have ever heard the Symphony performed “live.” Considering the massive musical forces involved, not surprisingly, the effect was overwhelming, yet more delicate parts of the score did not become obscured. Maestro Nelsons did an exceptional job in coordinating the orchestra, two choruses, and bevy of soloists, particularly challenging as some of them were positioned out of his forward line of sight on the balconies.
However, what was truly gratifying was that finally I was able to clearly hear and feel the substantial pipe organ part, expertly played by Dexter Kennedy. The huge 32 foot ranks drawn caused the floor and seat beneath us to tremble, and the upper work soared above the orchestra. I am grateful to Maestro Nelsons that he allowed the organist to play with such appropriate intensity. Due credit also goes to Foley-Baker, Inc. who thoroughly restored this wonderful Aeolian Skinner organ in 2003.
I also was enthralled with the intense, but pristine soprano singing of Latonia Moore, and the brief, beautiful work of Ying Fang. The sold-out audience, which sat through the 90 minute performance without one cough or other distracting sound, erupted in ecstasy at the conclusion of this most memorable night at Symphony Hall, for good reason- BRAVO!
Comment by Jonathan Kleefield, MD — October 6, 2024 at 11:01 am