Although many regard Gustav Mahler as the tone poet laureate of existentialism—the musical philosopher who most unforgettably voiced a 20th-century spirit of irony and despair—images of transcendent hope and redemption figure prominently in his work. These are especially present in the early symphonies, which draw on the early Romantic folk poetry collection known as The Youth’s Magic Horn: the Second Symphony (“Resurrection”), for instance, culminates in a spiritual affirmation of transcendence, while the Fourth comes to rest with an enigmatically cheerful, childlike portrayal of heaven itself.

The Seventh Symphony presents an especially puzzling case insofar as it seems to combine the “existential” Mahler with a final movement that rejoices with Dionysian revelry, as if locating heaven right here on earth. But the no-holds-barred joy of that finale has shocked generations of the composer’s most fervent admirers. It contrasts drastically with the fiercely concentrated, bleak, inescapably tragic vision that dominates the Sixth Symphony. This is all the more remarkable if we recall that Mahler was working on both symphonies simultaneously at one point. Arguably no other score of his poses so many interpretive challenges. The ambivalence at the heart of this kaleidoscopic, enigmatic work has inspired contradictory solutions in performance. It is therefore no surprise that the Seventh has been the straggler among Mahler’s symphonies, the last to find wider acceptance. Not until the fall of 1979 did the National Symphony add this score to its repertoire, under the baton of Mstislav Rostropovich—with no less than Leonard Bernstein, who had been in town for a series of concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic, in attendance.

An important aspect of the Seventh that troubled critics from the start was the continually shifting character of the music as Mahler moves from one mood to another, seemingly without motivation, as if mimicking the irrational processes of the unconscious mind. In terms of style, the Seventh ranges from poetic dreamscapes to offbeat parody to raucous humor, ending with an intervention by the aforementioned finale—the most controversial part of the symphony—that bursts on the scene like an exuberant non-sequitur. If the dramatic juxtaposition of diverse elements is a signature of Mahler’s style, the Seventh stretches this process to new extremes. Homages to Romanticism and Classicism play a significant role, but these are filtered through an ironic, distancing lens more characteristic of Modernism. Mahler’s diversity of stylistic references and moods even looks ahead to Postmodernism, touching on richly poetic dreamscapes infused with the spirit of early 19th-century Romanticism but also encompassing parody and boisterous humor and ending with what the biographer Henry-Louis de La Grange called “Rabelaisian verve.” This wild variety, for some, is precisely what gives the work its unique strength. It embodies “a riotous celebration of the down-to-earth, relishing its messy diversity,” according to the Mahler commentator Peter Davison. “The Seventh does not deny the possibility of transcendence, but shows that only the full acceptance of the limitations of incarnate being can provide a foundation for enduring spiritual growth.”

Mahler experienced unusual difficulty finding his way into this music. Working from the inside out, he began with the second and fourth movements (both of which he designated “night music” pieces). Mahler composed these during the summer of 1904 but then faced a creative block in the following summer, when he retreated at the end of the opera season to his “composer’s hut” at Maiernigg in the Austrian Alps, a refuge from the stress of Vienna. Struggling with the opening movement in particular, Mahler was on the verge of giving up when he experienced an epiphany, as he recounted it, that illuminated the way forward. This occurred while he was being ferried from the train station across the lake to his retreat. “With the first stroke of the oars,” Mahler recalled several years later, “the theme (or rather, the rhythm and style) of the introduction to the first movement came to me.” He then sketched out the three remaining movements of the Seventh Symphony (first, third, and fifth) at a rapid pace and completed the orchestration in 1906. However, Mahler waited until Prague’s 60th-anniversary celebrations of the rule of Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph provided an occasion to unveil the work and conducted the Czech Philharmonic in the first performance in September 1908.

Because of Mahler’s distrust of programmatic descriptions by this point in his career, there is no easy “narrative” by which to orient the listener. He did provide this brief overview in a description to a colleague: “Three night pieces; the finale, bright day. As foundation for the whole, the first movement.” The Seventh Symphony is sometimes known by the unofficial nickname “Song of the Night” (not Mahler’s), but the nighttime imagery that has become closely associated with this music goes beyond introspective melancholy. “Song of the Night” is actually something of a misnomer if it conjures images of night as a darkness that requires “transcendence.” Far from a monolithic threat, the darkness of the Seventh reflects the positive qualities associated by the German Romantics with nighttime.

Alma Mahler suggested that her husband had wanted to evoke the magic of writers he loved from the early 19th century, such as Joseph Eichendorff (1788-1857). Thus the middle movements, she wrote, were shot through with “visions of Eichendorff ’s poetry, rippling fountains, German Romanticism.” La Grange pointed to similarities in atmosphere shared by the Romantic writer Novalis’s Hymns to the Night, with their “shadows of the past … vague yearnings, and deceived hopes,” and Nietzsche’s philosopher-prophet Zarathustra, whose pivotal “Midnight Song” Mahler had previously set to music in his Third Symphony (a work that casts a shadow of its own over the Seventh). The Nietzschean subtext, according to La Grange, involves “a night of clairvoyance and heightened lucidity whose revelation is more essential than that of light.”

The conductor Willem Mengelberg, a significant early Mahler champion, believed that Rembrandt’s 1642 painting The Night Watch was a visual inspiration for the second movement (the first of the Seventh’s two “night musics”), though a colleague clarified the connection by suggesting that Mahler responded to Rembrandt’s technique of shading and chiaroscuro more than to his subject matter. Nature also forms an important element of Mahler’s nightscapes. In general, as La Grange observes, the Seventh “seems to welcome intrusions with a strange passivity, to mirror the strange diversity of the twentieth-century man’s experience, a diversity which has become impossible to synthesize… in a disillusioned present which knows … that ambiguities can never be solved.”

For all their heterogeneity, the Seventh’s five movements are held together by a unifying symmetry. The first and fifth movements counterbalance each other in proportion; the two “night music” movements, together with the central Scherzo they flank, similarly form an internal continuity roughly equal to each of the outer movements. What results is a neatly balanced arch shape (A-B-C-B-A), such that the odd-numbered movements modify more familiar, conventional forms (sonata, scherzo with trio, rondo finale), while the second and fourth movements are closer to fantasias that reinterpret the romantic “character” pieces otherwise known, respectively, as nocturne and serenade.

A shadowy mystique permeates the symphony’s opening moments—the passage that came to Mahler so suddenly during his boat ride. Over a stuttering, funereal accompaniment, its harmony unstable, Mahler superimposes the cry of a “tenor horn”—normally associated with brass bands, the unusual sonority of this instrument is our first indication of the Seventh’s distinctive and original orchestration. The first theme features a dotted, descending, three-note pattern as well as a long-short-short rhythm; both of these recur as unifying devices throughout the symphony. The accompaniment calls to mind the lugubrious Miserere march from Verdi’s Il trovatore—an opera saturated with night settings. With a fierce charge, the introduction accelerates into a fiery Allegro, its music transformed into a driving march that bears a close family resemblance to the opening theme of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. The yearningly lyrical second theme serves as the critical center of the development, where it emerges like a full moon from obscuring clouds and reaches a swooning, visionary climax. Mahler then plummets headlong into the introductory music again, beginning a varied process of recapitulation.

The first “night music” movement represents still another kind of march, one that slowly comes into focus amid echoes, fluttering sounds, and night calls before settling into a major-minor pattern that is Mahler’s musical equivalent of chiaroscuro. The effect is enticingly ambiguous. As in Béla Bartók’s night music, bird calls and sensuous new colors (including cowbells) emerge under cover of darkness. The Schubert-like charm of the contrasting melody is one of the nostalgic evocations of the past that figure in these middle movements.

“Shadowy” (schattenhaft) is Mahler’s marking for the central scherzo, a spectral Viennese waltz that both mocks and seems to outdo Romantic grotesquerie. The oboe’s cheerful tune in the trio comes back in a funhouse distortion when played by trombones and tuba. Echoes of the symphony’s opening theme heighten the symmetry by recurring at the center of the scherzo.

Mahler’s scoring here and in the ensuing “night music,” an Andante amoroso that serves as a gentle parody of the lover’s serenade, has a chamber music-like intimacy and painterly quality. The Andante amoroso is the first movement cast from the start in a major key (F major), with the sonorities of the mandolin and guitar evoking an ironic nostalgia. This second of the “night music” interludes herald the arrival of resplendent day in the finale, at the beginning of which exuberant timpani set in motion the brassy fanfare of a multipart rondo theme. In parts it resembles a drunken imitation of the pompously marching swagger from Richard Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger. The C major brightness of this music—Mahler pointedly designates it Allegro ordinario—intrudes unexpectedly after all that has preceded.

The finale, writes Peter Davison, gives us the feeling that “we are coming home after an exhausting emotional journey and that the light of dawn is reawakening the human world.” But this complex movement remains the Seventh Symphony’s interpretive stumbling block, for, La Grange observes, “Mahler flouts all rules, all limits, all habits and all traditions, particularly those he seems to want to revive.” Amid elaborate variations on the hyperactive rondo theme, which recurs seven times, “heaven turns to hell, day to night, joy to pain, laughter to a grimace, incense to sulfur, the Te Deum to carnival music, gold to lead.” The alternating tempos and elaborate variations on the hyperactive rondo music insist on an attitude of insolently clamorous joy. Mahler noted in connection with the finale that “everything has its price” (“Was kostet die Welt!”). Amid all the affirmation, one last ambiguous touch—an unexpected harmony—threatens to trip up everything before the Seventh reaches its close in unadulterated C major.

Instrumentation: four flutes (fourth doubles piccolo), piccolo, three oboes, English horn, three clarinets, bass clarinet, E flat clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, two harps, almglocken, bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, rute, suspended cymbal, suspended crash cymbal, snare drum, tambourine, tam tam, triangle, strings.

Thomas May © 2024