City of Music - Symphony No. 8 in E-flat major

Mahler sketched the Symphony No. 8 between June 21 and August 18, 1906, and completed the score the following summer. He conducted the first performance in Munich on September 12, 1910, with a specially assembled orchestra, the Riedelverein of Leipzig, the Vienna Singverein, the Munich Central School Children's Chorus, and soloists Gertrud Förstel, Marta Winternitz-Dorda, Irma Koboth, Ottilie Metzger, Tilly Koenen, Felix Senius, Nicola Geisse-Winkel, and Richard Mayr. The dedication is to “meiner lieben Frau, Alma Maria.”

The score calls for an orchestra of five flutes (fifth doubling piccolo), four oboes and English horn, three clarinets with E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, four bassoons and contrabassoon, eight horns, four trumpets, four trombones, bass tuba, timpani, bass drum, tam-tam, triangle, glockenspiel, tubular bells, celesta, piano, harmonium, organ, two harps, mandolin, and strings. There is, in addition, a group of four trumpets and three trombones, separately stationed. Vocal forces comprise two mixed choruses, boys’ chorus, girls’ chorus, three sopranos (Magna Peccatrix, Una Poenitentium, Mater Gloriosa), two mezzo-sopranos (Mulier Samaritana, Maria Aegyptiaca), tenor (Doctor Marianus), baritone (Pater Ecstaticus), and bass (Pater Profundus).

These notes are used by kind permission of the estate of Michael Steinberg and are taken from the complete notes in his Oxford volume “The Symphony”.

Goethe’s subject in Act III of the Second Part of Faust is the union, symbolic and physical, of his tragic hero and Helen of Troy. The association of the two figures is not in itself new. Simon Magus, the first-century sorcerer whose misdeed, as recorded in Chapter 8 of the Acts of the Apostles, has given us the word “simony,” is said to have called himself Faustus—in modern Italian he would be Fortunato and in modern American English Lucky—and he traveled and worked with a former prostitute to whom, for a bit of class, he gave the name of Helena. His sixteenth-century successor, who had probably read about Simon in a new edition of a book then 1,200 years old and titled Recognitiones, for professional purposes styled himself Faustus Junior and later simply Doctor Johannes Faust, and he too—“for the sake of order and propriety,” as Thomas Mann puts it—acquired a companion called Helena. The conjuring up of the legendary beauty, daughter of Leda and Zeus, came to be one of the standard entertainments in dramatic representations of the Faust stories. In Christopher Marlowe’s famous Tragicall History of D. Faustus (1604), Helen takes on greater significance in that it is for her sake that Faust is willing to reject salvation: “Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.” Nowhere, however, is the bringing together of Faust and Helen drawn so boldly as in what Goethe himself called his “Classical-Romantic phantasmagoria,” nor so freighted with meaning and suggestion. In their meeting the poet seeks to portray ideal love, to suggest the fusion of Germanic and Greek civilization, and to resolve “the vehement opposition of Classicists and Romantics.” And, as Johann Peter Eckermann, the Boswell of Goethe’s later years, pointed out, “Half the history of the world lies behind it.”

Joining Faust to Veni, creator spiritus—linking the complexities of Goethe’s humanism to the orthodoxy, the unquestioning faith of an eighth-century Christian hymn—Mahler sought to create a similarly encompassing work in his Eighth Symphony. In the Anglo-American tradition, we have no cultural totem quite like Faust, no one work so known, so quoted, so lived with and possessed, as Faust was by cultured Germans during the nineteenth century and at least the first third of the twentieth. The King James Version of the Bible is the nearest thing. Mahler’s own closeness to Faust was remarkable. A Viennese lady, whose occasional houseguest Mahler was, reported that he was not really so difficult. She provided apples at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and put Bielschowsky’s Goethe biography in her guest room, one volume in her country villa and one in her city apartment, and “he was in heaven. Goethe and apples are two things he cannot live without.”

Faust is a recklessly inclusive masterwork whose content is expressed in an astounding variety of styles, verse-forms, textures, quotations, allusions, parodies, and in tones sublime and scurrilous. Mahler, one imagines, must often have looked to it for permission for his own unprecedentedly global symphonies.

It was not, however, with Faust that the Eighth Symphony began. In June 1906, when Mahler arrived at Maiernigg on Lake Wörth in Southern Austria, where he had bought a plot of land, he had no ideas for a new composition. Then, on the first day he went to his studio, the Spiritus creator suddenly took hold of him and drove him on for the next eight weeks until the greatest part of his work was done.

He was quick to perceive that Veni, creator spiritus was but a beginning, that he dared tackle that Holy of Holies in German literature, the final scene of Faust, and that the bridge between the texts was to be found in the third stanza of the hymn: “Accende lumen sensibus,/Infunde amorem cordibus!” (“Kindle our Reason with Light./Infuse our hearts with Love.”)

He completed the score with astonishing speed. As usual, however, he was in no hurry about the first performance. He had much else on his mind—in the tumultuous year of 1907 his resignation as Artistic Director of the Vienna Court Opera, his decision to go to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the death from a combined onslaught of diphtheria and scarlet fever of his four-year-old daughter Maria, and unsettling news about his own health; in 1908 a heavy schedule in New York at both ends of the year, the premiere of the Symphony No. 7, and the composition of Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth); in 1909 the start of a three-year contract with the badly dilapidated New York Philharmonic and work on the Ninth Symphony.

Not until 1910 was the Eighth Symphony heard. Mahler conducted the first performance in Munich on September 12 that year. In addition to his vocal soloists, he led a specially assembled orchestra and three choruses. This concert was his one experience of being completely accepted as a composer. (The impresario Emil Gutmann coined the name Symphony of a Thousand as part of his marketing pitch, and there was truth in his advertising: The performance involved 858 singers and an orchestra of 171, which, if you add Mahler himself, comes to 1,030 persons.)

Tradition ascribes Veni, creator spiritus to Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz from 847 until his death in 856, but modern scholarship will not have it so. The hymn, which probably dates from just before Maurus’s time, is part of the liturgy for Pentecost, the festival that commemorates the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples (Acts 2). It is also sung at grand celebrations such as the elevation of a saint or the coronation of a pope.

The Faust chapbook of 1587, which is the literary source for the whole legend and which appeared in English in 1592 as The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, is an entertainment and a cautionary tale. For Goethe, the career of the old humbug was not just a tale to tell; it was a story upon which to hang an entire Weltanschauung. This became gradually clear to him as he worked on Faust, and that was a long time. He first harbored plans in the 1760s when he was an undergraduate, and he sealed up the manuscript—“ended, but not completed because uncompletable,” says Mann—on his eighty-second birthday, August 28, 1831, “lest I be tempted to carry this work further.” Being in fact tempted, he opened the packet in January 1832 and tinkered with details until the 24th of that month, eight weeks before his death.

Goethe’s most radical change in telling the story is that he makes it end not in death and damnation, but in Faust’s salvation. The Faustian quest is not arrogance but aspiration. The moment of salvation is the subject of the final scene and of the mighty close of Mahler’s symphony.

The story of Faust I, of the pact with the Devil and the Gretchen tragedy, need not be retold here. Faust II is a fresh start from another perspective. Faust has been made oblivious of his past. In successively higher stages of questing, Faust at last challenges nature itself as he takes on a gigantic project of land reclamation. One hundred years old, he receives the visitation of four gray women, Want, Distress, Guilt, and Care. As Care leaves, she strikes him blind. His pact with Mephistopheles demands that if ever he entreats “the swift moment . . . /Tarry a while! you are so fair!” his life is over and his soul forfeit. In his blindness, he takes the sound of his own grave being dug as the sound of his construction plans going forward. Enraptured by the vision of the life to arise on land newly claimed from the elements, he cries, “I might entreat the fleeting minute:/O tarry yet, thou art so fair!” He dies, but now heavenly hosts wrest his soul from the forces of hell. And with that, Goethe’s—and Mahler’s—finale can begin. To say that Goethe composed this finale as though writing a libretto for an opera or oratorio is not simply a matter of justifying Mahler. The musical libretto is one among many poetic styles touched in Faust; besides, we know that Goethe always hoped that at least parts of the tragedy would be set to music. The ideal composer, he said, would have been Mozart working “in the manner of Don Giovanni.”

The scene is set in mountain gorges inhabited by hermits who are named, in ascending order of divine knowledge, Pater Ecstaticus, Pater Profundus, Pater Seraphicus, and Doctor Marianus. Moving among these anchorites is a group of children who died immediately after birth. Angels come bearing Faust’s immortal essence.

Hailed by Doctor Marianus, the Virgin appears in glory. (This is the counterpart of Gretchen's scene with the statue of the Mater Dolorosa in Faust I.) Three penitent women—the sinner who bathed Christ’s feet at the house of Simon the Pharisee; the Samaritan woman who gave Christ water at Jacob’s well and to whom he first revealed that he was the Messiah; and Mary of Egypt, who repented a life of sin after an invisible hand had kept her from entering the temple and who, at her death after forty years in the desert, wrote a message in the sand asking to be buried there—intercede with the Virgin on behalf of Gretchen. One more penitent, “once called Gretchen,” speaks thanks to the Mater Gloriosa for having heeded her prayers on behalf of “my love of old.” With Gretchen’s reappearance, the immense circle of the poem is closed. The Mater Gloriosa grants to Gretchen that she may lead Faust “to higher spheres.” In eight celebrated and densely beautiful lines, a mystic chorus speaks of heaven as the place where parable becomes reality, where earthly imperfection is made perfect, where the indescribable is achieved.

Mahler specifies an “impetuous” allegro as he hurls the first words of the Veni, creator spiritus at us. The tempo is quick, and the musical events create a sense of urgency. With “Imple superna gratia,” solo voices emerge. “Infirma,” the plea for strength, is dark, with commentary from a solo violin. After an orchestral interlude in which Mahler’s harmonies are at their most adventurous, “Infirma” returns with stern power. Now we come to what Mahler regarded as “the cardinal point of the text” and the bridge to Faust, the “Accende lumen sensibus.” His first introduction of that line by the soloists is quiet, the word order reversed—“Lumen accende sensibus.” The great outburst with all voices in unison coincides with the first presentation of the line in its proper order. The change there of texture, tempo, and harmony makes this the symphony’s most dramatic stroke, and the effect is heightened by the breath-stopping comma that breaks the word accende in two. The points of the hymn are vividly differentiated, the rich detail subordinated to the thrust of the movement as a whole.

Reflecting the difference between Goethe’s discursive and theatrical rhapsodies and the concentrated plainness of the medieval hymn, Part II of Mahler’s symphony is as expansive as Part I was ferociously compressed. (Veni, creator spiritus is between a quarter and a third of the symphony.) Mahler begins with a miraculous piece of landscape painting, a broadly drawn prelude, hushed and slow, whose elements are recapitulated and expanded in the first utterances of the anchorites and angels. Goethe’s spiritual-operatic spectacle draws lively musical response from Mahler. Part of what drew him into the Roman church in 1897 was his attraction to the aesthetics of ceremony.

In some ways this movement is like a song cycle, as Pater Ecstaticus, Pater Profundus, the angel choirs, Doctor Marianus, and the three penitent women bring us their reflections and prayers, each articulated with marvelous individuality—the urgent pleas of the two patres (the one sweetly ardent, the other almost tormented in his passion), the mellifluous song of the Younger Angels, the ecstatic viola and violin rhapsodies that are hung like garlands about the words of the More Perfect Angels, the radiant Doctor Marianus, the all but whispered recollections of the penitent women, the ecstatic vocal line spun by Una Poenitentium as she prays to the Virgin for the salvation of the lover who betrayed her. At the same time, and again parallel to this part of Goethe’s composition, much of Mahler’s music is recapitulation, even hearkening back to parts of the first movement. This symphony, like Faust itself, is something to be lived with for a long time so that the richly intricate network of references and allusions might take on clarity.

The final summons of Doctor Marianus to look up to the Virgin’s redeeming visage—“Blicket auf!”—rises to a rapt climax. This is the beginning of the finale within the finale. Then, after long moments of suspense, the Chorus mysticus intones the poet’s reflections on now and later, here and beyond, image and reality. But, as he does in his Resurrection Symphony, Mahler gives over the power to music without words. Brass instruments, organ, drums, plucked strings, bells, all invoke the symphony’s opening phrase—“Veni, creator spiritus”—but now its dissonances are dissolved in concord. We are home.

—Michael Steinberg