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Bereavement, illness, adultery … the trials of Mahler’s late years are part of the story of his Eighth Symphony. This magnificent study explores its greatness
Stephen Johnson ends this thrilling study of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 8, and much else besides, with a quotation attributed to Beethoven, of which Oscar Wilde would have approved: “Sometimes the opposite is also true.” The legends attaching to Mahler’s life, especially in the final years, are treasured by lovers of Mahler the Titan, and woe betide anyone daring to question them. But Johnson, one of the finest contemporary musicologists, is also a demythologiser of the gentler sort, and all the more persuasive for it.
Mahler wrote the Eighth in 1906, in an astonishing eight weeks. The new symphony “was to be his religious rite, his High Mass, but conceived and expressed in terms that were both mystical and humanist”. He chose to set the words of the ninth-century Christian hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus”, along with passages from the close of the second part of Goethe’s Faust, and fashioned music meant to match the grandeur of both texts. The result is either one of the triumphs of 20th-century musical composition, or an overwrought mess. Of course, it may well be both – sometimes the opposite is also true. Continue reading...