Walking in the Woods with Mahler

Thoughtful agnostics continually experience intense emotion about the beautiful things, and the tragic things, in the world. It is with this thought that I introduce the following essay, which will appear soon on my website. It is about Gustav Mahler, an agnostic Jewish/Czech/Austrian composer who lived at the turn of the previous century. I used to say that I believed in God because Mahler, with his intense insight into the world, believed in God (he joined the Catholic Church). Then I found out that he did not, or at least was not sure. (His conversion to Catholicism was to deflect anti-Jewish prejudice.)

The autumn colors in Oklahoma are not as amazing as those in New England, but they are still beautiful—yellow hickory leaves, red red-oak leaves, and bronze post-oak leaves. On a sunny warm autumn day, it seems like a time of rejoicing. And, in part, it is.

But it is also a time of death. For the trees, it is senescence, not death; the leaves die as part of an orderly breakdown, and the buds already contain next spring’s growth. Many smaller plants die, as well as small animals such as insects. Death is part of the cycle of nature. Many of the red oak leaves on the Oklahoma hillsides are covered with parasitic galls and powdery fungi, but since the leaves are going to die anyway, it doesn’t matter. Autumn is a time to accept death as part of life.

It is also a time to rage against death, to feel intensely that it is a tragedy that all of the beauty, constructed so carefully during an organism’s life, should come to an end and simply be decomposed. This is especially true in humans, where a human brain has built up a lifelong structure of knowledge and wisdom and emotions, and then simply stops working and rots. Autumn, therefore, is a time to come to grips with death, to accept it but also to despise it.

The perfect companion during a walk in the autumn woods is the music of Gustav Mahler. Perhaps no other composer has written music with such an intensity of sensation, as intense as the reddest leaf of autumn. His emotions were nearly always intense. Before going to his cabin each morning in summer to write his symphonies, he would swim across the lake and back; writing music was an athletic exercise for him. His music embodied the joy of nature (e.g. his Third Symphony) but also rage against death (e.g. his Second Symphony).

Even in the first movement of the Third Symphony, when Mahler depicted the coming of spring, the conflicts were unresolved. A bright and cheerful march (which he called “Summer Comes Marching In”) alternates with the tragic chill of winter. Spring is a time when winter keeps coming back, at least in northern Europe, until summer has fully arrived.

Mahler never came to grips with life and death—the conflict always renewed itself in his mind and music. This is the way of the world: rebirth every spring, senescence every autumn, eternally unresolved.

If you want to know more, I suggest the new book by Norman Lebrecht, entitled Why Mahler?