The Word and the Deed
Deryck Cooke on the musical expression of Mahler's beliefs, published in The Listener July 2nd 1964
Every century is the heir of its predecessor, and it is the tragedy of the twentieth century that it has tried to disown its great progenitor, the nineteenth. In western Europe much of the vast spiritual capital inherited, through the nineteenth century, from the eighteenth, and ultimately from the Renaissance - the philosophy of humanism - has been allowed to moulder away in the bouts of discouragement which have followed first one world holocaust and then another. Yet we of the twentieth century, discouraged though we may be, are still committed to the heavy responsibility handed on to us by the nineteenth - that of trying to better the conditions and the quality of human life throughout the world; and we have no other spiritual capital to draw on than the philosophy of humanism. To turn back to outgrown religious dogmas, or to fall back on a cynical nihilism and hedonism - two attitudes which are indeed all too widespread - is a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy.
What this has to do with music - and particularly with Mahler's music - may not seem altogether clear at first. Yet composers have insisted on having their say, in their music, about what we human beings are, and what we are doing, and where we are going; and Mahler was concerned more than most composers with saying things of this kind. But the twentieth century's attempt to disown the nineteenth has also had its effect in the musical sphere; the definitive musical statements of the humanistic position by certain great nineteenth-century composers, are dismissed, according to the modern dogma of 'pure music', as illegitimate flirtations with philosophy and metaphysics.
Mahler especially comes under fire from this angle, which is a disturbing sign that the present popularity of his music may be largely a craze for its fantastic sound,
which has brought no understanding of its real and profound significance. For instance, in a recent broadcast talk it was approached
from a characteristic twentieth-century point of view - the psycho-analytic; and while the first and last works - the immature cantata
Statements like these show how curiously confused is the present-day attitude to the problem of musical meaning; musical criticism is certainly years behind literary criticism, which has long since recognized that a work of art - however apparently metaphysical its intention - is not an abstract statement of an intellectual proposition; it is an expression, through the manipulation and development of certain appropriate symbols, of an attitude to life, and an evaluation of man's various potential states of being. Mahler, as I have said, was concerned with expressing certain humanistic positions, and the Eighth Symphony is particularly important in this respect. In bringing together a great religious text, the old Catholic Latin hymn Veni Creator Spiritus and a great humanistic text, the final scene of Goethe's Faust, and in assembling some hundreds of performers to present the work in a large hall to thousands of listeners, Mahler clearly intended to make an artistic statement concerning the contemporary situation, which should have importance for common humanity. What we have to do is to try to understand just what this statement amounts to.
Mahler's music, like Wagner's and Beethoven's, arose out of the great crisis in civilized history which occurred in the nineteenth century. If I were asked to choose a motto for the nineteenth century, I should pick that famous slogan of Karl Marx: 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it'. Humanism had been a projected plan of campaign for a long time, but only in the nineteenth century, with the French Revolution already a fait accompli, were men in a position to put the plan into action.
For a time, of course, this new dynamic, humanistic conception of progress existed alongside the old static religious conception of man as a humble, fallen creature; and so it is that we find, in Schiller's Ode to Joy, which Beethoven set as the choral finale of his Ninth Symphony, the religious exhortation 'Seek your Creator above the starry spheres', even though Schiller's and Beethoven's attitudes were undoubtedly centred on the humanistic declaration 'All men shall be brothers'. But there was always a strong tendency for the emphasis to shift over entirely from the religious viewpoint to the humanistic one; and this eventual transformation found classic expression in a passage in Goethe's Faust.
In scene three of part one, Faust, that incarnation of restless humanistic man, seeking a new knowledge beyond the accepted knowledge of mankind, suddenly feels an urge to translate the New Testament from Latin into German. He opens it at the beginning of St John's Gospel, and begins construing: 'In the beginning was the Word'. But this literal translation fails to satisfy him: the expression 'the Word' must surely stand for something more dynamic. He tries again: 'In the beginning was the meaning...no. In the beginning was the power...better...'. And then he finds what he has been looking for: 'In the beginning was the Deed'.
This was the new discovery of the nineteenth century. Life is not a static condition but a dynamic process. Man was to find less and less and less satisfaction in communing with the Word - the immaterial and intangible Spirit - and more and more satisfaction in doing the Deed - in trying to put into action the humanistic ideals of the brotherhood of man, freedom, and human self-realization. And, finally, most thinkers and artists who wished to change the world abandoned the religious conception of man altogether, in favour of a completely atheistic humanism. There was no longer any need of 'the hypothesis of God', as Laplace had put it. Voltaire's witticism that Man had created God in his own image was expounded seriously by Feuerbach, who declared that God was Man - meaning man's projection of his ideal self; and, inevitably, this was soon taken to mean that Man was God. It is a scarcely recognized fact that hardly a single nineteenth-century composer of the first rank believed in the God of the Christian religion.
An even less understood fact - and unless we understand it we shall never begin to comprehend the so-called 'late-romantic' period from 1880 to 1914 - is that this crucial change in human thought, summed up by Nietzsche in the startling phrase 'God is dead', had an unexpectedly demoralizing effect on the later nineteenth century. Once the first flush of enthusiasm was over, and it became evident that it was beyond man to be his ideal self, the absence of any supernatural being on which to project this ideal self was felt as an acute and irreparable loss. Take only three characteristic types of late-romantic musical emotion - Delius's transience-haunted regret, Puccini's despairing eroticism, and Richard Strauss's aching sense of hollowness - these are so many musical manifestations of the traumatic spiritual experience undergone by man as a consequence of abandoning 'his belief in God and then finding himself incapable of being his own God and of building a heaven on earth in which to achieve fullness of being. As the poet Rilke lamented: 'The world has fallen into the hands of men'.
Nor should it be assumed that this sense of being forsaken by God vanished with the late-romantic period; we still find it acutely alive today, in a more bitter form, in the literary work of Ionesco and Beckett, even if we may have difficulty in finding equivalents in the pure abstractions of present-day music. Beckett curses God for not existing - which is exactly what Hilaire Belloc accused Thomas Hardy of doing. We are faced here, in fact, with the central problem of our age - what faith we can possibly have as a basis for our actions - and the roots of this problem are to be found in the later nineteenth century. Mahler is the composer who holds the central position in this three-cornered struggle between religious faith, humanism, and nihilism; and that is his fundamental significance for us today.
Mahler was a Jew who was brought up in a free-thinking world without any belief in the religion of his own race, but whose deep spiritual need impelled him to turn to the Christian faith, in the Catholic form of his native Austria. He became a converted Catholic; and although there was a certain coincidental expediency in this move, in that it was necessary for his musical career in antisemitic Vienna, the genuineness of his fundamental motive was never in doubt. If any words can be said to ring with sincerity, they are those of Mahler's wife in her book: 'He was a believer in Christianity, a Christian Jew, and he paid the penalty; I was a Christian pagan, and got off scot-free'. But Mahler was also, by virtue of his cultural tradition, a humanist. If he gave few outward signs of his humanism, it was probably because he took it for granted; it was certainly there, as one particular anecdote makes clear. One May Day in Vienna, both he and a fellow-composer, Hans Pfitzner, ran into one of the socialist processions of workers, marching along to band music. According to Mahler's wife again, Pfitzner was furious at the sight of so many proletarian faces, and escaped down a side-street, whereas Mahler accompanied the workers for some distance, and said afterwards that they looked at him in such a brotherly way - they were his brothers, he said, and they were also the future.
This brings us to the subject of Mahler's musical expression of his beliefs, since his works are permeated with the sound of the brass-band march. It is always assumed that this came simply from his having lived during his early childhood near a military barracks, but it seems obvious that a composer will only reproduce musical elements heard in his formative years if they have any inherent meaning for him. We can hardly imagine that if Ravel, for instance, had spent his childhood near a barracks, his music would have shown any signs of it. The brass-band march was, of course, the central symbol of the humanistic attitude, owing to its evocation of man on the road towards some positive human goal, and its element of vulgarity embracing all mankind including the common man. The first great humanistic march was naturally the Marseillaise, which accompanied the tramping feet of the French Revolution. March-music entered the classical symphony - bringing with it its unavoidable touch of vulgarity - when Beethoven used the march style for his three great humanistic statements: the ultimate march-like transformation of the graceful theme of the Eroica finale, the battering main theme of the finale of the Fifth Symphony, and, most significant of all, the unequivocal brass-band march, complete with drum and cymbals, and surmounted by a male-voice chorus, which hymns the brotherhood of man in the choral finale of the ninth. The funeral march also played its part, honouring the burial of humanistic heroes, in the Marcia Funebre of the Eroica Symphony, and in Wagner's mighty Funeral March for the death of his humanistic hero Siegfried, which the fastidious Romain Rolland, significantly found so repellent for what he considered its tasteless vulgarity. It was Mahler who brought this tradition to its head, by including in all his symphonies either triumphal marches to celebrate humanistic aspirations, or funeral marches to lament the burial of humanistic hopes.
But being a product of the later, disillusioned humanistic period, Mahler was acutely conscious of the insufficiency of humanism, in its pure, godless aspect, owing to the insufficiency of man himself. In consequence he revived, from a new standpoint, the earlier attitude of Beethoven's Choral Symphony, attempting a new fusion of humanism with religious belief; and for the expression of this belief he turned to the central musical symbol for the Christian faith which had been handed on to him by the devout Bruckner - the chorale. In several of Mahler's symphonies, march and chorale appear side by side, or are transformed one into the other, or are even fused into a single thematic idea. And so much of his music, far from being concerned with abstractions, or with vague metaphysical ideas, is simply an existential meeting-place for humanism and faith in God - for the Deed and the Word. It is a place where a bold attempt is made to erect a spiritual bridge over the abyss of nihilism, of a kind which may be the way forward for disillusioned modern man, who can hardly hope to return to the unreflecting childlike faith that made possible the music of a composer like Bruckner. This is particularly true of the Eighth Symphony of 1907, which may be regarded as the Choral Symphony of the twentieth century, as Beethoven's Ninth was that of the nineteenth century.
In the Eighth Symphony, the Word and the Deed are set side by side, both in the text and in the music. The old Catholic hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, which Mahler used for the first part of the symphony, is actually an invocation to the Word - to the Holy Ghost of Christianity, as Creator Spirit. And the text of the symphony's second part - the final scene of Goethe's Faust-may be described as the free rendering of the Catholic Latin of the Word into the humanistic German of the Deed. The salvation of Faust's soul symbolizes the indemnification of his humanistic quest, in spite of its failure; and this is granted because, as the angels sing, 'He who ever striving drives himself onwards, that man we can redeem'. And likewise, in the music, the two great symbols are the Brucknerian chorale, standing for the Word, and the nineteenth-century brass-band march, standing for the Deed.
But there is a strange thing here, which reveals Mahler's profound artistic and human originality. We should expect the musical and verbal symbols to go simply in harness together as they actually do in Beethoven's Choral Symphony, where the lines concerning the brotherhood of man become the basis of the march-music, while the words 'Seek your Creator above the starry firmament' are set to a kind of self-abasing religious hymn. But in Mahler's Eighth, the verbal and musical symbols are crossed with one another, to amazing effect. It is the setting of the Veni Creator Spiritus - the Word - that is the great striding triumphal march in the humanistic tradition; and it is the final scene of Goethe's Faust - the Deed - which is based on a religious chorale, and reaches its climax with that chorale. This extraordinary artistic cross-fertilization can mean only one thing: that the symphony offers a multiple symbol of the humanizing of religion and the spiritualizing of humanism - and the fusion of both into one faith. The Word becomes the Deed: in other words, the God the symphony addresses is not the static God 'out there', but the dynamic God 'in here' - in man's inner being: but it addresses this God, not as man's projection of his own ideal self - the purely human God of Feuerbach - but as the immaterial and intangible Creator Spirit which inspires and impels man's questing aspiration.
The truth is that the texts themselves provide a sound basis for this musical act of unification. The hymn Veni Creator Spiritus is more than a humble Christian prayer for personal salvation in another world. It is concerned with Pentecost - the great moment of inspiration, when the Holy Ghost descended and spoke in many tongues through the mouths of the Apostles, and was interpreted by Peter in the words of the prophet Joel: 'Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions'. In other words, it is concerned with the time when the Christian faith itself was at its most dynamic, and it suggests the march of men towards higher things: it addresses the Creator Spirit as DUX - leader - and contains the lines 'Scatter the foe; with Thee as our leader going before us, may we shun all that is evil'. And conversely, in the final scene of Goethe's Faust, the indemnification of Faust's humanistic quest is granted, not only because of his restless striving and driving himself onwards, but also through the Christian virtues of repentance, compassion, and forgiveness, symbolized by the intercession of 'a penitent, once named Gretchen' - the woman he had betrayed. Indeed Goethe, by his recourse to Christian symbolism at the end of his great drama, was clearly intent on stressing the truth that man has need of God for the achievement of his aims; and Mahler's chorale backs him in this.
But Mahler lived during the later period of humanistic self-doubt; and by bringing back on the orchestra alone the theme of his triumphal march to end his great symphony, in a new form which reaches up imperiously to the heights, he was evidently concerned with reminding us of the converse and complementary truth: that God - whoever or whatever God may be - has need of man for the fulfilment of the dynamic creative purpose of things.