This week’s theme is…Shuffling Off! Musicians are human, and humans die, often with works in progress. These unfinished works form a tantalizing “what would have been”. Sometimes they are finished by crafty folks who aim for the double bar. Sometimes it is interesting to listen to them as they remain, a fascinating window into the creative process of a genius, cut short by the mortality we all share.
Shuffling Off, Day 3 – Symphony No. 10 by Gustav Mahler
It seems that listeners love to discover musicians’ sources of inspiration, the events, objects and feelings in their lives that are responsible for the music sounding as it does. Perhaps you can relate to this. Have you ever listened to a piece of music and found yourself thinking “Gosh, this seems deeply felt or unusually evocative; I wonder what this is based on.” As a composer I have been asked questions like these. I remember a lady, upon hearing something I wrote, asking what had inspired it, as if some kind of extramusical impetus was necessary for something that struck her so beautiful and human. It’s only natural given the human penchant for meaning, relatability and understanding. And like anything this personal, it will vary widely from musician to musician, informed by a diverse array of factors ranging from personality and life experience to aesthetics and historical era.
Sometimes it’s patently obvious, like when a singer-songwriter tells you the precise story upon which a particular song is based. We all know that most songwriters perpetually probe their lives and experiences for fertile lyrical material. It is probably the exception to find a contemporary song that is not based in some way on an experience or feeling from the songwriter’s life in some way. But in classical music it isn’t usually so clear. Part of this stems from the tendency to simply refer to “classical music” as a monolith rather than parsing out the finer distinctions which constitute its body of work. The fact is a European composer working in 1700 will have had a much different notion of “inspiration” than one working in 1890.
Students of music history, professional and amateur alike, are often astounded to learn about the production rates of Baroque and Classical composers. The concertos of Vivaldi, the cantatas of Bach, the operas of Handel, the symphonies of Haydn (the marches of Sousa – see this post – not a Baroque or Classical composer, but animated by a similar creative impulse, I think). Prolific to the point of boggling our modern minds. But why? Obviously these feats are possible within the human experience, and not even extraordinary since their less famous contemporaries produced at similar rates. But it’s only possible because they weren’t sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike. They had solid and reliable methods and techniques for inventing and polishing their musical works, even if their results seem inspiring to us. But the notion of inspiration would probably have seemed foreign, and distastefully self-indulgent to them. They saw their role in the social order as sonic decorators for hire, illuminating the great myths of their societies into affective form fit for human consumption which supported their social order and structures of power (see this post). Certainly this can be argued as a form of inspiration, but not as we typically think of it.
The attitude which cultivated the modern idea of inspiration, which I would summarize as autobiographical, can be seen to have emerged, like so many of these significant aesthetic shifts, with Beethoven and his legacy. Suddenly listeners and scholars were scrutinizing his strong, powerful music for influences from his life and the forces which shaped the world around him. The music seemed so deeply personal that it must have had a different impetus than the dry, stodgy patronage system! I have read about analyses of his Eroica Symphony (see this post) which border on extravagant, even zany, and reach far to account for every moment as owing to some kind of inspiration. My feeling is that Beethoven was not as autobiographically motivated as his commentators and fans like to think, but perhaps more than his predecessors. At any rate, the feelings of his music became deeper and seemingly more personal; his rate of production dropped below the previous common practice norm, and he either anticipated or motivated later trends in which composers used their music to tell personal stories and/or promote ideological agendas. And certainly in Beethoven’s late music, so bizarre and wonderful (see this post) he seems to be working out his personal existential questions, reconciling his life, philosophy, eternity, and the world. Later musicians most certainly looked to this as a model for their own similar processes.
Was this shift a benefit to Western art? Rhetorical question of course. It depends on your evaluations of the results and the needs they fill. For some the earlier paradigm with its clear, principled and disciplined aesthetic is the very definition of artistic purity, a bonus to which is the the diversity of voices which managed to individuate within its framework (in other words, Bach, Vivaldi and Haydn have clear, distinctive, and distinctively clever voices even though their musical languages and cultures were shaped by similar societal forces and values), while the latter paradigm is messy, neurotic and uncomfortably self-indulgent. For others the older model is sterile and impersonal while the newer, autobiographical model is passionate and intensely meaningful on an emotional level. As I’ve noted before, it’s easy to lay teleology upon the flow of history and see a goal where none may in fact exist (see this post).
At any rate, after Beethoven musicians saw greater liberty to explore their personal places in art music, and we tend to call this sensibility Romanticism. In my estimation the neuroticism and intimacy of this approach reaches its absolute zenith in Gustav Mahler, the great Austrian conductor and symphonist who expanded the symphony to its absolute peak breadth and personal significance.
Over the course of his career Mahler had worked to expand the symphonic form to unprecedented length (see this post) while also developing a very unique manner of orchestration and harmony. Like Beethoven, he seemed to use his final utterances as a way to explore his inner landscape and work out the philosophical implications of his troubled life. Many see his final symphonies, particularly his sprawling 9th (which Alban – see this post – Berg called the most extraordinary thing he had ever written) and what exists of the 10th as deeply autobiographical, grappling with his roller coaster of marriage, his often turbulent career, his impending death and the losses of his life. There was perhaps no Western composer more neurotic or death-obsessed as Mahler, and his late music speaks this in abundant volume. Mahler sought the advice of Sigmund Freud in 1909 to deal with his wife, Alma, and her affair with the architect Walter Gropius. The advice of the great psychoanalyst seemed to provide a way forward, but the damage of the ill-advised marriage was done and ran deep. During the next couple of years Mahler began to work on what would be his Tenth Symphony but succumbed to a bacterial infection of the blood in 1911, not even two decades prior to the discovery of penicillin.
Mahler completely orchestrated the first of five movements and left sketches for the others. Some musicians and scholars have completed it in various versions, but many purists are content to confine their experience of Mahler’s Tenth to the aching and dissonant first movement, the only completed by him, an adagio that takes the listener on a deeply personal journey of neurosis and longing over the course of 30 minutes:
So go ahead and speculate about the inspiration for the music you hear. Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes not. Sometimes the societal and aesthetic framework of the musician’s experience supports the idea of inspiration and sometimes it doesn’t so much. But if you hear late music by Mahler, you can be sure that the inspiration is never far below the surface. In listening to movements like these you become like Freud in a sense, witnessing Gustav as he works through his life, reconciling pain and triumph. In his late symphonies we hear it all, fighting to make sense. Even though we would all love to have heard Mahler’s final version, many of us are content with the tears, pain and, ultimately, resignation that the surviving first movement speaks, a fitting epitaph to the most neurotic, but also one of the most pathetic, characters in the history of Western music.
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