I had the wonderful experience of hearing the BBC Philharmonic perform Mahler’s Ninth Symphony at the Bridgewater Hall on Saturday, 12th April. Goodness gracious, what a piece: stuttering into life with an uncanny heartbeat motif; blazing a path through lively dances; burning with resistance against the omnipresence of death; and finally facing its own finitude—finding, as the music fades, that any attempt to locate closure within the music itself is simply impossible. Bernstein saw this symphony as the death of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, but perhaps we can go further: to see the death of the classical and the start of the modern. The piece performs a functional parody of four-movement symphonic form while collapsing the classical idiom of balance and cadential finality, which had haunted the 19th century in a post-Beethovenian afterlife. Mahler 9: the Symphony’s Second Death.
Mahler’s opening gesture—the dysfunctional heartbeat motif—establishes the life-and-death stakes in a suitably dialectical fashion. His failing heart (beset by disease at the time of the symphony’s composition) would kill him, but it was also the only thing keeping him alive. So, this music is borne aloft not by fascination with its own death, but by fascination with its own failure to die. Each rest, each silence, each climax, each cadence functions as a failed attempt to end the music, which always seems to emerge again on the other side of unrealised closure. The piece simply cannot be killed, and it is always hungry for more: another climax, another cadence, another silence. It is the musical undead, and it must be laid to rest if we are to achieve peace from our haunting.
The funeral takes place in the final movement. Never has music seemed so endless as it does here: the melody is replete with the motif of a turn, a gesture which always circles back to where it began. The heartbeat motif of the first movement brought the fragility of life to the fore, bound as it is to the persistent possibility of death. However, the turn motif of the final movement reverses this relationship: if everything always returns to the same place, then all that has happened has simply described a straight and consistent line. There is no fluctuation, and death seems like an impossibility. There is no closure in a turn, as it invokes a repetitive forward momentum that cannot be arrested. How, then, can this music be laid to rest?
The answer to this question lies in a ritual which forever undermines the idea of closure from within the music itself: the ending can only come from the other, from outside the signifying chain. The slow fade to silence that makes up the final few minutes of the piece is an embrace of this otherness. The turn motif still rolls around as the music inches toward the end, but nevertheless the piece continues to fade. As the motif persists, a sublime feeling of oblivion settles into the music: even this idea—pushing toward infinite continuation—cannot avoid the ending. As the final turn comes, and the last chord gradually dies away, it becomes clear that the piece has not truly closed. It has simply merged with the silence that follows—and for a beautiful moment, just a few seconds, we have almost grasped the object of our listening: not the music itself, not even the silence, but the very being of listening.
Then, of course, the conductor closes the score, the audience begins to clap, and we must return to the world. As with any funeral, we are allowed only a fleeting, intimate moment with the departed before mundanity resumes.
James Waide 