Symphony of a Thousand

About the Work

Mahler’s Eighth Symphony is the largest, most exultant, and most public utterance of a composer otherwise known for his solitude and his doubt. He wrote the bulk of it in a single, astonishing burst during the summer of 1906 at his composing hut in Maiernigg, on the Wörthersee. By his own much-repeated account, the opening words of the medieval Latin hymn ‘Veni creator spiritus’ (‘Come, creator spirit’) seized him almost like a vision, and the music poured out so fast that he could barely keep pace with it. In a much-quoted letter to the conductor Willem Mengelberg he asked him to imagine the universe beginning to ring and resound: no longer human voices, but planets and suns revolving. Where his earlier symphonies had been long, searching journeys through despair toward consolation, the Eighth begins already at the summit and stays there: it is a symphony of pure affirmation.

Its nickname, ‘Symphony of a Thousand’, was not Mahler’s. It was coined by the impresario Emil Gutmann for the marketing of the premiere, and Mahler disliked it, fearing it reduced his work to a circus spectacle. Yet the figure is no exaggeration. The score calls for eight vocal soloists, a large boys’ choir, two big mixed choruses, an enormous orchestra with extra brass placed apart from the main body, organ, and a battery of unusual instruments. At the first performance in Munich on 12 September 1910, Mahler conducted something close to a literal thousand performers before an audience that included Thomas Mann, Richard Strauss, Camille Saint-Saëns, Anton Webern, Arthur Schnitzler, Max Reinhardt and the young Leopold Stokowski. It was the greatest public triumph of his life and, as it turned out, the last premiere he would ever conduct, for he died the following May.

The symphony’s daring lies above all in its design. Mahler discards the traditional four-movement plan entirely and builds the work in two huge parts, joining two texts separated by seven centuries and two languages. Part I sets the complete Latin hymn ‘Veni creator spiritus’, a ninth-century invocation of the Holy Spirit long used in the Christian liturgy. Part II, far longer, sets the closing scene of the second part of Goethe’s ‘Faust’, the ‘Bergschluchten’, or Mountain Gorges, in which the soul of the redeemed Faust is borne aloft through ranks of hermits, angels, and penitent women toward the ‘Eternal Feminine’. The cast of that scene gave Mahler his solo roles, among them the hermits Pater Ecstaticus and Pater Profundus, Doctor Marianus, the penitents Magna Peccatrix and Gretchen (here named Una poenitentium), and the radiant Mater Gloriosa, though the work makes its meaning through the whole assembled body of voices rather than through any single character.

What could possibly bind a Latin Pentecost hymn to a scene from German Romantic drama? Mahler saw in both the same idea: the descent of a creative, sanctifying, loving spirit that lifts humanity beyond itself. The hymn prays for that spirit to come; Goethe’s scene shows it received, as divine love draws the striving soul upward to grace. The plea of Part I is answered by the redemption of Part II. Mahler called the Eighth his most important work, the one in which his lifelong preoccupations with death, transcendence, and salvation finally resolved into unclouded light. He dedicated it to his wife Alma.

For all its colossal forces, the Eighth is not merely loud. Mahler handles his thousand performers with a chamber musician’s care, dissolving the mass into delicate solos and tender, transparent textures as often as he unleashes it in full cry. The work moves between the two extremes of overwhelming radiance and hushed, almost weightless stillness, and reserves its supreme effect for the very end, where it gathers everything it has into a final, blazing benediction.

What to Listen For

Part I, the hymn ‘Veni creator spiritus’, begins with no introduction at all: the organ sounds and the full chorus erupts immediately on the word ‘Veni’ (‘Come!’), a cry of summoning that sets the tone for everything to follow. This is the symphony’s most overtly symphonic stretch: Mahler treats the hymn almost like a vast sonata movement, with the choral lines functioning as themes that are stated, developed, combined, and recapitulated. Listen for the great striding subject heard at the start and for how it returns, transformed, to crown the part. A central, quieter passage on the words ‘Infirma nostri corporis’ (‘the weakness of our body’) pleads more tenderly, the soloists weaving above the chorus, before the music regathers its force. The part climaxes with a tremendous double fugue and a final ‘Gloria’, the offstage brass blazing out and the boys’ voices ringing on top as the spirit is hailed in triumph.

Part II could hardly be more different. It opens with a long orchestral prelude, dark, hushed and searching, depicting the rocky mountain gorges where holy hermits dwell, all murmuring low strings and bare, suspended harmonies. Out of this stillness the music builds by slow degrees. Listen for the solo voices of the hermits emerging from the landscape, the baritone’s ecstatic song and the bass’s surging plea, with Doctor Marianus’s tenor later soaring above; then for the chorus of angels bearing aloft the immortal part of Faust, and the limpid, high-floating entry of the boys’ choir as the younger angels. A radiant orchestral passage announces the appearance of the Mater Gloriosa, and a soprano sings the penitent’s prayer of intercession with melting tenderness. Throughout, notice how Mahler keeps thinning his enormous apparatus down to a few solo lines and a thread of harmony, so that the final ascent feels earned. That ascent is the Chorus Mysticus, ‘Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis’ (‘All that is transient is but a parable’), which begins as the merest whisper, almost inaudible, and grows over several minutes into the most overwhelming sound in all of Mahler. As the words ‘das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan’ (‘the Eternal Feminine draws us upward’) ring out, the offstage brass return and the whole vast assembly blazes into a final E-flat major chord of pure, transfiguring light. Let it carry you; it is meant to.