Resurrection in the Golden Hall

About the Work

Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony took him six years, and for most of that time he did not know how it would end. In 1888 he completed a large funeral march for orchestra and called it Totenfeier (Funeral Rites). For five years he could not decide whether it was a symphonic poem in its own right or the first movement of a symphony. When he moved to Hamburg in 1891 as conductor at the opera he played it on the piano to Hans von Bülow, the most eminent conductor in the city, who admired Mahler’s conducting. Bülow was appalled by the piece and said that if this was music, he understood nothing about music.

In the summer of 1893 Mahler added two middle movements, a gentle dance and a scherzo that reworks one of his songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the collection of German folk poetry. He knew he wanted a finale with voices and knew the comparison with Beethoven’s Ninth that this would invite. What he did not have was a text.

Bülow died early in 1894. At the memorial service in Hamburg a choir sang a setting of the Resurrection hymn by the eighteenth-century poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, and Mahler later wrote that it struck him like lightning. He used the opening stanzas of Klopstock’s hymn and continued the text with verses of his own. The finale was written that spring and summer, the first movement was revised, and the short Wunderhorn song “Urlicht” (Primal Light) was placed before the finale as a fourth movement. By the end of 1894 the score was complete.

Mahler conducted the first complete performance in Berlin on 13 December 1895. The symphony takes its nickname, Resurrection, from the hymn. Mahler wrote out a story for it more than once: a hero is carried to his grave, his life is remembered, doubt takes hold, and at last comes the summons to judgement and the promise of new life. He later withdrew these explanations, as he did with all his programmes, but they describe the course of the music accurately enough.

The forces are very large: an orchestra with ten horns and offstage brass and percussion, an organ, soprano and alto soloists and a mixed chorus.

What to Listen For

The first movement begins with a shudder in the upper strings and a fierce, striding theme in the cellos and basses. It is a funeral march on a symphonic scale, relieved now and then by a quiet, rising melody in the violins.

The second movement looks back to happier times, an unhurried country dance in the manner of a Ländler, led by the strings. The third is the scherzo drawn from Mahler’s song about St Anthony of Padua preaching to the fishes. Its rolling, circular motion goes on and on until the orchestra breaks out in a dissonant cry, and the music sinks away.

The alto then begins “Urlicht” with the words “O Röschen rot”, over a soft chorale. It lasts only a few minutes and is the stillest point in the symphony.

The finale bursts in with the same cry and then unfolds as a long sequence of scenes. Horns call from offstage. There are marches and a chorale. Then comes what Mahler called the Great Summons: brass from a distance, and in the hall a solitary flute, like a bird. After a silence the chorus enters, at first almost unaccompanied and as quietly as it can sing: “Aufersteh’n”, rise again. The soprano’s voice lifts out of the choral sound, the alto and soprano sing Mahler’s own verses, and the music builds in stages to the closing hymn, with organ and bells joining the full orchestra.