Symphony No. 2 in C minor (‘Resurrection’)

Program notes

About the Work

Mahler’s Second Symphony is the work in which he first staked out the territory that would define him: the symphony as a question about death and what, if anything, lies beyond it. He began it in 1888 with a single enormous movement, a symphonic funeral march he called ‘Totenfeier’ (‘Funeral Rites’). For a time he was unsure whether it was the opening of a symphony at all, and he set it aside, completing the work only in stages over the next six years. The remaining movements came in 1893 and 1894, and the full five-movement symphony reached its premiere in Berlin on 13 December 1895, with Mahler himself conducting. It became one of the most popular and successful of his works during his lifetime.

The symphony grew out of a problem Mahler could not solve in the abstract. He had written his funeral march and stood, as he put it, at the coffin of the hero of his First Symphony, asking the oldest questions: Why have you lived? Why have you suffered? Is it all only a vast, terrifying joke? For years he searched for a finale that could answer those questions without lapsing into either empty consolation or mere noise. The answer arrived, famously, at a funeral: the memorial service in 1894 for the conductor Hans von Bülow, where Mahler heard a choir sing a setting of Klopstock’s hymn ‘Die Auferstehung’ (‘The Resurrection’). ‘It struck me like lightning,’ he wrote, ‘and everything was revealed to me clear and plain.’ He took Klopstock’s opening stanzas, added verses of his own that pushed the poem beyond conventional piety toward a more personal vision of universal redemption, and built around them the choral finale the whole symphony had been waiting for.

The shape that resulted is deliberately strange. After the vast, tragic first movement, Mahler asks in the score for a pause of at least five minutes before the music resumes, a real silence to let the gravity of the funeral rites settle before the symphony turns to memory and doubt. The three middle movements are smaller in scale and human in tone: a gracious, backward-glancing ländler; a bitter, swirling scherzo built from one of Mahler’s own Wunderhorn songs; and then, breaking the orchestral spell entirely, the brief alto song ‘Urlicht’ (‘Primal Light’), a moment of childlike faith sung as if from the edge of heaven. Only after this does the enormous finale arrive: a vast movement that travels from apocalypse, through the summoning of the dead, to a final chorale of resurrection.

The forces are correspondingly huge. Mahler calls for an expanded orchestra with a large brass and percussion battery, an offstage band of horns and trumpets that sounds across a great distance in the finale, a soprano and an alto soloist, and a full mixed chorus held in reserve until the symphony’s closing minutes. The drama of the final movement turns partly on space and partly on patience: distant fanfares and a long-awaited ‘Great Summons’, the bird-call of a solo flute over silence, and then the almost unbearable hush from which the chorus first enters. Few composers have understood as well as Mahler that the loudest effect in music can be a sudden quiet.

What the Second offers is not a doctrine but a trajectory. Mahler, who was born Jewish, converted to Catholicism in 1897, and remained all his life a restless seeker rather than a believer of any settled kind, was not writing a confession of faith. The ‘resurrection’ he stages is closer to a hard-won conviction that suffering and striving are not finally wasted, and that, as his own added verses insist, nothing is lost, and everything that has lived and longed will rise again transfigured. The symphony earns that affirmation by refusing to grant it cheaply: it spends a full hour in the territory of grief, irony, and unanswered questions before the light arrives. That is why the ending, when it comes, can feel less like a happy conclusion than like a deliverance.

What to Listen For

First movement: Allegro maestoso (‘Totenfeier’). The symphony opens in the grave. Low strings attack a tremolando, and out of it rises a grim, march-like funeral music in C minor, jagged and severe: the rites over Mahler’s fallen hero. Listen for the contrast between this stern march and the consoling second theme, a warm, song-like melody that keeps trying to offer comfort and keeps being driven back. The movement is built as a struggle between these worlds, rising to shattering climaxes, and it ends not in resolution but with a bleak downward rush into silence. Mahler then asks for a long pause before the music can go on.

Second movement: Andante moderato. A complete change of air: a gentle, swaying ländler, a remembered dance from happier days. This is the symphony looking back tenderly at a life now ended. Listen for the music’s grace and lilt, ruffled twice by darker, more agitated episodes with rustling string figures, before it settles back into its untroubled glow. It is the one moment of unguarded sweetness in the work.

Third movement: In ruhig fließender Bewegung (Scherzo). Without warning the mood curdles. Built from Mahler’s own song of St Anthony preaching to the fishes (who listen, admire the sermon, and swim off unchanged), this scherzo is a perpetual-motion swirl that turns the world’s bustle into something hollow and faintly nightmarish. Listen for the mocking woodwind cries and the way the music spins faster and faster, until it erupts in a sudden, terrifying shriek of despair before subsiding. This is doubt at its most corrosive.

Fourth movement: ‘Urlicht’ (Sehr feierlich, aber schlicht). Out of that despair comes the alto’s voice, alone at first: ‘O Röschen rot!’ (‘O little red rose!’). This brief Wunderhorn song, ‘Primal Light’, is a moment of pure, childlike faith, the soul declaring that it comes from God and will return to God. Listen for the solemn brass chorale that answers the voice and for the music’s utter simplicity; after the scherzo’s vertigo, it is like a candle lit in the dark.

Fifth movement: Im Tempo des Scherzos (Finale). The longest movement crashes in with a cry of horror, then opens onto a vast landscape. Listen for the offstage brass sounding from a distance, the solo flute and piccolo singing like a bird over silence, and the marching of the dead toward judgement. The ‘Great Summons’ rings out, and then, at the moment of apocalypse, the chorus enters not in thunder but in the barest whisper, ‘Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n wirst du’ (‘Rise again, yes, you shall rise again’). From that hush the music builds, gathering soprano, alto, chorus, organ, and bells, to a final blaze of resurrection. Wait for the quiet entry; everything depends on it.