Symphonies of Salvation

By Lars Troide

January 1, 2013

Lars Troide on the differing paths to God of musical geniuses Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner.

The Adagietto movement is a love song to Mahler's wife, the beautiful and talented Alma Schindler, who after Mahler's death would marry, first, the architect Walter Gropius and, second, the novelist Franz Werfel, who wrote The Song of Bernadette Perhaps the most rewarding parts of Mahler's Seventh Symphony are the two movements titled "Night Music," which evoke the natural world being enfolded in darkness Mahler wrote on the score, "To live for thee; to die for thee, Almschi!" But despite moments of soaring romanticism, the symphony ends in total gloom, punctuated in the last movement by three sledgehammer blows of the tympani, which Mahler stipulated should sound like "the fall of an axe His final works, "Das Lied von der Erde" ("The Song of the Earth"), the Ninth Symphony and the uncompleted Tenth, received their first performances only after his death I believe that the explanation for Mahler's behaviour lies in the fact that, for him (as for many other composers, including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann), music itself was his true religion, his path to God

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