The Tale of Three Hammer Blows

by Stuart Feder

(The title of this talk can also be expressed musically in the three "hammer blows" from the Finale of Mahler's Sixth Symphony.)
An artist's relationship to the art created is a complex one and by no means uniform. The music of Gustav Mahler is a case in point. For example, when Mahler finally completed the Finale of his Second Symphony after a four year creative block he wrote jubilantly to his friend Fritz Lohr,
Beg to report a safe delivery of a strong, healthy last movement to my Second. Father and child both doing as well as can be expected-the latter not yet out of danger. At the baptismal ceremony it was given the name 'Lux lucet in tenebris'. Silent sympathy is requested. Floral tributes are declined with thanks. Other presents, however, are acceptable. Yours, Gustav. These are my birthday greetings to you.i
The birthday of course was Mahler's own, as Fritz would have known—his 34th, just days after the date of the letter. Fantasies of pregnancy are not uncommon in both male and female artists. In fact perhaps its greatest rival in the realm of fantasy is that of being God the Creator, or at least a Being comparably grandiose. Recall, for example Mahler's own climactic text of the Finale: "On wings that I have won, I shall rise up again. I die to live again." Here is the fantasy of self-creation and rebirth all in one. But the birth of the "Second" had a deeper meaning: Mahler himself was the "second child" in the Mahler family. He had been born as replacement for the infant brother who preceded him and who died in infancy.

Meanwhile, with the triumphant completion of the Second the First Symphony was trashed by its creator as an "abandoned, castoff skin"ii a musical placenta, as it were. Wrote Mahler, "there is as much difference between these two works, which seven years separate, as there is between a man and a newborn baby." The Creator here had become Zeus-like, with the creation emerging fully grown from the creator's head: "a man."

A different aspect of the Godhead is invoked in an unexpected portion of the Third Symphony, the Menuetto, second movement—called, in Mahler's program of the symphony (later discarded) "What the Flowers of the Field Tell Me." Mahler confessed to Natalie Bauer-Lechner that "while writing this piece, he was struck with the most uncanny sense of awe—far more so than if working on a tragic subject, against which he could arm and defend himself with both seriousness and humor. . . Being transported into the world's inmost being, he must now inevitably feel all the awe inspired by it, and by God."iii

Mahler associated this experience of awe and the uncanny, to two earlier creative events, a passage in Das Klagende Lied and the Funeral March of the First Symphony. He revealed to Natalie that there was a "seemingly insignificant" passage in Das Klagende Lied that he could "never get through without being profoundly shaken and overcome by intense excitement." Natalie goes on: "Whenever he reached it, he always had a vision of himself emerging out of the wall in a dark corner of the room."iv Mahler experienced this as his Doppelgänger ,his "double", forcing his way through the wall. At that point he was unable to work and had to flee from the room.

While working on the Funeral March of the First Symphony, in a roomful of flowers that had been brought to him after the successful performance of Der Drei Pintos, he "saw himself lying dead on a bier under heaps of wreaths and flowers." They had to be removed before he could go on composing. Perhaps his admonition to Fritz ("Floral tributes are declined with thanks") was no joke after all and the "silent sympathy" more to the point.

Natalie sums up that "no one can have any idea of the agonies of creation" and Mahler himself remarked to her, "Believe me, all creative work is closely linked to nervous excitement [Irritabilität]".v What these three creative events have in common— namely those of the "The Flowers of the Field", Das Klagende Lied and the Funeral March is the evocation of the uncanny. It is a particular feeling frequently accompanied by a sense of awe. In some instances , such as the "Flowers in the Field," the evocation of awe is reverent: there is something more—the etwas mehr of the Romantic— something greater than ourselves out there, the spiritual. But more commonly, the uncanny may become quite frightening when, as in the case of the Doppelgänger, the inanimate wall becomes animate or one loses the sense of body boundaries; similarly, as in the Funeral March, the animate composer becomes the inanimate corpse.

The meaning of such experiences is embedded in language: the uncanny in German is unheimlich, incorporating heimlich, the homey or familiar.vi It is awesome and frightening when the familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar or weird. Indeed, this is the stuff of horror movies. (You may provide your own examples of the unheimlich, the uncanny, from familiar, "Heimlich" movies.) Before we leave these events to go on to Mahler's Sixth Symphony, there are two features must be emphasized: First: In each of these instances noted in Mahler's response to his own work, there is no threat of danger from outside of the composer's mind. He has frightened himself by his own imagination; by his own creation. The benign fantasies of creativity with which this talk began (those of childbearing or the identification with God) could exist side by side with those evoking nameless fear. And second: these experiences are not necessarily pathological. They reflect the extremes and perils of creative life; the intensification of the normal that characterizes the authentic artist; or as Natalie Bauer-Lechner put it in romantic fashion, "agonies of creation."

* * *

Mahler Sixth Symphony was completed in the summer of 1904. Mahler exerted special care in planning its premiere, turning down at least one offer from Ferruccio Busoni the following year, because "everything must be just right."vii Mahler felt that it "would impose enigmas that only a generation that has absorbed and digested my first five can tackle." After much thought and consultation he accepted an invitation by Richard Strauss, agreeing to the premiere at the Essen Festival of Contemporary Music in May of 1906. He would share the podium with Strauss but would conduct the Sixth himself. Mahler took particular pains to make the performance "just right." He arrived fully nine days earlier to refine the score, correct the parts and rehearse the orchestra. Alma arrived two days before the concert in time for the rehearsals and found Mahler "sad and worried."
None of his works moved him so deeply at its first hearing as this. We came to the last rehearsals, to the dress rehearsal—to the last movement with its three great blows of fate. When it was over, Mahler walked up and down in the artists' room, sobbing, wringing his hands, unable to control himself. We stood transfixed, [along with the others in the room] not daring to look at one another.

On the day of the concert Mahler was so afraid that his agitation might get the better of him that out of shame and anxiety he did not conduct the symphony well. He hesitated to bring out the dark omen behind this terrible movement.viii

The "omen" lay in Mahler's fantasy. On completing the Sixth in the summer of 1904, he had told Alma: It is the hero, on whom fall three blows of fate, the last of which fells him as a tree is felled." she comments:
Not one of his works came so directly from his inmost heart as this. We both wept that day. The music and what it foretold touched us so deeply. The Sixth is the most completely personal of his works, and a prophetic one also.ix
As for the hammer blows themselves, Mahler is quite specific on the effect he wished in a footnote on the score at the first hammer blow. "short, mighty but dull in resonance, with a non-metalic character (like the stroke of an axe.)"x Alma reports: "The notes of the bass drum . . . were not loud enough for him; so he had an enormous chest made and stretched with hide. It was to be beaten with clubs."xi Unfortunately, the hoped for the "mighty whack" turned out anemic but Mahler shipped the monster to Essen nonetheless, where it was shortly scrapped and a bass drum used to thunderous effect. Mahler was still pre-occupied with the wished-for thud when he issued the third, and final, version of the score, where he wrote in a footnote, now at the second hammer blow, "Cymbals and Tam-tam only in case the hammer is not sufficiently penetrating."xii (Eulenberg score, xxxiii)

At the time of composition, Alma reports, unlike his response to actually hearing the music in performance, "he was serene. . . a tree in full leaf and flower."xiii After the experience in Essen, when Mahler was revising the score to the Sixth that summer of 1906, he attenuated the effect of the three hammer blows by omitting the third, the blow that fells the hero "as a tree is felled."

Richard Strauss, who was present at he premiere, and conducted another work on the same program, had been critical of the dramatic sequence of hammer blows: "Why ever does Mahler smother his effect in the last movement," he said, "He gets his fortissimo and then damps it down. Can't understand that at all." Alma's rejoinder: Anyone who understands the symphony at all understands why the first blow is the strongest, the second weaker and the third—the death blow— weakest of all."xiv (In practice, the third is not necessarily weakest.) For Alma too, the hammer blows were pregnant with meaning and had a reality of their own. Of Mahler she wrote, "On him too fell three blows of fate and the last felled him." (Parenthetically, she failed to note what the three "blows of fate" were; presumably those of 1907: the death of their child, resignation from the Vienna Court Opera, and the supposed diagnosis of his fatal heart disease. But we now know that it was Alma's affair with Walter Gropius in 1910, that resulted in Mahler's transient mental breakdown and physical lowering of resistance to the illness from which he died before a full year passed—something in the nature of a coup de grace.)

What Mahler experienced at the May 1906 festival in Essen was a severe and classical, although short-lived, anxiety attack. The specific form that it took was that of a radical and traumatic response to the encoded symbolism of his own music. What frightened him specifically was the symbolism of death. It should be noted however, that despite the emphasis that both Alma and Mahler placed on the three hammerblows, in the Sixth Symphony there are other musical memento mori in the symphony; that is, representations of death; representations which in the visual sphere frequently takes the form of the "death head"—the skull and crossbones. The most important is the musical idea called in Hans Redlich's analysis (in the Eulenberg score):, "the motif of cosmic 'hybris': the major triad turning to minor and underpinned by the relentless rhythm of Fate"and, in Norman Del Mar's analysis, "Motto (Fate motifs) A major/minor."xv Note that the latter assigns two parts to the motif. Just before [Rehearsal 7 on the score] the first part is orchestrated pungently with oboes and trumpets diminishing in volume with the background of a snare drum; in the second part a pair of tympani pounds the deadly motto. xvi

In addition, with regard to the symbolism of death, the very beginning of the Sixth Symphony is suffused with portent. The dread that is typical of anxiety states can be characterized as "something terrible is going to happen." The symphony begins with this portent, at first in 'cellos and bass and joined by the snare drum.

There are other sections in the symphony full of portent; briefly the very beginning of the Finale; and the Scherzo, which Robert Samuels in his semiotic study of Mahler's Sixth, likens to graphic representations of the "Dance of Death."xvii

Alma seemed convinced of Mahler's musical prophecy and Mahler himself, superstitiously re-scored the Finale in order to delete the third hammer blow, as if he could thereby ward off fate's decree. But was Mahler prophetic in his invention of these musical omens? Was he responding to the superstitious nature that informed other well- known enactments in his life? (e.g. The avoidance of numbering his Ninth Symphony) Or is there another explanation? In the relentless "violence" of the opening measure–and here I translate Mahler's directions on the score: "heftig", as "violent"—some may hear the onslaught of things to come in Germany: the rise and fall of Naziism; the Holocaust. In this view, he may be compared to his fellow Bohemian, Franz Kafka, of whom it has been said, "Cumulatively, Kafka's work is an archive of our era . . ." But like Kafka, Mahler "writes from insight, not . . . from premonition."xviii Indeed, Mahler's existential insights are extraordinary. And he articulates them, not in prose, but in musical form. This is the music of mortality and the inevitability of man's fate. I suggest that these symbols of death are universal and in good measure accounts for the impact of the Sixth Symphony on the listener; its durability as well. But, where music is philosophy, there is some perspective on these facts of life and death. For the concept of death and the very word are abstractions. But where the abstract collapses and the symbolic fails, becoming the actual, then one is confronted starkly with the unspeakable: ones own death. This is what happened to Mahler at the rehearsal when Mahler, according to Alma "walked up and down in the artists' room, sobbing, wringing his hands, unable to control himself," and subsequently "was so afraid that his agitation might get the better of him that out of shame and anxiety he did not conduct the symphony well", hesitating "to bring out the dark omen."

Freud attempted to address the fear of death, which he considered to be "a difficult problem to psychoanalysis," writing famously: "[F]or death is an abstract concept with a negative content for which [therefore] no unconscious correlative can be found."xix The mechanism, he goes on, is that "the ego . . .gives itself up." He applies this to melancholia (or depression) where the ego gives up on itself because it no longer feels itself loved. "Living," Freud asserts, "means the same as being loved."

As it subsequently turned out in Mahler's biography, "not being loved" was precisely Mahler's personal lexicology of death—tantamount to abandonment and annihilation. It is this that lies at the core of Mahler's fear of death. Four years later, under the threat of losing Alma's love when she engaged in the affair with Walter Gropius, Mahler wrote what amounted to suicidal notes addressed to Alma on the manuscript of the Tenth Symphony: "To live for thee! To die for thee! Almschi;" and "Ach! Ach! Ach! Farewell my lyre. Farewell . . ." Finally, (in German) "Tod! Verk." [sic] which, courtesy of David Matthews, we now know that it is likely that this referred to the "Totesverkundigung" —the Annunciation of Death in Die Walkure (Act Two.)xx (There is an anecdote that when Mahler was conducting this passage in Hamburg, he stared so intensely and menacingly at the tuba player that "the terrified player had been unable to produce a sound" and only the accompanying harmony could be heard.)xxi

In the last movement of the Tenth Symphony we hear the echo of the hammer blows of the Sixth—and a reminiscence of an experience Mahler and Alma shared when, in New York, they had witnessed a fireman's funeral procession with its muffled drumbeat from high up in their apartment on Central Park West. And, as if Alma could possibly misunderstand the communication to her, Mahler scrawled on the manuscript page, at this point in the score" "You alone knows what this means." Actually, I don't think any listener can escape its meaning.

Mahler's letters to Alma and her own published memoirs reveal that prior to 1910 their marriage was frequently unstable—Mahler on tour, for example, asking, exhorting, appealing to Alma to please write to him; and in the end angrily throwing up his hands helplessly. But before one is unduly critical of Alma, it should be pointed out that when it came to love, Mahler could be quite demanding. Nevertheless, it may have been this very instability of love, rather than its constancy, that led to the creation of the "Alma-theme" in the Sixth Symphony. It is at once passionate and yearning in its first four rising pitches; and in the descending figure that follows, disappointment and finally, resignation.

The musical iconography of death with its ominous, latent meaning, was safely encoded in the death-figures of the Sixth Symphony—the result of the craft of creative genius. It is there for the listener to experience aesthetically, although somewhat chilled by the sharp major-minor figure with its underlying rhythmic motto; and shocked by the finality of the hammer blows. But in a good performance all is under control and one feels oneself in good hands—the hands of its creator, Mahler, and those of the musicians who are re-creating the symphony.

But Mahler's experience at the festival in Essen was of a different order. For him there was a failure of the abstract as the symbolic became the actual. He found himself no longer confronted with the details of musical form but rather, face to face with death itself; its latent meaning penetrating consciousness and eliciting anxiety. Such instances induce the affect of horror and the sense of the uncanny. What was familiar to Mahler the conductor and a comforting part of his everyday reality, suddenly became hyper-real. The heimlich became unheimlich.

To give you a taste of what I believe Mahler's experience was like, we turn to a horror movie, The Stendhal Syndrome. It is based on an experience of the writer, Marie- Henry Beyle (whose nom de plume was Stendhal) while visiting Florence in 1817. Stendhal wrote: "On leaving the Santa Croce church, I felt a pulsating in my heart. Life was draining out of me, while I walked fearing a fall." He was responding to the work of a minor Tuscan artist in one of the chapels of Santa Croce, a sculpture of four sybils. "It's majestic, it's alive, it seems like nature in relief; one of them . . .has a grace which, joined with majesty, makes me fall in love with her at once."xxii The inanimate had become animate for Stendhal. The sought-after heimlich aesthetic experience became unheimlich, as the sculpture came to life and anxiety supervened.

Interestingly, as reported by Reuters in 1989, "Some visitors to Florence panic before a Raphael masterpiece. Others go into a frenzy when confronted with a Caravaggio. Still others collapse at the feet of Michelangelo's statue of David. Psychiatrists Call it the 'Stendhal Syndrome'. At least once a month on average, a foreign tourist is rushed to the psychiatric ward of Florence's Santa Maria Nuova hospital suffering from an acute mental imbalance seemingly brought on by an encounter with the city's art treasures."xxiii The article cites an Italian case report in which over the course of eight years, we have had 107 victims of the syndrome" called the Stendhal Syndrome.xxiv

In the clip you will see from the movie, The Stendhal Syndrome, a woman is hurrying through the Florence crowds on her way to the Uffizi Gallery. True to Stendhal's experience, she stops— not in front of the great masters, Raphael or Caravaggio—but before the work of a minor artist; a seascape, which suddenly comes to life. Already weakened by the impact of art, the woman faints. Here, as the symbolic becomes the actual; the heimlich becomes unheimlich; the woman loses her sense of boundaries and is overwhelmed by anxiety.

Mahler's experience differs, of course, in that he is both the beholder of the work and the artist who created it. In this, an ancient mythology is enacted: that of the creator who loses control of that which he created; or, on the other hand, becoming fearful that this might occur, needs to exert tight control over the possibility. This is the mythology of Ovid's Prometheus, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the Prague legend of The Golem. It is basically a creation myth and goes back to Genesis, in which "God created man in his own image."(Genesis 1:26)

Mahler was certainly familiar with the Bohemian Golem legend from the time he was a student in Prague at the age of 11 and later, as conductor when he was 25. In one version of the legend, in the sixteenth century, the Prague Rabbi Lowe "kneaded and shaped a human figure with all its limbs from clay." Its mission was to combat anti- Semitism. After an elaborate ritual the Rabbi inserted in the Golem's mouth, a parchment inscribed with the name of God and the Golem "opened his eyes and looked around in amazement." A decade later, Golem's mission accomplished—and more urgently, the fear that he would get out of control after he was found "rampaging around the Jewish Town like a madman, demolishing everything is his way"—Rabbi Lowe reversed the ritual and Golem "was transformed again into a mass of clay as he was originally."xxv

But perhaps the most famous retelling of this creation myth can be found in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Somewhere along its path of derivatives on stage or screen, the fact that it was the fictional creator who was named Frankenstein, and not the monster he created, was lost. When he brought the creature to life, and he observed "the dull yellow of the eyes of the creature open . . . and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs," Victor Frankenstein struggled to describe his emotions:
His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! . . . I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body . . . but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room . . .xxvi
Victor Frankenstein fled. Soon the creature became the murderer of those close to him, becoming the dark Angel of Death who now threatens his maker, "I will glut the maw of death, until it is satiated with the blood of your remaining friends. Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself . . ." It is the creature who takes the moral high ground with, "How dare you sport thus with life?"xxvii It demands that his creator do his "duty" to that which he has created by listening to his tale. Reason replaces horror as Frankenstein muses, "I weighed the various arguments that he had used . . .For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator toward his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness."xxviii

As was the case with Mahler, the inanimate had become animate. The power of beauty is transformed into horror and dread; the feeling of anxiety is so overwhelming that the creator must escape. Frankenstein flees; others may lose consciousness. For Mahler—in that perilous moment; hearing, as if the first time, the portent of his own creation—there is no way out. Briefly, but intensely, he is overcome with anxiety.

Except for one reference in his Tenth Symphony (the drum of the "Fireman's Funeral," noted earlier) Mahler never again revisited this world. Like Mr. Kurtz in Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, he had witnessed "the horror" and lived to tell about it.xxix The darkest portions of Mahler's next symphony, the Seventh, are only shadows. And in the Eighth, he is as far from the underworld of the Sixth as possible—in the stratospheric spirituality of Goethe's Faust. Das Lied von der Erde is an artifact of mourning; filled with life— desperate, sensual and nostalgic life—in its initial movements; farewell to life in the comforting retreat into the Chinese mountainscape of the Finale; and finally, life eternal in the closing measures. The Ninth Symphony contains the sense of resignation in what Stephen Hefling tells us are the "private inscriptions" on the autograph score: "O days of youth! Vanished! O love! Scattered! . . .O Beauty! Love! Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!"xxx

But Mahler never again confronts the fearful reality of death after the Sixth Symphony. And when inevitably, although prematurely, the time of his death approached, he faced it with the best in himself and without anxiety.

i Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler, Volume One, Garden City: Doubleday, 1973, p. 304
ii Ibid, p. 301
iii Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, Peter Franklin editor, tr. Dika Newlin,
iv London: Faber & Faber, 1980, p. 53
v Ibid, p. 53
vi Ibid, p. 54
vii See Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, Standard Edition, James Strachey editor, London: Hogarth Press, 1974, Vol.17, pp.217-256
viii Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler, Vol.2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 401
ix Alma Mahler, Mahler—Memories and Letters, Donald Mitchell editor, Cardinal, Fourth Edition, 1990, p.110
x Ibid, p. 71 Hans Redlich editor, Gustav Mahler, Symphony No.6, Eulenberg Score
xi Alma Mahler. Op.Cit. p 91
xii Gustav Mahler. Op.Cit. p.xxxiii
xiii Alma Mahler, Op.Cit. p.71
xiv Ibid, p. 100
xv Norman Del Mar, Mahler's Sixth Symphony—A Study, London:Eulenberg, 1980, p.24
xvi Hans Redlich, Op.Cit.
xvii Robert Samuels, Mahler's Sixth Symphony, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p.119 ff
xviii Cynthia Ozick, Essays, p. 41
xxix Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, Standard Edition, Vol 19, pp.1-60
xx David Matthews, Wagner, Lipiner, and the 'Purgatorio', in The Mahler Companion, edited by Donald Mitchell & Andrew Nicholson, Oxford, 1999, p.512
xxi Henry-Louis de La Grange, Op.Cit., Vol.1, p.311
xxii Jonathan Keates, Stendhal, p. 137
xxiii Alan Baldwin, Reuters, 1989, Worldwide Web
xxiv La syndrome di Stendhal, Magherini Graziella, 2002
xxv The Prague Golem—Jewish Stories of the Ghetto, Vitalis, n.d.,
xxvi Mary Shelley, Frankenstein—or The Modern Prometheus, Penguin, 1992, p.56
xxvii Ibid, p. 96-97
xxviii Ibid, p. 98
xxix Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness & Selections from The Congo Diary, New York Modern Library, 1999
xxx Stephen Hefling, The Ninth Symphony, in The Mahler Companion, p.468-469

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