Love Song

of light, shadow and Mahler

A symphony
of light
longs to
the darkness
of shadow
the day 
of glorious
love unfolding
ecstasy
dancing
primitively
on tomorrow's
risen promise
renewed in
a morning
sonata
of light
Everlasting.   

- Deborah T. Hewitt

I was playing Gustav Mahler‘s Symphony No. 5, yesterday, watching the day turn to evening, as bits of light endeavored to dance my garden into darkness. Grabbing a camera I sat and photographed the most beautiful part of the day. The sweet light and long shadows of pre-dusk, tucking us in for the evening…

I have been fascinated with light and classical music for a very long time.

The light of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C-Sharp Minor: IV. Adagietto, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim, turns me upside down with emotion.

Composed as a love story to his wife, at a cottage, in 1901 and 1902, one of the saddest events in history was how The Third Reich used composers, like Mahler, to re-write and twist history, long after Mahler and others were deceased.

Especially if you read about the composer. The abuse he took from his father, one of 14 children, his mother beaten like a slave, Mahler inherited his mother’s heart defect, the deciding factor in his death, in Vienna, shy of his 51st birthday in 1911.

Towards the end of his life Mahler was appointed Music Director at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He battled with bouts of depression and neurosis which put a strain on his marriage to Alma and he never recovered from the death of their first daughter, Maria Anna, at the age of five.

My husband’s grandfather, Max, a Swiss born Frenchman, with German background, refused to listen to the recorded album of John’s “all city high school symphony,” playing Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, at the Dorothy Chandler in Los Angeles. John proudly drove the album over to his grandparent’s home for them to hear, as Max, with his French accent, spit shame on the idea that he would entertain one iota of Mahler in his home. It was very confusing to John and it hurt. Here, they also drove Volkswagens.

John adored his grandfather and knew, even then, at 17, how foolish this was. How his own grandfather was swept-up in the twisted propaganda of the Nazis. His grandfather thought he was defending the Jewish nation, “refusing to listen to Mahler,” while at the same time tore down a composer who had nothing to do with the ousting of Jewish culture in German music or the killing of millions.

Perhaps too, Max felt since The Third Reich had spared Mahler’s music, as Mahler had been one of Hitler’s early favorite composers, this association was too much for him to bear. At the same time they were banning or re-writing all music written by Jewish composers or contribution, they were actually tearing down Mahler’s good name, while playing his music.

In a book published in 2007, Gustav Mahler: New Insights into His Life, Times and Work, by Alfred Mathis-Rosenzweig, he stated:

“The Nazis, from the outset, knew they would not be able to demolish the continuing force of Gustav Mahler's memory and his music through mere bureaucratic means. Therefore he was immediately put on the list of 'degenerate' composers, and books were written against him that attempted to prove his guilt in the adulteration and degeneration of the values of German musical culture." He goes on to say it would have made no difference if Mahler had not been of Jewish descent "because his music reflects with overwhelming power and intensity the sorrows of the world and the tragedy of his own life's struggle."

Read the complete story of the Third Reich’s cultural propaganda history here, beginning as early as 1933. Below, I highlight/quote what stood out.

Ignorance is not bliss, it’s extremely frightening, as it twists, like the Devil, to corrupt the most pure of hearts. The artists and musicians. Many a composer here, unknowing.

---

“Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the new Minister of Propaganda was intent on controlling every aspect of the German mindset and to this end he developed a four- point plan to expunge any and every facet of the Jewish presence in German music.”

“These exclusionist programs in German music, in their pin-pricking detail, were a harbinger of things to come, as can be seen in the following quote from the musicologist, Blessinger:”

“music is an important political matter of tremendous world importance with which we are involved at this very moment. That is the reason why the wrestling of the final recovery of German music extends far beyond the artistic and cultural area.”

“In the following quote taken from German composer Richard Wagner’s diatribe against the Jewish presence in German music, one finds all the irrational aspects of virulent antisemitism:”

“we observe in Jewish music-works that soulless, feelingless inertia. What issues from the Jews' attempts at making art, must necessarily therefore bear the attributes of coldness and indifference, even to triviality and absurdity; and in the history of modern music we can but class the Judaic period as that of final unproductivity, of stability gone to ruin.”

“Wagner’s case is extraordinary: a world-renowned composer writing a powerful antisemitic political tract in the mid-nineteenth century, which was then incorporated, decades later, in the Third Reich by the Education Ministry.”

Further, the likes of:

“Mendelssohn’s music could no more be permanently eradicated from German music than could Wagner and Levi’s intertwined lives be unraveled and separated. The German-Jewish symbiotic relationship evident in these two cases would be mirrored in the Nazi era with Himmler’s famous speech to senior SS officers in Posnan in 1943:

“… eighty million worthy Germans and each one has his one decent Jew.”

“S.S. Chief Heinrich Himmler was preaching for total exclusion with no exceptions. Time would show that Mendelssohn in the nineteenth century, Bruno Walter or Gustav Mahler in the twentieth century and Daniel Barenboim in the present century, all representing a Jewish presence in German music on the world stage, would provide the resounding cultural answer to irrational German antisemitism.”

“This essay presents several examples of how antisemitism in the pre-Nazi era, and the antisemitic racist dogma of the Nazis themselves, derailed sectors of the musical achievements of a cultured Germany along the route to the ensuing barbarism of the Holocaust during the Second World War.”

“Paul Celan, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, who became for many the greatest post-war German-language poet, named one of his most famous poems, ‘Death Fugue’. The musical term fugue so connected to an earlier famous German, Johann Sebastian Bach through his “Art of the Fugue” was recast by Celan from the achievement of Bach to the death metered out in the Nazi era.”

“he shouts play the violins darker you’ll rise as smoke in the air”

“This line from the poem refers to music played by Jewish musicians in concentration camps for work details on their way to slave labor and for public hangings in the camps. This ultimate degradation of music-making by the Nazis was one of the lowest points in the descent of culture to murder.”

Gustav Mahler, a stern, yet kind genius, demanded the best of everyone around him. While many found the “late Romantic” composer’s music uniquely exhilarating, some found the effect nauseating, likely to what happened, which is part of our continued history with earthly principalities. As for me, I feel Mahler’s quote to the moon and back:

"The symphony must be like the world; it must embrace everything" - Gustav Mahler

Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad;
    let the sea resound, and all that is in it.
Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them;
    let all the trees of the forest sing for joy

- Psalm 96:11-12