Like so many composers before and after him, Mahler had a superstitious fear of reaching his Ninth Symphony. After an initial, purely orchestral symphony, highly original in musical and tonal content, come three ‘literary’ symphonies in which he resorts to eschatology (or escapism). The Second confounds Death with the mystery of Resurrection. The pantheistic Third embraces eternity, commingling Nietzsche and the pseudo-ancient German fairy-tale vision of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn). The Fourth concludes with the composer turning once again to this fairy-tale heaven where the saints dance, sing and feast under the benevolent gaze of St. Peter.

In the purely orchestral Fifth, Mahler comes nearest to avoiding the terrors. In the terrifying Sixth, nihilism seems to win out. The Seventh, perhaps the ‘purest’ and also the most difficult to achieve in performance, is a symphonic tour-de-force, but essentially pessimistic. The mighty Eighth seeks to batter down the doors of heaven but sets itself impossible goals: to make a musical setting of the “Veni Creator” is not unprecedented, but to attempt a musical recreation of Goethe’s ultimate transcendent vision in his Faust was always asking for trouble. Das Lied von der Erde, (a disguised Ninth) with its departing murmur of Ewig, ewig… (for ever, ever…) only seems to bring closure.

The much-feared Ninth emerges at a time of terrible upheaval in Mahler’s life. His glorious but tumultuous reign at the Vienna Court Opera had ended amidst cabals and little love. He had begun his successful association with the New York Metropolitan Opera, but the prospects of a long future of artistic fulfilment and financial security were soon to be dashed by the diagnosis of serious heart disease. Within a couple of years further hammerblows were to fall, more painful even than those of the Sixth Symphony. His eldest daughter, Maria, died from scarlet fever. His ever-needy wife, Alma, feeling rejected while her husband isolated himself to work on the new symphony, sought consolation with Walter Gropius. No wonder then, that the Ninth, far from moving on from the calm acceptance of Das Lied von der Erde’s Abschied, sees Mahler in a more desperate state than ever before. Deryck Cooke perceptively called it Mahler’s “dark night of the soul”; one nevertheless penetrated with shafts of life-affirmation.

Mahler’s Ninth is both a summation of late-Romanticism and an adumbration of the end of tonality. There is no escape from passion, no final refuge in the beauty of creation. Time and again savage irony and bitterness distort the picture. The first movement’s reluctant opening gives no hint of the battle to come, or of the huge compositional achievement it would ultimately represent. Familiar, consoling landscapes are revisited, but a transformation of the main theme into a mournful echo of Johann Strauß’s Freut euch des Lebens (Enjoy Life) tells the true story. There is also a telling reference to the ‘farewell’ phrase from Beethoven’s Les Adieux. It will return, transfigured, in the Finale. As Alban Berg wrote: “The whole movement is permeated with the premonition of death”.

The Ländler that follows is a bitter mockery of those we remember from the early symphonies; the first ‘trio’ section is insane. Moments of affirmation survive the surrounding vulgarity and bitterness. The Rondo Burleske, perhaps the most ‘modern’ of all Mahler’s symphony movements, is at the same time a savage parody of academicism and a mocking gesture of futility, sweeping aside any vain attempt at optimism.

Nothing that has gone before has prepared us for the Rondo Finale. It is an astonishing achievement, spiritually and musically, and so hard-won. The sense of loss, of final parting (the Les Adieux theme again) of heart-breaking nostalgia, are now suffused into a quiet serenity. There is no rapt exultation, no sense of victory. Most telling of all, the end, with Mahler returning to his Kindertotenlieder, joining the beloved departed auf jenen Höh’n (upon those heights). One might think that here, at last, he has touched the hem of Eternity. John Kehoe