The moment Harry Potter burst into the sky, his "resurrection" sounded.

2021 marks the 110th anniversary of the death of Austrian composer and conductor Mahler.

For more than a hundred years, his works have been commemorated, interpreted, listened to, and even become the soul of some films.

Mahler once said, "Music should be like a universe." In fact, in each of his symphonies lives a heroic traveler, and his music is always about a capitalized man.

To listen to Mahler is to listen to yourself

Mahler was born in 1860 and died in 1911. Every other 10 years, the music industry will remember him, listen to him, and interpret him. The "cardiotonic agent" of this ten-year contract always seems to remind us that between the past and the modern, there is always a possibility that music and other fields can go out of the vast world, and the life of music has meaning and value in the cycle of time and space that constantly leaves and returns, and this journey is inherited from generation to generation; and the ultimate meaning of art is to return to people, human nature, and to think and care about people.

In the past 100 years, the public's musical taste has quietly changed, the clear confrontation in classical music has gradually been replaced by complexity, and people have constantly challenged the boundaries of audio-visual and indulged in a more complex and abstract sound world, which is exactly what Mahler is good at, and one "Mahler revival" after another has appeared. From the 1960s to today, Mahler's work has been the mainstream of concert repertoire, and there is not only a two-year-long "celebration marathon" every anniversary, but a large number of records, treatises, lectures, and documentaries have infiltrated Mahler's image and music into the field of mass culture.

The most well-known is the italian director Visconti's film "Soul Break Venice", the original author Thomas Mann is based on Mahler as the prototype to shape the male protagonist, and Mahler's "Fifth Symphony" in the small soft board is almost the existence of the soul of the film. Between 1990 and 2010, at least more than 20 films around the world used Mahler's work as a soundtrack, such as Mahler's Ninth Symphony in Woody Allen's The Virtuous Couple and Mahler's Eulogy for the Dead in Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Man. Mahler was also particularly well-suited to inspire epic films, such as The Soundtrack by John Williams for Star Wars, whose music was the key to its success. Even the moment Harry Potter rides a broomstick straight into the sky, Mahler's Second Symphony (Resurrection) sounds behind him.

The "00" to "01" from Mahler's birth to death seems to be a metaphor, a man standing between 0 and 1, as the conductor Bernstein said: "He is a giant who crossed the dividing line in 1900". 0 and 1 fit his temperament perfectly, along with his views and music. I once had a somewhat absurd association: 0 and 1 are the most primitive codes of computer languages, and the codes of various permutations and combinations can express rich and diverse meanings, but in the end it is only a matter of 0 and 1 - life and death or love and death, gaining everything and losing everything. It can also represent a repetition, 01010101 ... The never-ending cycle repeats itself, and life constantly returns to its original point. For the individual, this is a kind of fate, but it can also come out of a kind of sublimation. Perhaps in a sense, Mahler's musical language has some commonalities with the computer language that dominates our time, which can be superimposed, symbiotic, and developed by our fragmented language.

As a result, we have more connection and resonance with Mahler. Isn't the irony, black humor, absurdity, loneliness, contradictions, and alienation in Mahler's music what many people are experiencing? As the music critic Lebrecht put it in Why Mahler: "Mahler was a musician of our time, he never belonged to his time. To listen to Mahler is to listen to yourself. ”

A odyssey tour for one person

Mahler said, "Music should be like a universe. In fact, each of his symphonies is inhabited by a heroic traveler, and if these 10 symphonies plus "Songs of the Earth" are examined as a whole, they seem to be strung together into an Odyssey journey dancing with life and death.

The First Symphony to the Fourth Symphony is the beginning of the story: a teenager escapes into the mountains to escape the shadow of death at home, where he listens to his mission and then decides to travel, to find his homeland and voice, to depict his universe.

From the Fifth Symphony to the Seventh Symphony, he came to the most triumphant moment of his life. He ascended to the top of the highest musical mountain in all of Europe and married the most beautiful girl in Vienna. But the shadows followed, and he did not slack off for a moment with the uneasiness of his humble origins, along with his rock-solid determination to transform the old world. He was always worried that one day, all this would be taken back by Heaven.

The Eighth Symphony and the Song of the Earth took a dramatic turn for the worse. Losing his children, his health, his loss of Vienna, and finally the love of his wife, he stepped down from the high altar and made his way to the valley, where he began another round of wandering. In a foreign country, he heard the strongest voice in his life, and the belated recognition was like an autumn revival, but life had entered autumn, and he anxiously calculated how much time he had left.

The Ninth Symphony and the Tenth Symphony come to the end of the story: he finally admits his weakness and limitations as a human being, accepts eternal loneliness, and life is destined to fail, but seems unwilling, so he makes a final blow and sets off again. This time, he didn't come back, no answers.

There are always some unchanging elements in Mahler's work, equivalent to the motivations of music—death, loneliness, mountains and the universe. These motivations are pondered repeatedly at every stage of Mahler's life, and every mile of his career, he is looking, looking backwards, looking left, looking right, sometimes he hides in the ego and sneaks out, sometimes jumps out, and examines himself with the eyes of a third party. The same motivation presents a different expression each time.

Reflections on life and death are at the heart of Mahler's work, from the third movement of the First Symphony to the final Tenth Symphony. Although many of the images in Mahler's music seem to be purely about death, because his music emphasizes speculation, his views are based on the principles of contradiction and opposition, and writing "death" means writing "life". This ambivalence stems from his native family environment, the deep-seated way of thinking of the native Jewish language, Yiddish, and a less clear sense of local belonging.

In Mahler's music, the warning of the death of life appears from time to time, but he does not go to meaningless sadness, but lives with sonorous power to death. With this motive, the hero is always on the set off, he asks the meaning of life and death over and over again, and in the four-hour cycle, from adolescence to the prime of life, all the way to old age.

But it was a cool autumn

Towards the end of his life, Mahler finally ushered in the expected reversal in the final movement of the Ninth Symphony, but there is still a look back at death in the work. In his music, he begins by describing death on three levels, and at the end of the movement he offers us the last hymn of his life, praying for the restoration of life and faith in that century when everything is about to fall apart, which can also be understood as the love, kindness and blessing he has left us.

On the last page of the final movement, Mahler writes the note closest to the experience of death, and each listener walks on the path to death. The "writing of death" here encompasses too many layers: first, the end of one's own life; second, the death of the tonality, which for Mahler means the death of the music itself that he knows and loves; and finally, and finally, and most importantly, Mahler foresees the death of society, or rather the end of a certain cultural belief.

Mahler marked the score with the word "extremely slow board," the slowest of the musical speed terms. This extremely slow piece of music seems to have been fixed, and every wisp of sound falls apart. Mahler's note on the final section of the score as "fade out" is rather ambiguous and imprecise to the requirements for instrumental performance. Each listener must decide for themselves how to interpret it. As a result, it transforms into a moving epilogue that can be infinitely continued and transmitted, and the moment of solidification, only silence remains.

Symphony No. 9 is a symphony of life and death. The listener was silent, but there were many words like fish in the throat, just like the sentence of Xin Renjie: Now that I know all the sorrows and tastes, I want to say that I will rest, and I want to say that I will rest, but I will say that it is cold and autumn. Of course, we can dig out a lot of background information and implications from Mahler's own life situation, but in fact, if Mahler only wrote about himself, then it must not be so moving. His music is always telling a person with capital letters, and people will eventually have to go through the test in the face of death, asking whether they were born and whether they did not live in vain.

Mahler blends his experiences and emotions into his music, whether it's anger, sentimentality or unhappiness. He has long since jumped out of his own pain, describing in a poetic musical language in a higher sense a kind of beauty that can only be found by experiencing life and death. In a letter to his wife, the composer Alban Berger described the end of the Ninth Symphony as follows: "A kind of submission – yet his eyes are always on the 'other shore'". Mahler, 100 years ago, used his music to give us the possibility of watching ourselves, and maybe we could have a way out. This situation is a consolation for all the hard journeys of the world.

Column Editor-in-Chief: Huang Wei Text Editor: Chen Junjun

Source: Author: Chuang Garson