I wrote:

>>...this really is Mahler's biggest weakness.  Mahler's brand of
>>transcendentalism is so deus ex machina, an escape into Nature Mysticism
>>or into angelic clouds of the Everafter - even the words 'ewig...ewig'
>>with which das Lied end are but tacked on and as such fail to adequately
>>resolve the view of life as' meaningless suffering' (Schopenhauer's words)
>>presented in the first song from 'das Lied von der Erde' which climaxes
>>with words about the pitiful brevity of life and all its 'rotting
>>trifles'.

To which John Smyth gives us a very interesting commentary:

>I don't think Mahler was suggesting escape.  He was combining the
>pragmatism of Eastern philosophy with the individual assertiveness of
>Western Philosophy.

I am being very hard on Mahler.  I love das Lied more than any of his other
works.  I don't believe I am writing what I am about him.  But yet I must
because there is something fundamental to be gleaned from this.

>The Eastern, (and pre-Biblical) philosophy that life is an endless cycle
>with time perceived as a wheel that never alters its course, (ewig); makes
>a wonderful foil to the Western: though one is given a mandate to improve
>himself, altering(!) life's course, one is reminded that, though fate has
>its own agenda, loss and disappointment creates a vacuum for renewal and
>rebirth.

This is however not the view of Eastern thought that Schopenhauer presents.
His interpretation is immeasurable more bleak than this.  It is so bleak
and pessimistic that Mahler struggles his whole life long to escape from
this vision of all the agonising brevity of life ('if life is but a dream
why all this pain and woe' are the words in das Lied) and clutches out of
desperation at an Auferstehung/resurrection ('Believe my heart, O believe
that that you were not born in vain!  Have not vainly lived and suffered!'
are the words of the 2nd symphony).  Yet it almost seems that this faith
in resurrection has seemingly faded by the time of das Lied when there is
no resurrection just a deep sense of resignation only barely consoled by
the belief that nature will continue on eternally after us.  Either way
Ewigkeit (Eternity) is what comforts us when faced with mortality.  It is
this consolation by the Eternal that Schopenhauer just will not permit.

For Schopenhauer the main point of Eastern thought was that to exist was
to suffer and that it was a curse.  He is right in correcting the commonly
held notion that reincarnation is somehow a way of saying "don't worry
about death you can always come back as a cockroach".  Rather the cycle of
life and rebirth was a curse.  Only those who sinned in a former existence
were cursed with resurrection.  The whole aim, Schopenhauer points out is
to escape this curse and to achieve final rest in death.  Indeed this is
I feel is the meaning, in all it's Schopenhauerian bleakness of the whole
Wagner Ring cycle - Wotan's coming to accept his own mortality as a
redemption from the curse of immortality.  Death without the consolation
by any Eternal Life as the only final true bliss.  This is what Brunhilde,
Wotan's Wunschmaedchen (wish maiden) finally grants him as the final
deepest wish deep within his heart the flames of Siegfried's funeral pyre
consume Valhalla:  the wish for the bliss of death.

But Mahler will have none of this.  Even faced with his own imminent
death and a faltering faith in a resurrection in the Beyond he still had
to clasp at straws and believe in the Eternal in the form of an eternally
self-perpetuating Nature Mysticism..  To Schopenhauer everything in this
world was finite and transitory - even Nature.  Death would overcome
everything

I am sure Schopenhauer would argue that this resignation to death and the
finite was the true interpretation of Eastern thought and that Mahler in
his insistence on a belief in the afterlife (as something positively
desirable) was still very much Judeo-Christian.

It is really extraordinary that the struggles found in Mahler's symphonies
is one of life and death.  It is also a struggle against Schopenhauerian
pessimism.  Sorry to have laboured so long on a subject so grim...

Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
[log in to unmask]