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]