An embedded identity

DANA SCHLANGER

The 2010 Olympic Arts Festival is finally upon us and we can look forward to a flurry of remarkable events, among which is Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony.

The performances will involve two choirs, a children’s chorus, eight singers and a huge orchestra. VSO management told the Indpendent that the concerts of Mahler’s aptly nicknamed Symphony of a Thousand will “undoubtedly be historic performances; a magnificent, colossal production, the largest, most astonishing piece of music you will ever see – and hear – in live performance.”

Composed in 1906, the Eighth Symphony consists of two ample movements, each using voice and orchestra to set the text with deep spiritual allusions. VSO’s production provides an opportunity to explore Mahler’s complex spiritual and national identity, as well as a fascinating moment in history: Mahler’s turn-of-the-century Vienna, where a rapid decline of the Austrian liberalism and the emergence of Jews to cultural prominence were set against the backdrop of an increasingly virulent, institutionalized antisemitism.

A composer and conductor of genius, Mahler was born in 1860 in a small Bohemian village to Jewish parents. He defined himself later in life as “thrice homeless: as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans and as a Jew throughout the world – always an intruder, never welcomed.”

Events conspired to make Mahler’s position as a “cultural intruder” particularly relevant: in 1897, he returned to Austria after a string of opera house directorships in Prague, Budapest and Hamburg – it should have been a triumph. He returned to Vienna in the wake of intense negotiations for the main conducting posts of the central European music world. However, in order to fully qualify for such lofty positions in imperial Vienna, he had to officially renounce his Judaism and become Catholic. Mahler converted to Catholicism and was immediately appointed music director of the Vienna State Opera.

Mahler’s biographers concur that his Jewish identity remained, surprisingly unassimilated, deeply embedded in what his Viennese contemporary Sigmund Freud would have called “his music’s unconscious.” However, Mahler had not been an observant Jew before his conversion and did not become a devout Catholic after it. Baptism did not free him from antisemitic hostility. During the Third Reich, he was still systematically purged from Germanic culture. However, according to his (non-Jewish) wife, he loved churches, the smell of incense and Gregorian chant.

Like his music, Mahler’s religious affiliation defies clear labeling. What he sought throughout his life was perhaps something no single faith could provide: his passion for philosophy, eastern mysticism and his awe of nature. He never fully adhered to any religious doctrine and enriched his spiritual quest with ideas from humanistic sources, from Plato to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

A critic in Vienna wrote that Mahler “speaks musical German with a Jewish accent.” He meant it in the most negative way, but perhaps it infers that Mahler, in part, resisted assimilation.

Norman Lebrecht, a prominent music writer, articulated this idea: “the most Jewish aspect of Mahler’s music is to be found in forms of expression connected to the Yiddish language, a dialect developed over 10 centuries of oppression to a degree where the same phrase could express one thing to insiders and another to outsiders. Yiddish was both evasive and precise, a treasury of Jewish history, a rich, ambiguous terrain that no composer had exploited before. Mahler, raised in a German environment, heard his parents and grandparents speak Yiddish at home, giving his unconscious mind the spark to create music with multiple meanings. Being Jewish is the source of Mahler’s invention.”

The result is what gave his indomitable creative spirit some peace. Mahler wrote to his friend, conductor Willem Mengelberg: “I have just finished my Eighth – it is the grandest thing I have done yet ... try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound. These are no longer human voices but planets and suns revolving.”

Mahler’s Eighth Symphony will be performed at Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Jan. 30 and Feb. 1, 8 p.m. For tickets and information, visit vancouversymphony.ca.

Dana Schlanger is a Vancouver freelance writer and director of the Dena Wosk School of Performing Arts at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver.

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