Freuet Euch des Lebens

Certain pieces of music evoke a building... and vice versa. Sitting in the Goldener Saal of the Musikverein last weekend, listening to Fabio Luisi and the Wiener Symphoniker as they carved their interpretation of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, I realised that no building has an affinity with Mahler's last completed work as strong as that gilded barn. Mahler even appears to quote Johann Strauss’s Freuet euch des Lebens waltz, composed in 1870 to commemorate the opening of the Goldener Saal. The Symphony was premiered in the very same space in 1912 and, of course, in January 1938 performed by the Philharmoniker under Bruno Walter, shortly before Hitler's troops marched over the border, where they met not an ounce of resistance.

It's little wonder the work lends itself to such extra-musical ideas, even those which Mahler never witnessed, never predicted. Even if we are brave enough to abandon such crutches and think syntactically, we find fragmentation, diminution and evaporation in all levels of the Symphony’s construction. This is a far cry from the cyclical procedures and ‘immense breadth’ of the Eighth Symphony. Rather than the eternity predicted in that predecessor, here Mahler explores the ephemerality of things. The Goldener Saal may still be standing, yet the cultural figures who created the environment in which it could be so prized has vanished, foretold in Mahler's extraordinary work. Maybe his inclusion of Freuet euch des Lebens – annotated with his own ‘O Youth! Vanished! O Love! Gone with the wind!’ – was more a pessimistic appeal to us, his audience, to seize the day.

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