Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 8

Veni, Creator Spiritus! Come, Creator Spirit! shouts the chorus, beginning Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. So magnificent is the demand that, if the Creator Spirit heard, it would surely obey. Lines from the symphony’s text describe its character: “Visit our souls, fill them with grace…. Kindle our senses with light, pour Thy love into our hearts…. Give us joy….”

To call this symphony “ecstatic” is scarcely to hint at the beside-oneself joy and celebration maintained throughout the opening movement. I know nothing like it in music. Soloists, chorus and an enormous orchestra surge forward in miracle after contrapuntal miracle, finally reaching a coda that leaves one gaping. The second and concluding movement, a setting of text from Goethe’s Faust, is twice the length of the opening movement. It comprises a series of pictorial and dramatic events which settle the question why Mahler wrote no operas: he did, but they are concealed in his symphonies. Vivid tone painting first sets a mysterious stony scene and then eloquently shapes and punctuates the passionate utterances of various characters. After frequent returns, joy and celebration as in the first movement take a new form, stunning the listener with a perpetuum mobile of soprano and alto solos. Joy is then surpassed by awe and reverence, first hushed, then thunderous: Komm! Komm! Blicket auf…. Come! look up…. After nearly ninety minutes, the symphony ends with a fully convincing representation of Sublimity, a grandeur truly climactic.

The perilously dense and complicated score of the Eighth requires massive performing forces and perfect conducting. Sir Georg Solti, with faultless performers and engineering, offers a recording that marries clarity, order and great dramatic power. This reviewer’s study of the score failed to suggest any way in which Solti’s performance could be significantly bettered.

Mahler, notorious as composer of grim, gnarled emotional torment and battle, is well met in the Eighth as lyricist, optimist, romantic and giver of joy. Nonetheless, like much of his music, the Eighth is probably an all-or-nothing matter: one despises it, or falls in love with it. Those who love it love a symphony uniquely concerned with perfection, joy, rightness. Those who understand that music can offer practice in responses which the world at large might never engender, yet which may themselves transform the world, can find in Mahler’s Eighth challenge, adventure and hope.

Reviewed by Mark Corske / Classical Recording (2 Record Set) / BFL Price $9.95 (List $11.95)