A particular scene in Mahler's 8th symphony that has eminently filled my soul and inspires me to become myself.
What Wagner says about the fourth movement in Beethoven's 7th applies all the more here: THE APOTHEOSIS OF DANCE.
Mahler on his 8th symphony, "Think, in the last three weeks I have completed the sketches of an entirely new symphony, something in comparison with which all the rest of my works are no more than introductions. I have never written anything like it; it is something quite different in both content and style from all my other works, and certainly the biggest thing that I have ever done. Nor do I think that I have ever worked under such a feeling of compulsion; it was like a lightning vision - I saw the whole piece immediately before my eyes and only needed to write it down, as though it were being dictated to me. This Eighth Symphony is remarkable for the fact that it unites two poems in two different languages, the first being a Latin hymn and the second nothing less than the final scene of the second part of Faust. Does that astonish you? I have for years longed to set this scene with the anchorites and the final scene with the Mater gloriosa, and to set it quite differently from other composers who have made it saccharine and feeble; but then [I] gave up the idea. Lately, however, an old book fell into my hands and I chanced on the hymn “Veni creator spiritus” - and at a single stroke I saw the whole thing - not only the opening theme, but the whole first movement, and as an answer to it I could imagine nothing more beautiful than Goethe’s text in the scene with the anchorites! Formally, too, it is something quite novel - can you imagine a symphony that is, from beginning to end, sung? Hitherto I have always used words and voices simply in an explanatory way, as a short cut to creating a certain atmosphere and to express something which, purely symphonically, could only be expressed at great length, with the terseness and precision only possible by using words. Here, on the other hand, voices are also used as instruments: the first movement is strictly symphonic in form but all of it is sung. Strange, in fact, that this has never occurred to any other composer - it really is Columbus’ egg, a ‘pure’ symphony in which the most beautiful instrument in the world is given its true place - and not simply as one sonority among others, for in my symphony the human voice is after all the bearer of the whole poetic idea."
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