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4.
Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?
FROM THE WAILING SONG to the 2nd Symphony we see thematological and stylistic homogeneity, which must not be compared with the congruity of the preclassical world but with the continuum that the motion within the end of music projected. Man's reference to the world collapses entirely and systematically. We do not see any tragic element in Mahler's music; the transcriber of Beethoven's symphonies, most able director, and composer of such a great length, must have seen under the notes. Kant, Goethe and Bach, his permanent company at Steinbach cabin, where he prepared the works of the Future, comprised for him an additional way to look deeper, more voluptuously, at the abyss, and become like it.
In Mahler's music, time is not based so much on the bars as on the signs of intensity. Rhythmical values, melody, color and harmony, conveyors of the meaning of time within the musical work, the more they are used as signs of intensity, the more able they become to reveal this meaning. Music does not lead to an external end nourishing a relationship, but it displays the composer's very effort to construct an illusion of his portrait — an illusion, not because it is deceptive as a self-portrait, but because it is (by the composer himself) supposed to represent something else; in other words, it lacks self-consciousness.
A symphony about Resurrection, without people and without a God.
If this infernal wilderness was to cause the suspension of all composal activity, we would possibly speak of a spiritual turn of a range that would throw Europe in a deep and fertile impotence.
[6] Why did it not happen? The conversation between Leverkün and the slanderer allows a deeper reading of estheticism: "They swallow their tongues from the big pains and yet they don't comprise any community; they are full of irony and contempt for each other, and among the trills and groans they call each other awful names (...) The odd life you will act is an extremely bad habit, which one do not quit easily to return to a compensatory temperate condition (...) Hell is, at the bottom, nothing else but a continuation of the odd life (...) We have made a deal and a business — you have sealed it by your blood, you are promised to us and you received our unction — and this visit of mine stands for an affirmation (...) being loyal to our arrangement, we will obey you in everything and in all manners of subjugation, and Hell will also serve you, provided you refuse anyone who lives down here, all
the celestial orders and all people, because so must be it (...) you are not allowed to love (...) an overall freeze of your life and relationships with the people is in the nature of things — it is, rather, inside your very nature, we don't implant you anything new (...) we want you to be cold, so that the flames of creation will be hot enough to warm you. You will resort to them trying to shake off the iciness of your life (...) you will relish, for an entire eternity, a human life full of works. When the sand flows from the top to the bottom of the hourglass, I will have all the power to use and teach the beautiful, chosen creature, in the manner and pleasure of mine, to lead and guide it totally — body, soul, flesh, blood and anything it may have, for the whole eternity" (Doctor Faustus, pp. 288-293).
We shall use this excerpt (the culminating point of the dialogue) as a guide while we summarize the relevant thoughts of the entire dialogue.
a) Estheticism and the German language.
As Thr. Georgiades notes, "...in languages such as ancient Greek, Latin and the Romance languages sound and meaning need not coincide. (...) The German language, however, behaves differently (...) German retains the same accentuation throughout all of the different forms (...) Here the spoken language coincides entirely with the meaning". (Music and Language, pp.50-51). German language "Comes into being, as it were, only by virtue of sounding, out of nowhere, only to dissolve once again into nothing as sound dies away" (ibid., p.57). These factors constitute the linguistic basis of the possibility for the self to be considered a completely unique and authoritative substance, called to use at will its environment in order to build its world. The extravagant reality of such a world is pointed
out by "him", when, gladly enough, declares to Leverkün: "If you see me, I exist for you". This reality is also evidenced by Auschwitz or the Gulags.
b) The hell-bound time.
Evil is fictitious,
a prolongation of the fictitious life. The slanderer does nothing else than hypostasizing the meaning of his name, since in the whole dialogue he continually changes his appearance, mocking Leverkün's musical activity as an activity that degrades the purposeful outgrowth of nature
to a mechanical amassing of narcissistic trash. Death becomes property and donation of Hell inasmuch as it supports precisely this kind of time.
c) The fundamental notion of unfamiliarity.
The assigning of absolute value to oneself (self-quittance) is a consequence and not a cause of the feeling of unfamiliarity with people and things. Hell-bound time, as a time without possibilities, is oppressed, so that it will invent the illusion of its freedom in the intensification of unfamiliarity by extreme self-love. Large doses of contemptible passion are required in order for the fake and the true, the slander against the spirit and the inspiration, to be confused. Thus, illness is being consecrated as not only more valuable but also more real than health. Illness distinguishes genius from mediocrity. The Resurrection symphony is a magnificent composition
of those precisely the elements that threaten life and creation. It is about an "inspiration truly happy, exciting, redeemed from any doubt and full of faith, an inspiration, in which there is no choice, there is no better and no ‘that's enough', in which ‘everything becomes acceptable as a delightful dictation (...) — this kind of inspiration is not possible with God, because He entrusts too many things to logic, only with the devil is possible, the real master of enthusiasm» (Doctor Faustus, p. 279). Mahler meets Hegel by disparaging logic, will and emotion in an inflamed grasp of nothingness.
d) Inner hypocrisy.
The arbitrary intervention
of technique presupposes, besides all the others, that becoming is absolutely alone; insofar as this condition is passed over by the technician, it reveals him as a hypocrite.
Therefore, we can see that the claims for the
continuance, even after Beethoven, of compositional activity as if it were about a Creation, eventually led to only one ‘creation' — to the decision of transforming music into an "immoderate and deafening noise, which will flood asphyxiatingly the ears with squeals and groans, screams, grumbling, roars, growls, squalls, screeching, raging barks, pleading and yells of tortures, so that nobody will identify his song, which will be drowned into the dense, thick yell of hell and into the trill of shame, motivated by the eternal unity of the incredible and the irresponsible" (Doctor Faustus, p. 288). Incredible here is characterized the attitude of an absolute isolation, which is perfectly strange to the nature of things and possible only by means of an irresponsible decision. Irresponsibility means nothing else than what we have already come across as unmindfulness of the Muse's justice and legitimacy.
4th
page note
6 Talking of impotence we do not mean submissiveness. Let us take a political example: In May 1961, Commentary magazine arranged a conversation on "Western values and total war" (republished at The Commentary Reader, ed. Norman Pondhorentz). The conversation had been carried on with the
participation of a public consisted of selected intellectuals; in other words, it was about a political act. Among the eminent speakers, Sidney Hook supported the possibility of a total war by means of the following principle: "The free man is one who in certain situations refuses to accept life if it means spiritual degradation. The man who declares that survival at all costs is the end of existence is morally dead because he's prepared to sacrifice all other values which give life its meaning" (The Commentary Reader, p. 161). This statement entails a personal, not binding for the others, decision, and, more important, it does not answer to Jaspers school's significant remark that "nobody could talk of preserving a culture, freedom or values by resorting to a total war" (ibid. p. 160), showing, thus, its supporter as a defender of heroism rather than of culture; the most important objection would be that Sidney Hook does not clearly define which are those values that would allow a destruction of such a size and kind; is freedom of congregation and election a value worthy enough to bear a hundred million dead Americans — to mention only USA — or the vast alterations of the environment and the chaos their children would inherit? Should we see in Sidney Hook a romantic? For whom that traces with some coherency the cultural history of the West, values which give life its meaning look only like a distant, and not at all obvious, request, nor would such values ever allow a wholesale destruction: we have the right to offer ourselves as a sacrifice to freedom but we don't have the right to offer other people's lives, even if they are our enemies; such an attitude would damage precisely that which we are supposed to protect, namely freedom.
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