This morning I decided to listen to the Latin hymn "Veni Creator Spiritus." The hymn is a prayer to the Holy Spirit asking that He visit our minds, fill our hearts with divine grace, and kindle a light for our senses. The melismatic Gregorian chant conveyed a warm, organic, spiritual feeling. Unbeknownst to me, "Veni" was a prelude to a greater piece of music, one which would fulfill the prayer of the hymn: Mahler's Symphony no. 5.
Yes, I listened to all 70 glorious minutes.
There is an ineffability about music; whatever I will say in this post will fall terribly short of what I intend to convey. In fact, this is the greatest difficulty of talking about music. There's a sort of cliche that music "says the unsayable," or that "music reveals to a man an unkown realm... a world in which he leaves behind all precise feelings in order to embrace an inexpressible longing (E.T.A. Hoffman, "Beethoven's Instrumental Music," quoted in Steven R. Guthrie, Creator Spirit)," or yet: "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture"; or, in the words of composer Aaron Copland (who happened to be a good friend of conductor Leonard Bernstien): "Is there a meaning to music? My answer would be 'Yes.'... 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.'" Nevertheless, this is a blog post, and I must use words – I can't dance for the life of me.
What I wish to focus on is the fourth movement of the symphony, the famous Adagietto:
Watch the video. You won't ever regret it.
This movement is unusual for a symphony, since it employs only the strings and a harp. Like Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, the Adagietto is associated with sadness and death, Mahler's piece having been conducted by Bernstein during Robert Kennedy's funeral Mass and Barber's having been broadcast over and played at the funerals of such figures as Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, and Princess Diana, and the two pieces also bear musical similarity. However, some recent studies indicate that Mahler never intended to convey feelings of melancholy. Rather, Mahler wrote the Adagietto as a love letter to his eventual wife, Alma Schindler. Mahler certainly didn't intend to have the movement push thirteen, fourteen minutes, since at the 1904 premiere of the symphony the Adagietto was played in seven minutes under his baton. Perhaps a reason for the gradual slowing of performances of the piece is that the piece, marked adagietto, a term which denotes a faster tempo than adagio, is also confusingly marked "Sehr langsam" (very slow) and in the score there are musical directions like "zurueckhaltend" (held back) and "zoegernd" (hesitantly). (The difference between Elgar's 12-minute recording of his Serenade for Strings and the longer recordings of later conductors is a similar phenomenon, although Elgar's take on his famous Larghetto clocks in at the standard six minutes.)
But enough about the technical details. The Adagietto under Bernstein's baton is the most beautiful experience I've had with a piece of music in a long time. By the end of the video, I had experienced that "inexpressible longing" which music accomplishes in a musician or listener, and in the inevitable subsequent letdown I was walking as if in a trance, breathing heavily, shaking my head intermittently, and wiping tears that rimmed my eyes. The last time I had experienced something similar with a piece of music was when I listened to Eric Whitacre's "The Seal Lullaby"; the last concert piece that brought me to tears was the under-appreciated "Adagio di molto" from Sibelius' Violin Concerto. To be honest, I had listened to this piece multiple times before but was never greatly affected; in fact, the delayed effect of a music piece happens fairly often with me: Bach's solo violin sonatas and concertos, Brahms' Violin Concerto, Beethoven's late string quartets, and Shostakovich's quartets all took some time in affecting me (they aren't "cheap shots" like the banal Canon in D, the overly sentimental Meditation from "Thais," or the excessively bombastic finale of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, which I have to admit is still an awesome work regardless).The Adagietto has to be one of the closest copies of Plato's form of Beauty. The Adagietto conveys a greater sense of warmth, organicity, and spirituality than does "Veni Creator Spiritus," at least to my ears. Of course, they are two extremely different works – one is a concert piece, the other a sung prayer – but to me they related to each other by the Adagietto being the answer to the prayer that the Spirit "visit our minds, fill our hearts with divine grace, and kindle a light for our senses." Experiences like this are what make music worthwhile (or what makes life not "a mistake," as Nietzsche would have it). "The world is charged with the grandeur of God," Gerard Manley Hopkins says; I think Mahler's Fifth is charged with just a bit more of God's grandeur.
