Mahler's Ninth Symphony

I've been playing a musical instrument for 23 years now. Even before then, music has always been a part of my life. Something happened nine years ago that helped solidify my love for music and redefined my passion for it, ultimately leading me to pursue music as a career. This, apparently, happens to everyone who has a more than casual interest in Western art music - You get the Mahler bug. Gustav Mahler wrote these grandiose symphonies and song cycles that eloquently expresses every imaginable human emotion and feeling, especially those on the extreme end of the spectrum. The Mahler work that really did it for me was his Symphony #9.

After my freshman year in college, I spent the summer in Israel working as an archaeologist. This trip became a major watershed moment in my life. I became more religious. I started to take clarinet much more seriously and although I did not know it at the time, I slowly began to turn away from pursuing archaeology as a career. Something happened when I got back to school and I had lost all the confidence I thought I had gained from my trip. I became a little introverted and to make a long story short, the friends chose to spend the majority of my social time with reflected the state that I was in and only exacerbated it.

In November, I was at a low point. Screw Your Roommate, my college's twist on the semi-formal was coming up. I had no desire to go. Several friends had set me up but I insisted in staying in and trying to sort out my life. I even went as far as to say, "Even if you set me up with Claudia Schiffer and guarenteed me action, I still won't go!" Even on the night of, a friend came by my room pleading me to go with him - date and all. I didn't go of course. I sat in my room with the live broadcast of the Boston Symphony about to come on. I read in the Boston Globe that Bernard Haitink, one of the greatest Mahler conductors, was to lead the BSO in Mahler's 9th, a work I heard so much about up to that point. The reviewer called the Thursday night concert to be one of the greatest in the orchestra's history. Something inside me told me to tape the concert.

The symphony is about death and a person's struggle and reconciliation with its concept. Depressing stuff, right? No. It's some of the most beautiful music ever written partly because it's so truthful and doesn't sugarcoat anything. Mahler demands that truth and beauty be found in life as it is. I've been learning about this stuff through my growing religious studies but this symphony made me experience this truth viscerally for the first time. As I said above, one can find just about everything that is wonderful and terrible about humankind in this 90 minute work and yet it's all beautiful. This revelation could not have come at a better time. This symphony is rather autobiographical - it was Mahler's last completed work - he basically knew that he was dying and his life was going to shit. I realized that Mahler's life was much more shitty than mine yet he came to terms with everything, including death looming over the horizon.

This symphony helped shape the way I live my life and ultimately led me to pursue music as a means to live a better life. It's interesting how this work became an integral part of my life. One example sticks out. Within a few months of being introduced to this piece, I fell in love with someone for the first time. Meeting her was very much like listening to the Mahler for the first time - a very intense experience that forever changed my perspective on things. It was an intense friendship wrought with the tension inherent in such a relationship that could not become anything more than what it was despite our mutual yearning for one that would allow more overt manifestations of our affection for the other. Different parts of the symphony became leitmotives for her, my feelings for her and my unwillingness to act on those feelings, and eventually, for love itself.  Just as the 9th symphony will always be in the back of my mind whenever I hear a work I've never heard before, she remains to a standard I hold people to. 

The parallels end with the idea of resolution.  The music resolves quietly after all the drama, thus signifying Mahler's coming to terms with his life and eventual death.  I haven't quite reconciled everything.  I've had three girlfriends since then, each of them wonderful in their own respects, yet the very idea of her comes back every once in a while.  I am still striving internally to find a cadence for these feelings.